>>Paul Bloom: I want to talk about a certain way of thinking about pleasure and then I
want to suggest that this could help us understand a problem in everyday life, a problem that
I would bet everybody in this room struggles with.
The perspective is something I developed in my book a few years ago, "How Pleasure Works,"
and the main idea could be summarized as: Pleasure is deep.
What I mean by that is even the most seemingly superficial pleasures, like sexual orgasm
or sipping a glass of wine, is actually deep in a sense that it's powerfully influenced
by your beliefs about what you are experiencing.
So for instance, one example is, these are attractive faces.
We've done studies.
People ranked these as attractive faces.
But how attractive you find them depends critically on who you think you're looking at.
You probably think the person on the left is male and the person on the right is female.
If that belief turns out to be wrong, it will make a difference.
It makes a difference how much you like the person.
Married couples in good relationships each tend to think that their partner is far better
looking than anyone else thinks they are.
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: It's not like the woman says,
"Oh, my husband, I love him but he looks like a toad."
Rather, if you love him, he doesn't look like a toad anymore.
Or take wine.
So one source of pleasure of wine is, of course, the chemical composition of what you're drinking.
But we also know that what you think you're drinking will powerfully influence your experience,
and in particular how expensive you think the wine is.
This has been done in many ways.
Most recently it's been done in an fMRI scanner.
So to get subjects to lie in the scanner, they sip wine through a tube, and while they're
sipping wine through a tube on a screen in front of them is information on what they're
drinking.
Everybody, of course, is drinking the same wine, but if they think they're drinking cheap
stuff, parts of the brain devoted to sensory pleasure lie dormant while if they think they're
drinking expensive stuff, it lights up like a Christmas tree.
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: Another domain is consumer products.
So people value these -- they get pleasure from these objects, and any economist will
tell you one reason they get pleasure is through their utility, what they can do for you.
So you could wear shoes on your feet.
You could play golf with golf clubs.
And chewed-up bubblegum doesn't do anything for you.
But each of these three objects gives pleasure for reasons above and beyond their utility
because of what people know about their history.
The golf clubs were owned by John F. Kennedy and sold at auction for three-quarters of
a million dollars.
The bubblegum was chewed by Britney Spears and sold on eBay for a couple of hundred dollars.
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: And the shoes.
The shoes may be the most valuable of all.
According to a New York Times report, a Saudi millionaire offered $10 million for that pair
of shoes.
And these were the shoes thrown at George Bush at an Iraqi press conference.
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: Now, with my collaborators at
Yale, we started to explore what sort of history influences pleasure, so we did a study where
we asked people, "Name the living person in the world who's famous and who you most admire
and most respect."
And some people answered George Clooney.
So we said, "Okay.
How much would you pay for a sweater that was owned and worn by George Clooney?"
And the answer is: A fair amount.
I'll pay more for this sweater than a sweater that's brand-new or a sweater that's owned
by me or somebody else.
And then we did various experiments to pull apart what's giving the sweater the value?
So for another group of subjects, we said "You can buy the sweater but you're forbidden
from reselling it.
You can't tell anybody you own it.
You can't boast about it."
And actually, that causes the value -- people to pay a little bit less, suggesting boasting
value, resale value matters.
But what really has an effect is you tell people "You buy this sweater, you can boast
about it, you can resell it, but before it gets to you it's thoroughly washed," now the
value drops substantially.
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: As my wife put it, you've washed
away the Clooney cooties.
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: We did a very intensive experiment
where now we didn't ask people who they might have -- "Who is the famous person who you
hate the most in the world, who disgusts you?"
And so some people said Bernie Madoff.
And we did the same experiment and we found the results flipped.
So some people don't want Bernie Madoff's sweater at all.
Other people will actually spend quite a bit of money on it, but if they're told they can't
resell it or boast about it, they don't want it anymore.
Well, this time if it's thoroughly washed, it goes up slightly in value, not down.
Then in collaboration with George Newman, we took it out of the lab and into the real
world, and we actually looked at auction data to see how much do people pay for this stuff
that goes under auction.
And what we did was we factored out everything else and we just looked at the fact of bodily
contact.
How much has it made contact with a person's body.
And what we found was for beloved celebrities like the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe, contact
with the body makes its value go up, while for someone like Bernie Madoff whose stuff
was recently sold at auction, it has a small but significant effect in the opposite direction.
The biggest case where history matters in our experience comes from the pleasure we
get from artwork.
So this "Supper at Emmaus."
When it was thought to be painted by Vermeer, it was one of the most popular paintings in
all of Europe.
People came from all around the world to see it.
And then one terrible day it was discovered to be a forgery by Han van Meegeren and it
was immediately taken away from the museum.
It lost all of its value.
And when it comes to the pleasure we get from an artistic object, artistic performance,
we resonate very much to what we believe its history is.
So here's another example.
This is a work by Jackson Pollock.
Who here likes Jackson Pollock?
Who here doesn't?
Does nothing for you.
Okay.
I have nothing to say about who's right, but what I'll suggest is, the pleasure you get
from the Pollock depends critically on how difficult you think it was to make.
There's a lot of evidence suggesting that the harder you think it is to create something,
the more pleasure you get out of it, the more you enjoy it.
As another example of how history matters, consider the modernist composer John Cage
and his most famous composition, 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
As some of you know, this involves somebody going up to a piano, sitting down, opening
up the piano, and sitting there doing nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
Now, people could disagree about what they think of the composition, but what strikes
me as fascinating is you can -- you can buy it on iTunes.
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: Now, Mike mentioned the comments
section.
If you want to see people arguing about it, see the discussions over here, we see, "You're
spending money for 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence?
Just to sit there?"
And other people say, "No.
I want to hear that silence."
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: So history matters.
And this brings us to the puzzle I want to raise.
People in the first world, people in the western world, get an immense amount of pleasure from
movies, television shows, music, and books.
You take all those pleasures and the time we spend on them, and it's way more than all
other pleasures put together.
But recently we've had a revolution in how we can experience these pleasures.
So this is my study at home.
This is my computer.
And on this computer I can watch thousands -- probably millions -- of movies.
Virtually any movie I can think of I can watch for a small fee.
Same with television shows.
Same with music.
I can listen to any song I can think of.
I can type it in and it will come up on Spotify or YouTube or iTunes.
For books, if I want a book, I can just type it in on my iPad and then I have the book.
If my 12-year-old self knew that in the future, I'd be even doing this, he would say, "Wow,
that's amazing.
You must be very happy."
The puzzle is, I'm actually not very happy.
In fact, I often sit at my computer at night, faced with this staggering bounty of potential
pleasure, and I check my email and I look myself up on Google --
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: -- and, you know, okay, so -- so
maybe you say this is -- you know, I did an biography.
I'm weird.
Fine.
But it's not just me.
So this is a graph of happiness, United States, from '46 to 2006.
As you could imagine, a lot has happened there.
Some world wars, recessions, stock market booms, transformations in the role of women
and treatment of African-Americans and homosexuals, and among all these changes, what I'm talking:
the increase in easy access to all of these pleasures.
So around that period, we get the founding of Google, of Netflix, and of iTunes.
And here's how it affected our happiness.
Not at all.
So that's kind of a puzzle.
And -- and so one way to frame the puzzle is, we now can experience the pleasures -- some
of the pleasures we most enjoy, and we have an enormous amount of choice and we have little
or no effort.
And I think that the reason why this doesn't give us as much pleasure as we might want
is because there are two problems with this situation.
One is there's an enormous amount of choice and a second is there's little or no effort.
So we know from the work of psychologists like Barry Schwartz that there exists something
called a paradox of choice.
That once you go beyond a small number of options, too much choice makes you miserable.
People faced with large numbers of choices make it -- find it harder to choose, they
are anxious about choosing, they'd rather not choose, and once they've chosen, they're
less happy with their decision.
Presumably because they could then regret, they have the possibility of regret.
"I could have chosen something better and I have nobody to blame but myself."
As for effort, there are some very elegant works suggesting that the amount of effort
you put into something, that aspect of the history of an object leads to a -- powerfully
influences the pleasure that you get from it, and actually my favorite study here was
done by Mike Norton and Dan Ariely and their colleagues where they get people to build
something, and then later they're asked how much do they value it, how much will they
pay for it.
And this is compared to the very same object, except they didn't build it.
And it turns out that creating it, putting the time into it, radically increases the
amount of pleasure people receive from it.
Something that they describe as the Ikea effect.
So how do we -- how do we deal with this problem?
Well, there's a couple of solutions but they're not easy solutions.
So one is, we can give up these easy pleasures.
We can shut ourselves away from the Internet.
We can -- we can watch our -- listen to our music from records.
We can go to movies.
We can take out our books from the library.
But we no longer make it so easy for ourselves.
A second one is, we can off-load choices.
So like Neo in the Matrix, we could find an advisor or an oracle to choose for us, giving
up our freedom to choose as a way of enhancing our pleasure.
Both of these are cases of what philosophers describe as self-binding.
So self-binding is a case where we act now to narrow our choices or our abilities in
the future.
And the classic example of this is Ulysses, who demanded that the sailors bind him to
the mast so he can listen to the song of the sirens, but not -- but be forbidden from going
into the water after them.
Now, self-binding is often described in terms of the satisfaction of long-term goals such
as losing weight or not being sexually unfaithful or not drinking and driving, where we know
what we're attempted to do and we try to block it.
But I think that it's also central to solving this puzzle.
So self-binding is not easy.
You see from his expression he's not a happy man.
It requires -- it requires forethought, it requires intelligence, and it requires extraordinary
discipline.
But I think it is the only possible solution to the paradox of pleasure that we all face.
Thank you.
[ Applause ] >>Dan Ariely: So a couple of questions.
So first of all, so you talked a lot about how objects gain history and knowledge.
We did a study a while ago.
We made a new word for shaving.
We call it "smoothability," and we taught people what "smoothability" means and we got
our students to shave -- some of them knew what smoothability was, and some not -- for
six weeks, and then the people who learned about this new word loved shaving more and
were willing to pay more for a razor.
And it struck me that one of the possibilities is to say about how you give back the history
of an object.
Maybe when the search is too simple and you just consume it, you're not getting enough
of the background and history.
Could you think that this could be another part of the solution where we just basically
inject more meaning into the object and therefore we get people to consume them in a broader
sense?
>>Paul Bloom: That's an excellent point.
So when you start looking for examples like this, they're all over the place.
Food tastes a lot better if it's being served by somebody who loves you than if you're eating
it while running through an airport.
It's the same chemicals but it's a different experience.
So there's a third version of self-binding I didn't get to, which is savoring and understanding.
So the way to enjoy wine more isn't just to get a lot of expensive bottles and start drinking
like crazy.
It's take a wine tasting course and learn to experience it.
The way to experience a movie more or a song more is to sort of understand it more, but
also to savor it.
But, again, that's difficult because I don't need to -- we have this easy immediate access.
But I think you're right, but I think that that's still a need for self-binding.
>>Dan Ariely: Last question.
What do you do personally to derive more pleasure?
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: Thanks, Dan.
[ Laughter ] >>Paul Bloom: I appreciate it.
I actually try to understand things more.
I have taken wine tasting courses.
I've taken beer tasting courses.
It's very simple.
If it's cold, it's good.
But still -- [ Laughter ]
>>Paul Bloom: But -- but -- and I've tried to learn more about music and about movies,
and I find that because I learn more about movies, I see a movie and I say, "Oh, I see
what they're doing there," and it enhances my pleasure.
>>Dan Ariely: Very good.
Thank you very much.
>>Paul Bloom: Thank you.
[ Applause ]