Emotion and Intuition: Does Schadenfreude Make Interns Poor Learners?

EMOTION AND INTUITION: DOES SCHADENFREUDE MAKE INTERNS POOR LEARNERS? OLIVER H. TURNBULL, RICHARD B. WORSEY, AND CAROLINE H. BOWMAN ________________________________________________________________________ While emotion has often been regarded as a negative force for human decision making, there are times when emotion is essential in order for human beings to make sensible choices.The basis for the phenomenon appears to be the ‘hunches’ that we often generate about complex problems, typically described as intuition —- a source of knowledge that has a vital role to play in creativity and imagination. In this study we describe an attempt to investigate the indirect, or empathic, experience of these intuitive phenomena, in a context akin to an ‘intern’ relationship. Using a well-established tool (the Iowa Gambling Task), we attempted to establish how intuition was empathically experienced by an observer. Critically, we also measured the extent to which this process was helpful in the observer’s later performance, measuring the phenomena using behavioral, subjective experience and video-monitoring methods.The most remarkable finding is that, even where the observers have ample opportunity for observation, they later perform very poorly when required to demonstrate the extent of their learning -– at levels worse than those of a naïve player. Based on an analysis of video-captured material, a plausible account of these data is that the experience of schadenfreude (a feeling of pleasure at someone else’s mis- fortune) might account for this surprisingly poor performance. A series of control experiments allow us to examine this hypothesis in more detail, primarily by making it possible to rule out a range of plausible confounds.The additional experiments also allow us to establish some of the boundary conditions for this phenomenon, and make it clear that when human beings can work together towards a common goal, in which they both have some degree of investment in the process, the disruptive (schadenfreude-based) effects are no longer observed. After decades of neglect, emotion has recently become a central theme in psychological sci- ence (e.g., Damasio, 1994; 1999; 2004; LeDoux, 2000; Panksepp, 1998; Rolls, 1999). Indeed, it has now become clear that emotion is not only an interesting and potentially worthwhile topic of study in its own right, but also that it may play a role in intellectually demanding tasks, such as complex problem solving and decision making. This stands in sharp contrast to the view, held by philosophers from Plato (360BC/1956) through Kant (1781/2004), that emotion typically is a rather negative force in human intellectual life (see Damasio, 2004, for a readable survey of philosophical antecedents). Most philosophers have suggested that, in order to make successful and appropriate decisions, human beings need to exclude emotions from the decision-making process and instead focus on an entirely rational (or in modern The authors are affiliated with the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience School of Psychology, University of Wales in Bangor, Wales Contact: Dr. Oliver Turnbull, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, Wales, LL57 2AS, UK Telephone: +44 (0) 1248 383670 E-mail: [email protected] Key words: intuition, emotion-based learning, Iowa Gambling Task, internship, schadenfreude 5 Philoctetes Center Journal VOLUME 1 · NUMBER 1 parlance ‘cognitive’) approach to tackling complex problems (Damasio, 2004). It has become clear in the last decade or so that there are times when emotion is absolutely essential in order for human beings to make sensible choices, and indeed some work in modern neuroscience has demonstrated this with great clarity (Bechara, Traniel, & Damasio, 2000; Damasio, 1994; Eslinger & Damasio, 1985; Manes, Sahakian, Clark, Rogers, Antonin, Aitken, & Robbins, 2002; Rolls, 2000). The best class of evidence comes from human neuropsychology, and in particular from patients who have damage to the ventromedial frontal lobes (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994) –-patients who appear to be intellectually intact, but who show severe deficits in decision making. The classic example is that of Phineas Gage (Harlow, 1848; 1868; 1869), a railway work- er in the Northeastern United States who suffered a terrible injury with a tamping rod, which passed up through the medial parts of his frontal lobes (Damasio, Grabowski, Frank, Galaburda, & Damasio, 1994). While he made a remarkable physical recovery and attempted to return to his original job, it rapidly became clear to his employers that he had become, in many respects, a different ‘person’ (Harlow, 1848; 1868; 1869). Many such cases have been reported since the original Gage report (e.g., Dimitrov, Phipps, Zahn, & Grafman, 1999; Eslinger & Damasio, 1985). Such patients appear to have preserved intellectual capabilities but, in spite of this, make a number of dreadful real-world decisions. Such decision-making difficulties are especially apparent in their interpersonal life, their work, and the management of their finances (Dimitrov et al., 1999; Eslinger & Damasio, 1985; Goel, Grafman, Tajik, Gana, & Danto, 1998). Finally, such patients appear to undergo a form of personality change, with, for example, once loyal husbands becoming promiscuous (Dimitrov et al., 1999; Ogden, 2005) and once stable earners becoming drifters (Eslinger & Damasio, 1985; Macmillan, 2000). EMOTION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE The likely anatomical basis of this class of psychological disorder is also becoming clear. In particular, it now seems apparent that phylogenetically ancient subcortical emotion systems might input to prefrontal cortex (e.g., Damasio, 1994; Panksepp, 1998), thus enabling emotion systems to directly influence the most sophisticated aspects of human thought (for review, see Bechara et al., 2000a). The primary mechanism by which this seems to occur is rooted in previous learning about the emotional consequences of actions (Bechara et al, 1994; Damasio, 1994). It seems that these emotion systems are capable of providing some sort of average or aggregate from a whole range of previous experiences with regard to any particular object (Bowman & Turnbull, 2004). Thus, damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex appears to prevent an individual using information based on prior emotional experience to guide future choices (Bechara et al., 2000b; Damasio, 1994). Put more simply, we all have experiences with people in the world, some of which are positive and some negative, but we seem somehow to be able to gauge an average level of 6 Intuition and Schadenfreude experience in relation to those individuals; for example, judging whether someone is trust- worthy or not, helpful or not, friendly or not. This class of information is potentially very useful in solving problems that are yet to occur in the future, which occur by a process of trial action (Freud, 1915). Thus, we inhibit action in the world, but instead run intellectual scenarios of possible actions, and experience the emotional consequences associated with each outcome (c.f., Damasio, 1994; 1996). For example, one could test out whether a col- league or friend would be a suitable person to babysit your child for an afternoon. This, of course, requires the blending together of ill-specified variables, such as the character of your child, the competence and trustworthiness of the friend, and the likely childcare set- ting. Nevertheless, it seems clear that a process of trial action plays a potentially central role in the decision-making process, especially with regard to novel scenarios which can be test- ed before being implemented in the real world. The neuroscientific literature supports this claim of anticipatory emotional experience (Bechara, Tranel, & Damasio, 2000; Bechara, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1996) with its requirement for the rapid evaluation of poorly defined variables. Indeed, the personality change described in frontal patients may be so catastrophic because some of the most complex decision-making circumstances that human beings are likely to encounter are rooted in the interpersonal domain (Dimitrov et al., 1999; Eslinger & Damasio, 1985). The interpersonal world is, of course, characterised by constant change, requiring that you evaluate a number of complex variables, such as the way in which your feelings and your potential actions might interfere with the feelings and potential actions of others. In addition, these judgements must be made ‘online,’ because social settings require virtually immediate responses and leave no time for lengthy cogitation. EMOTION AND INTUITION In sum, emotion based systems appear to serve as the intermediary between low-level emotional experience, and high-level cognition. Indeed, the interface between emotion and cognition appears to form the basis for the phenomenon that has long been formally described as intuition, that ‘gut feeling’ or ‘hunch’ that we have about the potential outcome of a problem, often in the absence of our being able to consciously identify how we arrived at that solution (Damasio, 1994, pp.187-189; Myers, 2002). Intuition also seems to have an important role to play in a range of imaginative and creative activities, all of which involve potentially operating in a complicated ‘workspace’ which has been incompletely explored: a world in which you know that there might be interesting options available, but in which the landscape has yet to be clearly laid out. While the literature

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