Jon Ronson speaks at TED2012. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

At TED2012, Jon Ronson wove a mind-bending tale that asks: How can we truly tell who is a psychopath? What’s the line between crazy and sane? Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath testAnd is it something we can truly delineate, or are we trying to discern black and white in a color-soaked world?

Today’s TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post picks up this question, using Ronson’s talk as a jumping-off point to talk about the concept of “normalcy.” Here, three essays from the weekly HuffPo feature to pique your interest.

Jon Ronson: The Story of a Man Who Faked Insanity

Whenever someone comes on TV or the radio sounding potentially like a psychopath — Lance Armstrong, etc. — we all get drunk with our psychopath spotting powers. I get millions of tweets asking me if they are one. I also get offers to be a talking head on TV. I try to always say no because whilst it would be nice to make hay while the sun shone, it’s quite morally corrosive (not to mention massively unethical) to diagnose someone off the TV.

I tell you who would be even more unethical than me if they went on TV to diagnose someone from afar as a psychopath: any forensic psychiatrist or psychologist or anyone who works in that field as an expert. The Psychopath Test is a cautionary tale to not do that, in fact. It’s as much a book about confirmation bias as it is about psychopaths. Read the full essay »

Dr. Harold Koplewicz: Defending Psychiatrists and the DSM

In Jon Ronson’s rather entertaining TED Talk, he has a little fun at the expense of psychiatrists. That’s fair, but let’s look at what he says. He asks: “Is it possible that the psychiatric profession has a strong desire to label things that are essential human behavior as a disorder?”

To which I would answer: The psychiatric profession has a strong desire to find a way to help people who are suffering — and the family members who struggle alongside them. Suffering is, of course, “essential human behavior,” but when people are miserable, and suicidal, and dangerous to themselves and others, we have an ethical obligation to try to help them. And to alleviate their suffering, we need to understand it. Read the full essay »

Laura Cococcia: Psychopathy, a Cultural Reality?

Stalin, Draper, Caulfield, Salander. No, it’s not the latest name of Mad Men‘s pivotal ad agency. It’s part of a list of people one could classify as psychopaths.

“Strange answers to the psychopath test,” the TED Talk by journalist Jon Ronson, explores the nature and definition of psychopathy. As research, Ronson visits a tough-as-nails CEO he suspects of psychopathy as well as an inmate of a psychiatric facility who claims he pretended to be a psychopath to avoid going to prison. Through the talk, he questions whether psychopathy is a legitimate category of mental illness, or if it’s just a construct we use to explain away actions in our fellow humans that are less than nice, less than normative, that make us non-psychopaths feel uneasy. Read the full essay »

Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil

Today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post features a selection of essays surrounding the ideas brought up in Zimbardo’s talk. Here, three essays to pique your interest.

Philip Zimbardo: Journeying From Evil to Heroism

EVIL: How and why do good people turn evil?

VERSUS

GOOD: How can ordinary people be inspired to act heroically?

These two questions have been challenging me since I was a kid, and finally after many decades, I have discovered answers that I need to share with everyone who might care about these fundamental issues of human nature.

Growing up in poverty in the inner city of the South Bronx, New York City, means that I — like all such kids similarly situated everywhere in the world — was surrounded by evil. There were and are always hustlers, guys who make a living by getting good kids to do bad things for a little money — like steal, run drugs, sell their bodies, and worse. Why did some kids give in and start down that slippery slope of evil, while others resisted and stayed on the right side of that line separating good from evil? Read the full essay »

Marina Nemat: The Many Faces of Evil

In 1977, a 21-year-old political prisoner, Ali Moosavi, was tortured in Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran, by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. Ali was a devout follower of Ayatollah Khomeini, whom the vast majority of Iranians — including Marxists, Islamists, liberals, seculars, etc. — came to support during the revolution as the only leader who could unite everyone against the monarchy. Ali was hung from a ceiling in a torture room in Evin. He was beaten for hours and then repeatedly electrocuted. He believed in his cause, which, according to him, had to do with bringing justice and democracy to Iran. To many people, he was a hero.

In 1982, it had been about three years since Iran had become an Islamic republic, but the country was neither free nor democratic. On a daily basis, thousands of young people protested on the streets against the antidemocratic policies of the new regime. Hundreds of protestors were arrested and then tortured in Evin. It was supposed to be shut down with the success of the revolution in 1979, but it wasn’t. In 1980, Ali Moosavi became an interrogator in Evin and tortured teenagers. Read the full essay »

Sam Sommers: Life, Oversimplified

Personality is overrated.

One of our biggest misconceptions about human nature is that the people around us are of consistent, predictable character. When thinking about one another we tend to oversimplify, categorizing each individual as either a good or an evil person, a hero or a coward, and so forth.

But the reality of our social universe is far more nuanced. People are complicated and compellingly contradictory. Human nature is surprisingly context-dependent.

Zimbardo makes this case using graphic visual evidence to show us the darkest capabilities of otherwise ordinary individuals. But our tendency to explain away bad behavior as the result of “a few bad apples” isn’t limited to egregious atrocities. In fact, I rely on the very same principles when speaking to corporations and other organizations about, say, the psychology of fraud and unethical behavior. Read the full essay »

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Jim Flynn is an expert in intelligence famous for his research on the Flynn effect, the phenomenon that humanity’s IQ has been dramatically increasing since the 1930s. He opens Session 11 today on the last day of TED2013 to help answer the question, “Who are we?”

During the 21st century, our minds have altered, he begins. At the beginning of the century, people were confronted with a concrete world, and their primary interest in dealing with it was to analyze how much it would benefit them. In today’s world we confront a complex world with new habits of mind: classification and abstraction. We clothe the concrete world, trying to make it logical and consistent. We ask not just about the concrete but the hypothetical: what might be, and not just what is.

Today the line for giftedness is an IQ of 130. If you scored people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an IQ of 70. That is the line for mental retardation today. What can account for this?

Imagine a Martian came down to Earth and found a ruined civilization. Imagine it found target scores from the past century: In the 1865 the target had one bullet in the bullseye; in 1898 it had five bullets in the bullseye; in 1918 100 bullets in the bullseye. The extraterrestrial archaeologist would be baffled. The tests were supposed to measure the keenness of eyesight and whether the shooter has control over their weapon, and so on; how could human skill have advanced so quickly in such a short amount of time? But of course we know the answer: We had muskets at the time of the Civil War, repeating rifles by the Spanish-American War and machine guns by World War I. It was the equipment in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not better eyes or steadiness of hand.

So what mental artillery have we picked up over the last 100 years? Alexander Luria studied neuropsychology in the early half of the century, and he found that people were resistent to classification, to deducing the hypothetical. His subjects simply couldn’t think about anything abstract. Consider this exchange:

Luria: What do crows and fish have in common?
Subject: Absolutely nothing. A fish swims, and a crow flies.
Luria: Are they not both animals?
Subject: Of course not, a fish is a fish, and a crow is a bird.

The man could only think of the objects as how he might use them, not as abstract objects part of a classification system.

Luria told another subject: “There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?” The subject replied, “If it’s big enough, perhaps it has camels.” Luria prompted him again to listen to the conditions, and again he replied that perhaps Hamburg had camels. He was used to camels, and he was unable to imagine that there weren’t any in Hamburg.

How have we come to solve things that aren’t real problems? For one thing, education has changed dramatically. These days the majority of Americans get a high school degree. We’ve gone from four to eight years of formal education to twelve. Fifty-two percent of Americans get some tertiary education. In 1910 a state examination in Ohio given to 14-year-olds asked socially-valued concrete questions, like “What are the capitals of the 45 American states?” In 1990 such a state examination was about abstractions, asking instead: “Why is the largest city of the state rarely a capital?” And the student is supposed to reason that the state legislature is rural controlled and they hated Big City, and so on. Today we educate people to use abstractions and link them logically.

Another shift in the past century has been in employment. In the early 1900s, three percent of the population had cognitively demanding professions; today, it’s 35 percent. And not just professions like lawyer and doctor, sub-professions like technician and computer programmer are also cognitively demanding. Compare the banker in 1900, who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy for paying back their mortgage. Today’s bankers, like the ones involved in the mortgage crisis, have jobs that demand much more from their cognitive faculties. It’s not just the spread of more cognitively demanding jobs but the upgrading of old professions.

Moral intelligence has escalated in the past century because we now take the universal seriously and are able to look for logical connections. In the 1950s and ’60s, people were coming home and talking to their parents about Martin Luther King, Jr. When they asked the generation before them, “How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and you were black?” their parents responded, “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Who have you known who has ever woken up black?” They were fixed in the concrete mores they had inherited, and they were unable to take the hypothetical seriously. As Flynn says, “Without the hypothetical, it’s very difficult to get moral argument off the ground.”

Looking at the evolution of IQ tests, it’s evident that gains have been greatest in certain areas, like classification and analogies. Consider the analogies in the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test:

In 1900 people could do simple analogies: Cat is to wildcat as dog is to … ? People answered wolf.
In 1960, two squares followed by a triangle is to two circles followed by a … ? People answered semi-circle.
And in 2010, two circles followed by a semi-circle is to two 16s followed by … ? An eight. People were even able to see beyond the symbol to abstract the concept of halving.

It’s not all good news, says Flynn. Our political intelligence is not improving. Studies show that American young people read less history and literature and less material about foreign places. It’s as if they are ahistoric, living in the present. How different might life be if Americans were more aware of their history, such as the fact that we have been lied to the past 4 out of 6 wars we’ve fought in? Lusitania was not an innocent ship with explosives on it, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and Sadaam Husein hated Al Qaeda. Flynn remarks, “You can have humane moral principals, but if you’re ignorant of history and other cultures, you can’t do politics.”

But the 21st century has undoubtedly shown there are enormous cognitive reserves in orginary people, and they’re finally being tapped into. The aristocracy once was convinced that the average person would never make it, that they wouldn’t develop their cognitive abilities. But we know today that the average human is capable of much, much more.

We’ve all had that moment when you see or hear something and wonder: am I going crazy? In this episode, TED speakers share their experiences straddling the line between madness and sanity. Neurologist Oliver Sacks explains a peculiar condition called Charles Bonnet syndrome — when people of sound mind experience lucid hallucinations. Law professor Elyn Saks shares stories about her schizophrenic episodes and how she was able to rise above her grave diagnosis. Plus, author Jon Ronson goes psychopath spotting, and wonders who among us is truly completely sane.

Check your local NPR schedule to find out when the show premieres today. Or head to iTunes where the podcast is available now »

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Helen Fisher: Why we love, why we cheat

Humans have sex like apes

Christopher Ryan begins his talk with a strong reminder, “We didn’t descend from apes. We are apes.” A special kind, but we are one. We’re closer to chimps and bonobos than they are to any other primate. But he wants to know, “What kind of ape are we? Particularly in terms of our sexuality.”

That’s a subject he’s been investigating as the co-author, with Cacilda Jethá, of Sex at Dawn. He says that there has been a standard narrative — that men and women are locked in an eternal struggle. That throughout history men have “leased” women’s sexuality in return for security.

This narrative is mistaken. It turns out that in many societies those things were shared in what he calls a “fierce egalitarianism.” Ryan makes it clear that he is not saying they were noble savages. But he notes that that social structure did exist, and is further saying this extends to sexuality. That “human sexuality has essentially evolved, until agriculture, as a way of maintaining and establishing the complex social networks that our ancestors were very good at.” He is also quick to note he is saying ancestors were promiscuous, but is not saying they were having sex with strangers, because, “There were no strangers.”

This is also not to criticize monogamy. “To argue that our ancestors were sexual omnivores,” says Ryan, “is no more a criticism of monogamy than arguing that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism.”

Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm

Evidence from anatomy and anthropology

Where did our misconceptions about sex come from? Well, Darwin, as it turns out, was a world-class Victorian prude. He was fascinated by the colorful genital swelling in bonobos, but what he didn’t know is that female chimps have sex 1-4 times an hour with up to a dozen partners. Furthermore, Ryan notes that female chimps are sexually available for 40% of their menstrual cycles, but bonobos for 90% — almost as much as humans, who are capable of engaging in sex at any point in their cycle. That is a trait that is vanishingly rare among mammals.

For Ryan, a key question to understanding the origin of human sexuality is, “Are human beings a species that evolved in the context of sperm competition?” Are they competing against each other or with the sperm of other men as well? It doesn’t seem to be the case. For example, the average human has sex about a thousand times per birth. “If that seems high to you,” laughs Ryan, “don’t worry, it seems low to other people in the audience.” A more typical number among apes is to have sex about a dozen times per birth. Additionally, Ryan notes, humans and bonobos are among the only animals that have sex face to face. They also have external testicles. Says Ryan, ”External testicles are like having an extra fridge in the garage for beer. If you’re the kind of guy that has a beer fridge, you expect a party to happen at any moment.”

The evidence that the standard model isn’t correct extends beyond anatomy to anthropology. When one looks, they find all kinds of societies which have sexual practices that should not exist if the standard model is correct. In one culture, they found no shame about sex, and women with many lovers — some with well over 100. Who takes care of the children of those unions? The responsibility falls to the mother, her sisters and brothers. The biological father has no role.

In the Amazon basin, there are a few societies where a child can have many fathers. Those cultures believe that a fetus is made of accumulated semen. A woman who wants a child who is smart, funny and strong will have sex with one man who is smart, one who is funny and one who is strong. When the child is born, each of these men will come forward. Paternity is a team endeavor.

Esther Perel: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

What does this mean?

Why is this important? Ryan is worried: “Our evolved nature is in conflict with many aspects of the modern world…. There is a conflict between what we feel and what we’re told we should feel.”

He hopes that thinking about the origin of sex will make us become more tolerant of alternative arrangements than the Victorian models. And most importantly, to “finally put to rest the notion that men have an innate right or instinctive need to control women’s sexual behavior.” He says our real fight is not between the genders, but with “an outdated Victorian notion of morality, that conflates desire with property rights.”

In other words: Forget about “men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Men are from Africa, and women are from Africa.”

In her 20s, Meg Jay saw her first psychotherapy client, Alex, who was there to talk about her guy problems. Jay didn’t take the sessions all too seriously at first. But then her supervisor gave her a wakeup call. While Jay said, “Sure she’s dating down and sleeping with a knucklehead. But she’s not gonna marry the guy.” Her supervisor responded, “Not yet. But she might marry the next one. The best time to work on Alex’s marriage is before she has one.”

For Jay, it was an a-ha moment. She realized that 30 is not the new 20. The 20s are not a throwaway decade — they’re a developmental sweet spot as it is when the seeds of marriage, family and career are planted.

There are 50 million 20-somethings in the US — that’s 15% of population. And Jay wants them to consider themselves adults, and know that this period is as important for their development as the first five years of life. Because the first 10 years of a career have an exponential impact on how much money a person is going to earn. Love is the same way: Half of Americans are with their future partner by the age of 30.

“Claiming your 20s is one of simplest things you can do for work, happiness, love, maybe even for the world,” says Jay. ”We know your brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood. Which means whatever you want to change, now is the time to change it.”

Jay worries that messages in the media about the changing timetable of adulthood, and the 20s being an “extended adolescence,” are trivializing this important decade. These messages encourage 20-somethings not to take action on the things that matter to them most. It leads them to think,  ”As long as I get good job by 30, I’m fine.” Or that dating is just a game, and that they should stay with someone who is just “fun.” The result: they waste valuable time.

Jay also takes issue with the phrase “you can’t pick your family, but can pick your friends.” Because you can pick your family — your own. Jay notices that many people feel pressured by time on this big decision. “Grabbing whoever you’re living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress,” she says. She wants 20-somethings to be as intentional with love as they are with work.

“Too many 30-somethings and 40-somethings look at themselves and say about their 20s, ‘What was I doing? What was I thinking?’” says Jay. “When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous 30-something pressure to start a family, have your career, pick a city. Many of these things are incompatible to do all at once.”

So what can 20-somethings do? They can own their adulthood. They can invest in identity capital—courses, skills, friends—that add value toward who they might want to be. They can work on building a wide social network, instead of a tightknit one that doesn’t allow for outside opportunities.

Jay explains, “Twenty-somethings are like airplanes, just taking off from LAX heading for somewhere west. A slight change in course on takeoff is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.”

Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money?

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

1. Navigation and Pormpuraawans
   In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
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2. Blame and English Speakers
   In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
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3. Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
   Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
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4. Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
   In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

What makes us happy? It’s one of the most complicated puzzles of human existence — and one that, so far, 87 speakers have explored in TEDTalks.

In today’s talk, Matt Killingsworth (who studied under Dan Gilbert at Harvard) shares a novel approach to the study of happiness — an app, Track Your Happiness, which allows people to chart their feelings on a moment-by-moment basis. As they go about their day, app users get random pings, asking them to share their current activity and note their mood. When Killingsworth gave this talk at TEDxCambridge in 2011, the app had collected data from more than 15,000 people in 80 countries, representing a wide range of ages, education levels and occupations. In this talk, Killingsworth reveals a very surprising finding: that mind-wandering appears to factor heavily into this happiness equation.

“As human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray,” says Killingsworth on the TEDx stage. “This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is amazing — it allows us to learn and plan and reason.”

While most people think of mind-wandering as a lifting escape from daily drudgery, the Track Your Happiness data shows that this may not the case. In fact, mind-wandering appears to be correlated with unhappiness. When people were mind-wandering, they reported feeling happy only 56% of the time. Meanwhile, when they were focused on the present moment, they reported feeling happy 66% of the time. This effect was true regardless of the activity the person was doing — be it waiting in a traffic jam or eating a delicious dinner. (Read Killingsworth’s study, published in the journal Science in 2010, to see a breakdown of mind-wandering rates by activity.)

According to Killingsworth’s data, people mind-wander most when in the shower and least when they are having sex. But, still, mind-wandering is a constant. Overall, people mind-wander 47% of the time. Perhaps not such a good thing if it relates to unhappiness,

To hear more about mind-wandering — and about the importance of studying happiness in general — watch Killingsworth’s talk. And after the jump, read several more fascinating studies on the psychology of mind-wandering — some of which will make you feel better about your daydreaming.

A relationship to working memory
Mind-wandering might make us feel less content, but it could also have a functional purpose. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that mind-wandering might be a sign of a high capacity working memory — in other words, the ability to think about multiple things at once. Researchers asked study participants to press a button and, as they went, checked in to see if their minds were wandering. After the task was complete, researchers gave participants a measure of their working memory. Interestingly, those who were found to be frequent mind-wanderers during the first task showed a greater capacity of working memory. Researcher Jonathan Smallwood of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science explains, “Our results suggest that the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life — when they’re on the bus, when they’re cycling to work, when they’re in the shower — are probably supported by working memory. Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.”

A key to memory formation
Mind-wandering might also play a vital function in helping us form memories. New York University neuroscientist Arielle Tambini looked at memory consolidation in this study published in the journal Neuron in 2010. Participants in the study were asked to look at pairs of images and, in between, were instructed to take a break to think about anything they wanted. Using fMRI, the researchers looked at the activity in the hippocampus cortical regions while they did both. The study showed that these two areas of the brain appear to work together — and that the greater the levels of brain activity in both areas, the stronger the subjects’ recall of the image pairing was. Explains Lila Davichi, who oversaw the study, “Your brain is working for you when you’re resting, so rest is important for memory and cognitive function. This is something we don’t appreciate much, especially when today’s information technologies keep us working round-the-clock … Taking a coffee break after class can actually help you retain that information you just learned.”

A creative boost
As the cliché goes, the best ideas usually come when you are least expecting them. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science gives a clue as to why. A research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California at Santa Barbara asked participants to take “unusual uses” tests — brainstorming alternate ways to use an everyday object like a toothpick for two minutes. Study participants did two of these sessions, and then were given a 12-minute break, during which they were asked to rest, perform a demanding memory exercise or do a reaction time activity designed to maximize their mind-wandering. After the break, they did four more unusual uses tests — two of them repeats. While all of the groups performed comparably on the two new unusual uses lists, the group that had performed the mind-wandering tasks performed 41% better then the other groups on the unusual uses lists they were repeating. “The implication is that mind-wandering was only helpful for problems that were already being mentally chewed on. It didn’t seem to lead to a general increase in creative problem-solving ability,” says Baird.

A plate of food overrun by roaches. A blood-encrusted scab. The squish of dog poo under one’s shoe. In this talk from TEDxEast, David Pizarro explains that each of these images elicits disgust, a visceral emotion that serves a good purpose — to keep us away from harmful substances. But disgust may in fact do much more than that.

“A growing body of evidence suggests that this emotion of disgust influences our moral beliefs and even our deeply held political intuitions,” says Pizarro, a professor of psychology at Cornell University. “It works through association. When one disgusting thing touches a clean thing, that clean thing becomes disgusting — not the other way around. This becomes a very useful as a strategy if you want to convince someone that an object, or an individual or an entire social group ought to be avoided.” As Pizarro points out, Nazi propaganda described Jews as smelling terrible while, more recently, anti-gay websites conjure up images of “vile sex acts.”

Pizarro and his team wondered if certain people were more likely to be swayed by these kinds of appeals. They looked at the variable of “disgust sensitivity” and found that, across three studies, those who reported feeling easily disgusted were more likely to also report themselves as politically conservative. In fact, a larger survey of Americans showed that disgust sensitivity could even be used as a predictor for how people voted in the 2008 election. The same basic pattern held across 121 different countries.

And it could be a causal relationship. Researchers have shown that when people feel disgusted in lab scenarios, they shift to more stringent socio-moral judgments. As Pizarro describes, just taking a survey in the presence of a sign touting the importance of hand washing was enough to have this effect.

To hear more about Pizarro’s studies — including one which showed that the presence of a bad smell upped negative attitudes toward gay men — watch his talk. Below, some more recent findings in the growing body of disgust research.

1. Arousal may be one of the few things that can tame disgust. Sex doesn’t seem disgusting in the moment and yet, out of context, the fluids and smells associated with it are rated as revolting. A recent study from researchers at The University of Groningen in The Netherlands looked at the interplay between disgust and arousal. They studied a group of 90 women, seeing whether their agreeableness towards performing disgusting tasks (for example, drinking from a glass with a bug in it or cleaning an unused sex toy) would change depending on whether the participant had been shown arousing materials. Their findings suggest that arousal may in fact override feelings of disgust for women. [Plos One]
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2. Disgust can effect how you shop for groceries. Certain products — like trash bags, diapers, and toilet paper — make people feel just a little icky. Researchers Andrea Morales and Gavan Fitzsimons, of Arizona State and Duke University, wondered if this might effect how people shopped at a supermarket. In tests, they found that even the most delicious of items — say, cookies — seemed disgusting when they had come within an inch of the undesirable items. The pair published the implications for grocery store aisle design in the Journal of Marketing Research in May of 2007. [Time.com] And more recently, the pair looked at whether disgust makes people more susceptible to fear appeals often made in commercials and ads. [Marketing Power]
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3. For women, disgust may be linked to hormonal cycles. Daniel Fessler of The University of California Los Angeles has long been curious about why pregnant women are so easily disgusted, and has linked their disgust sensitivity to the hormone progesterone. Progesterone is known to spike in a woman’s first trimester, and Fessler hypothesizes that this might help protect the fetus when it is most susceptible. [NY Times] But Fessler’s newest study, conducted with Diana Fleischman of The University of North Carolina, shows that women may be affected by this hormonal connection even when not pregnant. The pair looked at the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, when progesterone fights off inflammation that could prevent an implantation. The two see a potential link — as the body becomes more hospitable to an embryo, it also cranks up disgust responses to protect it from outside contamination. [Hormones and Behavior]
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4. Disgust might explain weight bias. People who are overweight are often stigmatized and discriminated against. In a study published in the International Journal of Obesity, Lenny Vartanian of The University of South Wales in Australia looked at whether disgust might be a factor in this poor treatment. He asked participants to assign ratings of disgust to obese people, as well as to other social groups including smokers, drug addicts, women, homosexuals and politicians. Not only did participants rate those who were obese as more disgusting than almost all the other groups — this also correlated with how much control they believed obese people have over membership in the group. [Nature.com]

To read lots more about disgust research, read The New York Times article “Survival’s ick factor,” or look at the list of speakers from the conference “The Evolution of Disgust,” held last January.

There’s one very important thing that everyone should do before heading into a job interview, giving a big speech or attempting an athletic feat. According to Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, everyone should spend 2 minutes power posing. What, you ask, is power posing? It is adopting the stances associated with confidence, power and achievement — chest lifted, head held high, arms either up or propped on the hips.

As Cuddy explains in this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, both humans and animals express power through their bodies. They tumble in on themselves when they feel unsure, making themselves smaller by hunching over, crossing their arms over their chest and avoiding big movements. When they feel on top of the world, they sprawl out. Cuddy wondered—could adopting these postures change a person’s internal state and make them feel more powerful?

Cuddy, along with her collaborator Dana Carney of Berkeley, ran an experiment in which people were directed to adopt either high-power or low-power poses for 2 minutes. Then they were asked if they wanted to gamble. Cuddy and Carney found that 86% of those who posed in the high-power position opted to gamble, while only 60% of the low-power posers felt comfortable taking a roll of the dice. But even more interesting — there were physiological differences between the two groups, as shown by saliva samples. While high-power posers showed an 8% increase in testosterone, low-power posers had a 10% decrease in the hormone. Meanwhile, the inverse relationship happened with cortisol, the hormone related to stress. While high-power posers experienced a 25% decrease in cortisol levels, low-power posers had a 15% increase in their stress levels.

“Our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves. Our bodies change our minds,” says Cuddy.

To hear Cuddy’s powerful story of how power posing helped her get her own life on track, watch her talk. Below, hear stories of how power posing has worked for others, as told to Cuddy through emails and online comments.

From a male high school physics teacher in the United States:

“I introduced my AP Physics students to power posing last spring. One student in particular was always so nervous during assessments and therefore her test scores did not represent her abilities at all. We all know that old saying about correlation and causation — and this was no scientific study — but from that day forward that student power posed before every physics test and her grades went from high ‘C’s and low ‘B’s to where she belonged — in the mid to lower ‘A’s. I’m convinced that power posing helped her even if it is difficult to prove.”

From an online commenter:

“It’s nice to see that there’s scientific support for Oscar Hammerstein’s King and I lyrics: ‘Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid …The result of this deception is very strange to tell, for when I fool the people I fear, I fool myself as well.’”

From a male musician in Canada:

“I tried your ‘power positions’ right before I went on stage with a symphony, and I have to say, it was the best performance I have had in terms of nerves in my life.”

From an online commenter:

“My dad used to do a lot of work over the phone. Great advice: You can hear a smile on the other end of the phone. He’d also often stand up tall over his desk when he was talking on the phone. Must have pumped up the confidence since I find myself doing the same.”

From a woman in finance in the United States:

“I power posed before my third interview for a job the other day! Moving onto fourth and final interview on Tuesday!!! I was seriously nervous and power posing calmed me down … Okay, there was a fifth interview today. I was freaking out, so while waiting I walked outside and power posed on the street. I can’t believe how much better I felt. And I did really well on the interview.”

From an online commenter:

“I believe this has wide implications for classroom teachers. Early in the school year, students note a teacher’s verbal and nonverbal language to determine if they can seize the power and authority from him/her. A teacher’s body language and voice must beam: ‘I have faith in me and I have faith in my ability to teach you. I have high standards and expectations.’”

Want to know more? Read about Cuddy’s latest research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week, which shows that leaders tend to have lower cortisol levels. As Cuddy explains to the U.S. News and World Report, this relationship is mediated by their overall sense of having control over their lives, from the mundane to the significant.