Gianfranco Girotti

Transcription

Good afternoon, sinners. (LAUGHTER) I guess you've all come straight from church this Sunday morning. Glad to hear it. It's my great pleasure today to be introducing Dr Simon Laham to this Sunday afternoon session of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Simon is a Sydney boy, but he now is in the psychology department at the University of Melbourne, and today he's here to talk about his new book, 'The Science of Sin', which I think is long overdue, by, you know, a millennia and a half. And as you're about to hear, Simon doesn't see what all the fuss is about sinning. But what's truly excellent, for those of us that don't mind a bit of lust or gluttony on a Sunday morning, is that his argument isn't some sort of tired old libertine excuse. He's been much, much more rigorous than that. What Simon's done is go and collect a whole bunch of international experiments that have all been published and peer-reviewed and use them to demonstrate that the seven deadly sins might not be all that bad. In fact, used responsibly, they might even be good for you. So that's good news for all of us, I think. Goodbye, guilt. Hello, long days in bed with cake. (LAUGHTER) The epilogue of Simon's book notes that there's been some discussion around the world in recent years about updating the seven deadly sins to more accurately reflect the modern era and to include some sort of, you know, current-day sins like hypocrisy and bigotry. But I was surprised that there was a... ..what I thought was quite an important omission from the conversation surrounding our new sin list, which is the absolutely heinous sin of letting your mobile phone ring in a theatre. -So, rather than subject yourself... -(LAUGHTER) So, yeah, please turn it off... to silent, because you can tweet, if you'd like to. As most of you who've been attending the Festival over the weekend would probably know by now, the Twitter hashtag is #fodi. So, you know, go nuts with that, but in the meantime, it's my great pleasure to welcome Simon Laham. (APPLAUSE) Well, thank you, all, and thanks, Edwina, for that lovely introduction. And thanks for coming today. It's a great pleasure for me to be here today. As Edwina mentioned, this is my home town. It's great to be in this city, in this place and at this Festival, especially on the weekend that the Swans won the grand final. So, what I want to talk to you today about is, some of the work in a recent book of mine, which is called 'The Science of Sin' in the US and called 'The Joy of Sin' out here and in the UK - that is the book up on the screen. And the take-home message of this book, the dangerous idea, I guess, is that the seven deadly sins aren't really as bad as they've been made out to be. If you take a look at what the scientific record shows, and in particular at what psychological research shows, you'll see that if used wisely, the seven deadly sins can actually serve us quite well. So here they are, for those of you who haven't been to Sunday school recently or seen the Brad Pitt movie in quite a while. And I don't know about you, but... Each day before I go to work, I've committed at least three of these things. Which particular three, I'll leave up to your imagination, or... My fiancee's out there somewhere, so if you find her, you can ask her. But the fact is that we sin, and we do it all the time, and when I say 'we', I mean we - Australians. It may please you or it may disturb you to know that we're actually quite good sinners in this country. A couple of years ago, 'BBC Focus' magazine ran a study to determine the world's most sinful nations. And they used various statistics to index sin. The number of cosmetic surgery procedures per capita to assess pride, for example, the number of sick days taken to assess sloth. -And when they... (LAUGHTER) ..and when they crunched all the numbers, it turns out that Australia comes out on top. (LAUGHTER, CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) So we're pretty good at envy, it turns out, but we're also not so bad at lust and gluttony. But don't worry too much about this 'cause what I want to spend the next little while talking to you about is the fact that indulging in these so-called sins is often far from deadly, and if used wisely, the seven deadly sins can actually make you smarter, more successful, happier, and this last one's going to really annoy the puritans out there - they can actually make you more moral. But before I get on to that, I wanted to say a few words about where these sins came from, how these particular seven ended up on the list. Now, I was raised a Catholic. And what I could never understand was why these seven were on the list. What's so bad about these? Why isn't murder there? What about rape? What about genocide? And to answer this question, it helps to take a quick look at the history of the list of deadly sins. Now, it may surprise you to know that the list isn't actually laid out in the Bible. Lots of things are, of course, condemned in the Bible, but the seven deadly sins aren't there in a fully formed list. You have to instead go to this guy. Evagrius Ponticus. He's one of the so-called Desert Fathers of the early Christian Church. Now, the Desert Fathers were monks who withdrew into the desert in order to face temptation, overcome it and seek spiritual communion with God. And in his efforts at spiritual enlightenment, Evagrius, late in the 4th century AD, set down a list of eight evil thoughts that he found particularly distracting in his quest for spiritual development. And these look very similar to the current list. So he has gluttony, lust, greed. Sadness is on there, which is not on the current list. Anger, sloth, vainglory and pride. And this list was brought, then, into the Western Church and from the desert into communal monastic life by one of Evagrius Ponticus' followers, a guy called John Cassian. And from there, the list made its way into some of the doctrinal documents of the Roman Catholic faith. The definitive list we have today is the work of this guy - Pope Gregory the Great - who, late in the 6th century AD, whittled the eight evil thoughts of Ponticus down to the seven deadly sins that we know today. And over the years, the sins were given a firmer philosophical foundation by scholastic writers like Thomas Aquinas and, as I said, retain a place in some of the doctrinal documents of the Catholic Church. And they've also, as you all know, have made their way into mainstream cultural consciousness in the Western world. They come through the writings of Chaucer and Dante and Milton and, of course, the Brad Pitt movie, but...from the beginning, all the way back to Evagrius and John Cassian, the argument for naming these particular seven as deadly was that they were thought to be the sources or roots of all other sinful behaviour. So another name for the deadly sins is the seven capital vices. 'Capital' here, which comes from the Latin 'caput', which means 'head', suggests that these things are, in a sense, fountainheads from which a whole cascade of bad stuff flows. So when John Cassian was making this argument back in the 5th century, he made claims like, "From lust springs buffoonery, "foolish talking and filthy conversation." (LAUGHTER) "From sloth comes rudeness and wandering about." (LAUGHTER) Which actually seems like a contradiction to me. But... He goes on. "From anger springs murders and indignation." Fair enough. And "From pride springs blasphemy and murmuring," whatever that means. Now, there are two kinds of questions that these sorts of claims raise. There are questions of fact, so does anger actually cause violence and murder? Does sloth make people rude? Does lust lead to buffoonery? Does pride lead to murmuring? And there are later questions of value. So in what sense are these things bad? Are they indeed bad? Are they bad for us? Are they bad for those around us? It's these kinds of questions that I want to talk about today. But before I go on, I have a confession to make. I am an experimental social psychologist. In the promotional material for the Festival, there are scare quotes around this phrase, and I don't really know why - it's not made-up. It's actually what I am. It's, like, my job title. What does this mean? So, what it means is that I study human social behaviour and especially moral behaviour by bringing people into a laboratory and manipulating them in devious ways, manipulating their emotions or their thinking or their behaviour, and then watching what happens. So in other words, I use the experimental method to try to work out how the mind works and why we behave the way we do. And it's this kind of research, as Edwina mentioned, that I talk about in the book. And what I want to show you is that when you put these sins through their scientific paces, you discover that they are complex, interesting and in many ways, very, very useful aspects of human psychology. So let's begin the tour. I'm not gonna go through all seven, because that would take too long and then you'd have no reason to buy the book, which would be self-defeating. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through a couple in a bit more detail and then maybe we can touch on the others in question time. And the two that I want to go through, I think, offer some of the most interesting and counterintuitive benefits of sinning. So... Anger. Just a sec. A little bit too much of the gluttony last night of the drinking variety. Now... What was I saying? Anger. So, I want to begin with anger because I think, of the seven, it seems the one that many people have the most trouble conceiving of as anything less than sinful. And this is because anger has become synonymous with violence over the years. And you'd be forgiven for thinking that anger and violence are the same thing. If you consider, for example, historical depictions of anger in European painting, what you see, by and large, is a collection of sword-wielding maniacs running amok in the European countryside. So in this detail from Hieronymous Bosch's painting, 'The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things', anger is a man with a sword attacking some guy with a table in his head. (LAUGHTER) I don't know why he's got a table in his head. And in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's depiction of anger, from his series on the vices and virtues, we again see a sword. I don't know if you can see it. I'll laser-point to it over there. Watch your eyes. (LAUGHS) Can I laser-point it? It's not working. There's a sword in this that's so big, if you can see it, that it actually requires two people to wield it as it slices through the poor characters down below there. And you can't really make out on this screen, but there are people being roasted on a spit towards the back and boiled alive, and these are not special cases. Anger has long been associated with and indeed identified with violence, and in many people's minds, it still is, but they're not the same thing, anger and violence, and, in fact, estimates from psychological research suggests that violence follows anger in at most about 10% of cases. So the vast majority of the time, fully 90% of the time, we experience the emotion without the aggressive consequences. And so when violence is stripped away, I think anger starts to look a little bit better. Now, one of the key points about thinking about anger, and emotions in general, is that they have in large part been designed by evolution for certain purposes. In other words, emotions are functional, right? They are for certain things. So, what is anger for? What are its functions? Well, one of the main things that anger does is highlighted by a clever study by Mario Mikulincer, who's a psychologist from Herzliya University in Israel. And what Mikulincer did was bring a group of students into his laboratory and he gave them some puzzles to solve. And they worked through it. They had to try and figure out a rule that underpinned these different patterns in these puzzles. And they worked for a while and they had a hard time solving them. They worked for a little bit longer. And no-one could actually work it out. And this is not surprising, 'cause Mikulincer actually gave them unsolvable problems. We're like to do this sort of thing, social psychologists. He did it because he was interested in how people would react to that failure, right? And what you might expect is... Some people reacted with despondency and despair that they couldn't actually solve these problems. Others got frustrated and reacted with anger. And what Mikulincer did next, I think, is the really interesting part. He next gave these participants another set of problems, this time with solutions, and what he was interested in is how people would perform on that second task depending on the emotion they felt in response to the first task. And what he found, which is good news for anger, is that people who felt angry at the initial failure subsequently persisted longer and, as a consequence, were more successful on the second task than those who felt sadness. So... You can think of anger in this sense as a gauge and a trigger. Anger gauges our progress towards a goal. We want something. We can't quite get it. We get frustrated and we get angry. But it also serves as a trigger - and this is the useful part, I think - because it triggers us to persist, and as a consequence of that persistence, it often leads to greater success. Now, I think that the functional story of anger actually gets even more interesting when you start to ask exactly how anger does this - how does it bring about these persistence and success benefits? So...I want you to think about these questions for a second. So these questions are about risk perception. And they measure a general tendency towards optimism or pessimism, and this matters for anger because anger changes the way you actually respond to these questions. So in one study, when participants were brought into a laboratory and induced to feel anger by recalling a previous angry episode, they became much more optimistic. Angry people think that they're more likely to marry somebody wealthy. They think that they're less likely to develop gum problems. They are overall more optimistic. And the reason that this happens is another interesting mental shift that anger triggers. People who are angry feel a greater sense of control. And that's, I think, really the key to understanding why anger brings about these persistence and success benefits. When you're moving towards a goal and you can't quite get there and you get angry, what tends to happen is these mental shifts towards optimism and control - you feel in control of the situation, you optimistically focus on pay-offs, rather than threats, and as a consequence, you're more likely to succeed. So that's one thing that anger does. What else does anger do? Well... When we think about emotions, we often tend to emphasise what they look like from the inside, right, what emotions actually feel like to us. And with anger, this internal dimension is probably something we can all recognise. There's a sense of general bodily tension. There's a quickening of the pulse. But many emotions also have a very, very important external dimension. They don't just feel like something but they also look like something to other people. They come with certain body language and a set of facial expressions. Anger looks like this. You see... You probably can't read this, but... You see a furrowed brow, a glare in the eyes and a narrowing and pursing of the lips. That's what anger looks like, and that's what anger looks like everywhere in the world. Now, the fact that anger looks like something to others means that it communicates something about you, and to get a sense of exactly what it communicates, it's useful to think back to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So, many of you, of course, will remember this. The Lewinsky scandal that ensnared President Bill Clinton back in the late '90s. Now, during the affair, Clinton was widely criticised not only for his misconduct but for his apparent lack of remorse and guilt about his behaviour. Now, Clinton did make a few brief apologies at the time, but one of the most memorable images of the scandal was this one. Clinton... ..with furrowed brows, a glare in the eye, angrily waving his finger, staring down the camera barrel. And it turns out that this display of anger may have actually played a small part in keeping him in office. So early in 1999, just as the US Senate was debating Clinton's guilt, Larissa Tiedens, a psychologist at Stanford University, brought two groups of students into a lab to do a study that would have actually been of some use to the Democratic Party's publicity office at the time. One group of students was shown a 50-second clip of Clinton's grand jury testimony, depicting an angry Bill Clinton, this Bill Clinton, gesticulating with force and staring down the camera barrel as he denounced the unjust behaviour of the opposition lawyers. The other group of students saw another clip from the grand jury testimony but a clip depicting a sadder, more remorseful, more subdued Clinton, with head hung and gaze averted, as he discussed the inappropriateness of his relationship with Miss Lewinsky. Now, after watching the videos, participants reported their agreement with various statements relating to the whole Clinton affair. So, should Clinton be removed from office? Should the Senate find him guilty? Should he be severely punished? And it may surprise you to know that it was those people who saw the angry Clinton that were more lenient on him. They were more in favour of letting him retain the presidency. And the reason that this happens comes from another set of interesting studies, also by Larissa Tiedens, where she looked at how expressions of anger changed people's perceptions of personality characteristics, and what anger seems to signal is dominance, strength, toughness and competence, which are presidential qualities. So seeing the angry Clinton, the dominant Clinton, the presidential Clinton, led people to want to keep him in office. Now, this is fine for Bill Clinton, but what about the rest of us? Those of us who aren't president of the United States, former or otherwise. One possibility is that expressing anger may only work for people who are already in a position of power. Now, in another study to test this interesting possibility, Tiedens again showed people two video clips, but this time, they were of regular people conducting a job interview. And these clips were identical except that at one point, as the job applicant was recalling an instance from his previous job, he expressed either anger, in one condition, or sadness, in the other condition. That is the only difference between these two videos. And what you find is that when participants were later asked to make judgments about these job applicants, including how much should this person be paid... ..people who saw an angry applicant suggested a salary of $53,700. Those who saw a sad applicant suggested a salary of $41,330, which is an anger bonus of about $12,000. So, what works for Bill Clinton works for the rest of us, it seems. Well, but...not quite. There's a bit of a twist here. Seven years after Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony, there was a different Clinton in the news, Hillary Clinton. And back in 2006, Hillary Clinton publicly and angrily criticised aspects of the Republican Party's behaviour in Congress. But she didn't seem to get the bonuses that her husband got. Maureen Dowd, the journalist writing in the 'New York Times', summarised the situation like this, and this is a quote from Maureen Dowd. "They," and here she means members of the Republican Party, "are casting Hillary Clinton as an angry woman. "She is a she-monster, melding images of Medea, the Furies, harpies. "This gambit handcuffs Hillary. "If she doesn't speak out strongly against President Bush, "she's timid and girly. "If she does," if she does express anger, "she's a witch and a shrew." So when Bill's angry, he's presidential, but when Hillary gets angry, she's a witch. So... What's actually happening here? Do angry expressions actually backfire for women? Well, it seems they do. When you go back into the lab to test this in controlled circumstances, what you find is that when... So a study was done. It was identical to the interview study that I just mentioned. But this time, the job applicant was a woman, not a man. When angry women... ..are judged and are assessed on salary, angry women pay a $5,500 anger penalty compared to people who express sadness. So why do women pay this anger penalty? Well, it's because of how the emotion is explained. For men, anger is stereotypical. It's normal. It's part of the masculine stereotype. So when it's expressed, it's seen as an expected and appropriate response to external events. The printer breaks or Paula Jones's lawyers behave inappropriately and so one gets legitimately angry. But for women, who are stereotyped as the more caring, softer and kinder sex, anger seems unusual. It seems counterstereotypical. And...when something is unexpected or counterstereotypical, one tends to explain it in terms of internal dispositional characteristics. So angry women are seen as just that - inherently angry women - and thus are deemed less stable and perhaps less capable of handling adversity in a calm fashion. So... That's some stuff about anger. What I want to turn to next is sloth. So these days, when we think about sloth... ..we think of laziness and procrastination and just, you know, taking it easy. Originally... Originally, however, for early thinkers on the sin, sloth referred to a more spiritual kind of laziness or despair, but since then, sloth has been condemned more and more as an economic sin, like a sin against productivity rather than a spiritual one. And this fact, this kind of transition, can be attributed somewhat, I think, to the Protestant work ethic, the idea, as Henry Ford suggested, that work is our salvation. Now, work undoubtedly provides meaning and means for all of us, but I think the blind adoration of the Protestant work ethic is troubling. The problem with the "work equals virtue" equation is the invalid corollary, which is "sloth equals vice". When you pit virtuous work against sinful sloth, the sin becomes synonymous with inactivity, with doing nothing, but the really interesting thing about sloth is it actually constitutes a lot of activity, it's just that you can't actually recognise it. Robert Louis Stevenson captures it well in his 'Apology for Idlers' - a great essay for those of you who want to justify your sloth. He says, "Idleness, so-called, does not consist in doing nothing "but in doing a great deal not recognised." And I think that's true. And when you look at what's not recognised about sloth, you actually see that a lot of it is actually beneficial. So let's start with the ultimate of slothful states - sleep. So for all its seeming simplicity, sleep remains something of a mystery to scientists. From the outside, it looks like nothing much is going on at all when we sleep. If you take a closer look, you discover that the sleeping brain does a hell of a lot that's not recognised by the casual observer. Now, I want you to take a moment and try to remember this list of words. I'll give you about 20 seconds. Just try to remember this list. I'm going to give you a test in a little while. OK. That's enough. The test is to come. And one of the key insights from the past few decades of sleep research is that the brain does a lot of work shaping our memories while we're asleep. The sleeping brain works quite hard to consolidate the information that we've been processing during the day. Now, according to some researchers, what sleep does is allows the brain to sew together the fabric of our memories, strengthening associations between ideas and forging new connections between concepts. And one of the most interesting things about this creative needlework of the brain is the precise way that it weaves these memories and ideas together. So to illustrate this, let me give you the test. So think back to the list on the previous slide. Was the word 'sick' on the list? AUDIENCE: Yes. -Was the word 'doctor' on the list? -No. -What about the word 'patient'? -Yes. Right. You guys are especially good at this. I think you're quite attentive. This is always problematic whenever I run a demonstration in my lectures and it doesn't bloody work. (LAUGHTER) What most people... And you guys aren't most people. What most people do when they're given a task like this is they mistakenly remember that... Remember. ..that 'doctor' is on the list. So 'sick' is on the list and 'patient's on the list but 'doctor' is not. And what this demonstration should have shown is an interesting property of human memory. And this is that what the brain is particularly good at doing is encoding the gist of stimuli, right? Now, in this case, the gist is medicine, alright, and so people tend to mistakenly remember the word 'doctor' is there. Now, our brain is quite good at this kind of processing when we're awake, but it turns out that it may be even better at this kind of processing when we're asleep. So when researchers give participants memory tasks like this one and they train them on the task in the evening and then test them the following morning after a full eight hours of sleep, they find that people are much more likely to misremember that 'doctor' was on the list than if they are trained in the morning and tested in the evening after a similar amount of time being awake. Now, this may seem to suggest that sleep actually leads to worse memory performance. On this particular kind of task, it actually does lead to more errors. But this kind of apparent maladaptive memory processing is actually very, very useful for everyday functioning, 'cause we're constantly bombarded with lots and lots of detailed information, and it's often redundant information, and we...most of the time don't really need to remember all the ins and outs. Extracting the summary information, extracting the gist, is often much more efficient than laboriously retaining and processing all the details. And it turns out that it's not just gist memory that gets a boost from sleep. Other memories are also well served. Emotional memories are better after sleep. Memories of facts are better after sleep. Procedural memories, so how to do things, are better after sleep, and there's some intriguing work that also suggests that creativity, especially insight, also gets a boost from sleep. And for those of you who are thinking that all this sleeping sounds like a hell of a lot of work, the good news is that naps also work. Naps also bring a lot of the same benefits that a full eight hours of sleep does. Now, over the last decade or so, we've seen an upsurge in slow movements of all kinds. And implicit in these slow movements, these calls to slow down, from slow food to slow sex, to slow schooling, is a notion that easing the pace of life a bit is a good thing, right, that slowing down will bring more happiness and health and all sorts of other blessings. But an intriguing question, I think, when it comes to sloth, when it comes to slowing down, is...can sloth actually make us more moral? Now, one of the most influential movements in... ..the era of slow has been slow cities, which is this sort of global movement to ease the frenetic pace of city living. Are there any moral benefits from living in a slow city? To answer this question, some researchers in the United States measured the pace of life in a bunch of US cities, 24 US cities, sampled from all over the United States. And they were interested in whether or not the pace of life in these cities impacted helping behaviour in any interesting ways. So in each of these cities, what the researchers did was first measured pedestrian walking speed as a general measure of pace of life. So they measured how long it took people to walk 60 feet. That was the measure of pace of life in the city. And just for the record, New York happens actually not to be the fastest. It's seventh. San Francisco happens to be the fastest, which is kind of counterintuitive to me. Next, they measured helping behaviour in a bunch of interesting ways. So, for example, one measure involves the experimenter dropping a pen in the street and seeing how many people offer to help pick it up. And in another measure of helping, participants were asked for a quarter to make change for the phone. And the extent to which people helped was taken as a measure of pro-social behaviour here. And what these researchers found was that slower cities were actually more helpful cities. Now, this study comes with all the correlational ambiguity of any correlational design. It leaves open the question of causality. We don't know whether walking slowly actually causes more helping or something else is going on, and to get at this question of cause, we need an experiment, and, thankfully, we have an experiment, from social psychology, in the shape of a very elegantly designed classic study that's come to be called the Good Samaritan study. Now, for those of you who don't recall, the Good Samaritan study, paraphrased... ..goes something like this. A guy gets beaten up and pretty much left for dead on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. And as he lies on the roadside, he's passed by a priest and a Levite, who's also a religious functionary, who fail to offer any help. But a passing Samaritan stops and helps, bandaging the man's wounds and taking him to an inn. That's the basic parable. And the moral of this story... is that... ..it's good deeds that count for moral goodness, not religious belief per se, but there's another interesting and less obvious moral to this story that occurred to two psychologists back in 1973 - John Darley and Daniel Batson. And what occurred to them when they read this parable was this, and this is a quote from this classic study. "One can imagine the priest and Levite, prominent public figures, "hurrying along with little black books "full of meetings and appointments, "glancing furtively at their sundials. "In contrast, the Samaritan would likely have far fewer "and less important people counting on him "to be at a particular place at a particular time "and therefore might be expected to be in less of a hurry "than the prominent priest or Levite." So this question that occurred to Darley was, does being in a hurry actually lead you to help less? And this is an interesting thought, but how to be certain? So like all good experimental psychologists, Darley and Batson decided to test the idea, and to do so, they actually re-created the Good Samaritan parable on the Princeton campus. And here's what they did. It's one of my favourite studies from social psychology. They got seminary students, people studying for the priesthood, to come into their lab, and they were told that the purpose of the study was to deliver a short talk. They'd have to deliver a short talk on the Good Samaritan parable, which is an interesting point that I'll come back to later. And next comes the key manipulation. Now, the students were told that the building they were currently in was a little short on space, so they couldn't do their talks there - they had to go to another building, just next door, across an alleyway, to give their talks. And this is the manipulation. Some students were told to hurry - they were told they were late and they should dash across as fast as they could - but others were given the impression that they had all the time in the world. So these were the sort of more slothful Samaritans in the study. Now, out in the alleyway, they come across a man, slumped in a doorway, moaning and coughing and seemingly in need of help - a confederate of the experimenters, of course. So they planted this guy here. So the question is just how Samaritan-like were these students? Now, these are seminary students studying for the priesthood who have just read the Good Samaritan parable. (LAUGHTER) People who were told to hurry... These are seminary students who had just read the Good S... (LAUGHTER) 10% of these people helped this man, who was in clear need of help. The slothful Samaritans, however, of these, 63% helped the man. So it seems that indulging a little bit of sloth in this case brings out the altruist in us. Exactly why, no studies have been done to test this precisely, but it seems that... it seems that what's happening is that easing the pace of life and releasing the inner sloth allows us to get our thoughts out of our own concerns and makes us a little bit more attentive to the needs of others. So in this case, sloth, long held to be one of the deadliest of sins, actually looks much more like a virtue to me. Now, this is where I want to end the brief tour. Hopefully, there'll be plenty of time to explore the other sins in questions. And what we've seen is how two of these sins can serve us quite well in many ways. They're also quite beneficial to those around us. And the same goes for the other deadly sins. So just for example, lust can make you smarter. Gluttony in some circumstances can also make you more helpful. Greed... When it comes to greed, it's particularly interesting. The very idea of money, the very idea, when it's activated in your mind, can actually make you more resistant to pain. Envy, if used wisely, can make you smarter, and pride, long held to be the deadliest of the seven, can actually make you more successful. Now, I had quite a lot of fun researching this book and writing this book, and it was always meant to be a very, very light-hearted exploration of what I find to be simply a bunch of fascinating psychological research. But I'm often pushed to make a more serious point, to have a dangerous idea. But I'm always a bit reluctant to be more serious than I need to be, but if I have to make a serious point, it'd be something like this. Back in 2008, Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, who's a high-ranking bishop in the Roman Catholic Church, decided it was necessary to revamp the seven deadly sins for the new millennium. And in an interview with a Vatican newspaper, he suggested that not only do you offend God with a little bit of lust and greed and gluttony but you also offend God by even considering the idea of... ..stem cell research... By even considering these ideas, you condemn yourself to an eternity in hell. This isn't official Church doctrine, of course. This is not official Church doctrine but this was just his opinion. And it's precisely this kind of simplistic ideological reduction of extremely complex aspects of the human condition to the status of mere sin that led me to start to question the sinfulness of the traditional list. I mean, what strikes you as a more sensible course of action? Reason and informed debate about the ethical consequences of stem cell research or simply asserting that such research is a sin and abandoning it altogether? Drug treatment programs, based on careful consideration of the scientific evidence surrounding the causes of drug abuse, or a "drug abuse equals sin" mantra, which condemns drug users not only to an eternity in hell but also to social exclusion and stigmatisation. In the last half-hour or so, we've explored in some detail two of seven fundamental psychological characteristics of the human species that have for about 16 centuries been simplistically demonised as mortally sinful. And, hopefully, I've convinced you that these things are far from sinful in certain circumstances. And all it takes to get to this conclusion is a little bit of careful thought, a perusal of the scientific record and a willingness to abandon a cultural legacy that drastically simplifies human nature. If you take a moment, it's not difficult to see how the seven deadly sins can often work for you and for those around you. And if you take just a few moments more, you'll find it equally reasonable that almost any facet of human behaviour, from sloth to genetic engineering, is just a bit too complex, too multifaceted and in the end, often simply too interesting to be written off as mere sin. Thank you. (APPLAUSE) Thank you, Simon. Now, we are going to be opening to questions. There are microphones on either side of the stage. And because the session's being recorded, it would be good if you could use the microphones, rather than shout them out. But while you're getting down there, I have a question myself. The obvious sort of... You know, the... The bulk of the book is about the experiments. And they are, some of them, just, like, you know, brilliant and devious, and it makes me think you guys are the evil geniuses of the scientific community, you know, and some of them, I thought, you know, well, maybe it was a bit of a long bow sometimes to get the conclusions from the behaviour and maybe sometimes, you know, cultural responses are conflated with neurological and vice versa and stuff, and it seemed to me to be all down to the design of the experiment, and when you're trying to plumb something as complex as the human psyche, how do you go about that? How do you set out to devise or design an experiment that... Yeah. And that's a really good question. And... I mean, the reason I got into social psychology in the first place is precisely because I found so many of the experiments just fascinating. The classic Milgram study, the Zimbardo Stanford prison experiment, these experiments are just remarkably clever ways, I think, of exploring human social behaviour. But in terms of how to design an experiment and design a good experiment that you can make justified and broad inferences from, there are a couple of things. Technically, the essence of an experiment is control over the phenomenon that you're interested in. I mean, that's really why you do experiments. You...you take a complex phenomenon in the real world that you can't quite work out the causal story for. You strip it down as best you can, put it in a laboratory context and you manipulate just one thing, right? You hold everything else constant. And if you manipulate just one thing and find an effect, then you can be reasonably confident that that thing that you've manipulated is causing some consequence. So... I didn't talk about lust, but... There's some really interesting work on lust, I find - it's really quite counterintuitive - that shows that when you are lustful, you can actually be smarter. And the way the researchers did this study was to bring people into the laboratory, and here's the devious part - they induced lust in them by showing them naked pictures of people of the opposite sex. These were done with heterosexual participants. And they measured their thinking in interesting ways. One thing they did was measure what's called detail-focused or global-focused information processing. And to do this, they use a very, very clever stimulus called a compound letter stimulus. If you can imagine a large 'L' shape made up of tiny 'H's, right? So when you look at this shape, you can see 'H's and you can see an 'L'. And depending on what you're faster to respond to in a computer task, psychologists can make inferences about the kind of processing that's going on in your mind. So if people are relatively faster at recognising the little 'H's, they're focused on details. If they're relatively faster at recognising the global 'L', they're focused on more holistic properties of the stimulus. An interesting thing about this is that... ..this kind of detail-focused thinking is related to analytic thinking, the kind of thinking that's involved in the kinds of questions you find in the Graduate Record Examination in the US. And so, what the psychologists have done is bring people into the laboratory, manipulated lust, right, controlling everything else. They've measured a mechanism, global/local processing, and they've measured a final variable, which is analytic reasoning, and because of the control they have, they can make a strong causal story there. The flip side of all this is when you come into the lab, you strip down the phenomenon, and you have to do that to make causal judgments, but... This is the tricky part. This is the really, really tricky part. You have to maintain, as best you can, the essence of the real phenomenon, 'cause you want to actually say that... ..that study says something meaningful about the rich experience of lust, you have to be sure that the essence of lust is maintained in the manipulation. And there's no easy way of sort of saying how we do that. Just, I think, that's part of the art of experimentation - it just comes from thinking and reading a hell of a lot. So it's always a battle between control and saving the richness of the phenomenon. Is there any trial and error? Are there ever sort of experiments that are done which, like, "Yeah, that didn't really work"? Many, many experiments are done like that. It's just... And this is one of the problems. This is one of the actual problems with this kind of research, is that there are so many things that can go wrong that you have to trial and trial and trial. And you just have to learn from error. I mean, there's actually a whole philosophy of science that's called... ..well, it's based around the concept of learning from error, from experiments, so it's very, very essential. Cool. Now, do we have any questions? I can't really see. Yeah. OK. Down here, please. MAN: I'd like to raise two points. The first one is an observation. When you mentioned that anger when shown by men tend to reinforce the idea of leadership in them, I thought immediately about Hitler and the ayatollahs. They're always in angry poses, and that's probably a reason why they're charismatic leaders. The second point is, I'd like to disagree, and I'm just one example - I know I can't conclude much from that. When you measured altruism from the seminarian experiment, I'd like to think of myself as an altruistic person. I engage in volunteer work and I make monthly donations... -EDWINA: Can we get to the questions? -Yeah. And... But I lead a frenetic life. I cram lots of activities in every minute of my life, almost... ..to...almost to an illness state. -How...how do you reconcile that? -SIMON: OK. OK. That's cool. That's a fair question, and the way you reconcile that is to simply recognise that any particular behaviour is a product of aspects of the person and aspects of the situation. I mean, this is the essence of social psychology research. I mean, it's an interactive perspective. So we all have certain kinds of reasonably stable individual differences. So things like extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience - these are things that manifest pretty stably over time. But we're all impacted by situational factors as well. So this is not to say that if you take any person and put them in the Good Samaritan study, they're going to be an altruist, right? I mean, the way particular people respond to different manipulations depends on the kinds of internal characteristics that they have. So... The way to think about that is an interactionist approach. Great. Over here, please. MAN: The powerful simmering anger of women that there have been, like Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto and perhaps Queen Victoria, are they aberrations, or is there something more complex and more layered going on in including them in your analysis? They are aberrations in the sense of what we expect in the West based on the stereotype of women, so... That was the point I was making with those studies, is the way that people are perceived in general - not just in this particular case of angry women but in general - is that if they tend to display behaviours that are unusual for them based on the group they belong to, then they'll be perceived in a different way, and what tends to happen is that people make what are called dispositional inferences about their behaviour. So angry women, because anger is counter-stereotypical, are seen as inherently angry women. The anger is seen to come from the internal disposition rather than aspects of a situation. Whether they're statistical aberrations, whether there are actually more angry women than angry men, I don't know. Maybe you can ask Germaine Greer. I think she's around here somewhere. (APPLAUSE) EDWINA: OK. Yes, please. Hi. More on the angry women job applicant experiment. Did you guys...or did the experiment account for responses by females versus responses by males to the video that was shown? Do you think there would be a difference to a female response than a male response, so... in the audience? So they... The results of that report are averaged across males and females, and, from memory... ..from memory, and there are so many of these studies in this book, it's hard to remember all the details of all of them, but from memory, I think that there wasn't any clear influence of participant gender on this judgment. It doesn't mean there never would be, but... I mean, the interesting thing about this is that both men and women tend to hold very, very similar stereotypes of men and women. So, to that extent, you may expect that these processes would work the same way for men and women, but I can't remember the details of the study to answer you completely definitively. So thanks. Over here, please. Simon, I think your book quite... you know, and all your research quite clearly shows, you know, the benefit of the sins in certain circumstances. Probably in the vast majority of times is probably quite undesirable. In this way, it seems to almost require like a selective approach to morals. Given, you know, the value people often placed on having a very consistent system of values full of integrity, how could you maybe reconcile this in an approach to maybe life or... MAN: Quite broad. (LAUGHS) Put you under the gun. So...so one point is the idea that, implicit in your statement... ..that in the vast majority of cases, these things are probably bad. Now... That's the empirical question, and I don't know if that's actually true. I mean, we assume that in the vast majority of cases these things are bad, but I think that's partly because we've just inherited the idea that these things are bad. Anger, for example, is a good example, I think, because... When people think of anger, as I said, they tend to think of violence, but when you look at the evidence, anger only leads to violence in about 10% of cases, right, so here's a case where 90% of the time, there is no obvious negative consequence. So...so there's...there's an empirical question, that point. How do you reconcile this approach with... How do you get a philosophy of life out of this approach? Well, here we go. Let's see. I'll just... (LAUGHTER) I'll just... I'll just adlib. So... We'll see where we end up. This will be my philosophy that's online. Not yet. Exactly. So... There's some interesting recent research looking at virtues, right, so, what people actually think constitutes a good life. And there's surprising consistency around the world when it comes to virtues. So some researchers asked people from a bunch of different countries, and they also read the philosophical writings of different traditions from different places in the world. And they found that there are basically six virtues that people around the world agree on constitute the good life. The exact balance is not the same in all cultures, but they are... I'm gonna test my memory here. ..wisdom, humanity, courage, temperance, transcendence and...I knew I was gonna forget the last one. Justice. So these are the ends towards which, right, many people are actually working. So to my mind, the way to reconcile this approach to morality that I'm taking, experimental approach, with the question of how to lead a good life is to find the ends that you want to attain, right, which for the majority of people seem to be some combination of those six, and just ask the empirical question, right, does this particular sin, or does any aspect of human psychology, bring about more wisdom or less, does it bring about more justice or less? And that's how you approach the question. To my mind, it's an empirical question. Once you've decided on the ends, the question of how you get there and how to live the life to reach those ends is a question for science. MAN: Thank you. (APPLAUSE) EDWINA: Do the sins...do the sins kind of correlate across cultures, or are they a particularly Christian little bag? Yeah, that I don't know. So I'm not, by any means, a religious scholar, and, to be quite honest, I... Although it seems like I'm advocating sin in this book, what I'm really doing is using the seven deadly sins as a neat conceit for talking about a bunch of interesting social psych stuff. So I didn't actually delve into much more about sort of the cross-cultural commonality of these sins, so, actually, I don't really know. EDWINA: OK. Over here. MAN: Thank you. Peter. On anger, and I take your point that you say anger isn't violence, but in all my experience, it tends to lead to violence, or can lead to violence. Have you ever in an experiment pushed a person... ..facing a person that they're getting angry at to the point where violence is about to explode and then had the person that they're directing the anger at just faintly smile at them - "Om"? -I haven't done that. -(LAUGHTER) I'm speaking from experience. -(LAUGHTER) -A lot of it. Basically, the angry person just deflates. So I see anger as a sign of weakness. SIMON: OK. So... I... I haven't done that study. I don't know that anyone... I don't know that anyone has done that particular study. But... You could do the study. I don't know what to think about that - anger as a sign of weakness. I'm not sure... I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with that, because from... And this may be your experience, but, I mean, from the research that I know, it's actually a sign of the precise opposite. It tends to be interpreted as a sign of dominance and strength. Maybe there are some circumstances or in some cultures that expressions of anger may be seen differently, but... -Can I change anger to bluster? -Sorry? Can I change weakness maybe to bluster? Weakness to bluster... MAN: Are you better at thinking when you're angry? Or are you worse? -The question... -You're worse. -Are you better at thinking... -Thinking? ..when you're angry? Yeah. Well, it depends on what you mean. Here's an interesting thing on thinking. So, what I assumed... This is leaving your question, I'm sorry. That seemed to me like a different question. So let me answer that question. (LAUGHTER) What I assumed about anger was that it'd make you quite stubborn and closed-minded. But it turns out, strangely, that it does exactly the opposite. So there is a tendency...a cognitive bias called the confirmation bias, which is the tendency to simply seek out evidence that confirms the things you already believe, right? So this is why Democrats watch 'The Daily Show' and Republicans watch 'FOX News', right? They have a world view, they have an ideology, and they seek to confirm it - that's the confirmation bias. And we all tend to show this. This is actually one of the reasons why, I think, people's folk theories about how the world works aren't very objective and aren't very reliable - that's a side point. There were... There's an interesting study that looked at the confirmation bias after manipulating emotions. And what they found was that angry people tended to be less susceptible to the confirmation bias. So they're, in a sense, more open-minded. They were more open to the arguments of an opponent. And the reason that this is the case is that anger, although it doesn't often lead to violence, statistically speaking, does come with a confrontational mindset. And so...the researchers think what's happening is that when a person is angry and is expecting to get into a discussion with somebody, they actively seek out the arguments on the opposite side so they have a better chance of beating their opponent. Now, the interesting... the consequence of this is that... ..when angry people seek out this information, these arguments for the opposite side, they also tend to process them quite deeply, right? They're really trying to sort of pick holes in them. And as a consequence of that, and this is the counterintuitive part, they become more open to be persuaded by those arguments. So... Anger actually reduces the confirmation bias and seems to make people more open-minded, which is bizarre, but there are a few studies that show that, so... EDWINA: Does that mean that all the left-wingers amongst us have to go and listen to Alan Jones and all the righties need to listen to Phillip Adams? (BOTH LAUGH) Generally speaking, I think it makes sense to look at both sides... both sides of an argument, but... EDWINA: OK, we have a question over here. Yeah, look, in defining all these things as... ..well, defining sin, the experiments seem to be on one person. Now, in something like... A lot of sin, I would have thought, is about interaction in a relationship. So when... Anger might be beneficial to the angry person, but the recipient of that anger, if bullied, for example, or... ..you know, or any of the other things, then there's a negative effect, so... How do... You know, how can we say that it's necessarily not a sin? -Well, so, yeah. So it's all about... -(APPLAUSE) So it's all about balance. I mean, the question of whether these things are, on balance, or on average, good or bad for you, is a question of taking the good stuff from the bad stuff and weighing them up. And this book was deliberately contrarian and partisan because I wanted to explore the good side. My publishers wanted me to explore the good side. (LAUGHTER) So... In the relationship context, it's interesting, because some of the estimates of... ..the relationship between anger and violence come from relationship contexts. And it turns out that most of our anger experiences actually happen in the home with people that we're in relationships with. When people are asked when they feel anger, it's in those circumstances. But... ..when you ask people, "What are the consequences "of feeling anger in your relationship," about 50% of the time, they're positive, and about 50% of the time, they're negative, statistically. And what seems to account for the... ..the question of whether it's positive or negative is how anger is dealt with in the particular situation. So, what we know about how anger relates to violence is there are certain things that increase the likelihood that anger leads to violence and certain things that decrease the likelihood. The things that increase the likelihood are rumination, right, so if you ruminate on an angry experience, you tend to be more aggressive. And interestingly, and this is counterintuitive, I think, catharsis also increases the likelihood of aggression. So there's this theory, of course, that when you're angry, you should vent it, right? You should hit a punching bag and let it out, and as a result, you'll have more positive consequences. It turns out the opposite is the case, because... What research seems to show is that when you give people an opportunity to vent their anger, on a punching bag, for example, via this aggressive route, what you're doing is you're actually strengthening the association between anger and violence, and then when you actually give them another opportunity to experience anger and measure the likelihood that they aggress, the people who have previously engaged in catharsis are actually more likely to aggress because catharsis has strengthened the link in their minds between anger and violence. So two things that don't work are rumination and catharsis. The two things that do work and bring back positive consequences in relationship contexts are distraction... So if you feel anger and you can distract yourself from it, that tends to bring about more positive outcomes. And the other thing is what's called cognitive reappraisal. And this just basically means taking a step back and thinking about the situation differently, and if you can avoid blaming, yelling and these sorts of things, then that tends to lead to positive outcomes of feelings of anger in relationship contexts. So that's just a little bit on anger in relationships. EDWINA: Alright. Well, we're out of time, but thank you very much for coming along today, and I hope that you all feel remarkably better for hearing that and when you go out this afternoon, you will get drunk and fall asleep and make yourself a better person in that way. -So thank you, Simon. -(APPLAUSE) Thanks. -You're signing books, right? -Sorry? You're signing books after this, aren't you? Simon's gonna be out in the foyer signing his book after this. If you have any judgmental relatives that you are thinking it might be a suitable Christmas present for, then I urge you to take opportunity and hope you enjoy the rest of the Festival. Thank you for coming.