Transcriber: Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer: Ilze Garda
I'd like to start this talk with a question,
and that is: what am I thinking?
Any ideas? Front row? Nobody? No?
I'm thinking of the annual Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling
at which officials roll a wheel of cheese down the hill,
and crazy young men run after it, and usually injure themselves.
The reason I'm thinking of this
isn't to show you that I think of weird things,
but instead to illustrate just how hard it is
to know what's going on in another person's mind.
And it leads me to the second question,
which is a little more philosophical in nature:
how do you even know if I have a mind?
What is a mind?
It's the capacity to think, and to feel, and to have conscious experiences,
and it seems pretty obvious that I have one, right?
I'm giving you this talk.
But think about it: how do you know I'm a person with a mind,
and not a very sophisticated robot, just programmed to act like me?
Philosophers have a concept called 'a zombie',
which isn't someone who eats brains, but instead someone like a Stepford wife:
someone who acts, and talks, and looks just like a person,
but they don't have anything going on up there.
(Laughter)
They have no conscious experiences,
so they might cry when you kick them,
but that's just because they are programmed to do so.
(Laughter)
And so, it's very clear to you that you have a mind,
but you can never be sure about anyone else.
Look around: how do you know the person sitting right next to you
won't open up their head and reveal a circuit board?
(Laughter)
So, because mind is ambiguous,
it's a matter of perception, and thus subject to some disagreement.
Does a dog have a mind?
Well, if you're a dog owner,
(Laughter)
you might think your pooch has personality and panache,
but if you're the neighbor of a dog owner,
(Laughter)
you might just see a kind of a mindless furball
that craps on your lawn, right?
And so, mind is a matter of perception, but it's an important perception.
If animals have rights, or if animals have a mind,
then they deserve moral rights.
If you think a fetus has a mind,
then you have a different position on abortion than if you don't.
Indeed, many of the worst injustices of history have been perpetrated
when we fail to see minds in others.
And so, though mind is perceived,
it matters a very great deal to those we are perceiving.
I willl talk about some research today
that suggests that it also matters to you, to the perceiver,
and that many of the experiences that make up our lives
- pain, pleasure, and even taste -
hinge upon how we see the minds of others.
As a kind of general example of the importance of mind perception,
I will give you the exact same scenario:
first without a mind behind it, then with one.
So, imagine you get on an elevator on the 8th floor,
and you realize it's malfunctioning,
and that it's going to be stopping at every floor on the way down.
What would you do?
You might wait it out, you might get out and take the stairs.
Either way, no big deal.
But now let's imagine
that, as you get on the elevator, I follow behind you,
and just as the doors are about to close, I look at you,
I take my hands and I press every button on the plaque.
(Laughter)
Now, it's still the exact same outcome, it's still stopping at every floor,
but now you're super-pissed, right?
(Laughter)
So the idea is, even though it's the exact same outcome,
it has a much greater psychological impact on us
when we perceive a mind behind it.
It's not only the presence of a mind that matters;
it's also the intention behind that mind.
You're out for your Sunday morning walk,
and I come up to you, and I say, "That's a nice hat."
Or I come up to you, and I say, "Yeah, nice hat." Right?
The intention means everything behind that.
And this kind of makes sense because language is ambiguous,
and so intention can change our experience of a conversation.
But what about something more basic?
What about the pain we experience from an electric shock?
[For] something as fundamental as that
the intention we perceive wouldn't seem to matter, or would it?
In a series of studies,
I tested whether the intention we perceive in others
changes our physical experience.
In this first study, what happened is people came into the lab,
and they were paired with a partner
who they thought would be giving them a series of different tasks.
One task would be evaluating the pitch of some musical tones.
Another task would be evaluating the painfulness of electric shocks.
Importantly, in one condition,
participants thought their partner was evil,
and that they'd be shocking them every chance they got.
In another condition, participants thought their partner was benevolent,
and trying really hard not to shock them, but they were getting shocked anyways.
And so, we have an intentional shock, and we have an accidental shock.
How much did they hurt?
Well, not only did the intentional shocks hurt more,
but the benevolent shocks or accidental shocks
over the course of the study hurt less and less,
so even though the malice can keep things stinging,
benevolence can soothe our pain.
Examine it also with pleasure.
People sat in a chair like this and got a series of electric massages,
and they were administered or chosen either by a person or a computer,
and even though the massages were exactly the same,
participants felt significantly more physical pleasure
when they were chosen by a person.
Just knowing there are positive intentions can make things feel better.
Finally, I looked at taste.
People got a candy, in this case a Tootsie Roll,
that was either chosen at random,
or selected just for them by another person.
It's the exact same candy,
but again, it tasted better in the person-given-condition,
and not only that: it tasted sweeter when someone else chose it for them.
This suggests why grandma's cookies taste so good!
We can actually taste the love baked into them.
(Laughter)
So what these studies suggest then
is that our experience of the world hinges on the intentions of other people.
But, remember, mind is perceived, the intentions of others are perceived,
and so, it's somewhat up to us
to determine what other people's intentions are.
Just like you can see this figure here
as either a rabbit facing that way, or a duck facing the other way,
so too can we perceive others
as either generally being cruel or generally being kind.
It's up to us to determine what people's intentions are.
And so, if we generally think others are nice,
then the world becomes less painful, more pleasurable, and better tasting,
and if we think others are nasty, the world becomes correspondingly nastier.
Most of all, what these data suggest is that when you go about your day,
if you could just give people the benefit of the doubt,
when they cut you off in traffic, or give you a gift, or even make you food,
life will not only seem, but it will actually be a little sweeter.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)