Read about and understand the various psychological phenomena you observe in your day-to-day life. Get answers to common curiosities about everyday behavior. Understanding the root causes of your behaviors and those of others will greatly improve your understanding of human psychology. No human behavior, however small, is insignificant.
To understand why justice is important, we first need to understand the evolution of the tendency in humans to form cooperative coalitions. This is because it’s this phenomenon only that gives rise to contexts in which we seek justice and revenge.
So why do we form cooperative coalitions at all? Why do people come together and work together?
The fundamental condition to be met for the formation of a cooperative coalition is that there must be some common goals that the coalition is trying to achieve. The attainment of these goals must benefit each member of the coalition in some way.
If a coalition member feels that the goals of his coalition are not in line with his own goals, he’d want to break free from the coalition.
In short, it’s the gains that motivate people to form coalitions and stay in them.
Ancient conditions
In ancestral times, forming cooperative coalitions helped our ancestors to hunt large animals, share food, invade territories, build shelters and defend themselves. Those who formed coalitions had an evolutionary advantage over those who didn’t.
Hence, those possessing the psychological mechanism of coalition formation out-reproduced those who didn’t. The result is that more and more members of the population were willing to form cooperative coalitions.
Today, the people who desire to form coalitions far outnumber those who do not possess any such desire. Forming alliances is regarded as a fundamental attribute of human nature.
The point is that the psychological mechanism of forming coalitions has made its way into our psyche because it had myriad benefits.
But the full story about coalition formation in humans isn’t so simple and rosy…
Justice, punishment, and revenge
What if some members of a coalition are defectors and free-riders i.e. they take away only the benefits without contributing anything or even incurring huge losses to other members of the group?
Such members will have a huge fitness advantage over those who’re loyal to the coalition. Also, when other members bear huge costs, they’d doubtless want to break free from the coalition, tearing the coalition apart.
The presence of defectors and free riders will work against the evolution of the psychological tendency to form cooperative alliances. If such a tendency has to evolve, there must some opposing force that keeps defectors and free riders in check.
This opposing force is the human psychological desire for justice, punishment, and revenge.
The desire to punish those who are disloyal toward the coalition helps keep disloyalty in check. This, in turn, facilitates the evolution of the tendency to form cooperative coalitions.
We frequently witness the human desire for justice, punishment, and revenge throughout history and in our day-to-day lives.
When strict punishments are in place for those who fail to contribute their fair share, high levels of cooperation tend to emerge. Add to this the desire to harm slackers and those who’ve incurred a heavy cost on others. This, in common language, is called revenge.
Studies have shown that people’s reward centres of the brain are activated when they punish or observe punishment of those who they think deserve punishment. Revenge is indeed sweet.
In this article, we’ll discuss the psychology of hit songs. Specifically, how the principles of Psychology can be exploited to make a hit song. I’ll focus on four key concepts- patterns, emotional themes, group identity, and violation of expectations.
It’s hard to imagine life without music. Despite music being an integral part of all human cultures and all known civilizations, very little is understood as to why it affects us the way it does.
The variety of music is staggering. There’s music for all seasons and emotions.
Some musical compositions make you want to jump around and punch someone in the face, while others make you want to relax and hug someone. There’s music that you can listen to when you feel terrible and there’s music that you can tune into when you’re elated.
Imagine you’re in a band and planning to release a new song. You’ve not had much success with your previous songs. This time you want to ensure that you’ll produce a hit.
In your desperation, you hire researchers that study all the previous hit songs in the history of music to identify the common tone, pitch, theme and musical structure of these songs to give you a recipe for a hit song.
You also hire a psychologist who tells you what factors you need to take care of in order to make a song that people will like. Let’s explore those factors:
1) Patterns
“Make sure your song has recurring patterns, not only of vocal parts but musical parts too”, the psychologist tells you.
You’ll find recurring patterns in every song. In every song, there’s a portion (whether musical or vocal) that is repeated over and over. This serves two important psychological functions…
First, it takes advantage of the human cognitive function of pattern recognition. We humans have a knack to recognize patterns in random events. When we recognize a pattern in a song and hear it over and over, we begin to like the song because its patterns start becoming familiar to us.
Familiarity breeds likeability. We like the things we’re familiar with. They make us feel safe because we know how to deal with such things.
Unfamiliarity causes slight mental discomfort in us because we’re unsure how to deal with unfamiliar things.
The second important function of a recurring pattern in a song is to aid memory. If there’s a recurring pattern in a song, it’s easily absorbed into our memory and we’re able to recall and hum that pattern quite often. This is why the songs that we like the most tend to be the ones that we remember most.
Notice how the melodious introductory tune is repeated in this Beethoven masterpiece:
2) Emotional themes
“Your song should have some kind of an emotional theme embedded in it”, the psychologist suggests you.
You’re much more likely to like a song if it arouses emotion in you. This is due to a phenomenon that I call ‘emotional inertia’.
Emotional inertia is a psychological state where we tend to seek activities that sustain our current emotional state.
For example, if you’re feeling happy you’ll seek activities that continue to make you feel happy and if you’re sad you tend to continue doing things that make you sad. This is why we like listening to songs that match our current emotional state- songs that describe exactly how we feel.
So deliberately trying to elicit an emotion from a song is a good idea. People will like that and the odds of your song becoming a hit will increase.
3) Group identification
“Ask yourself, ‘Which group can strongly identify with this song?’”, is the next suggestion.
There are many songs that became a hit not just because they sounded good but also because they spoke to a certain group of people.
If a song contains lyrics that describe exactly how a major group of the population feels, it’s more likely to become a hit.
For example, if racism is a big problem in your country, you can write a song highlighting the ills of racism or describing how victims of racial hatred feel.
If there’s a presidential candidate that a large group of people hates, then making a song that mocks that presidential candidate is definitely going to be a hit in that group.
We like songs that match our world-views and belief systems. Such songs maintain and reinforce our beliefs- a very important psychological function.
4) Breaking conventions, slightly
“Break conventions, but not too much” is the final suggestion you’re given. If you’re an average 25-year-old adult, you’ve probably heard thousands of songs by now.
When you listen to a new song, you have certain expectations in your mind. If the new song that you hear is similar to a thousand songs that you’ve heard before, it’ll be bland and boring.
Also, if it violates your expectations too much, it’ll sound like noise and you’ll not pay any attention to it.
But if it violates your expectations just a bit, there’s a big chance you’ll like it.
A slightly unconventional song excites our brain and hits that sweet spot between familiarity and unfamiliarity. We like songs that startle our minds, but not too much.
Heavy metal music, for example, is not mainstream music. Therefore, when people are introduced to it they’re repelled by it.
However, if they listen to metal genres that are closer to the music they already listen to (pop, country, hip-hop, etc.) they slowly begin to like heavy metal too. And before you know it, they’re already into extreme metal genres like death metal and black metal.
Many people find it hard to get into genres like Heavy Metal that grossly violate their expectations of what music should sound like.
When we were younger, things were different. Everything was new to us and we didn’t have any expectations yet. This is probably why we liked almost all the songs that we listened to as kids. Even today, such songs are enjoyable and bring back good memories.
You can probably name 10 different songs that you hate but if I ask you, “Name one song that you hated as a kid?” you’ll probably have to think long and hard before you come up with a name, if any.
Using psychology for success
Now here’s a fun fact: A band actually did hire people to study all the previous hit songs so that they could ensure their next song would be a hit!
They invested a lot of money in that research and ultimately came up with a single. They released it and waited with bated breath to watch it blast all the top charts.
Nothing, nada, zilch, zippo.
Far from becoming a hit, no one paid any attention to the song. But the band had invested way too much to quit at this point.
The experts realized that the song was probably too unfamiliar and that something should be done to make it more familiar. They decided to sandwich the song between two familiar and well-known hit songs on the radio.
The idea was that when people listen to the song over and over along with the other familiar songs, the familiarity of other songs will spill over to the song sandwiched between them.
Why do people believe conspiracy in theories that sound stupid to others but not to the conspiracy theorists themselves? Conspiracy theorists such as:
Shapeshifting reptilians are ruling our world, the earth is flat, and the moon is an abandoned spaceship. Aliens tripping on marijuana (which cures everything) draw crop circles in fields to communicate with us and 9/11 was an inside job.
Psychology of conspiracy theories
There are several psychological drives that cause people to believe in conspiracy theories. In fact, conspiracy theorists are not very different from the rest of the population when it comes to biased thinking.
In other words, we’re all prone to behave like biased conspiracy theorists unless we exercise careful reasoning. The cognitive biases that make conspiracy theorists behave the way they do are built in the psyche of all human beings.
Following are the main psychological drives that seem to govern the behaviour of conspiracy theorists…
1) Need for control
The need for control is a fundamental human need. Look how we’ve moulded our environment to suit our needs and how we’ve tamed the forces of nature to serve our ends. Control feels good and facilitates our well-being. Loss of control makes us psychologically unstable.
Not understanding the major events of the world makes us feel powerless and without control. When we explain things, we restore power and control.
This is why many conspiracy theories revolve around events for which there are no clear explanations. The human mind cannot tolerate leaving things unexplained. Explaining things, no matter how ludicrous the explanations, help us restore control and psychological balance.
In the words of Ronald T. Kellog, author of The Making of the Mind:
A long line of research in cognitive science has documented that people make causal attributions about events as a means of maintaining personal control. It is the feeling that things are spinning out of control that motivates the human brain to find a pattern in events and try to predict what happens next.
– Ronald T. Kellog
2) Coping with tragedy
If you look at when conspiracy theories have cropped up throughout history, you’ll notice a recurring trend: They mostly emerge when a population group faces a major tragedy or loss.
Be it a financial crisis, terrorist strikes, wars, epidemics, natural disasters or high-profile deaths, conspiracy theories help people to cope with these times of uncertainty and fear by reassuring them that bad things don’t happen randomly. Instead, they have structure and perpetrators.
By exposing the perpetrators and punishing or overthrowing them if they’re in power we can prevent bad things from happening to us. We’re not responsible for our predicaments, they are. Bad things don’t happen randomly and to anyone. That’s scary. Someone must be behind them.
3) Ego boost and heroism
It always feels good to be the old wise goat in a flock of sheep. Many conspiracy theorists often accuse others who don’t believe in their theories as being deluded and brain-washed. In a way, they see themselves as heroes who’re on a mission to pull out mankind from their depths of ignorance toward the light of truth.
Also, convincing you that ‘they’re watching us’ or ‘we have been fooled’ makes them feel like saviours on a rescue mission. As you can see, this gives them a major ego boost.
It also seems to me that conspiracy theorists tend to piggyback on major political and global events to feed their need to feel special. Talking about big things makes us feel big. The bigger the conspiracy we unearth, the more special we feel.
Also, if our beliefs are contradictory to mainstream ideas that most people subscribe to, that too can give us the special feeling of being the ‘chosen ones’.
Next time something big happens, for example, we send a human to Mars or find the cure of AIDS, be prepared to be bombarded by alternate narratives of conspiracy theorists who’re always on their toes, scrutinizing major events of the world to steal attention from.
4) Exaggerating trivialities
If there is some confusion or ambiguity surrounding a fact or an event, conspiracy theorists use it to their advantage by making a mountain out of a molehill.
Often, they start with reasonable doubt about an ambiguity, trying to capture the listener’s attention and then go from there to make ridiculous claims. For example, flat-earthers will question the way in which NASA showed some images and then go on to claim that all NASA scientists are Satanists.
5) Projection
A 2011 study published in the British Journal of Social Psychology suggested that people who’re more likely to conspire are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.1
In other words, we see the world as we are. This is called projection.
Conspiracy theorists project their own attitudes and ways of thinking to the people they accuse of conspiring. Because we behave and act in certain ways, we think others behave and act the way we do too.
An important caveat
It’s essential to note here that just because conspiracy theorists may be satisfying some ulterior psychological motives doesn’t mean their claims are necessarily false. There are some conspiracy theories that did turn out to be true or are likely to be true.
Take, for example, the long-held belief that countries intervene in civil wars of other countries for oil.2
So, instead of outrightly dismissing the claims of conspiracy theorists, it’s a much better strategy to try and engage with them rationally. Mocking them can lead to the backfire effect- they end up holding on to their views more strongly.
Appealing calmly to their sense of logic and reasoning has a better chance of working out.
In this article, we’ll explore the psychology of deja vu with a special emphasis on the reasons behind this weird phenomenon.
Deja vu is a French phrase meaning “already seen”. It’s a feeling of familiarity that you get when you’re in a new situation despite knowing you’re experiencing the situation for the first time.
People who experience deja vu usually say something like:
“Though this is the first time I’ve visited this place, I feel like I’ve been here before.”
No, they’re not just trying to sound strange or cool. Deja vu is a fairly common experience. According to studies, about two-thirds of the population have had deja vu experiences.
What causes deja vu?
To understand what causes deja vu, we need to look at the psychological state of deja vu a tad more closely.
First, note that deja vu is almost always triggered by locations and places rather than people or objects. So locations and places have some kind of an important role to play in triggering deja vu.
Second, we look at what the mind tries to do while being in the state of deja vu.
After the initial feeling of familiarity, we notice that people desperately try to recall why the place looks so familiar. They do a mental scan of their past hoping to find a clue, usually in vain.
This suggests deja vu has something to do with memory recall, otherwise, this cognitive function (memory recall) wouldn’t get activated in the first place.
Now with these two variables at hand (location and memory recall), we can arrive at an explanation as to what triggers deja vu.
Deja vu is triggered when a new situation unconsciously triggers the memory of a past similar situation. Except we fail to consciously recall the precise memory of the latter.
This is why our mind searches and searches, trying to find out the past situation that is similar to the new one we’re currently experiencing.
So deja vu is basically an aberration in the normal way in which memory is recalled. Deja vu may well be defined as ‘an incomplete recollection of a memory’. We have a slight feeling of knowing that we’ve been here before but we can’t exactly recall when.
It’s unclear why some memories are incompletely recalled. A most likely explanation is that such memories were vaguely registered in the first place. It’s a long established fact in psychology that poorly encoded memories are poorly recalled.
Another explanation is that they were registered in the distant past and are buried deep in the unconscious. Our conscious mind may tug at them a little but is unable to fully pull them out of the subconscious, therefore causing us to experience deja vu.
Deja vu is very much like the ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ phenomenon, where instead of a word, we’re unable to recall a situational memory.
Similar arrangement of different objects
An experiment revealed that similar spatial arrangement of different objects in different scenes can trigger deja vu.
Participants were first shown images of objects arranged in a particular fashion. Later, when they were shown images of different objects arranged in the same fashion, they reported experiencing deja vu.
Say you visit a picnic spot which is a large field with a sole farmhouse on the horizon. Years later, while looking for a good place to camp, say you find yourself in a large field with a sole hut on the horizon.
“I think I’ve been here before”, you utter with a weird, other-worldly expression on your face.
The thing is, our memory for the arrangement of objects is not so good as that of the objects themselves. If, for example, you notice a new plant in your dad’s garden that he calls his favourite, you may immediately recognize it when you see it next.
But you may not have a good memory of how your dad arranges that plant in his garden. For instance, you’re unlikely to remember where he sows it and next to what other plants.
If you visit a friend who grows a different plant but arranges it in the same fashion as your dad arranges his plant, you might experience deja vu.
Jamais vu
Ever had that experience where you look at a word that you’ve looked at a thousand times before, but suddenly it seems like you’re looking at it for the first time?
Well, this feeling that a familiar thing is new or strange is called jamais vu and it’s the opposite of deja vu. In jamais vu, you know what you’re seeing is familiar, but somehow it seems unfamiliar.
An experimenter once made his participants write the word “door” again and again. Soon, more than half of the participants reported experiencing Jamais vu.
Try it out. Write any word or phrase over and over again like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and see what happens. Please don’t lose your mind though.
This article will throw light on the major psychological causes of superstitions. While people have countless superstitious beliefs, the underlying psychological tendencies that give rise to them are more or less the same.
Superstitions are everywhere. From the chain messages that ask you to ‘forward this to 10 people and something good will happen soon’ to your uncle who thinks him not wearing his lucky hat is why a sports team didn’t win.
After all, we don’t see other animals wearing their lucky hats or chanting mantras when they try to hunt, forage, look for a mate or protect themselves from danger. They just do their thing.
Psychological causes of superstitions
To understand superstitions, we need to understand how and why they’re born in the human mind. It’s a fact of human nature that our psychological repertoire only contains behaviors that benefit us in one way or the other.
If superstitions, no matter how stupid they seem on the surface, were not beneficial in any way, they wouldn’t have existed in the first place.
Seeing patterns or signs that confirm one’s superstitious beliefs is a characteristic feature of superstitious behavior.
Following are the major psychological reasons that lead to superstitious beliefs…
1) False cause bias
One of the major cognitive biases in human beings is the false cause bias. It states that when two events occur in succession, we think the preceding event causes the succeeding event.
For example, when you install a new game in your PC and your PC crashes, you’re likely to assume that the game caused the crash. In reality, however, the game may have nothing to do with the crash, but some other problem in your OS may have caused the crash.
False cause bias is the backbone of most superstitions.
A black cat crossed Anil’s path when he was on his way to work one morning. Soon after that he met with an accident and broke his leg. As he lay dismayed in the hospital room, he was convinced that the cat caused the accident.
Sheena kept staring at the amulet she’d purchased from her psychic, who’d promised her it brings good luck to those who wear it.
Smiling and wondering what miracles the amulet would unleash, she finally wore it around her neck. Seconds later she got a call from her husband who announced the great news of his promotion at work.
“It works”, she thought, with a stronger smile and a twinkle in her eyes.
2) Need to fill in the gaps
Human beings have a strong desire to explain things and fill in the gaps. And when we can’t explain things with reason, we resort to superstitious beliefs.
As we saw in the false cause bias, we can attribute causes to certain events that have no causal relation to each other whatsoever. We’re only misled by their simultaneous occurrence.
Even if two events don’t occur simultaneously, we can still assume one to cause another, thanks to our deep-seated need of filling in the gaps.
Abid wondered why he was having such a bad day. “What have I done to deserve to this?” he asked himself. Then suddenly he remembered that on his way to college that morning, he had ignored a beggar who then cursed him out of frustration.
The next day, Abid dropped some pennies into the beggar’s bowl. He also pleaded the beggar pray for him and remove the curse. Confused, the beggar did as told.
3) Need for control
The need to explain things is strongly tied to the need for control. What we can explain, we can usually control. When we have control, we feel powerful. Without control, we’re powerless.
In the above example, Abid felt that he’d lost control over his life because of the bad phase that he was going through. He had to find a way to restore in himself the illusion of control. He was feeling powerless before life, so he had to do something to regain that lost power.
“All this is happening because that beggar cursed me. If I make up with him, I’ll pull myself out of this predicament.”
This was his conscious thought. Subconsciously, he thought along these lines…
“I finally have an explanation for what’s going on. I have successfully restored control and regained power over my life. By persuading the beggar to remove the curse, I can change my fate now. I feel powerful.”
If you know black cats crossing your path, opening an umbrella indoors, or walking under a ladder brings bad luck, you can avoid doing these things. Therefore, you think you can prevent bad luck. Now you’ve successfully fooled yourself into thinking you have complete control over your luck. How very reassuring and comforting.
4) Blaming external factors
The human mind can sometimes go to great lengths to protect the ego. We have several ego defense mechanisms that kick in whenever our ego is threatened. One of these mechanisms is blaming external factors for the shortcomings we’re personally responsible for.
People have a tendency to attribute good outcomes to themselves and bad ones to others. It’s called the self-serving bias.
It’s a lot easier to blame bad luck if we fail in an endeavor than to admit that the fault lay in our own thinking or our methods. A person may cling to his superstition just because it helps him protect his ego.
A self-reinforcing cycle
At its root, a superstition is nothing but a false belief. So it works just like any other belief. Once a superstition gets planted into a person’s mind, he collects ‘proofs’ to bolster his belief. Unless he questions his superstitions or is forced to question them, he may carry them in his psyche all his life.
We don’t always perceive time as it flows. In other words, there can be a discrepancy between psychological time and actual time shown by a clock. Primarily, our mental states influence or distort our perception of time.
Our minds have an amazing ability to keep track of time, despite the fact that we have no sensory organ specifically devoted to the measurement of time.
This has led many experts to believe that there must be some sort of internal clock in our brain that ticks continuously, just like any other man-made clock.
Our sense of time is malleable
You’d expect that our internal clock functions just as a normal, man-made clock but, interestingly, that’s not the case. The clock that you have in your living room measures absolute time. It doesn’t care how you’re feeling or what life situations you’re going through.
But our internal clock works slightly differently. It appears to speed up or slow down depending on our life experiences. Emotions are the strongest influencers of our sense of time.
Take joy for example. It’s a common and universal experience that time seems to fly when we’re having a good time. But why does this happen?
To understand this phenomenon consider how you perceive time when you’re feeling sad, depressed, or bored. Without an iota of doubt, time seems to move slowly in such situations. You wait in agony for these long and hard times to end.
The thing is, when you’re sad or bored you’re much more aware of the passage of time. On the contrary, time seems to fly when you’re joyful because your awareness of the passage of time is significantly reduced.
Boring lectures and psychological time
To give you an example, say it’s Monday morning and you’ve got a really, really boring lecture to attend in college. You consider bunking classes and watching a football game instead.
You know from experience that if you attend the classes you’ll be bored to death and time will move like a snail but if you watch a football game time will fly and you’ll have a good time.
Let’s consider the first scenario in which you decide, against your will, to attend the classes. You’re not paying any attention to what the lecturer is babbling and time seems to drag along. Your awareness is not engaged with the lecture because your mind sees it as boring and useless.
Your mind is simply not allowing you to process the lecture because it’s such a waste of mental resources. At times, your mind totally shuts you off by making you fall asleep. You desperately try to stay awake lest you piss off the lecturer.
If your awareness isn’t focused on the lecture than what is it focused on?
The passage of time.
You’re now painfully aware of the passage of time. It seems to move so slowly as if deliberately slowing down to make you pay for the sins you did not know you’d committed.
Say the lecture starts at 10:00 am and is over at 12:00 pm. You first check the time at 10:20 when the first wave of boredom hits you. Then you check it again at 10:30 and 10:50. Then again at 11:15, 11:30, 11:40, 11:45, 11:50 and 11:55.
Against all rationality, you wonder why the lecture’s taking so long. You forget that time moves at a constant rate. The lecture is taking so long only because your sense of time is influenced by boredom. You check your watch again and again and it seems like time is moving slowly and not as fast as it is ‘supposed’ to move.
Let’s consider the other scenario now- where you decide to attend a football game instead.
Say the game too starts at 10:00 am and is over at 12:00 pm. At 9:55 you check your watch and eagerly wait for the game to start. When it does, you fully immerse yourself in the game you love so much. You don’t check your watch until after the game is over. You lose track of time, both literally and metaphorically.
When the game’s over and you board a subway to head back home, you check your watch and it says 12:05 pm. Last you checked it was 9:55 am. “Boy, time really flies when you’re having fun!” you exclaim.
Our mind compares new information with previous related information. Although, to you, it seemed like time took a giant, quick leap from 9:55 am to 12:05 pm, it didn’t. But because your awareness was directed away from the passage of time (you didn’t frequently check the time during the game), time seemed to fly.
This is precisely why pleasant music is played at waiting places like airports, train stations, and office receptions. It distracts your awareness away from the passage of time so that waiting for long periods of time becomes easier. Also, they may put up a large TV screen or give you magazines to read to achieve the same end.
Fear and psychological time
Fear is a powerful emotion and it strongly influences our sense of time but for reasons different than those discussed so far. Studies have shown that time seems to slow down when a person skydives, bungee jumps, or unexpectedly senses the presence of a potential predator or mate.
Hence the expression, “Time stood still”. This expression is never used in the context of sadness or boredom. Time seems to stand still in the context of fearful or anxious situations because these situations often play an important role in our survival and reproductive success.
The standing still of time enables us to perceive the situation more sharply and accurately so that we can make the right decision (usually fight or flight) that can have a huge impact on our survival. It slows things down for our perception so that we’re given ample time to make the most critical decisions of our lives.
This is why fear is often called a ‘heightened sense of awareness’ and the most critical scenes in movies and TV shows are sometimes shown in slow motion to mimic our real-life perceptions of such situations.
Why days seem to pass by quickly as we age
When we were children, a year seemed so long. Today weeks, months, and years slip through our hands like grains of sand. Why does this happen?
Interestingly, there’s a mathematical explanation for this. When you were 11, a day was approximately 1/4000 of your life. At the age of 55, a day is approximately 1/20,000 of your life. As 1/4000 is a bigger number than 1/20,000 so the time elapsed in the former case is perceived to be larger.
If you hate math don’t worry there’s a better explanation:
When we were children, everything was new and fresh. We were continually forming new neural connections, learning how to live and adapt to the world. But as we grew older, more and more things began to become a part of our routine.
Say during childhood you experience events A, B, C, and D and in adulthood, you experience events A, B, C, D, and E.
Since your brain already has formed and mapped out connections about A, B, C, and D, these events become more or less invisible to you. Only event E stimulates your brain to form new connections and you feel you’ve really spent time doing something.
So, the more you break out of routine the less quickly the days will seem to pass by. This is why it is said that people who keep learning stay forever young, of course not in a physical sense but definitely in the mental sense.
Ever wondered why do we laugh? What’s the psychology of laughter?
As much as I enjoy laughter and jokes, I also find these phenomena weird. I mean, if you think about it, laughter is creepy. You open your mouth wide open as if to engulf the earth and go ‘HAHAHA’ whilst shaking your body like a vibrator and sometimes even rolling on the floor like a baby.
If you were an alien visiting earth with the objective of studying human behavior, laughter would indeed perplex you. It’s such an intrinsic part of human nature that we often take it for granted and overlook how strange it actually is.
Evolutionary psychology of laughter
All human beings laugh, no matter what part of the globe they inhabit and what language they speak. This suggests that the laughter response is an evolutionary inheritance from our ancestors. Usually, a behavior that is inherited must have an advantage, at least in the context of our ancestral environment.
Our ancestors lived in a world rife with environmental threats. Before they could speak, making shrill sounds and crying must have been the most important means of communication.
Imagine you’re a human ancestor on a hunting trip with a bunch of fellow hunters. Our ancestors preferred to hunt in groups because it was easier that way to hunt down a large animal and avoid the dangers of getting hunted by predators.
If you’re attacked by a predator, you’d cry your lungs out so that other humans nearby hear your alarm call and rush in to rescue you. But what if you hear a rustling in the bush, cry out loud, but immediately realize it’s just a harmless squirrel and not a sabre-toothed tiger?
The initial shock of encountering a predator was there but it turned out that the situation was harmless. So your crying had to somehow modify itself to sound less alarming and more relieving.
Perhaps, in an attempt to impede the crying and breathe out a sigh of relief simultaneously, you broke down your crying into a series of sounds that we today call laughter.
Laughter: A response to harmless shock
When we perceive a situation to be shocking but harmless to us, laughter ensues. The basis of most jokes is that, at the punch line, some disastrous or humiliating event happens to someone. This is why people laugh when they see videos of other people falling, slipping or getting caught in embarrassing or humiliating situations.
Any sort of physical or psychological threat that is perceived to be harmless has the potential of triggering laughter. If a person jumps from a building with wings on, trying to fly, it may be funny at first but if he dies when he crashes to the ground then it isn’t funny anymore. This is because the ‘harmless’ aspect of the situation got removed.
I’ve mentioned in a post about smiling that smiling is mostly a fear reaction. The same is true for laughter. The unexpected ending of a punch line ‘frightens’ our subconscious even though we consciously know that the danger isn’t real or isn’t happening to us. So we laugh with sounds very similar to that of chimps warning other chimps of imminent danger.
This is also the reason why puns and other forms of similar wordplay tend to be funny. If you analyze the puns that make you laugh you’ll soon realize that most of them shock you or harmlessly violate your expectations in some way.
Studies have shown that laughter releases endorphins, boosts immune response and increases pain tolerance. So if there was any chance that the dangerous or painful event turned out to be real, our body would be prepared to deal with it!
Sometimes there indeed is a fine line between crying and laughing. When you laugh your heart out, tears may start to trickle down your eyes.
Similarly, when a person faces a serious emotional crisis, such as hearing about death, they may slip into denial mode and start laughing until reality hits them and laughter turns into crying.
Theory of harmless shock applied to babies
The most direct way of seeing the theory of harmless shock in action is by observing what sorts of actions and events make babies laugh. Babies are pure and innocent, still unfamiliar with the ways of the world and without any ulterior motives. So their reactions to situations are more or less purely evolutionary.
Adults usually make babies laugh by playing the game of Peekaboo. They look at the baby, hide, and then quickly look again as the tiny lump of life revels in ecstasy. Tickling the baby works too, so does lifting and throwing it up in the air and catching it safely on its way down. Moving your face very close to the baby’s and uttering gibberish also seems to work.
All these activities make a baby laugh because they frighten it harmlessly in one way or the other. A baby feels safe in the presence of adults and in the game of Peekaboo where this presence is momentarily withdrawn and quickly brought back, laughter is generated as a response to an apparently harmless shock.
Similarly, tickling the baby and moving your face close to theirs are toned down mock threats. Many apes tickle each other for amusement.
A baby gorilla’s reaction to an adult gorilla’s tickling in an East Germany zoo
Just as you wouldn’t find it amusing if a stranger came up to you and started tickling you, when babies are tickled by strangers and not by their primary caregivers, they may perceive the threat to be real and start crying.
You listen to a new song that you like and make your sibling, partner or best friend hear it, often against their will.
You watch a brilliant movie or a TV show and go about recommending it to everyone. You read a chilling novel and swear to your friends that they’d be thrilled if they check it out.
Why do we do this? Why do we go about like madmen recommending our favourite stuff to others?
The first reason that flashes across the mind is, “Well, because it is good stuff. We recommend what we find worthwhile to recommend.”
This is doubtless one of the strongest reasons why we recommend our favourite stuff to others. When we share good stuff with others and they too feel good about it, our good feelings are multiplied.
But there’s more to the story. Besides sharing good stuff simply because it’s good, there are other psychological drives that motivate this sort of behaviour…
Boosting the ego
Boosting one’s ego and self-worth is a core human need. One of the most common ways this need is satisfied is by identifying with worthwhile things.
We, humans, tend to identify with what we like (be it a celebrity, a politician, a movie, a song, a sports team, a car, anything). Therefore, when we recommend our favourite stuff to others we’re indirectly telling them, “This is who I am.”
For example, if you like the rock band Black Sabbath, “A Black Sabbath fan” now becomes a part of your identity and self-concept. You see yourself as a Black Sabbath fan and since they’re a great band, you’re indirectly sending the message that you’re great.
Our ego is nothing more than a collection of our various identities. People boost their ego is by projecting their most valued identities to the world. So if you’re ‘a proud Black Sabbath fan’ then this is the identity that you’ll project to the world because this identification and association with a great band work to raise your self-worth.
All of this isn’t just limited to bands, movies, songs, and celebrities. People also identify with ideas and belief systems. This is one reason why there are so many ‘isms’ in the world, the ‘grand’ ideas that people like to identify and associate with to boost their ego.
Seeking validation for beliefs
When we’ve formed an identity that boosts our self-worth, the next important step is to nourish our new identity, to make it thrive and to prevent it from dying out. Because if it dies, we lose a part of our self-worth. If it thrives, our self-worth thrives.
Say you like a Black Sabbath song and recommend it to your friends. You’re not just recommending a good song to your friends, no. You’re indirectly telling them, “Look, how great I am. I like Black Sabbath. I want you to like it too so that I can convince my mind that I’m indeed great.”
Remember the mind gets programmed by repetition and the more proofs we collect for a belief the more that belief is held strongly by the mind. So, if more and more people like your favourite song, the stronger your “Black Sabbath is great. I’m a fan so I’m great too” belief becomes.
No wonder you get disappointed and even angry at times if people don’t share your tastes. They’re not just rejecting a song but they’re rejecting a part of you. Every time someone rejects something that you recommend, a little lump of self-worth falls off your ego.
The desire to validate our beliefs is so strong that we tend to get irrational and forget that people have different tastes and inclinations. Anyone who doesn’t share our tastes is a fool. Anyone who prefers The Rolling Stones over Black Sabbath should be condemned to hell. A frightened mind floundering to maintain its belief.
When you subscribe to an idea, to an ‘ism’, you’ll find yourself continually scanning the world to support your ‘ism’. You’ll read articles, watch videos and talk to people that confirm your world-view. You may also find yourself recommending these to others vehemently.
In sum, here’s the pattern that is usually followed when one subscribes to an ism…You inherit from your society or come across an idea that seems worthwhile to identify or associate with, an idea that boosts your self-worth in some way.
Now you need to water this new identity, this new belief so that it thrives because it performs the all-important function of raising your self-worth. The greater the number of people who agree with you, the stronger your belief and the higher your self-worth.
Final words
There’s nothing inappropriate about trying to raise one’s self-esteem by identifying with good tangible and intangible stuff. It’s how the mind works.
However, in some circumstances, such tendencies can promote conflict and make us behave irrationally. So it’s always a good idea to understand why we do what we do. This enables us to be more rational in our dealings and reduce conflict in our lives.
Why do we do what we do? Why do we choose a certain behavior/action over other options? What rules govern our decision-making? Why do we become indecisive at times?
Answers to all these questions are contained in a terminology that we’ve borrowed from economics, namely ‘cost/benefit analysis’.
In economics, a business decision is made after weighing its potential costs and benefits. This does not apply only to business decisions, but to all human decisions, or in other words, to all human behaviour.
Cost/benefit analysis in human behaviour
We all have a kind of mental weighing scale on which we weigh the likely costs and benefits of a decision or a future course of action. When the benefits outweigh the costs, in quantity or quality, only then do we execute that decision or course of action.
For example, on a cold wintry morning, you may want to get out of the bed as soon as you can because you have tons of stuff to do but you postpone it because it’s too cold outside. In this case, getting out of bed has the benefit of letting you start working on your projects earlier but it also carries the cost of leaving your warm and comfortable bed.
Since you chose to stay in bed it means the cost of getting out of bed outweighed its benefit. Or in other words, the benefit of getting out of bed did not outweigh its cost. Hence, no action of ‘getting out bed’ was performed.
Now, what if you check the time and realize it’s getting too late? You had decided to get up at 6 a.m. and now it’s around 8 a.m. For the past 2 hours, you’ve been lying in your bed with quiet desperation. Suddenly, alarm bells start ringing in your head…
“Oh no, it’s too late! I’ll never finish my work if I stay in bed any longer. I’ve got to get up NOW!”
What you basically did here is ‘increase’ the perceived cost of staying in bed so that its benefit is outweighed. The cost of staying in bed is now greater (you won’t finish your work) than its benefit (warmth and comfort).
To rephrase, the benefit of getting out of bed (finishing the work) now becomes greater than the cost of getting out of bed (losing comfort) and so you muster the will to jump out of your bed.
To give you another example, say you’re attracted to someone and want to approach them. You first evaluate the possible costs and benefits of this course of action in your mind. Suppose the cost of carrying out this action is more than its benefit.
You decide not to approach because you fear getting rejected (which is a cost because it can lead to reputational or ego damage).
Now, what if something happens that mitigates this cost?
What if a friend tells you that your crush was singing your praises the other day?
Now, the cost of approaching the person has been significantly reduced because those who sing our praises tend to like us and are less likely to reject us. You’ll now approach that person with confidence because the benefits (possible friendship/relationship) outweigh the costs (possible rejection/ego damage).
Cost/benefit analysis applied to career choice. Clearly, this guy is going to go for it.
What causes indecisiveness?
In view of the conceptual background that I just provided you with, it should be rather easy for you to figure out the reasons behind indecisiveness.
Indecisiveness is caused when the potential costs and benefits of carrying out an action are equally strong i.e. they do not seem to outweigh each other. This makes a person vacillate between two choices for long or even suspend making the decision altogether.
After much thought and advice-seeking, the person may finally decide to pursue a course of action, but it’ll only happen if the benefit of pursuing that course of action is greater than its cost, no matter how slightly.
Unconscious cost/benefit analysis
So far we’ve been more or less discussing conscious actions, decisions, and behaviours. But what about our unconscious behaviours? Do they follow the same principles?
Of course, they do. Even if a behaviour occurs unconsciously, it will only occur when its benefits are greater than its costs. We tend to think that cost/benefit analysis requires complex calculations that can only be carried out by the conscious mind. But this is not the case.
In fact, the subconscious mind carries out cost/benefit calculations that are much more complex than the conscious mind can even begin to grasp and in much more speedy and accurate ways.
Take for example our bodily functions such as respiration, digestion and blood circulation. All these activities carry the highest benefits for us because they’re critical to our survival. These processes are in the hands of our unconscious and they keep going on in the background because our unconscious mind already knows that their benefits outweigh their costs.
But this doesn’t mean our unconscious mind has set them on ‘automatic mode’ and forgotten about them. When we encounter different situations, our unconscious mind re-evaluates these processes, calculates their costs and benefits and decides a course of action, even if our conscious mind has no idea what’s going on.
For example, in a life-threatening fight-or-flight situation, our unconscious mind alters our normal blood circulation and respiration. It makes our heart beats faster so that more blood is pumped and makes our breathing heavier so that more oxygen is taken in.
Not only that but it is also ensured that more blood is supplied to the limbs (as our limbs require more energy during fight/flight) and less to other physiological processes like digestion.
The unconscious mind knows that supplying more blood to the limbs (which can be costly for other physiological processes like digestion) is more beneficial than not doing it and risking survival (getting eaten by a predator).
While our conscious mind may not have fully grasped what’s going on yet, our unconscious mind is quick in carrying out its cost/benefit calculations and choosing the most suitable course of action.
The same is true for our reflex actions. When you touch a hot stove, the benefit of pulling your hand back is much greater (not burning your hand) than keeping it there (burning your hand). So you unconsciously pull your hand back in a flash before your conscious mind gets the time to evaluate what’s going on.
To give you a subtler example, consider a guy who is addicted to smoking and sees his behaviour as costly (wastage of money and potential health risk) and as a result, comes to the conclusion that cost/benefit analysis principles do not apply to human behaviour.
After all, why would he continue doing a behaviour that is so costly for him?
But when he realizes that, subconsciously, smoking satisfies his important need to look cool and socialize with his ‘cool’ smoker friends, he’ll surely change his mind about the legitimacy of the cost/benefit analysis when applied to human behaviour.
Behind every action/behaviour, there is a perceived benefit, conscious or unconscious, that has successfully outweighed all the costs associated with carrying out that behaviour.
Why are some people overly controlling? What causes someone to be a control freak?
This article will explore the psychology of controlling people, how fear makes people controlling, and how the behavior of control freaks might change. But first, I want to introduce you to Angela.
Angela’s mother was a total control freak. It seemed like she wanted to control every aspect of Angela’s life.
She asked about Angela’s whereabouts all the time, chaperoned her whenever she could, and interfered in her major life decisions. On top of it, she had this annoying habit of occasionally moving things around in Angela’s room.
Angela realized this behavior wasn’t just careless. Far from feeling cared for, she felt her basic rights were being trampled on.
Psychology of controlling people
An extreme behavior often satisfies an extreme, underlying need. When people push themselves strongly in one direction, it’s because they’re being pulled by something in the opposite direction.
Control freaks have a strong need to control others because they believe they lack control themselves. So excessive need to control means the person is lacking control somehow in their own life.
Now ‘lack of control’ is a very broad phrase. It includes every possible aspect of life that a person may want to control but find that they don’t or can’t. But the general rule stays constant- a person will only turn into a control freak if they think they lack control over any aspect of their life.
Anything that a person is unable to control in their life can induce feelings of lacking control. These feelings motivate them to regain control over that apparently uncontrollable thing. That’s totally fine because that’s exactly how many emotions are designed to work- signaling us that some need needs to be met.
Instead of regaining control over the thing they lost control over in the first place, some people try to regain control over other irrelevant areas of their lives.
If a person feels they lack control over X, instead of regaining control over X, they try to control Y. Y is usually something easier to control in their environments, like furniture or other people.
For instance, if a person feels they lack control in their job, instead of regaining control in their work-life, they might try to regain it by moving furniture or interfering unhealthily in their kids’ lives.
The default tendency of the human mind is to seek the shortest and easiest path to reach a goal.
After all, to regain feelings of control, it’s much easier to move furniture or shout at kids than to face a major life problem and work through it.
Fear makes people controlling
We like to control things that have the potential of causing us harm because by controlling that thing we can prevent it from harming us.
A girl who’s afraid that her boyfriend will dump her may try to overly control his life by constantly checking in on him. She does this to convince herself that he’s still with her.
Similarly, a husband who fears his wife will cheat on him might become controlling. Parents who fear their teenaged son is at risk of being negatively influenced by friends might control him by imposing restrictions.
In the above cases, it’s clear that the goal of trying to control others is to prevent harm to oneself or loved ones.
However, there’s another sneaky, fear-related factor that can turn a person into a control freak.
The fear of being controlled
Oddly enough, those who fear being controlled by others may end up becoming control freaks themselves. The logic here is the same- pain or harm avoidance. When we’re afraid that people are trying to control us, we may try to control them to prevent them from controlling us.
By controlling people around them, control freaks can rest assured no one would ever dare to control them. After all, it’s hard to even think of controlling someone when you’re already under their control.
Control freakiness is changeable
Like many other personality traits, being a control freak isn’t something you’re stuck with. As always, understanding the reasons behind one’s controlling behavior is the first step to overcoming it.
People are likely to become controlling after a major life event induces feelings of lack of control in them. For example, switching careers, moving to a new country, going through a divorce, etc.
New life events that restore their sense of control tend to naturally appease their controlling behavior over time.
For example, a person who initially felt without control in a new job might cease to be a control freak when they start to feel comfortable at their new workplace.
However, people in whom being a control freak is a dominant personality trait are like that because of childhood experiences.
For instance, if a girl felt sidelined since childhood and had no say whatsoever in important family matters, she might grow up to become a controlling woman. She turns into a control freak just to make up for the subconsciously-held feelings of not being in control.
Since the need was shaped in childhood, it’s deeply ingrained in her psyche and it might be difficult for her to overcome this behavior. Unless, of course, she becomes conscious of what she’s doing and why she’s doing it.
