Lectured by Paul Bloom,
the psychologist,
and his popular Introduction to Psychology 110 class has been released to the
world through the Open Yale Courses program.
Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist
Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists -- that our beliefs about
the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an
illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is.
Key Notes Taken:
A lecture about the pleasures of everyday life. Why do
origins matter so much? Why do
we respond so much to our
knowledge of where something comes from? Well
there's an answer that many people would give.
- The reason why we take origins so seriously is because we're snobs if we want to show off how rich we are, how powerful we are, it's always better to own an original than a forgery because it is much fewer originals than forgeries.
- Paul didn’t doubt that that plays some role, but what he want to convince us today is that humans are natural born essentialists. People don't just respond to things as what they see, what they feel, or what they hear them, rather we are conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is….It is not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things.
- Pleasure is deep -- and that this isn't true just for higher level pleasures like art, but even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about hidden essences.
Paul justified his statement with several cases/stories:
Ø
Hermann Goering who was Hitler's second in
command in World War II. Like Hitler, Goering
fancied himself a
collector of art and especially something painted by Vermeer. Finally he found a Dutch art dealer who sold
him a wonderful Vermeer for
the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars and it was his favorite
artwork ever. World
War II came to an end, Goering
was captured and
ultimately sentenced to death. Then
the Allied forces went through his collections and found
the paintings and arrest
the people who sold it to him. The dutch dealer was charged with the crime of
treason and at the end, he confess guilty to sell the paint, but not for treason. He said : I didn’t sell a great masterpiece to
that Nazi. I
painted it myself; I'm a forger and he proved it”. When Goering was told that his favorite
painting was
actually a fake, according to his biographer, "He
looked as if for the first time he had
discovered there was evil in the world." and he
killed himself soon afterwards.
Ø
Take food for example, Some of you
would eat the meat if it's pork, but not beef. Some
of you would eat it if it's beef, but not pork. However
few of you would eat it if it's a RAT or a HUMAN. That's
not so surprising and but what's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically
on what you think you're eating. So if you want kids to eat carrots and drink milk, tell them they're from McDonald's. Kids believe McDonald's food
is tastier, and it leads them to experience it as tastier.
Ø
How do you get adults to really enjoy wine? It's simple: pour it from an
expensive bottle. If you believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of the brain
associated with pleasure and reward light up like a
Christmas tree. It's not just that you say it's more pleasurable, you say you like it more, you really experience it
in a different way.
Ø
Or take sex, one of the most heartening findings from
the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your
physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This
is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks
much better than anyone else thinks that they do.
Ø
As another example, consider consumer
products. One top of its utility,
e.g. the golf clubs, where you can
play golf, but the most important is it value, beyond
what it can do for you based on its history, the golf clubs were owned
by John F. Kennedy and sold for a million dollars at auction. The
attraction to objects doesn't
just work for celebrity, most people, have
something in our life that's literally irreplaceable, in
that it has value because of its history – maybe the wedding ring, maybe your 1st child's
baby shoes ……. so that if it was lost, you couldn't get it back.
Ø
Joshua Bell, a very
famous violinist, the Washington Post decided to go for an bold experiment, “How
much would people like Joshua Bell,ua Bell, if they didn't know they
were listening to Joshua Bell” So he got Joshua to take his million dollar violin down to a Washington
D.C. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make. After being there for
three-quarters of an hour, he made 32 dollars. Apparently to really enjoy the music
of Joshua Bell, you have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell.
Ø
The second example from
music is from John Cage's modernist composition, "4'33"." this is the composition
where the pianist sits at a bench, opens up the piano and sits and does
nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds -- that period of silence. And people have
different views on this. Today we can buy this from
iTunes for a dollar 99, you can listen to that silence, which is different than
other forms of silence.
Also everything related to origins of pleasure applies to pain as well. It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose.
