The science of human recklessness, in 25 minutes | Paul Bloom

[00:00:00]I'm Paul Bloom. I'm a professor of  psychology at University of Toronto and an ameritus professor at Yale  University. And I study human nature.

[00:00:08]I study children. I study development.  I'm particularly interested in morality, in the social emotions, in how we understand  ourselves and how we relate to other people.

[00:00:22]Why are we compelled to behave badly? So, I'm  really interested in perverse actions. And what I mean by perverse actions are when we do the wrong  thing. Wrong from a moral point of view. Wrong for a rational point of view just for the sake of  doing the wrong thing. Why we rebel against the forces of morality and rationality? I find this  a fascinating question. It's a question which has occupied psychologists and philosophers and  theologians for a very long time and it seems like a genuine puzzle. You know, natural selection,  human development, our needs as social creatures and physical creatures will should all drive us to  behave reasonably, rationally. So, it's a really interesting puzzle for me why sometimes we don't.  Not because we're making a mistake. We slip up all the time but because we choose not to. So whenever  I talk about perversity inevitably people ask me you know so so you know what kind of perverse  things do you do? How do you break the rules? How do you you know what kind of great these gross  immoral actions you've done? The truth is I'm a fairly boring person if you're not talking  to Hunter Thompson here. On the other hand, uh I I I do I engage in what a friend of mine  uh Talia Wheatley described as micro perversity, which is these little little ways in which I  I I I do things kind of unexpected. You know, maybe we're sitting across dinner and all of a  sudden I grab one of your French fries. Dude, what's what's up with that? Eh, just felt like  it. I was on a podcast and somebody asked me my opinion of um of a very famous figure in my  field and I said yeah he's a drunk and you know the person was shocked just edit that out but so  I push it in little ways but in big ways I am not I'm not a very perverse person there's a sense in  which psychologists say research is research and people study the way they are for me I've often  studied what I'm not I mean I study religion even though I'm not religious uh and and I think  my interest in perversity often is that I'm not that perverse and so that makes me even more  interested in the perversity of others. My work on on psychology is very informed by evolutionary  theory and I'm always the sort to ask how did this evolve and I think about this in my research on  uh social interaction on morality on rationality always looking for an evolutionary account for  how we've come to be I don't think in the case of perversity there is such an evolutionary account  I don't think for instance other animals other primates engage Asian perverse actions in the  sense I'm interested in. They do good things, they do bad things, sometimes they they make mistakes,  but but they aren't purposefully perverse. Ain't being purposely perverse is something that's  uniquely human. Doesn't mean it's magic. It doesn't mean it violates evolutionary theory.  I I I think the best way to think about it is that we've evolved through natural selection, an  extraordinarily rich set of cognitive capacities, a sort of social intelligence, the ability  to imagine the future, moral motivations, perverse actions are something we've thought  up once given this sort of suite of capacities, all of a sudden it occurs to some of us, many of  us, maybe all of us, hey, I can be perverse. And so it wasn't shaped directly by evolution, but  it's more of a sort of individual discovery that we all make. One of the forces behind perversity  that I find particularly interesting is what I call hopeful monster theory. And hopeful monster  is a phrase um used to explain an evolutionary theory by this guy a long time ago named Goldmid.  And Goldman understood that the logic of natural selection is you have these animals and they  and you know and and they reproduce and you get this very very slight variation and then the  variants that do better uh uh give rise to more offspring. The ones that do worse die out and  through this slow gradual accretion you end up with different species and different organs and  different capacities. That's the Darwinian story of natural selection. But Goldmith said there's  something else. Sometimes he argued there are extreme mutations and these extreme mutations lead  to radical changes in creatures and most of the time they're unsuccessful. They lead to death. But  some small proportion of the time they pay off.

[00:05:03]They lead to an entirely different way of doing  things that's superior. And in that way he argued we get certain forms certainly cases where there's  speciation different species evolve. Now I'm not arguing that this is true for evolution. I'm not  I'm not an evolutionary biologist. I understand many of them look very uh very poorly on this  theory. But I do think it's true for everyday life. I think sometimes if your life is going  well, you will keep on doing what you do and maybe you'll try out different things. You'll try  this restaurant instead of at that restaurant.

[00:05:41]Maybe you'll go to work 10 minutes earlier, just  minor modifications. You behave towards your kid, towards your spouse in subtly different ways.  That's normal life when it going well. What if it's not going well? What if everything you  try fails? What if it's all a disaster? Well, maybe what you should do is analogy of hopeful  monster theory. Take a jump. Do something totally different. Don't don't go to work one day. Leave  your job. Start a new relationship. Do something totally different. If you ain't got nothing, you  ain't got nothing to lose. If things are going badly, these jumps, the payoff that these jumps  could give you, these very perverse acts can give you um outweighs the costs of their failure. And  I think this is a form of perversity that shows up sometimes in extreme circumstances, but it but  it but it shows up in some individual lives. So what do I mean when I'm talking about perversity?  Well, my favorite example and a favorite example by anybody who thinks about this is that of St.  Augustine. So St. Augustine wrote to confessions a long time ago and in it he begins a chapter by  saying I'm going to confess my my my perverse and evil actions and you think he's going to talk  about sex because he's kind of leading up a lot of sexual insinuation. Doesn't talk about sex  at all. His example to the disappointment of many people through history is very very mild. He and  his friend go into an orchard and they steal some pears. That's it. That's the extent of the crime.  But Augustine was fascinated by this because he didn't know why he did it. He said, "I wasn't  hungry and in fact I threw the pears to some pigs.

[00:07:25]Didn't want them. I did it because I wanted to  be bad." This was puzzling for Augustine because unlike other bad behaviors, including his sexual  transgressions, there was no motivation for it.

[00:07:40]His sexual transgressions were meant to satisfy  a desire he had. But where does desire to be bad come from? Why would he want to be bad? This sort  of historical example led me to be interested in perverse actions. And I then wanted to collect  everyday examples. I had a lot of examples from books and from movies and everything. I wanted to  get collect everyday examples. So I started what I called the perversity project where I went  online in multiple sources and asked people to contribute stories from their own lives where  they acted perversely. And perversely was defined as cases where they did the wrong thing because  it was wrong. And I got some amazing stories. The first story I got was from this young woman who  flirted with her girlfriend's boyfriend. Um, just to get him interested in her, get her girlfriend  very upset. And she I don't know. I just did it to be wrong. I just did it cuz it would just mess  things up in some way that was satisfying to me.

[00:08:40]But the story I like the most is some guy he's  goes on and he says like I'm walking to my friend and we get some some uh some ice cream and I  thought to myself, "Man, it would be messed up if I stuck my finger in his ice cream." So I did it.  I stuck my finger in his ice cream. And you say, "Dude, what are you doing?" I don't know. I just  wanted to do something messed up. And now I have hundreds of examples like that. Some are cruel.  Some are involving real cruel things people do to each other. Some are silly. Some are really mild.  Somebody somebody wrote a little thing saying, you know, sometimes even there's a sign saying  don't walk on the grass. I stick my fing my foot in there just just to do it a little bit very  mild and sweet. I think once you introduce the term perversity, you introduce the idea to people,  everyone has their own examples. So the perverse acts I'm I'm interested in and I study are ones  that are deliberate and conscious and they're not mistakes but there's a near neighbor to them  which is actually very interesting and it's perverse actions that are born out of intrusive  thoughts. So we all have intrusive inappropriate thoughts. You know I'm I'm you know I'm standing  on a high balcony I have the urge to jump. I'm I'm on the subway and there's somebody next to me and  I have the urge to push. I never would, but there is this intrusive urge. And for some of some of  us in in cases of psychological problems, the urge can become overwhelming and requires treatment,  but most of us don't have it that badly. We have this intrusive urge. Um, but sometimes there's a  bit of a glitch in the system and um and it leads us to behave in ways that are similar to perverse  actions. So, for instance, um people who are very very worried about appearing prejudiced will  sometimes blurt out and be more likely to blurt out prejudice remarks because they're constantly  monitoring and thinking and it's more on their mind. There's some studies finding that if you're  told don't reveal the location of something, told to keep a secret, you become more than somebody  else more likely to reveal a location because you have this voice in your head saying don't tell  them, don't tell them, don't tell them. And that that's a very loud voice and things could could  slip out. I don't think they're true expressions of say an autonomous urge, but they are perverse  in the sense that you end up doing exactly what you don't want to do. Psychologists have tried to  explore perversion in uh in different directions.

[00:11:20]And one I think interesting attempt at this  was done by uh Michael Bang Peterson and his colleagues. And they developed what they call the  need for chaos scale. And the need for chaos scale explores a sort of particular form of perverse  action. The des the desire to destroy everything that's good. You have to say how much you agree to  statements like sometimes I just like to destroy beautiful things or I think society should be  burnt to the ground or sometimes I see something beautiful and I wish it would go away. And it  turns out people vary widely. Some people say no, no, no, that's crazy. And other people say yes.  Um they find in a scale and maybe this won't be surprising to you um that young people tend to  go higher for need for chaos than old people.

[00:12:11]Men are higher than women and that people on the  political extremes tend to be higher than people in the center. They had expected that people  on the right extremely right-wing would show more of a need for chaos than the left wing  and some while other people expected should be more on the left than the right. But it turns  out it's kind of balanced. It's just political extremes tend to encourage a sort of need for  chaos. To put it another way, I think maybe a better way is if you have a very high need for  chaos, you really want to mess the world up.

[00:12:43]You'll be drawn to views on the political extreme  either to the right or to the left. There are many explanations for perverse behavior. I think this  diversity of explanations is one reason why it's such an interesting topic. It reflects all sorts  of different human motivations. But for my money, the most interesting motivation for perversity is  a desire for autonomy, a desire to be an agent in the world to to to exert one's will. If I just do  the rational thing, if I just do the moral thing, what good am I? Why am I needed? I could be  replaced by an algorithm. And I think this weighs on us. This weighs on us as we do, as we  should, the reasonable thing, the moral thing, over and over and over again. We want to show  ourselves to be human. We want to push against it. I think this explains why perverse behavior  shows up in particular at certain points of life. Toddlers are notoriously perverse creatures.  They want to exert their will. They want to exert their will sometimes in silly ways by demanding  something that they can't get, by picking a fight over something that's ridiculous. It's just filled  with rage, but in a profoundly irrational way, but but it's a human desire and it shows up early.  Adolescence, a period of great transition and a great uncertainty of where you you um you fit  into society is a time for perverse actions. And um there's a so-called midlife crisis at  a certain point in age. Uh a lot of men, a lot of women are wondering, is this what it is?  Is this what I'm stuck with? Is this the way my life is going? And so it it grates on them and  they push. and you know they they push they may get a tattoo they may get a sports car they can't  afford they may do something crazy they may end one relationship and begin another and I think  that um these times of life in which perversity is most extreme reveals the power of autonomy in  uh in as as one explanation for it there's also some psychological research and the psychological  research comes under the rubric of what's called reactance theory. And the idea of reactance theory  is sometimes people will do things just because they are told not to do those things. And I think  this expresses the urge to be autonomous. If I was going to walk out that door when I leave, there's  many doors. I choose to walk out that door and I'm headed to that door and then somebody tells me,  "You better walk out that door." I might choose to walk out a different door. Maybe that was the  door I wanted to, but nobody tells me what to do.

[00:15:37]I want to make my own decisions. I want to be be  a person. I want to be autonomous. And so there's various studies finding that interventions  often have paradoxical effects. During COVID, there was some evidence that for some people  being told they had to get a vaccine shot made them less likely to get a vaccine shot. Studies  of binge drinking in colleges find that some people if they're told very strongly and in a very  authoritarian way, you are not to drink too much, well then go out and drink too much. Same thing  for drug use and for smoking. Often we respond to to demands upon ourselves and you don't have to  hear the psychological studies to know this. We we feel in everyday life. Often we respond to demands  upon ourselves by doing the opposite. And it's because we want to be in charge of ourselves. And  this is one of the forces I think behind perverse behavior. You have to distinguish the autonomy  explanation from a signaling explanation. I think signaling explanations perversity are interesting.  But this is different. When I say when we act, when we break the rules, it's not to impress  other people. It's not to say, "Wow, what a rule breaker. How interesting." It's to show something  to ourselves. A perverse agent might break the rules in ways that are private that only he or she  knows about. The concern about autonomy is not a concern about how about looking autonomous. It's a  concern about being autonomous. And you know, I'm not the first to point this out. You know, um this  is an observation by uh by Dstoyki by Sartra about how even in the most private of ways, we want to  show ourselves to be free. Another explanation for for perverse acts is to impress other people.  I mean, you know, if if I behave rationally and morally, you might see me as a square. Wouldn't  want that. I might want to be vivacious, exciting, unpredictable, sexy in a way. And I think it's  maybe no surprise for why the the the jump in perverse behavior by adolescence may be in part  an asserting of autonomy, but it may also be in large part because this is a time where people  are struggling to find partners, to impress, to rise up to social hierarchy. And in the right  sort of community, a reputation for being a bit unpredictable, a bit dangerous really does do  the trick. People who study social behavior and uh game theory and that kind of thing have  pointed out that there's cases where sort of strategic irrationality, a little bit of  craziness can actually give you an advantage over somebody else. And sometimes this craziness  manifests itself as perversity. A rational person is an extremely predictable person. And someone  who has a bit of perversity through their lives, it makes them unpredictable in certain ways. A  perfectly rational poker player is a poker player who's fairly easy to beat, which is why the best  poker players always throw some randomness into their behavior. And you know, often life is poker  writ large. Another way in which perversity could be powerful is regarding threats. So suppose I'm  a perfectly rational agent and you and I are in some sort of deal. They say, "If you do this, I'm  going to do this back at you." But you know I'm rational. So if I make an extreme threat, a threat  that would throw myself at risk, that would would cause too much damage, you could dismiss it. Bloom  is rational. He would never do something extreme.

[00:19:14]But suppose you knew I was a perverse agent and  often did the wrong thing just for the sake of doing the wrong thing. Now you have to worry about  my unrealistic threats. It's what uh Richard Nixon called the madman theory of politics which is if  you give your adversary the impression that you're a little bit nuts. It gives you an edge in certain  ways and I think some perverse behavior could be explained in that way. There are some fields of  human endeavor where perversity is really priced and you know probably no more than the art world.  The great artists are often known and appreciated and admired for acts that seem perverse and  unpredictable. It's said that you know modern art began when there was an art competition in  New York City and they said they would accept any artwork. So Marcel Duchamp sent in a urinal  and they they sent it back. They said no no no we just want artwork and duchon said it is artwork  and the urinal the called fountain became one of the most prized prized artwork of our time when  we think about about great artistic innovations and often great scientific discoveries there's  often a sense of the audacious another example is from Bangsy so Banksy um had this artwork  um girl for balloon I think it was called um on auction from sibies and so are going around and  they're doing the the gavvels and everything and people are bidding and when the final bid comes  in, a machine that was hidden inside the frame starts to operate and and the painting goes down  and is shredded in front of a horrified people and it shreds about half of it. This this artwork  which has been destroyed is of course now far more valuable than uh than it was it was purchased for  because of Banksy's willful acts of destruction.

[00:21:08]I mean to be honest sometimes uh the the it's not  so much perversity as it is calculation. I'm not sure. Bangsy described Banksy described himself  as an act of creative destruction and everything, but Banksy might have also thought, "Boy,  this is going to get me a lot of attention, a lot of money." In which case, does it  count as perversity or does it count as sort of the enactment of perversity? I'm not  sure. Perverse actions are individual acts, but they're in the context of a culture. And  this shows up in a couple of ways. One way is your culture determines how much perversity  is is encouraged. How much it's nurtured and encouraged or how much it's staunched. There are  many societies where children are encouraged to go a bit crazy to be creative to break the rules. And  an imaginative way of breaking the rules is often looked at kind of fondly. You know, respect causes  some laughter. There's other more authoritarian cultures where children are expected not to do  so where where attempts to break the rules are severely punished within sort of adult community.  There have been times and situations in our world say where conformity is encouraged where skill and  virtuosity are encouraged. Other times maybe the skill matters less and imaginative jumps matter  more the creativity audaciousness. So you get this influence of culture and then of course the  perverse acts of people shape the culture. Um to some extent you could look at the music we listen  to now the movies we watch the books we read the art we appreciate and we see in it the reflections  of the individual decisions most of them rational most of them normal but some small percentage  of them perverse on the world we have now. So culture influences the extent of perversity and  perversity goes back and influences culture. It wouldn't be crazy to look down on perversity.  Um I mean it makes sense that people should do the right thing right from a moral point of view  right from a rational point of view. And I think 99.9% of the time this is the best way to live  a life. A lot of perverse actions also cause harm. They cause suffering. I think there's a  lot of evil that's not perverse. A lot of evil is done just for sort of functional reasons and  people want to satisfy goals. You want to rob a bank cuz that's where the money is. You want to  kill somebody because you hate them. Not cruel, but not not perverse. But some acts, evil acts  are perverse. There are perverse agents who live among us [clears throat] and they cause nothing  but trouble. It's like Alfred Batman's butler um how he described a Joker which is that some  some people just want to watch the world burn.

[00:23:59]And that's not there's nothing good to that. But  I'm a fan of perversity at least in the right places in the right dosages. Um I think perversity  is a force that makes the world more interesting.

[00:24:11]It it pushes the boundary of creative products of  art of music of of literature. I think it plays a role even in science where I think sometimes  scientists act perversely and sometimes not always not usually but sometimes it pays off  in wonderful ways. I also think on an everyday basis it makes life more interesting. You know  I want my friends to be moral and rational most of the time. But I think it's a little bit of  a more interesting world where occasionally, you know, I steal my friend's French fry and  uh and you know, he sticks his finger into my ice cream and there's a little bit of chaos  inserted that make life a little bit more fun.

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