Emotions 2.0: When I Feel What You Feel

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 1965, Mark Rudd was an 18-year-old freshman at Columbia University in New York. America's military involvement in Vietnam was ramping up. At first, Mark wasn't interested in much beyond his studies, but before long, he was drawn in by the passion of his politically engaged peers. He would later write, Over beers or a joint, I'd listen to discussions about China's cultural revolution, then just starting, and to Cuba's seven-year-old revolution. It was thrilling to be with these people who were tapping into something so much bigger than ourselves, something so grand, so historic, remaking the world. By the time he was 20, he had been elected chairman of the Columbia Chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. In 1968, he led the student occupation of several university buildings. He called his parents, exhilarated. We took a building, he exclaimed. Well, give it back, his father told him. But Mark was drawn deeper into radicalism. Along with some friends, he formed a revolutionary band known as the Weather Underground. The group sought to violently overthrow the government and instigated a string of bombings. The violence gave Mark pause, but he felt compelled to continue. I felt like a member of the crew on a speeding train, dimly aware of disaster ahead, but unable to put on the brakes, he would later recall. Decades later, Mark Rudd said he had feelings of guilt and shame about his actions. He told a pair of documentary filmmakers, these are things that I am not proud of. Few of us become violent revolutionaries like Mark Rudd, but most of us know what it's like to be part of an energized, passionate group. This week on Hidden Brain, we kick off a new series called Emotions 2.0. We start today with a special double-header episode. We look at what happens to our brains when we get caught up in a crowd, and then explore how these ideas shape cultures and societies around the world. The line between different disciplines in the social sciences can be blurry. Anthropologists, psychologists, economists and sociologists all study human behavior, but they use different lenses and different terminologies. Our focus on this show is to explore human behavior in daily life. We look at what animates individuals, when they are happy and when they are sad, and how people can bring about change in their lives. At Harvard Business School, the psychologist Amit Goldenberg studies why we feel what we feel. But the lens he uses takes a step back from individual minds to how groups think, feel and act. Amit Goldenberg, welcome to Hidden Brain.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Amit, I understand that you grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home. One of the most important dates on the calendar was the holiday of Yom Kippur. What did the day signify for you?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yom Kippur was a really special day for us. I remember I used to be scared of that day. I felt that this was a really important day in kind of determining the future or the next year for me, whether it's going to be a good year or a bad year. And so I wanted to get to that day in the right mindset and in the right way and kind of do the right prayers and get ready in the right way.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, you have a vivid memory of fasting for Yom Kippur when you were just 10 years old. Can you paint me a picture of what you did, what you saw and what you heard that day?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yeah, so traditionally, children start to fast when they're 13, after their Bar Mitzvah, but I really wanted to try. So that was my first big attempt. And the first evening was kind of easy, but already in the morning, I was completely weak and I could barely stand. And there's a special prayer, which is the heart of that day, which is all about atonement, talks about the decision that God has to make. And so it says, how many shall pass away and how many shall be born? Who shall live and who shall die? Who's by water and who's by fire? And so I was always anxious about this prayer, because it kind of very vividly portrays the future of various people. But there's also something very calming in feeling this anxiety with other people, something very protective. So as a community, we're praying for everyone's kind of verdict, rather than my own personal verdict. And I think it's one of the first time that I acknowledge how strong collective experiences could be.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, more than a century ago, the sociologist Émile Durkheim talked about an idea. As people go through things together, they experience something that he called collective effervescence. How is this connected, do you think, to what you felt at age 10?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Oh, very much connected. Durkheim is one of the most influential thinkers for me. I don't think it's a coincidence that Durkheim also focused on religious ceremonies, because I do think that they represent some of the strongest collective emotional experience. But one thing that was missing, and that became part of my goal as a researcher, was to kind of try to unpack that experience. What does that mean to feel effervescence? There's obviously a sense of togetherness, but there are also very specific processes that are occurring as groups feel emotions together that tend to lead to this feeling of effervescence.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I want to talk about a second example in your life that showed you the power of collective or shared emotions. As a young adult living in Israel, Amit, you became an activist. You often engaged in protests against the policies of the Israeli government. One of these demonstrations took place in a neighborhood of Jerusalem. What was the trigger for the protest and what happened?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yeah, so like many Israelis, I was always conflicted by feeling strong identity to the country that I am at and feeling a strong sense to serve the country, but also feeling very strong negative emotions about some of the policies that are being taken by the Israeli government. And one of the experiences that are strongest to me is an event that took place in Jerusalem, in a Palestinian side of Jerusalem called Shekh Jarrah, where a family of Palestinians were evicted from their homes. And I remember watching the videos of what's happening in their house a few days after the event, which took place in August 2009, and I was absolutely furious. I can still think about those videos, and it makes me angry just to talk about it. And there was nothing I could do about it. There was nothing no one could do about it, I mean, other than demonstrate. And there are already demonstration about this happening in Jerusalem. I was living at the time at Tel Aviv, and I remember getting a ride to the demonstration, and I just wanted to express kind of rage and anger with other people. What's interesting is when I got there, I realized something very interesting. Yes, there was a lot of rage, and expressing it with other people was a great feeling, but there was also a lot of positive emotions. People were also interacting with each other, laughing and having fun. And I remember thinking that you need to have both in some ways. The possibility to feel anger with other people, and that feels good, but also to normalize the situation, so that people will have the energy to keep going. And I came back to demonstrate every Friday for almost a year, and it really kept me going.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And it's clear that what brought you back was not just your feelings about the injustice about what happened, but also the sense that you were among other people who shared your concerns.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: That's right. One of the unique things about collective emotions is that feeling negative emotions together, even if these emotions that are typically unpleasant at the individual level, doing it with other people feels good. And that's a strong reason for why people joined together to demonstrate and to generate collective action processes, because despite of the fact that in many cases, this is driven by negative experiences, it also feels really good to do it with other people.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There was a third moment in your life when you noticed that what you were feeling was closely tied up with what others were feeling. You were doing some investigative work on companies and paying close attention to the stock market. Something unusual happened on May 6th, 2010. What kind of work were you doing, Amit, and what happened that day?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yeah, so I worked as a journalist in Israel, and I did some investigative journalism, including work on companies in Israel. And I was hired by an American company to do some analytic work related to the stock market at around 2010. And so it was the first time that really my personal wellness was connected to the stock market. And for those of you whose job is to look at the stock market all day, you know that the volatility of the market has a huge effect on one's own emotions. What happened on May 6th, 2010 is called the Flash Crash. And it started at 2:32 p.m. Eastern time. It lasted approximately 30 minutes. And during that time, the Dow Jones dropped about 9%, which is a huge drop. And the crash was triggered by a large sale order of these S&P 500 future contracts that were amplified by some algorithm. The details don't matter as much, but what happened was a huge decline in the stock market and no one knew why. And I remember seeing it happening. There was no apparent reason, but everybody was sure that someone knows something that they didn't. So internet forums of stock investors were complete chaos, starting all sorts of rumors as stock continued to fall. And I remember realizing the power of this financial panic and I was panicking as well. And it was one of those short but pivotal moments, I think, that I realized that I didn't want my emotions to be tied to the state of the stock market. And soon after that, I applied to grad school and became a researcher of that phenomena. But I vividly remember that experience.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, I'm thinking about the hours after the 9-11 attacks in the United States, you know, a couple of decades ago. I remember working at a newspaper in Washington at the time. And, you know, the first few hours were so chaotic because it was not quite clear what was happening, who knew what, and there was a sense that things were unfolding that were larger than you and much more powerful than you that you didn't understand. And that produced incredible fear and incredible rumors about fresh horrors that were about to unfold.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: For sure, there's also a really interesting thing happened in September 11, which was after the first plane hit the towers, there was a huge anticipated affect. You know, what is going to happen next? Is it going to be the end of it? And there's a lot of really interesting works showing that anticipated affect is actually stronger in intensity than the actual thing. And so people were not only kind of responding to what happened, but also extremely anxious of what is about to happen. I think that makes things so much stronger.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I want to go a little bit further back in history. During World War II, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and shortly after that, fears about Japanese Americans spread like wildfire across the United States. You know, it's somewhat hard to imagine today, but thousands upon thousands of Japanese American citizens were rounded up and interned in camps. In some ways, this is at a much larger level, the same phenomenon that you saw at the stock market, that you saw at your protests in Jerusalem. The same idea magnified many times.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Absolutely. You know, when groups feel panic and rage, they tend to, just like individuals, they tend to focus their attention sometimes on the wrong things and make decisions that sometimes are extremely destructive, that they would never have made these decisions without these emotions. And one of the things about collectives feeling these emotions is that it's not only that they feel these emotions, but they don't have any motivation to regulate them. In many cases, when individuals feel negative emotions, they don't want to feel those emotions. So helping people regulate involves harnessing their basic motivation. But in these collective situations, when groups feel emotions like rage or fear, they really want to feel those emotions because it feels good to express these emotions together. And so, if you want to regulate them, you really need to find ways to bypass the motivational limitations. In the last few years, me and a lot of other people are trying to think about ways, creative ways, to overcome these motivational hurdles, to reduce collective anger, anxiety and fear, and to increase hope in some of those very desperate situations. Because the outcomes can be so destructive, that any form of regulation may be a huge help.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When I think about my emotions, I usually think about the emotions that I am feeling. My happiness, my anger, my gratitude. Most of us don't think about emotions as collective experiences. But as Amit had seen on multiple occasions in his own life, emotions are in fact shared. They are experienced collectively. In time, he was to learn that when emotions are shared, they can take on a life of their own and have surprising effects on us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Amit Goldenberg is a psychologist at Harvard Business School. He studies what happens when the things we feel are shared by tens or millions of other people. He's found that shared emotions can have surprising effects on all of us. Amit, in October 1938, millions of Americans were listening to the radio when the broadcast was interrupted by what seemed like a news bulletin.



CLIP: I'm speaking from the roof of a broadcasting building. Announcers described an alien spaceship landing on a farm in New Jersey. Martian invaders soon emerged from the spaceship and started taking over the United States. Bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate the city as Martians approach. Estimated in the last two hours, three million people have moved out along the roads to the north. All communication with Jersey Shore closed ten minutes ago. No more defenses, our army is wiped out. Artillery, Air Force, everything wiped out. This may be the last broadcast.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So this was not an actual news bulletin, of course, but a fictional presentation called War of the Worlds, created by the director Orson Welles. Can you remind us of the effect that this broadcast had on listeners, Amit?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yeah, so this created a widespread panic among listeners, who basically thought that Martians took over the United States or the world. And panic thrives when there's ambiguity. No one has ever experienced a Martian attack, and no one even can imagine what is the right thing to do when Martians attack. Where do you go? There's no plane you can go, or there's basically nothing to do. And so panic really kind of thrives in these situations. And this ambiguity just led to widespread panic.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Yeah. So one of the things that we saw in the aftermath of the Orson Welles broadcast, but also in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombings, in the aftermath of the stock market meltdown you saw in Israel, is that fear can spread very easily, almost like a highly infectious virus. Can you explain the idea of emotional contagion, Amit?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yeah. So generally speaking, emotion contagion involves the tendency of people to adopt the emotions of their social surrounding. Now, this is caused by a variety of mechanism. We're wired to mimic our social environment. So there's a basic mechanism of mimicry. We use other people as information to evaluate our emotions. And so we take people's emotions as information for what we should feel. And there's also just natural activation of the brain, category activation of panic when you see a panic around you. Now, there's something really interesting about emotion contagion, which is that we have an evolutionary tendency to attend specifically to negative emotions. So our ancestors were not able to doom scroll, so they didn't have an endless amount of negative emotional information. They observed reality as it unfolded, and negative situations were extremely informative to them. If there is an attack on one's village, or if there's something that one needs to be afraid of, this is extremely informative. And so our general tendency to attend more to negativity leads to the fact that emotion contagion is usually much quicker and much stronger for negative emotions.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, in 2012, the social media giant Facebook ran an experiment in emotional contagion. Many people were concerned about the ethics of this experiment, but what did Facebook do, Amit?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: So, this is probably the most important paper that came during my PhD, and it really impacted me for a variety of reasons. Well, basically, what Facebook did, and they did the experiment in 2012, is basically for a period of a week, they took people who usually wrote a lot of a post on Facebook, and for half of them, they reduced the post that had negative emotions to almost minimum, and for half of them, they reduced the post that expressed positive emotions to almost minimum. And so, some of the participants basically saw just negative emotions on their feeds, and some of the participants or the users saw basically just positive emotions on their feeds, and then they looked what content do these participants or users produced. And they saw that it had an effect on the content that users were producing. So users who were exposed to more positive content tended to generate posts that were more positive, and people who basically saw negative emotions on their feed mostly produced or produced more negative content by themselves.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You told me that years earlier, when you attended that protest or that series of protests in Jerusalem, you were very angry before you went out to the protest, but when you went there and you saw all these other people who were also angry, it made you even angrier. What do we know about how group processes modulate individual emotion? When we experience an emotion collectively, how does that change the emotion that we feel?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yeah, so the notion that when people get together, they become more emotional is one of the foundations of social sciences. So when I started to think about what makes groups emotional, one of the ideas I've had was that people may not be accurate in their evaluation of what other people feel. If we think that other people are feeling stronger emotions than they actually are, we may conform to that emotional values which leads the whole system to be amplified.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Amit himself got to experience this crowd distortion effect some time ago. He had to give a series of high-stakes talks as he was searching for a job as a professor. It was very stressful, but he felt he had gotten the hang of it by the time he got to the final talk. That was until he looked out into the audience.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: So when I was going into that talk, I thought to myself, oh, this is going to be just a breeze, you know, I've done this before and I feel very confident. But the moment I started my talk, I realized that there was a person in the audience was really not happy with what I had to say. I mean, I don't know this for sure. He may not have been happy because of something he had for breakfast. Right. But I didn't care about that. I thought that he was angry at me. And I remember knowing that I should not be spending much of my time looking at him. And it is distracting and maybe not representative of what other people say, but I just could not get my eyes off of him. Yeah. And I didn't get the job. And still, I didn't know if it was because of him or not because of him. But I remember that experience very, very vividly.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One reason being in a crowd amplifies our emotions is that we preferentially pay attention to people in the crowd who are behaving emotionally. Amit ran an experiment that revealed how common this behavior is.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: We had people wear an eye tracker, and we had them look at crowds with people expressing different emotional intensities. And what we could see was that people had a hard time dis-attaching their attention from the more emotional faces. It took them longer. They had to scan the crowd, but it took them longer. They spent longer time on those emotional faces. And indeed, their evaluations of the overall emotions were more intense than the actual emotion expressed by the crowd.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You know, I'm thinking about those speeches that politicians give, where they sometimes have their supporters sitting behind them as they're giving the speech. So you can see the politician in the front and the supporters in the back. And it's inevitable that you end up scanning the faces of all the people behind the politician. And it's true. Our eyes do gravitate to the person who seems the most expressive, the person who seems to have be experiencing the most emotions. Our eyes seem to be drawn to that person, almost like a gravitational field.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Absolutely. And I would say even further, you know, much of the emotional content that we consume is collective in many ways. So when we scroll through our social media feeds, for example, and we try to understand what people feel about something, we don't just get one expression. We get multiple expressions, and then we need to aggregate these expressions and represent them in a sense. And so one of my students, Jonas Schoene, extended our work of crowds to feeds. And so what we show there is that people remember stronger emotions on their feeds much more, and this paints their perception of what the collective feels in response to certain events. So our representations of multiple emotions tend to be amplified, generally speaking.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, you and your colleagues call this idea acrophily. What is acrophily, Amit?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yeah, so acrophily is a takeoff on the term homophily. So homophily is one of the most established phenomena in social sciences, and it's basically attraction to people who are similar to you. Acro means extreme, and so acrophily means attraction to people who are more extreme than you. And the idea is that if you have two people who have the same distance from you, or the same distance from you in terms of their views or their emotions, one is more extreme and one is less extreme, you would prefer to interact with the person who is more extreme than the person who is more moderate. And you can imagine if you play that out in your mind, if that attraction is even tiny, that leads the whole system to slowly polarize and become more and more emotional over time. And so we had a series of studies that examine that idea. What's interesting is that if you ask people, are you more attracted to people who are more extreme or less extreme, they often will say, no, no, I like moderates. I prefer moderates because they represent something that I believe is better in some ways or I believe is more balanced. But when you give them a choice, or when you have them to interact with someone who is less extreme or more extreme, and you ask them, how much did you like that person? They tend to prefer the people who are more extreme. And that tendency, that acrophily, has a huge impact over time on the rate and the degree of segregation and polarization that may occur within a network.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: As we are drawn to notice individuals who show heightened emotion, we unconsciously assume this heightened state of emotion is shared by the group as a whole. We ratchet up our own emotions to match our perception of the crowd. Besides the idea of emotion contagion, Amit has studied another aspect of collective emotion. He calls these emotional cascades. The best way to understand this is to start with an event that unfolded in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: So, the event started at 12 p.m. where a police officer shot Mike Brown at his car. An hour later, Michael Brown's father posted a picture of himself holding a cardboard that says, the Ferguson police just executed my unarmed son. And you can already see tweets about Ferguson 2 p.m., two hours after the incident. And rates were increasing, reaching up to 30,000 tweets per hour by August 14, five days later. And I was a grad student at the time, and I was observing this as it unfolded, and I started to record all these tweets and kind of study them. And what I could see there really changed my perception about what makes collective emotions stronger. So one of the interesting things is that the emotions of individuals in the movement were calming down. So if a person wrote a second tweet about Ferguson, it would be less intense than the first. So people as individuals habituated to the story. But the whole system as a whole, at some point, started to increase in intensity. A great analogy for that is that of a forest fire. So if you look at a forest fire, sometimes if you look at the specific trees, you know, the trees, they burn down and that's it. They're burnt. But the fire may increase in intensity over time as it accumulates more and more territory. And so if you want to think about the influence of forest fires, it's not enough to be thinking about the individual tree. You have to be taking a broader view and thinking of the collective phenomena here and how you take control of that. And so that's one insight of because emotions spread, they become more intense.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: A related idea is that collective emotions change what gets shared and expressed. So we've talked about the idea that more extreme emotions in some ways attract attention. But can you see a moment about the valence of that emotion? What happens when the emotion being expressed as positive versus negative?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: So one of the most basic findings in emotion research is what we call negativity bias, which is people's tendency to attend more to negative emotions compared to positive emotions. And so one of the findings that we're starting to see when you look at what content people share on social media is that people generally tend to share more negative emotions compared to positive emotions. And this is interestingly especially true when these emotions are produced by people who are public figures. So for example, basically public figures and ordinary users, 20% of the tweets that they produce, for example, are negative. But if you look at shared content, content that's shared by public figures, 30% of it is negative. So there's a 10% increase of negativity shared by public figures, and that has a huge effect on the content that people consume on social media.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So when you step back and look at this big picture, Amit, groups can amplify our emotions, they draw us to people with extreme views, and they especially draw us to negative emotions rather than positive emotions?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: That's right. So generally speaking, people tend to attend to emotions in general, and they tend to attend more to negative emotions. The fact that people tend to these negative emotions means that they're more likely to share them, which means that their proportion in the content that people see increases. We also tend to amplify emotions by aggregating that emotional information. So in addition to this basic contagion effect, the fact that we over represent in our attention and memory stronger emotional expressions, meaning that we tend to think that people's emotions are even stronger than they actually are. But even further, the fact that we prefer people who express more extreme emotions means that our social networks to begin with are more emotional. And so we have this cyclical loop of contagion, misperception, tie selection that contributes to that process of increased emotionality.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And as we become sucked in to that process, we essentially make the group itself larger, which in turn has the effect of sucking in even more people.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: That's right. That's exactly right.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering, Amit, if you've given thought to why our brains harness our individual emotions to the currents that run through groups. Your data suggests that this does happen. I think we've all seen this first hand. But why do you think it happens?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Well, I would actually flip the order of importance here. I think that first and foremost were members of a collective system, and only after were individuals. I think that as psychologists, we're kind of trying to think of people as individual entities. But really, everything that we know of individual brains is that we need social connections just like we need water or air. And our emotional experiences are not independent. They're mostly collective, and they're also experienced at the individual level. And so we have very few emotions that we feel as separate individuals. Many more emotions that we feel as part of family members, community members, national groups, and collectives, sports fans, fan clubs, and so on and so forth. And so I would urge people to think about emotions, to think of emotions and emotion regulation much more at the collective than the individual level.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Shared emotions are neither good nor bad, but they can lead us to do things that are good for us or things that are bad for us. When we come back, how to step away from groups when they are leading us astray, and how to open the door to shared emotions we might never experience otherwise. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.



This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Our emotions are designed to guide our behavior. When we are afraid, we feel like running or hiding. Sadness tells us that something is wrong, and to avoid doing things in the future that put us in the same position. Joy and delight and awe prompt us to do more of the things that bring us joy and delight and awe. As a deeply social species, it is unsurprising that we are also influenced powerfully, not just by our own emotions, but the emotions coursing through the people around us. It makes sense that fear in others should spread contagiously to us, that we get swept up in collective feelings of anger, envy, and triumph. Amit Goldenberg is a psychologist at Harvard Business School. He's fascinated by the effect of group level emotions. Amit, when your son was small, he once fell off his highchair. What caused this to happen? What happened? And what did it teach you about the ways in which we think about shared emotions?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Well, first of all, I'm afraid it was failure in parenting that caused that to happen. We had a new highchair that we've never used, and when my wife, Jenna, put our son, Levy, who was just a baby, to eat, a few moments later, he kind of leaned forward and fell off the highchair and landed on his face.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Oh my God.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: And that was a huge moment of panic, obviously. Everybody were panicking. Levy was panicking because he was just hit in the face. Jenna was panicking and feeling a lot of guilt because she forgot to buckle the seat in the proper way. And I was also panicking because, you know, this is one of those moments where you say, oh my God, this is exactly what you're afraid of as a parent. I was standing at the side and I saw Levy panicking and Jenna's panicking. And I was also internally panicking, but I felt that the appropriate response was to not express my panic and to in some ways offset the panic that Jenna felt, to maybe help Levy calm down and realize that we have things under control. And I think that parents do this all the time. You know, we see what our partner is expressing and we ask, is this the appropriate response? Sometimes we overreact, sometimes we underreact. And if we're good partners, we offset our partner's responses. So I see each member of a collective as trying to steer the group in the appropriate way by modifying their own emotions. And so the best way to see it is in family units, which are small, and each person has a huge impact on the unit. And so in this unit, parents and people are expressing their emotions to try to get the group to feel in the appropriate way.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you've done research that looks at how, when two people are in a relationship, they often cue off each other such that the emotional unit now stays in balance. Tell me a little bit about this work on what you call emotional compensation.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yeah. So what we do in these experiments is we give parents a scenario. So for example, you have two boys and a girl, Mark, David and Jenny. Twelve-year-old Jenny is the oldest. Last week, your partner smelled alcohol on Jenny's breath when she came home. Your partner was very surprised and asked Jenny, were you drinking alcohol? Jenny immediately replies, yes, I drink with my friends. So what? Already as a parent, you're starting to get angry. Yesterday, your friend called and told you that she ran into Jenny on the street and Jenny seemed quite drunk. You and your partner sit to talk with Jenny. And so, in this scenario, the parents hear the other parents saying, this is a huge deal, your partner says to Jenny, extremely angry. I know kids who are drinking alcohol at this age, drinking destroyed their lives for good and it will destroy your life too. So it turns out that when they hear their partner being overly angry, they actually lower down the anger to try to create some balanced response. And what we find, and that's the most interesting thing, is that parents who tend to compensate for their partner over or under reactions, generally tend to report happier marriage. Which is not what you would expect this thing. You would expect that parents who are congruent in their responses are happier. But in fact, a collective systems need balance. And if a system has the tools to balance itself, that is a predictor of a more successful unit.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Amit says skilled leaders can help regulate the collective emotions of entire nations. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Americans suffering through the Great Depression that they had nothing to fear but fear itself, he was trying to calm the panic that was engulfing many households. Corporate leaders such as Steve Barmer at Microsoft have shown how you can modulate emotion in the other direction.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: They played a really important role in increasing positive emotions within their groups and organizations. It starts with joy, happiness, and in this case, it's passion. Barmer's passion is so strong that it's contagious. He doesn't need to fake it. It comes naturally to him. He sweats during this speech. And it's just a great gift that someone has as a leader.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Rituals are also a way people can regulate collective emotions. Amit says you see rituals in religious settings, at cultural events, and on sports fields.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: So there's all sorts of ceremonies. Start from physical touch. So a player is standing on the penalty line, and they're fist bumping everyone in their team. Why is that? I mean, why do high-intensity law firms get together and drink on Friday afternoons? They do this as a ritual to help resolve the anxiety that was building up during the week, and get these people ready to spend some time with their family when they're not amped up from a really busy week of work.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Yeah. Or if you think about morning rituals, for example, probably the same idea.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Absolutely. We talked about the fact that feeling negative emotions together feels better, but it also helps us to understand that people are feeling negative emotions with us as a form both to amplify these negative emotions in a concise way, but also to control them. Rituals control variability, and we use rituals to have a specific emotional experience in a controlled way.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Another way of nudging a group's emotions in a particular direction involves teaching people that their opponents are capable of change. Amit, you've tested an intervention like this with a group of both Jewish and Palestinian students. Can you describe the intervention and tell me what happened?



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Yeah, we're in the era of hatred, and hatred should be very clearly differentiated from anger. When you feel angry, you want to make things right, and you want to fix things. When you feel hatred, the person on the other side, you already established the idea that the person on the other side cannot be changed, and there's nothing that can be done. But you can't tell Israelis, Palestinians can change because, and you can't tell Palestinians that Israelis can change, because they've been educated all their life that the other side hates them. And so you have to do it in an indirect way. So we developed these leadership workshops where we talked about identifying change in general as a leader, and thinking about groups as malleable entities. This is based on Carol Dweck's idea of malleability. And we show that even when you teach people about group malleability, even when you don't tell them that they need to apply this to the specific context of the conflict, the idea of malleability seeps into a lot of their aspects of their thinking and changes how they feel and how they think about resolving the conflict.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Amit Goldenberg is a psychologist at Harvard Business School. Amit, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.



AMIT GOLDENBERG: Thank you. There are situations where we all get to see collective emotions in action. It doesn't matter if you live in a bustling city or a tiny village. It makes no difference if you're a member of a vast intergenerational household or living on your own. You might be religious, or you might be a devout atheist. Humans around the world invoke supernatural forces when it looks like their sports teams might lose. They take part in annual festivals that demand time, effort and money. They mark important moments, such as marriages, births and deaths, with intricately choreographed scripts. These festivals, rites and scripts are largely designed to shape the emotions we feel collectively. The psychology of rituals perfectly complements the story we heard today from Amit Goldenberg. Some time ago, I interviewed the anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas. He told me not only about his research, but about the time he himself was induced to take part in one of the most fearsome rituals in the world. He was terrified, yes, but he said, What I also felt was this jolt of exhilaration that lasted not just for a few minutes, not just for a few hours, but in fact for several days.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, a bonus Emotions 2.0 feature into the deep history and powerful psychology of rituals. Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas works at the University of Connecticut. His research has taken him across the planet. In his travels, Dimitris has found common cultural practices among people living in far-flung places. Many of these practices involve dangerous, difficult or expensive rituals. The rituals themselves are often dramatic. They are also regularly incomprehensible to outsiders. But when you peer beneath the surface, rituals actually reveal a great deal about the human mind and the psychological features that people around the world have in common. Dimitris Xygalatas, welcome to Hidden Brain.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Hi, Shankar. Thank you for inviting me.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Dimitris, some years ago, you found yourself in the Spanish village of San Pedro, Manrique, and you met a man named Alejandro. How did you first come into contact with him?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: So I was doing research on fire-walking rituals in Greece. That was for my doctoral research. And after that, I found out that there's another place in Europe where fire-walking rituals are performed. And this is the small village called San Pedro, Manrique. So I just showed up there. I started asking people if they knew about this ritual. And as it turns out, it was a really big deal in that community. So one of the first people who others pointed me to was Alejandro. People hold him in very high esteem in that village because he's one of the oldest firewalkers. And he in fact has been doing this ritual for many decades.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So I understand that he was in his 70s when you were talking with him. Can you paint me a detailed picture of the firewalking ritual as it was practiced in this small Spanish village?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: We are talking about a village of 600 inhabitants. That is in the middle of pretty much nowhere. And yet people have built this large open amphitheater that can host 3,000 spectators.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Wow.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: And they only use it once a year for the purposes of this ritual. So clearly this is very important to them. On the summer solstice, every June, people start gathering in the central square. They engage in all kinds of processions and other celebrations throughout the day. And in the evening, they all join hands and they form this human chain, and they start marching up the hill in lockstep towards that venue. And once everybody takes their place, at exactly midnight, people start taking off their shoes, and they face a large pit of coals. This has been produced by two tons of oak wood that has been burning for hours. And it forms this bed of glowing coals. We actually measured the temperatures there at 1200 Fahrenheit. That's enough to melt aluminum.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: My gosh.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: And while faced with this bed of coals, they take somebody on their back, and they walk barefoot across it on the burning fire.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Wow. And this was true of Alejandro as well? He would carry someone across this bed of fire?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Correct. In fact, one time, I saw him carrying his niece, who was significantly larger than him. Alejandro is a tiny man. So he struggled to balance her on his soldiers. People offered to help him, but then he just waved his hand and he went through and did it.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You once asked Alejandro if he would ever stop engaging in this ritual. I want to play you a clip of what he said in Spanish.



CLIP: Hombre, tiene que llegar a dia. Cuando? Pues, yo para no pasarla no tengo que subir al fuego, porque de la torre me tiro abajo.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Can you translate what he told you, Dimitris?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: He looked at me, he thought about it for a while, and he says, well, I suppose that they will come. But when it does, he says, I will just not go up there. And I said, what do you mean? He says, well, I cannot go there, because if I do that, if I saw it, without being able to do it, I would climb on the bell tower and jump off and kill myself.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So the following year, Alejandro got some news from his doctor. What was it, Dimitris?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: I heard from Alejandro's son, Mamel, that his doctor told him he had detected some arrhythmia in his heart, and therefore he banned him from doing the ritual. But things took a dramatic turn that night. I was in the central square with his son, preparing for the procession that would lead us to the venue. And at some point, Mamel pulled me out of the chain. I said, What's happening? Mamel says, Come with me and you will see. So he took me to his father's house, and he announced, he said, Dad, I know you cannot do the ritual, so I'm going to carry you through the fire. And Alejandro just looked at him for a few seconds, he hugged him, and then they cried together. So we left the house, and we walked towards the venue. And indeed, Mamel was one of the first persons to walk across the fire. He took off his shoes, he took his father on his back, and he crossed the burning coals. At that point, the crowd was ecstatic. Everybody was cheering, his family rushed to hug him, but then suddenly Alejandro turned towards them, and with a sharp gesture, he told them to stop. Everybody went completely silent, 3,000 people, you could hear a pin drop as Alejandro turned around, facing the fire, and he just went ahead and crossed it again, by himself this time.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You talked to Alejandro about his choice to endanger his heart against his doctor's advice. What did he tell you afterwards, Dimitris?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: It was actually not the first time I've heard this from a firewalker. He said something like, my doctor said that if I do the firework, something terrible might happen to my heart. But does he know what will happen to my heart if I don't do the firework?



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You know, it seems almost that there is a theme that shows up again and again in your research into rituals. When you look at them from the outside, they can seem incomprehensible, bewildering, but seen from the inside, the people who practice these rituals really cherish them, even when they carry significant costs. And in some ways, that's what you were hearing from Alejandro, wasn't it?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Absolutely, yes. Across all kinds of different contexts, they carry so much meaning that people consider them to be a fundamental part of who they are as individuals and an equally fundamental part of their collective identity, who they are as group members.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, we've looked at one example of a ritual that carried enormous physical risks. But of course, rituals also carry other forms of risks and other costs. Tell us what pilgrims endured during the Kumbh Mela festival in India.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: The Kumbh Mela is one of the most important Hindu pilgrimages in the world. And this is arguably the biggest congregation of human beings in known history. Last time somebody counted, there were about 150 million people attending the festivities. It takes place every 12 years, and it happens on the banks of four sacred rivers, the Ganges being one of them. And people might take several weeks to travel there from all parts of India and beyond. And when they reach it, the festival lasts for a month. Some people actually stay for the entire month. And during that month, you can imagine, in such an incredibly crowded place, people live in tents, they bathe in the river, they drink from the river, and the Ganges is possibly the most polluted river on earth. So there's definitely a high risk of infectious diseases spreading. It's very hot during the day, but it's freezing cold during the night. So this ritual is full of hardship.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, at a more prosaic level, you've also studied rituals that are just financially costly and many rituals fall under this category. Certainly staying in a place like India, there are many families in India who celebrate weddings by going into extreme debt. Can you talk about that, Dimitris?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: This is something that is actually very similar to what I've seen in my home country. I come from Greece, so in rural areas of Greece, certainly when I was younger, when I was a kid, I've seen many instances of people going into debt to finance their children's wedding. In India, there's this local NGO which estimated over 60% of all Indian households, they turn to money lenders in order to finance their children's weddings. And of course, they have to pay extortionate rates. And in many cases, they will sign contracts that get them into voluntary servitude over a period of years, so indentured labor, to be able to pay those debts off.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, hearing about these ordeals, people on the outside might wonder why would anyone voluntarily go through such hardship? And one thing you've done is actually ask participants that very question, and you've discovered a paradox when you ask someone like Alejandro or a pilgrim in the Kumbh Mela why they do what they do. What do they tell you, Dimitris?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: I have asked hundreds, if not thousands, of people this question, why do you do your rituals in general, or why do you do this particular ritual? And one of the most astonishing things that never ceased to amaze me is that even in the case of rituals that involve extraordinary material costs, physical effort, physical risks, most people would just look at me and say, what do you mean, why would you do our rituals? This is just what we do. This is who we are.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You call this the ritual paradox. Unpack that idea for me.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: So the paradox is that on the one hand, people attribute tremendous meaning and importance to those rituals. Sometimes they will tell me this is the most important event of their lives. And yet, when I ask them why they do it, they very often cannot come up with an answer.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you had first-hand experience of what it was like to participate in one of these rituals. When you were a small boy growing up in Greece, I understand when you were eight years old, your dad took you on an important, let's call it an expedition. Can you describe where he took you and what you saw?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: So this was a football stadium. And by football, I mean what the United States people call soccer, which in many parts of the world, my home country included, can be an almost religious-like activity. People have very strong loyalties towards their team. So at eight years old, I went into a stadium packed with 45,000 people. And I noticed that as soon as the game started, everybody jumped up and never sat down again. And what followed from that moment on was one of the most unbelievable experiences of my young life. People lit thousands of flares and torches and fireworks, and the entire stadium turned into this ball of fire. It really looked like a volcano. People chanting in synchrony, jumping up and down in synchrony, lighting those flares, which of course meant that as soon as the game started, it had to be paused for several minutes just for the air to clear. And my father kept picking me up so that I could watch the game, but I didn't even care about the game. All I cared about were all of those incredible collective rituals that were happening around me.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So as I was hearing the story, Dimitris, I was sort of seeing the 80-year-old version of you essentially becoming an anthropologist before our eyes, sort of observing all the people around you and asking why they were doing what they were doing. But it's also the case that you became a fan of the sport, but also of this particular team.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: See, most people, they don't show up at the temple when they're eight years old, just because they had an internal yearning to worship. Typically, their parents take them. But it is through the act of participation itself that one becomes religious or becomes a fan, that one gets bonded with this group of people. Because when people come together and they engage in all those kinds of ecstatic-like rituals, this conglomeration of individuals ceases to be that, and suddenly becomes one unified group. And even from the perspective of an eight-year-old looking at this group, that's exactly what it seemed like. It seems to be 45,000 individuals, and it was simply one large pulsating unity that was chanting and it was jumping up and down together as if it was a single organism. And I was part of it.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, the psychology of how and why rituals affect us so deeply. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.



This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. At the University of Connecticut, anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas has found that rituals exact significant costs in time, money, even pain and suffering from the people who practice them. Irrational economists might say, it would make more sense for people to make sacrifices for activities that improve their lives in some tangible way. But everywhere and in every age, including our own, people divert significant attention to seemingly ceremonial activities. Dimitris, you call this the ritual paradox. From the outside, rituals seem pointless, and yet they are experienced by participants as something truly vital. In your book, Ritual, How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, you say that it's a mistake to think of rituals as primarily being about what we do in the outside world. The real purpose of rituals is for us to hack into our own inner worlds?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Absolutely. And the idea is that just because ritual does not have any immediate, direct effects on the physical world, this does not mean that it has no impact at all. In fact, it has a huge impact on our internal world, the way we perceive ourselves, the way we feel, the way we connect with other people, and ultimately our well-being and our quality of life.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So one immediate question is why we need to do this, because after all, we are capable of introspection, we're capable of reflection. There are a lot of ways that we can talk to our internal selves. What is it about the challenges we face in life that prompt us to do things on the outside, things like walking across a bed of fire, to change what's happening inside our own minds?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Well, the simple answer here could be, because it simply works. Sometimes, we don't really have to understand that a particular behavior helps us reduce anxiety or cope with grief or connect with other people. But visually, it does so. So when we go out and we dance and sing with our friends, we don't stop to ask the question, why are we doing this? Isn't dancing pointless? And yet, there's a fundamental function to acts like dancing or singing or celebrating or performing any kind of ritual together.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of the really interesting ideas that you and others explore is that there is something of a mismatch between the minds that have been handed down to us by evolution, our physical brain, and the challenges that we're often called to address in the actual world. And I'm not a fan of the idea that the brain is like a computer. The metaphor is not exact. But if you were to think about the brain as a computer, it's almost as if this computer was designed to solve a set of problems, but the problems have now changed in some dramatic way. And we have a software patch that can essentially get this older computer to function in this newer environment. Is that the connection that you would make with rituals, that rituals in some ways are functioning like a software patch?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Yes, that's a good analogy, I think. And one example would be the way we handle stress and anxiety. Stress is a useful thing. It's an adaptive response. It motivates our behavior. It motivates us to seek solutions, to avoid certain things that are stressful to us. But in the modern context, we see that levels of anxiety are higher than ever. That's because our environment has changed, not our biology. We're living a life that is way faster than anything our ancestors would have experienced. We're living in social contexts where most of us, or many of us at least, live very far away, removed from our social support networks, our family, our best friends. We move around, we live with anonymous strangers, and all that can be very stressful. So by finding ways of soothing these kinds of anxieties and these kinds of pressures, we might be able to solve these new problems that our biology has not had time to solve. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to an anthropologist called Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski noticed that in the Trobriand Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, where he was doing his fieldwork, the local fisherman would perform a lot of rituals before going out to fish in the open sea, but not before going out to fish in the shallow waters of the lagoon. Now, he surmised that this was because fishing in the ocean is dangerous, it's stressful, and it's uncertain. You never know what you're going to catch, you never know if you're even going to come back alive, if you have to battle the waves and hunt sharks and whales. And this is a theory that has been taught to anthropologist students for about a century, but there was very little evidence to support it. Within the last couple of decades, we now have tangible evidence that ritual actually helps alleviate anxiety.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of these studies took place on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Tell me about that experiment, Dimitris, and what you found.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: For this study, we went into a small fishing village, and there's a Hindu temple there. The local women will visit this temple frequently, and they will perform these prayers. They consist of repetitive movements performed in front of several statues of the Hindu pantheon. And before going in there, we used an anxiety-inducing technique. So we asked them to think about natural disasters, like cyclones and floods. And this is very salient to this island, because it's very often threatened by such natural disasters. And then we allowed them to do their rituals in their normal way. And we also had a control group who went into a secular space and spent the equivalent amount of time just sitting down. And afterwards, we measured their anxiety levels, both in terms of how they perceive their anxiety, and in terms of what their body said. We measured heart rate variability, which is an indication of our body's ability to cope with stress. And we found that performing this ritual actually helped people reduce their anxiety more than those in the control group.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering how this actually works inside our minds, Dimitris. How is it that rituals can actually soothe people's anxiety? What is it that they are doing, do you think?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: So the idea that my colleagues and I are proposing here is related to the way our brain works. Our brain is not just a computational machine. It's a predictive machine. It makes active inferences about the state of the world. Our brain does this in all kinds of contexts and all the time. This is a very useful cognitive architecture to have, of course. But one byproduct of that architecture, one side effect, is that when there's uncertainty in the world, where we cannot make accurate predictions, we experience anxiety. And we think this is exactly where ritual comes in. Because if ritual is anything, it is structure. It is predictability. When I engage in a ritual, I know exactly what to do. I know exactly when to do it and how. And this gives my brain a sense of control. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether this sense of control is real or illusory, as long as it has tangible effects. And we do see that it does.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There's been research showing that performing rituals doesn't just make people feel better, it can actually lead to better outcomes. One study investigated the effect of a made-up ritual on people's performance in a stressful activity. Can you tell me what that study found, Emotions?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Yes, this was a study performed by Alison Brooks, who asked people to prepare in order to engage in a series of stressful tasks. Those were tasks like taking a maths test or participating in a public karaoke competition. So the researchers asked participants either perform an artificial ritual which resembled a magical spell or perform no ritual. The ritual was consistent in drawing a picture of how they're feeling right now, and then sprinkling salt on the picture, counting up to five, and then ritually destroying the paper. What they found was that performing this type of ritual helped people actually perform better. So they evaluate the karaoke performances or the mathematical tests, and they saw that people were able to perform better. And of course, not through some kind of magical causation. When they looked at the mediating factors, they found that it was through the reduction of anxiety and an increased sense of control that they were able to improve their performance.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So we looked at different ways in which rituals might help us address questions of uncertainty, questions of stress. Another problem of living that rituals address is the pain of loss and grief. Dimitris, can you help us understand why there are so many rituals associated with death and dying?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Every human society we've known has had elaborate burial rituals. Now, why is that? Well, this again has to do with the way our brain works. We are hyper social animals. And as hyper social animals, we have a number of particularly strong forms of attachment. We see, for example, when young children are separated from their parents, they experience what we call separation anxiety. When lovers experience a breakup, they might go through this very painful period. And when we look at it from this perspective, we realize that the capacity to grieve may have stemmed from evolutionary adaptations, but grief itself is not adaptive. There is an obvious benefit to the child who experiences anxiety when separated from its mother, because they can cry for help. But when we lose somebody because they're no longer with us, there's not much else we can do. So from that perspective, grief is not necessarily very adaptive. And to be able to cope with these debilitating emotions, such as the experience of loss and the fear of our own mortality, every human culture has developed a set of rituals.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And what do you think these rituals are doing? I mean, is it the case that they're actually ameliorating our grief, channeling our grief in a new direction? What do you think the rituals are accomplishing here?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: They can make the process of separation from the deceased a little bit more gradual, so they give us time to digest the fact that they're no longer with us. And if you look at burial customs throughout the world, you will see in a lot of those customs, they involve keeping the deceased in the house for one day, three days, a week, in the case of some tribes, even for a year. Another thing they do is that they help keep the deceased alive in our memories. So they now turn them into ancestors, they turn them into beings with which we will interact in the future again through these periodic rituals, we will make offerings for them. And therefore, they provide a sense that they're still with us just in some different way.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So we've looked at two areas where rituals can be very helpful in managing anxiety and in managing grief. A third problem of living has to do with the challenges that come from living in groups, getting people to coordinate and cooperate with each other, especially as you point out, in modern societies where large numbers of people are living among strangers. How do rituals help us rise to this challenge, Dimitris?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: This is perhaps the biggest of all challenges for us, because we are a social species, but once again, we now live in conditions that are very different. So now we live in these very large societies of anonymous strangers, and cooperation is always going to be a problem. And this is why we have more collective rituals than any other animal, in order to get people to feel more bonded and cooperate. For example, collective rituals might have people dress in similar ways. There are studies that show that when people appear to be similar, our brain makes inferences that they are indeed similar, because also in nature, people who look like us, they're more likely to be our relatives. Another way is to align our movements. So we move in synchrony, we chant in synchrony. And again, there are studies that show that people who move in synchrony, they feel closer to each other, they are more rapport and they like each other more. Another way is to align our emotions. When we feel the same thing, again, we feel more connected. Because who are the people that you feel the same things with? Who are the people that you will mourn with, and you will laugh and you will cry with? Typically, those are members of your family and your close friends. And by getting anonymous strangers to do those things together, rituals can create this sense of community and likeness.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So we've looked at several ways in which rituals can produce social good, but any psychological force that is powerful enough to get people to walk over burning coals can also have bad outcomes. I want you to listen to this news report from CBS News about a student's death in California.



CLIP: Good morning. Noah Domingo's blood alcohol level was more than four times the legal limit. The UC Irvine freshman was found unresponsive in the house behind me after a party in January. His father says Noah was taking part in a dangerous and long-standing fraternity ritual, where Noah was compelled to guzzle a so-called family drink to become part of his big brother's family.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Dimitris, talk about the connection between the bonding power of rituals and the initiation rites we see at college fraternities.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: So these types of rituals, the very intense types of rituals, they actually do carry great risks. And these risks have to outweigh the costs. So if you think of the kinds of contexts in which these rituals would have been used, societies that face more warfare, for example, they have more intense initiation rituals. And it is one thing to go through an initiation ritual that involves a lot of pain and suffering even. If you're doing this with the elders of your community, your cohort, everybody you grew up with, and that's a ritual that has been performed for a thousand years, so there's a lot of trial and error going on. But when we take those rituals out of context, and we perform them for no good reason, perhaps for fun, they can become something very different. It's a very different thing to take that ritual out of context, tweak it, and try to use it to get the same benefits in an entirely different setting.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of the things that I find fascinating about your work is that in recent years, you've started to use technology to assist you in understanding how rituals work. And one of the forms of technology you're using are heart monitors. So using heart monitors, you've collected data during the San Pedro Firewalkers. You found something extraordinary in the heart monitor data when it came to what was happening in different people's bodies at the very same time. What did you find, Dimitris?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: So this project started from hearing some of the things that people were telling me in San Pedro. Again and again, I heard them say the same thing. They say that when you go up there, there are 3,000 people, but you feel like one. They said things like, I cannot put it into words, they would say, but there's this feeling of togetherness, like our emotions are aligned. And this to me sounded very much like what early anthropologists had said. Emil Durkheim described this feeling of collective effervescence. He described it as if there was this jolt of electricity running through a group of people that congregated and turning them from a group of unrelated individuals into this cohesive group. So, I started thinking, how do we actually measure this feeling of oneness, this ineffable feeling of emotional alignment, and that my participants described, but nobody has actually demonstrated. So what we did is that we put those monitors on firewalkers, but also members of the group who were just watching, and even unrelated strangers who had been there just as curious tourists to watch the festival. What we found is that during the ritual, their heart rates began to synchronize to a really impressive degree. In fact, they were more synchronous during the ritual, where some of them are walking on fire, some are watching, some are preparing for their own walk. They were more synchronous during that time than the time they were marching up the hill in synchrony. But we also find that this effect only holds for group members, because we also map the social network of the village. So we knew who was related to whom and to what degree, whether by blood or by friendship. And we see that we can actually use the degree of social proximity to predict the degree of physiological synchrony. So this is a fundamentally social phenomenon.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, in an increasingly rational world that looks with suspicion at anything that smacks of superstition, how do we harness the psychological power of rituals? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas is the author of Ritual, How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. He's found that over a very long span of time, groups of humans in different parts of the world have independently homed in on the basic elements of rituals that make them effective in manipulating our inner thoughts and feelings. Dimitris, you found that rituals always display an important characteristic, one that sets them apart from other actions. And you call this causal opacity. What do you mean by this idea? And why is such causal opacity important in the performance of rituals?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: This is one of the key characteristics of ritual. In fact, it goes to the very definition of ritual. Rituals are those actions that have to be performed repeatedly. And they have some symbolic value, they're treated as special. And yet, they either don't have any specific goal, or there's no visible connection between the actions that one undertakes to achieve a goal and the goal itself. So, if I take a shower in order to cleanse myself, there's obvious utility to this. But if I perform a purification ritual that involves perhaps rubbing mud on my hair, there's no clear connection, there's no obvious connection between the action that I'm performing and the outcome that I am seeking. And this is very important, because by virtue of the fact that ritual actions are arbitrary, that means that they can now take any kind of symbolic meaning. And this makes them very efficient group markers. Because if we are the group that rubs mud on our hair to perform our purification rituals, then we can be fairly certain that no other group does it. And that allows us to discern those who don't belong and also to discern the members of our own group who are more likely to cooperate with.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I love this idea that in some ways, rituals transform everyday actions to the realm of the symbolic. And so in some ways, the causal opacity might look like a bug, but in fact, it's actually not a bug, it's a feature.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Exactly. There are actually laboratory studies that have looked at this ability of ritual to make things special. So when they showed people different types of drinks being prepared, beverages, in one case, the beverage was served in a pretty straight up way. In the other condition, it was served up in a ritualized way. So perhaps somebody would bow to it or turn it around three times before consuming it. And then when they asked participants which drink they would prefer, when they asked them which drink thought was better, when they asked them which drink they thought was special, they all picked the ritualized drink.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So in addition to this opacity regarding cause and effect, Dimitris, you've noticed that rituals tend to have three qualities, repetition, rigidity, and redundancy. Can you explain what these are?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: So a ritual obviously involves a lot of repetition. Once a day, once a week, once a month, once in a lifetime, but it's always repeated. But even within each particular ritual performance, there tends to be a lot of repetition. So sometimes people will chant Om 108 times. Some people will count the rosary and perform repetitive prayers for hours. By rigidity, we refer to the fact that ritual actions must be performed in a specific way. There are actually studies that show that if you try to intervene and change the way a ritual is practiced, people get morally upset. Now this has actually happened historically. FTR moved Thanksgiving by a week so that the holiday period could be extended and people would spend more money. And people were morally appalled. Most states actually refused to enforce it. And they refer to it as Frank's giving. And it caused an uproar. And finally, the third aspect is redundancy. And this refers to the fact that rituals go well beyond what is functionally required. What I mean by this is that maybe 20 seconds of washing your hands would be sufficient to keep them clean. But in something like a purification ceremony, the relevant rites may go on for hours or sometimes even for days.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So besides the fact that rituals have these characteristics, you've conducted studies that find that when people are experiencing setbacks or anxiety or stress, their actions sometimes naturally take on some of the characteristics of rituals. Can you explain the study for me, please?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: We brought people inside a laboratory, and we wanted to see whether inducing anxiety in that context would lead them to perform more ritualized behaviors. And what we found, we used motion trackers to quantify the movement of these people. And as they became more anxious based on a task that they had to perform, their behaviors spontaneously became more ritualized. So they started performing the same actions again and again and again.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And I think what that tells me is that when you think about how rituals evolved, it may well be that they actually evolved through these mechanisms where people were naturally turning to some of these systems in moments of stress and anxiety and then over time, those behaviors get codified.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: That's exactly what I think that happened, that ritual evolved as a sort of mental technology that helped individuals cope with all kinds of anxieties and then was co-opted by groups, by cultures who then transformed into a very important social technology.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We discussed earlier how when people are engaged in a ritual, they often feel as if they are part of a larger organism. You felt this way when you were in the soccer stadium with your dad. The people at the fire-walking ritual in Spain felt the same way. Is the reverse true as well when people do things in synchrony? Does it change the way they think and feel?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Yes, absolutely. And this is one of the reasons why rituals are so powerful. Our brain simply infers that if we move in the same way as other people, then we are more like those people. And we feel more rapport with those people. This has been demonstrated by different studies, one of which we did in a laboratory where we induce synchrony. So we have people move either in tandem or with slight variations. You can imagine this as performing a dance, either with somebody who is a good dancer or with somebody who is a bad dancer, and sometimes forgets the steps or makes mistakes. And we found that when people moved in synchrony, their endorphin levels were elevated. Now the release of endorphins is related to social bonding. And not only that, but we found that they liked each other more, they perceived their partners to be more cooperative, and they trusted each other more. And we see this not just in the self-reports, but also in their behavior in a trust game. Where they actually have to trust each other with real money that they could be putting in their pockets.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And of course, this now makes perfect sense why you would have so many rituals built around music and chanting, especially in group settings.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Absolutely. Dancing and singing and chanting, those are some of the most primordial ways for human beings to connect. And you find them in all kinds of contexts, and especially ritualized contexts.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of the things that you say is that high arousal rituals that stimulate many of our senses at the same time, that these high arousal rituals can produce some of the most powerful effects on our emotional states and memory. What do you mean by this, Dimitris?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: One way in which they do this is by creating these powerful episodic memories that become a part of our autobiographical self. The very sense of who we are as a person. So some of your episodic memories may involve your first kiss or the time you found yourself in battle, or the time your house burned to the ground. So they can be some of the most important moments of your life. Those moments typically involve a lot of emotional arousal. Rituals use this by putting people into situations where they exhibit very high arousal and they do this collectively. So when I share the same exciting moments, when I cry with you, when I laugh with you, when I'm in danger or in pain together with you, it feels like we are essentially brothers.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of the implications of this, of course, is that the more important the moment, the more extravagant the ritual might need to be in order to mark that moment. Because, of course, moments that are engineered to have this heightened sense of ritual significance are going to be seen as more legitimate, more important, more emotionally salient in our minds.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Exactly. And this is why, for example, you see that state rituals tend to be very extravagant. And in fact, particularly state rituals that have to do with leaders who have less popular legitimization, leaders like kings and dictators, they tend to have more elaborate, more lavish, more flamboyant rituals. That's because those rituals add to that sense of authority that they so desperately need.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I wonder, Dimitris, if you could tell me about one particular night when you got to experience the power of rituals firsthand. You were conducting fieldwork in Mauritius, and you'd been living in a coastal village for a number of weeks, preparing to observe an annual fire-walking ceremony. And one day, you were standing near the temple when you noticed some of the local men engaged in lively discussion. And every so often, they would look in your direction, and eventually one of them, the temple president, called you over. What did he say?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: So, this was Prakash, the local temple president. And when he summoned me there, he said, Dimitris, you've been living with us for how long now? And I said, a couple of months. And he said, right, so you're one of us now. And I immediately knew that he just hadn't called me there to tell me that. And I said, well, I don't want to pretend to be one of you. I'm here to learn about your traditions. And he just cut me off. And he said, well, so you should also do the fire walk. And I was stunned by this request, because in other parts of the world where I studied fire walking rituals, this would not have been allowed. This was something only for the locals. People had either drew their ancestry from the village or were part of this religion. My first reaction was to politely decline. I said, I don't want to pretend to be one of you. It's very important for me to be able to document this ritual. So on that day, I'll have to take pictures and take notes. And Prakash cut me off again. And he said something like, if God wants you to do it, you will do it. To which I responded, trust me, Prakash, God does not want me to walk on fire.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: All right. So then, so then you're wearing your researcher hat and you're watching the fire ritual unfold. Tell me what happens next.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: So I had permission to be inside the enclosure where all the fire workers were. So because I want to take photos. And I was looking through my camera lens, so I didn't know what was happening around me. And the ritual itself is so captivating that I was completely immersed in this. The smells and the color of the fire and the chants, everybody chanting Om Shakti, as people were crossing the fire one after the other. The emotions in their faces. And at some point, Praga stopped me on the shoulder. And I looked up and I said, what? And he said, stand up. And I stood up and he said, turn around. And I turned around and I realized that the entire village was looking at me. I was facing the fire. And everybody expected me to walk across it.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What did you do, Dimitris?






SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Now, you were someone who knew that the temperature of the coals could range from 750 degrees to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Was that going through your mind as you stepped onto the fire?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: Of course. When you're faced with a fire like that, you cannot be unaware of the fact that you're walking on a surface that is hot enough to melt metal, and you actually feel it. You feel yourself, your face is getting roasted by that heat. And I've seen people go across that fire. I've seen the sparks fly off their feet. I was wondering whether the same thing was going to happen to me. I have seen people get hurt through the fire walking ritual. So the thought certainly crossed my mind. But I just took that first step, and just like people had described to me, your mind is completely empty. There's nothing but you and the fire. When you're walking through the coals, you go into this mode that some researchers have called flow. And in that state, your peripheral vision almost disappears. So you don't see anyone. It's just you and the fire. But there was one step in particular where I just knew this was going to leave a blister. So there was probably something sharp under my foot. And it hurt. And it did leave a blister afterwards. But when this adrenaline kicks in, you don't really worry about the pain. That's the last thing that you feel.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What did it feel like as you got to the other side, Dimitris?



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: The first thing that happens is that it's as if a cloud is lifted. So suddenly you're aware of your surroundings again. But what I also felt was this jolt of exhilaration that lasted not just for a few minutes, not just for a few hours, but in fact for several days. And I was amazed at all those powerful feelings and emotions that came through such a brief moment of participation. That got me wondering if I, as an external observer, as an anthropologist, as a visitor, as a guest in this community, if I come to experience such strong emotions through this brief act of participation, how much more powerful would that be for a person who grew up in that community, for the insiders, for whom this ritual has a deep meaning connected to a thousand year old tradition.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Ritual, How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. Dimitris, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.



DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: It's been a real pleasure, thank you.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Coming up next week, we continue our Emotions 2.0 series. We'll consider the benefits and risks of one of the most misunderstood of emotions, Pride.



JESSICA TRACY: He was a successful business person, he was supporting his family, he was getting promotions at work, but he wasn't being the person that he saw himself to be. He wasn't meeting his own goals for his identity. And that's what we all need to be, and that's what brings us Pride. And I think all of us, when we're not getting that, we know it.



SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Burns, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you love Hidden Brain and want more of the show, please consider joining our podcast subscription. It's where you'll find stories. There's no reason ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Plus, your financial support provides the fuel that drives the research, writing and production costs involved in making the show. You can try a free seven-day trial of Hidden Brain Plus by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. Or you can also find us on Apple Podcasts at apple.co/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.