A Bad Feeling Doesn’t Always Mean Something Is Actually Wrong
Or, the science of stupid decisions
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
There’s a popular saying: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.
Basically, when people struggle together against a common enemy, their wins produce a strong sense of identity and abundance. But shortly after when they no longer need to focus on survival, they quickly shift their focus to achieving higher states of prestige.
Which sounds natural except it functionally means that since people no longer share a common enemy, they begin to turn on each other.
The human psyche seems to crave an antagonist in order to flourish.
Enough talk! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 2,500 words.
One more thing. If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍
Q: Can we avoid obvious stupidity?
Matthew Emmons is one of the best shooters in the history of American shooting. Across his 23-year career, the four-time Olympian has won numerous titles, including one gold, one silver and one bronze at the Olympic Games, plus a gold and bronze medal at the World Championships.
But he might be better known for the Olympic gold medals he didn’t win than the one he did. His astonishing performance in the finals of 2004 Olympic Games made him jokingly admit that “maybe he is more famous in China than in the United States.”
In 2004, a 23-year-old Emmons stepped onto the Olympic Games shooting range for the first time. At first, everything went smoothly. Even though his gun had been tampered with, he still won the men’s 50m rifle prone gold medal with a gun borrowed from a teammate.
When recalling the experience in an interview with Alaska’s Capital City Online newspaper in 2016, Emmons joked: “I never found out who the saboteur was, but I’d like to know so I could shake their hand and say thanks.”
However, this unpredictable experience seemed to have exhausted all of Emmons’ luck at the Olympics.
Two days after winning that gold medal, Emmons stood on the stage of the men’s 50m rifle three-position final, during which he had established a huge advantage, with a three-point lead over the second-placed athlete prior to the final shot.
Then, the unthinkable happened.
Emma’s scored zero on his final shot after misfiring at another competitor’s target. Yes! He hit someone else’s target instead of his own. He blew the three-point lead, dropped to eighth, and handed Chinese shooter Jia Zhanbo the title.
Emmons was among the best, and clearly he wasn’t stupid to make such amateurish mistake. What was stupid instead was the situation he was in.
Today, let’s talk about stupidity. More precisely, let’s try to understand how stupidity is often less about what we actually do, and more about the situation we are — technically, our brains are — in.
Unlike how an object breaks under too much stress, our brain can get overwhelmed without us knowing. It can still keep on functioning, but with much reduced efficiency.
Stupidity can be defined as overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information. It is usually avoidable when our brains aren’t distracted and functioning as they should. Real avoidable stupidity is making crucial decisions in stressful situations. They are bound to fail.
Matthew Emmons was under a lot of pressure. What his brain interpreted wasn’t reality. When your business is on the verge failing, or when your family is in a dire financial situation, it is impossible to make good decisions no matter how smart you are normally. Your body just doesn’t have enough fuel to think straight.
The goal of this essay is to understand what really goes on inside your brain — how are thoughts made, and how in certain stressful situations, we stop seeing reality.
Let’s crack on!
When you wake up in the morning, do you feel refreshed or crabby? In the middle of the day, do you feel dragged out or full of energy? Consider how you feel right now. Calm? Interested? Energetic? Bored? Tired? Cranky?
Scientists call them affect.
Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. The pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favourite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence.
The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energised feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal.
Anytime you have an intuition that an investment is risky or profitable, or a gut feeling that someone is trustworthy or a crook, that’s also affect. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect.
Scientists largely agree that affect is present from birth and that babies can feel and perceive pleasure and displeasure, even as they disagree whether newborns emerge into the world with fully formed emotions.
Now, affect depends on interoception. Interoception is the collection of senses perceiving the internal state of the body. This can be both conscious and unconscious. It encompasses the brain’s process of integrating signals relayed from the body into specific subregions — like the brainstem, thalamus, insula, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex — allowing for a nuanced representation of the physiological state of the body.
That means, affect is a constant current throughout your life, even when you are completely still or asleep. It does not turn on and off in response to events you experience as emotional. In this sense, affect is a fundamental aspect of consciousness, like brightness and loudness.
When your brain represents wavelengths of light reflected from objects, you experience brightness and darkness. When your brain represents air pressure changes, you experience loudness and softness. And when your brain represents interoceptive changes, you experience pleasantness and unpleasantness, and agitation and calmness. Affect, brightness, and loudness all accompany you from birth until death.
Let’s be clear on one thing: interoception is not a mechanism dedicated to manufacturing affect. Interoception is a fundamental feature of the human nervous system, and why you experience these sensations as affect is one of the great mysteries of science.
Interoception did not evolve for you to have feelings but to regulate your body budget. It helps your brain track your temperature, how much glucose you are using, whether you have any tissue damage, whether your heart is pounding, whether your muscles are stretching, and other bodily conditions, all at the same time.
Your affective feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and calmness and agitation, are simple summaries of your budgetary state. Are you flush? Are you overdrawn? Do you need a deposit, and if so, how desperately?
When your budget is unbalanced, your affect doesn’t instruct you how to act in any specific way, but it prompts your brain to search for explanations. Your brain constantly uses past experience to predict which objects and events will impact your body budget, changing your affect.
These objects and events are collectively your affective niche. Intuitively, your affective niche includes everything that has any relevance to your body budget in the present moment. Right now, this essay that you are reading is within your affective niche, as are the letters of the alphabet, the ideas you’re reading about, any memories that these words bring to mind, the air temperature around you, and any objects, people, and events from your past that impacted your body budget in a similar situation.
Anything outside your affective niche is just noise: your brain issues no predictions about it, and you do not notice it. The feel of your clothing against your skin is usually not in your affective niche (though it is now, since I just mentioned it), unless it happens to be relevant, say, to your physical comfort.
The psychologist James A. Russell developed a way of tracking affect, and it’s become popular among clinicians, teachers, and scientists. He showed that you can describe your affect in the moment as a single point on a two-dimensional space called a circumplex, a circular structure with two dimensions. Russell’s two dimensions represent valence and arousal, with distance from the origin representing intensity.
Your affect is always some combination of valence and arousal, represented by one point on the affective circumplex. When you sit quietly, your affect is at a central point of “neutral valence, neutral arousal” on the circumplex.
If you’re having fun at a lively party, your affect might be in the “pleasant, high arousal” quadrant. If the party turns boring, your affect might be “unpleasant, low arousal.”
Younger folks generally tend to prefer the upper right quadrant: pleasant, high arousal, while middle-aged and older people generally tend to prefer the lower right quadrant (pleasant, low arousal).
Hollywood is a $500 billion industry because people are willing to pay to see movies so that, for a few hours, they can travel within this affective map. You don’t even have to open your eyes to have an affective adventure. When you daydream and have a large change in interoception, your brain will swirl with affect.
Affect has far-reaching consequences beyond simple feeling. Imagine you are a judge presiding over a prisoner’s parole case. You are listening to the inmate’s story, hearing about his behaviour in prison, and you have a bad feeling.
If you agree to parole, he could hurt someone else. Your hunch is that you should keep him locked up. So you deny parole. Your bad feeling, which is unpleasant affect, seems like evidence that your judgement was correct. But could your affect have misled you? This exact situation was the subject of a 2011 study of judges. Scientists in Israel found that judges were significantly more likely to deny parole to a prisoner if the hearing was just before lunchtime.
The judges experienced their interoceptive sensations not as hunger but as evidence for their parole decision. Immediately after lunch, the judges began granting paroles with their customary frequency.
When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world.
The psychologist Gerald L. Clore has spent decades performing clever experiments to better understand how people make decisions every day based on gut feelings. This phenomenon is called “affective realism,” because we experience supposed facts about the world that are created in part by our feelings.
For example, people report more happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, but only when they are not explicitly asked about the weather. When you apply for a job or college or medical school, make sure you interview on a sunny day, because interviewers tend to rate applicants more negatively when it is rainy.
And the next time a good friend snaps at you, remember affective realism. Maybe your friend is irritated with you, but perhaps she didn’t sleep well last night, or maybe it’s just lunchtime. The change in her body budget, which she’s experiencing as affect, might not have anything to do with you.
Affect leads us to believe that objects and people in the world are inherently negative or positive. Photographs of kittens are deemed pleasant. Photographs of rotting human corpses are deemed unpleasant. But these images do not have affective properties inside them.
The phrase “an unpleasant image” is really shorthand for “an image that impacts my body budget, producing sensations that I experience as unpleasant.” In these moments of affective realism, we experience affect as a property of an object or event in the outside world, rather than as our own experience. “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.”
People employ affect as information, creating affective realism, throughout daily life. Food is “delicious” or “bland.” Paintings are “beautiful” or “ugly.” People are “nice” or “mean.” Women in certain cultures must wear scarves and wigs so as not to “tempt men” by showing a bit of hair.
Sometimes affective realism is helpful, but it also shapes some of humanity’s most troubling problems. Enemies are “evil.” Women who are raped are perceived as “asking for it.” Victims of domestic violence are said to “bring it on themselves.”
The nervous nineties is a commonly used term in cricket.
The term refers to a specific form of analysis paralysis, felt by a batsman when he has scored more than 90 runs in an innings, and is nervous because of the pressure and desire to convert this into a century (100 runs), which is a celebrated milestone of individual success in the game.
This situation is referred to as batsmen being in the nervous nineties. Batsmen tend to bat in a more conservative manner when they are close to their century, in order to avoid getting out and thus missing out on the milestone. Batsmen dismissed on 99 are considered the unluckiest of the nervous nineties victims.
Sachin Tendulkar, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest batsmen in the history of cricket, has scored in 90s 18 times in ODIs and 10 times in Test cricket and holds the record for highest number of dismissals in the 90s (a total of 28 times) across all forms of international cricket.
The thing is, a bad feeling (especially when you are on the cusp of victory) doesn’t always mean something is wrong. It just means you’re taxing your body budget. When people exercise to the point of laboured breathing, for example, they feel tired and crappy well before they run out of energy.
When people solve math problems and perform difficult feats of memory, they can feel hopeless and miserable, even when they are performing well. Any graduate student of mine who never feels distress is clearly doing something wrong.
Affective realism can also lead to tragic consequences. In July 2007, an American gunner aboard an Apache helicopter in Iraq mistakenly killed a group of eleven unarmed people, including several Reuters photojournalists. The soldier had misjudged a journalist’s camera to be a gun.
One explanation for this incident is that affective realism caused the soldier, in the heat of the moment, to imbue a neutral object (a camera) with unpleasant valence.
Every day, soldiers must make quick decisions about other people, whether they are embedded in a unit during wartime, on a peacekeeping mission, negotiating in a cross-cultural setting, or collaborating with unit members on a stateside base. These quick judgements are extremely difficult to negotiate, especially in such high-stakes, high-arousal settings where errors are often made at the expense of someone’s life.
People like to say that seeing is believing, but affective realism demonstrates that believing is seeing. The world often takes a backseat to your predictions. It’s still in the car, so to speak, but is mostly a passenger.
When you are functioning normally, you often listen to the passenger once in a while, but in a stressful situation, when everything is blurry and moving very fast, the passenger is completely ignored, and you create your own distorted version of reality where only stupid things can happen.
Today I Learned
Children have a biological instinct to attach — they have no choice. Whether their parents or caregivers are loving and caring or distant, insensitive, rejecting, or abusive, children will develop a coping style based on their attempt to get at least some of their needs met.
We now have reliable ways to assess and identify these coping styles, thanks largely to the work of two scientists, Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main, and their colleagues, who conducted thousands of hours of observation of mother-infant pairs over many years.
Based on these studies, Ainsworth created a research tool called the Strange Situation, which looks at how an infant reacts to temporary separation from the mother.
It was observed that “securely attached” infants are distressed when their mother leaves them, but they show delight when she returns, and after a brief check-in for reassurance, they settle down and resume their play.
But with infants who are “insecurely attached,” the picture is more complex. Children whose primary caregiver is unresponsive or rejecting learn to deal with their anxiety in two distinct ways.
The researchers noticed that some seemed chronically upset and demanding with their mothers, while others were more passive and withdrawn. In both groups, contact with the mothers failed to settle them down — they did not return to play happily, as happens in secure attachment.
In one pattern, called “avoidant attachment,” the infants look like nothing really bothers them — they don’t cry when their mother goes away and they ignore her when she comes back. However, this does not mean that they are unaffected.
In fact, their chronically increased heart rates show that they are in a constant state of hyperarousal. This pattern is called “dealing but not feeling.” Most mothers of avoidant infants seem to dislike touching their children. They have trouble snuggling and holding them, and they don’t use their facial expressions and voices to create pleasurable back-and-forth rhythms with their babies.
In another pattern, called “anxious” or “ambivalent” attachment, the infants constantly draw attention to themselves by crying, yelling, clinging, or screaming: They are “feeling but not dealing.”
They seem to have concluded that unless they make a spectacle, nobody is going to pay attention to them. They become enormously upset when they do not know where their mother is but derive little comfort from her return. And even though they don’t seem to enjoy her company, they stay passively or angrily focused on her, even in situations when other children would rather play.
Attachment researchers think that the three “organised” attachment strategies (secure, avoidant, and anxious) work because they elicit the best care a particular caregiver is capable of providing. Infants who encounter a consistent pattern of care — even if it’s marked by emotional distance or insensitivity — can adapt to maintain the relationship. That however does not mean that there are no problems: Attachment patterns often persist into adulthood.
Anxious toddlers tend to grow into anxious adults, while avoidant toddlers are likely to become adults who are out of touch with their own feelings and those of others. As in, “There’s nothing wrong with a good spanking. I got hit and it made me the success I am today.”
In school, avoidant children are likely to bully other kids, while the anxious children are often their victims. However, development is not linear, and many life experiences can intervene to change these outcomes.
But there is another group that is less stably adapted, a group that makes up the bulk of the children who need some form of treatment and a substantial proportion of the adults who are seen in psychiatric clinics.
In the 1980s, Mary Main and her colleagues at Berkeley began to identify a group of children (about 15 percent of those they studied) who seemed to be unable to figure out how to engage with their caregivers. The critical issue turned out to be that the caregivers themselves were a source of distress or terror to the children.
Children in this situation have no one to turn to, and they are faced with an unsolvable dilemma; their mothers are simultaneously necessary for survival and a source of fear. They can neither approach nor flee.
If you observe such children in a nursery school or attachment laboratory (yes, there exists such a type), you see them look toward their parents when they enter the room and then quickly turn away. Unable to choose between seeking closeness and avoiding the parent, they may rock on their hands and knees, appear to go into a trance, freeze with their arms raised, or get up to greet their parent and then fall to the ground. Not knowing who is safe or whom they belong to, they may be intensely affectionate with strangers or may trust nobody.
Main called this pattern “disorganised attachment.” Disorganised attachment is “fright without solution.”
Timeless Insight
Some things are up to us, while some things aren’t.
Pain usually comes when you confuse between the two, and try to control or wish for things to happen that aren’t completely in your control. Because if you want things that are not up to you, you will often fail to get it, and when this happens, you will feel miserable and upset.
For example, if you have an important chess match coming, then its preparation is completely in your control. But winning the match is however not in your control. Because you have no control whatsoever upon your opponent’s training and tactic.
If you aren’t “lucky” enough to win the game, it’s very likely to upset you. And you cannot be lucky all the time, so at some point in life you are very likely to face misfortune and misery if you try to control what isn’t up to you. For the record, winning is never up to you.
But it’s life. You gotta kill to survive, and you have to win to live. Therefore a good strategy to get the best out of yourself in the game of chess, and in the game of life, is to internalise your goals.
An internal goal is completely in your control, devoid of any externality. Therefore, instead of saying something like, “I will win the match,” or, “I will destroy my enemy,” your goals should start sounding like, “I would give my best,” and, “I will fight with all my might.”
What I’m Reading
Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Starry Messenger
Tiny Thought
Knowledge is a curse because once you have it, you can’t imagine what it’s like not to possess it.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋