Hidden Brain - You 2.0: In the Heat of the Moment

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

In a fit of anger or in the grip of fear, many of us make decisions that we never would have anticipated. As part of our You 2.0 summer series, we look at situations that make us strangers to ourselves — and why it's so difficult to remember what these "hot states" feel like once the moment is over. If you like our work, please consider supporting it! See how you can help at support.hiddenbrain.org. And to learn more about human behavior and ideas that can improve your life, subscribe to our newsletter at news.hiddenbrain.org.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. So often, when we're thinking about who we are and what we want from our lives, we think about the choices that we make. How do we get from point A to point B? What steps can we take to improve our careers, our relationships, our personal health? As we ponder these questions, it can be tempting to assume that all we need is the right blueprint, and we can build the exact life that we want. But the choices we make are only part of the equation.

So often, the trajectory of our lives is shaped by moments when our decision-making goes haywire, when we act in ways that feel completely out of character. What are we to make of these moments? What do they tell us about our inner selves? This week on Hidden Brain, as part of our annual U2.0 series, we bring you a favorite episode about certain situations that cause us to become strangers to ourselves. I definitely didn't maintain cool and calm.

My entire body froze. I was just an absolute, blubbering mask. I became filled with anger and I just kind of lost it. And we look at the deep psychological mystery that occurs during these moments. No matter how many times we discover the stranger's living inside us, the next time, always catches us by surprise. Quick heads up, this episode contains stories about sex, sex work, and sexual harassment. Morgan Smiley has been performing with an improv comedy troupe since she was in college. After dozens of performances, she's learned that you need more than a creative mind to

get the audience laughing. You also need to be a good listener. That means not just hearing what people say. You have to pick up on everything that surrounds the words. Like, let's say I came out and instead of saying happy birthday, like with a happy face, I can be like happy birthday and clearly that means that I'm upset. And then we go from there like, why am I mad at them? Is it that when it was my birthday last time, they treated me like garbage,

things like that. Morgan prides herself on being able to pick up on subtext, on being able to read between the lines, behind the lines. When she does that well, she can hear the results immediately. When you get the laugh, you just like such a self-esteem boost. It's like instant validation. And instantly exhilarating. That's how she felt at a recent show. There's one thing I did. I was like a slug on stage.

I like got on the floor and I like acted like a slug. I inch-wormed across the stage. Her fellow actors lit up. The audience exploded in laughter. When Morgan walked out of the theater that night, she was practically bursting. I just needed to do something with my energy. I didn't want to just go home and go to sleep. Just then, this guy walked out of nowhere. He was carrying a tripod and a bunch of other stuff. Like a sack with stuff in it.

And he was just like, does anybody want to buy this tripod? And I was like, yeah, I want to buy this tripod. I think I could get a lot of you set of a tripod. I was like, how much? And he said $25. And also, I'm going And he said, $25. And also, I'm gonna give you this $50 Amazon gift card. And I was like, okay, a tripod and a $50 Amazon gift card for $25. Wow, this guy is so cool.

I'm totally gonna do that. The high she fell from inch warming across the stage, just got even higher. Morgan walked with a guy to an ATM. I got my money in 20s, so I either had to give him $20 or $40. She asked if she could give him $20, rather than the full $25. He was like, you give me whatever you want to give me. And I was like, you're so cool. I'm going to give you $40.

And I gave him $40. And then he gave me like a shoe box full of other random things. And I was like, he's so cool. Morgan felt like she had hit the jackpot. There was a lufa in there. There was a bunch of pens. And I got really excited about the pens, because I don't know, I just love pens. lufa in there. There's a bunch of pens and I got really excited about the pens because I don't know I just love pens like stress balls in there. There was like a diamond cleaner. I've never heard of a diamond cleaner before but it's got like bristles at the end and like this juice on the inside.

What else is in there? I've seen crafts supplies. I've also threw in a pair of women's shoes. They weren't my size but I was like I could sell those. This is awesome. Morgan couldn't wait to show her roommates the loot. She burst into her apartment and told them about her unbelievable good fortune. They were like, what is wrong with you? They were like, okay, what this guy did is he took this stuff out of cars that weren't locked and then he sold it to you for money. And slowly, like, my universe just, like, unraveled. And I was like, no! I just bought a bunch of stolen stuff. Why did Morgan, who prides herself on being able to read

subtext and situations, fail to see what seemed obvious to her friends? I like to think of myself as like a pretty logical person, but in that moment I didn't have any logic. Like I wasn't questioning the situation. I was just being super impulsive, and so in that way I think I was being a pretty different person. It's as if there are two people within Morgan and neither understands the other.

Logical Morgan thinks impulsive Morgan made a glaring mistake, but impulsive Morgan is just as bewildered by logical Morgan. Who would pass up a deal like this? George Lewinstein understands what Morgan was experiencing. George lives in the Pittsburgh area, which is home to some of the steepest hills in America. He used to run those hills every week with his friend, Jules. We would get absolutely exhausted on the way up, and we kind of be egging one another on and be feeling very, very miserable.

On the way up to the peak, all he could think of was the pain. But moments later, it was all forgotten within maybe 10, 20 seconds. The more George thought about it, the more it seemed like a puzzle. As he was climbing the hill, the idea of relief was inconceivable. The pain felt endless. But the moment he crested the hill, the pain faded so quickly that in his memory, it hadn't been so bad. A few days later, he would lace up his shoes and go running with jewels again. It occurred to George that this gap in perception was psychologically important and applied to more than just the pain of running.

I realized that when you're not in pain or cold or experiencing a powerful emotion like anger or fear, it's very difficult to imagine yourself in that situation. There is a reason this happens. Emotions completely transform us as people, so when we're in one emotional state, as if we're a different person, then we are when we're in a different emotional state. George has thought about this phenomenon a lot. As a professor of psychology and economics at Carnegie Mellon University, he has conducted dozens of studies to understand how our emotional states affect us. One of his

earliest studies involved ice water. My colleague wanted to be the guinea pig for the studies, and you're supposed to put your hand in the cold water for like a minute. He put his hand in the cold water, and 20 seconds later he pulled it out. And then a minute later he said, hand on the cold water and 20 seconds later he pulled it out and then a minute later he said, that's ridiculous, I can do it because he couldn't remember the pain anymore. Expecting fully that he would be able to sustain the minute in the cold water and then about 20 seconds later he pulled his hand out again. It was just like what George experienced on his runs. As soon as his colleague pulled his hand out of the freezing water,

it was like he was struck with amnesia. George came up with a name for what was happening, the hot cold empathy gap. the Thiccac. Usually, when we think about empathy, we think about how we relate to other people. Georgia's insight is that we regularly lack empathy for ourselves when we are in a different emotional state. When we are angry, we cannot imagine being calm. When we are tranquil, it's hard to imagine being so angry that we could hurt someone. The hot-called empathy gap can also be caused by physiological

states. When we are really hungry, all our resolutions about healthy eating evaporate. When we are full, it's easy to forget what it felt like to be hungry. We imagine that we will stick to salads the next day. The hot and cold in the hot cold empathy gap are a shorthand. They describe strong emotional and physiological states. When we're in a cold state, we're logical, deliberate. When we're in a hot state, our emotions overtake us. Morgan Smiley was in a hot state when a young man sold her a sack of random stuff. In her excitement, huskcepticism failed to kick in.

Another familiar hot state? Sexual arousal. Can I talk about that on MPR? Like, I don't know. The answer is yes. So parents of young children, here's your warning. When Irene Pemberton was in middle school, she devoted as much time to sex said, as her classmates may have spent hanging out at the mall. Every Sunday evening for about a year, her parents drove her to a unitarian church for a two-hour session.

We learned everything, you know, like they had like the condoms, you know, putting on bananas kind of deal. Irene's family also spoke frankly about sex, like the time in high school when Irene got an IUD and had a conversation about it with her mom. I just remember her saying that I still have to use condoms and, you know, to still be careful. In other words, Irene received an unusually candid, comprehensive sex education. All those hours sitting on church couches and talking to our family made her confident

that she'd made good decisions when it came to sex. I was like, well, obviously, obviously I would use condoms. Like if I didn't know the person very well and like we're not monogamous or anything And I probably was like I would do it every time and she did that is until she met one Special suitor. He's just kind of like a like a greasy guy that like wears like overalls with no underwear and like So I think it was cool. I thought I thought I was pretty charmed by that. Wait, how did you know that he wears overalls with no underwear?

Oh yeah, that was later. That's my take on him now. Here's what happened before Irene figured out what was or wasn't beneath his overalls. We hung out, had dinner and stuff, and then go back to his place. I'm not the type of person that is just carrying around condoms all the time. He is the type of person that never used condoms. That was really annoying for me, but I was just like, like, the conversation did not happen until we were already getting intimate.

This is what all her years of sex at training had prepared her for. I'm like, oh, you don't have condoms, okay. In hindsight, Irene realizes this was exactly the situation that called for condoms. Definitely the type of people that never use condoms are probably the type of people that you should use condoms with, in my opinion, at at least because they don't ever use condoms. But in that moment, a different line of reasoning went through her head. I can either choose to not have intercourse or just not have any sex at all. That was not what I really wanted to do. It didn't sound as fun or like do something

else sexual that still just like would not be my top choice, or just have unprotected sex. And so I was like, this is going to be okay, just this one time, and it's not a big deal, and it'll be fine. And so then I did that. It's a perfect illustration of an empathy gap. This is psychologist George Lewinstein again. When you listen to her description of what happened, it's a very kind of clinical description

because when she was talking to you, she wasn't in an aroused state. So she was talking to you as if she was really making a decision when probably in the heat of the moment. She was just very kind of swept up in the course of things. Irene wasn't thinking back to what her mom said about condoms. She also wasn't thinking about what she just learned in class on the history of the AIDS epidemic. Hot State Irene didn't say what cold State Irene would have predicted she would say.

No one has to have sex, so I would have just said, okay, another time. I asked Irene if she felt pressured into having sex. I really wanted to do it, so I feel like it was fully my choice. It was a good time. I felt like I was pretty satisfied with the results aside from me feeling like, like, cheese, I shouldn't have done the, you know, unprotected sex part. Once the night was over, it wasn't long before cool-headed Irene reappeared.

She was reading for class about the risks of unprotected sex and HIV. So, like, my brain immediately is like, oh my god, I have made a mistake. This is the one time you have unprotected sex. Like, it could be like really bad or something like that. Three days after that first date, she went out again with the same guy. Before the date, I really clearly told herself what would happen and what would not. Going into it, I was like, not tonight, I'm not gonna have, I'm gonna have, I'm gonna have sex tonight and then I go on hang out with him and I'm really distracted.

The problem was cold state Irene had not anticipated how hot state Irene would act again. I still did not bring condoms and I made the same choice. Although that time I was like, well, you know, that was like three days ago, and nothing bad has happened yet from that. So maybe you just one more time. Just like Morgan Smollie kind understand, why she trusted a guy selling random things on the street,

Irene doesn't recognize the person who made these impulsive decisions. I was telling my friend about this and I'm like, I don't know that girl. Like I don't know her. George Lonestein is sympathetic to Irene. Sexual arousal can lead people to do things they would never expect. Downplay risks, rationalized behavior, and come up with excuses. Things that make people wake up the next day and go, oh no, what did I do?

Beyond having unprotected sex with a date, sexual arousal can also drive more troubling behavior. Years ago, George ran experiments where men were given different scenarios to imagine. In one study, they went on a date with a woman named Susan, and things were going well on the date. At some point, they're kind of on the verge of getting into more serious physical things, and Susan says she wants to stop. And we ask people, what would you do in this situation?

The studies put some men into a state of sexual arousal. In one experiment, the men were shown pictures of nude women. In all the studies, a control group featured men who were not sexually aroused. George found that sexually aroused men were more likely to say they would encourage a woman to drink to increase her willingness to have sex. They were more likely to say they would encourage a woman to drink to increase her willingness to have sex. They were more likely to say they would be willing to slip a drug into her drink. They also said that if she resisted them, they would be less likely to take no for an answer. Did men realize how their behavior changed as a result of the intervention? In one experiment, George had men get sexually aroused, but then brought them back to the lab the following day. These men had

time to cool down. We actually got a surprising result in that condition. The surprising result was that the men in this condition didn't just say they would respect the woman's boundaries. They indicated they would be even more mindful of consent than the men who had not been aroused. George doesn't know exactly why they got this result, but he has a guess. They can't remember that how aroused they were, so they think, oh, you know, I saw these scantily clad women and I wasn't very aroused, so probably I'd behave really well on the date. George and other researchers have repeatedly found that people are worse at predicting their behavior

in a hot state. After, they will already experience that hot state. These findings show the hot-called empathy gap works in two directions across time. First, we're not great at predicting how we'll behave in a different emotional state. That's the prospect prospective empathy gap. But we also have trouble understanding our actions in the past.

Our memories are faulty, especially when it comes to how intense feelings can overwhelm us. Think about George's colleague who couldn't remember how painful it felt, just one minute earlier, to have his hands submerged in icy water. So that's a retrospective empathy gap. Irene's story shows both these gaps. Before she was aroused, Irene was certain she would apply everything she had been taught by church leaders about unsafe sex. But soon after her date with the overalls guy, Cole stayed Irene could no longer put herself back into the shoes of

Hot State Irene. I don't know that girl. This incomprehension led her to feel confident about how she would behave on her next day. She forgot that Hot State Irene would not be able to access her Cold State logic. This is true not just for sexual arousal. It's true for hunger, pain, addiction, depression. If you are not depressed and your friend tells you, oh I feel really depressed, you might say, oh that's really terrible, I feel really sorry for you, but if you're not depressed yourself, it's

really very very difficult to imagine what they're going through. This gets at one of the most troubling consequences of the hot cold empathy gap. Not only does it keep us from understanding ourselves, it can keep us from understanding other people. I'm Shankar Vedantam and you're listening to Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. A reminder, this episode contains stories about sex, sex work, and sexual harassment. Feelings like hunger, thirst, and anger can cause us to act impulsively. When we are in these hot states, we can say and do and think things that we never imagined possible even minutes earlier.

But sometimes hot states don't get us fired up. They paralyze us. This can be true for emotions like embarrassment or shame or fear. Nina Fuller learned this decades ago. She was in her early 20s studying art at George Washington University. But she and her husband needed part-time jobs to pay for school. She found a listing for a job in the classified section of the newspaper. And I saw this, a head that said, be a masseuse, no experience necessary. It was a way to earn money, and she'd get trained on the job. Nina called the number.

She was given a date and time to show up. I put my hair in the little braids and drove myself to this place and walked in. The space Nina entered looked like the waiting room of a dentist's office. Nina checked in. And somebody told me to take my hair out of the braids. I'm like, why would I do that? You know, and they were like, well, I remember they said, you know, these guys that come here, they're going home to their wives and they have high stressful jobs and they want to relax before they go home. Oh, my God. All right, you know.

They were other women in the room. They looked about the same age as her. The women were asked to line up, side by side. Behind them, there were doors to massage rooms. I figured okay, the guys come in, they pick the women and go into the room and get a massage. A man wearing a suit came in and chose Nina. She walked into one of the rooms with him. He took his clothes off. Then I gave him a massage.

I mean, how do I even know how to do that. I don't know. I just figured what made it up as I went along. That on the job training she expected to get never happened. And then he rolled over. And I'm alone in this room with this guy. And he rolled over and he had an erection. And I was just what? I mean, it wasn't until that point that I thought, oh, what have I gotten myself into? You know, like, what the hell?

Nina says the man made it clear to her that he expected more than a massage. You know, like, what? The hell? Nina says the man made it clear to her that he expected more than a massage. He must have said this is why I'm here. This is what you do. I mean, I think I was probably thinking, how could I not have known that? How? What? You know, what?

Oh. Oh. The man told Nina, he expected an intimate massage. What? You know, what? Oh. The man told Nina he expected an intimate massage. She gave in. This is the thing that I've wondered for all these years. Like if there was an essay question or there was a multiple choice question and it was like, okay, this happened and these are the choices. You stay and you do what that man wants. You say no, I'm not doing that, what are you nuts? You leave, you get, get walk out,

get in your car and drive home. I would have probably have checked, I'd walk out and I get in my car and I drive home. And definitely, but that's not what I did. Nina says she doesn't remember whether she gave any more massages that day. The rest of that evening is a blank. But the one thing she does remember

is that she stayed for the whole shift. I asked her why she felt compelled to stay. When she herself would have predicted, she would do otherwise. I think I was just embarrassed to think that I had didn't know what was going on. And sort of getting your bag and walking out would have meant what, would have said what. That I had put myself in a situation that I didn't, that I had no idea what was going on when I got there. And that would mean what?

Maybe that would mean that I was stupid. You know, maybe I didn't want to appear as naive and domazai felt at that moment. Like everyone else that was there knew what they were doing that why they were there. Yeah, maybe I didn't want to. I don't know. Maybe I didn't want to be a peer-stupid. I think that's a very common response that people say,

yeah, I went through with it because, clearly, I should ask more on the front end, and I didn't, and I didn't want to look like I didn't know what I was doing, so you just go through with it. This is psychologist Julie Woodzica. I am a professor at Washington and Lee University. Julie has spent years studying how people react in situations like the one Nina found herself in.

Many of these people ask themselves the same questions. Why didn't I speak up? Why didn't I protest? Why did I go through with it?" Some of Julie's earliest thoughts on sexual harassment and abuse came together when she was a college student. Like millions of others, she witnessed the tectonic event in 1991 that brought the term sexual harassment into popular use. It was a Senate testimony of law professor Anita Hill. use. It was a Senate testimony of law professor Anita Hill. She claimed Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor. After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual

matters. Before an all-male Judiciary Committee, she alleged he had made sexual advances and told explicit jokes. He commented on what I was wearing in terms of whether it made me more or less sexually attractive. He talked about pornographic materials. On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess. The nation was wrapped and divided. I remember really, really vividly people saying like, no, she's lying. She's got to be lying.

There was one specific detail that led many people to that conclusion. After Anita Hill allegedly experienced harassment, she was given an opportunity to work for Clarence Thomas again. She took it. During the hearings, Senator Allen Simpson pressed her on this point. If what you say this man said to you, occurred, why and God's name when he left his position of power or status or authority over you and you left it.

In 1983, why in God's name would you ever speak to a man like that the rest of your life? That's a very good question. And I'm sure that I can't not answer that to your satisfaction. That is one of the things that I have tried to do today. I have suggested that I was afraid of retaliation. I was afraid of damage to my professional life.

And I believe you that you have to understand that this response, and that's one of the things that I have come to understand about harassment, that this response, this kind of I have come to understand about harassment. This response, this kind of response, is not atypical. And I can't explain. It takes an expert in psychology to explain how that can happen. But it can happen, because it happened to me.

By the early 2000s, Julie had become one of those experts in psychology. She and her collaborator, Marianne Lafrance, found themselves talking about how people reacted to Anita Hill's testimony. We noticed a lot of people said I'd never would have responded that way if I had been sexually harassed, I would have, like I would have told them to stop, and I probably would have left the job, I definitely would to follow him to another job. Julie realized some of the most important questions about sexual harassment had not been studied at all.

There was a lot on how women remembered responding and there was a good amount on how they anticipated they would respond, but there was nothing at that point on looking at how women actually responded. Julie set out to understand how women react to sexual harassment as it's happening. In the first phase of the study, we had roughly 200 women come into the lab and we gave them a scenario that they needed to read through. Here's the scenario. You're interviewing for a job as a research assistant.

The interviewer is in his mid-30s. You're in an office alone with him and you know after initial greeting he starts asking you some questions. This time the interview questions. Until this one. Do you have a boyfriend? A few questions later. Do people find you desirable? The interview continues. Then he asks, do you think it's important for women to wear bras to work? Remember, this is a job interview. The women who participated in Julie's study imagined the situation

and were asked to describe how they thought they'd react. The response was overwhelming. About 90% of the women thought that they would respond in a very assertive and sometimes aggressive way. So about 60% said that they would confront assertively, that they would say to him, that's inappropriate. You shouldn't ask those questions.

About 30% said that they would leave the interview or that they would often say, I'd tell them off or it's slap them and then leave. Besides confronting the interviewer and leaving the interview, many participants said they do something else. 68% of all respondents said that they would refuse to answer at least one of those three questions. The women were not only asked to predict what they do, but to describe the emotion, they would feel.

A lot of women about 30% said that they would feel anger. Women who predicted they'd be angry were more likely to say they'd confront the interviewer. Anger was galvanizing. We're interested in fear too, how many people thought they'd be a little bit afraid, and only 2% of people said that they would be afraid. And fear was not correlated with confronting. So this doesn't sound like Nina Fouler at all. These women were all assertive, angry, indignant.

They were sure they would tell the man off. In the second part of the study, Julie set up an experiment to test whether women actually did what they forecast they would do. We had 50 women who were applying for a job. The job was a research assistant in a lab. The women would come into the interview and we had covert cameras set up. Their interviewer was a man in his mid-30s. He asked those three questions.

The same three questions from the first phase of the study. Do you have a boyfriend? Do people find you desirable? Do you think it's important for women to wear bras to work? What was different here was that the women weren't imagining a job interview. They were in a job interview, or so they believed. So how did they react? Did 90% respond assertively? Tell the interviewer off?

Slap him and walk out. Nobody left. Every single person answered every single question. Some women did speak up, but generally not until the end of the interview. Thirty-six percent of the participants at that point said very politely, yeah, I was just wondering, you know, why did you ask about me being desirable? There was another important difference between the women's responses in the two parts of the study.

So you remember in the anticipated study, most women responded that they'd be angry, very few, fearful, and it was the flip in this study. So we found that many women reported feeling afraid in that situation and anger was not very much reported. While the women who imagined being sexually harassed thought they'd be angry and that anger would propel them to act, women who were faced to face with a harasser, in fact experienced fear.

There's clearly an aspect of the study that should make you uneasy. Researchers brought in unsuspecting women for what they thought were job interviews, and then subjected them to harassment to see how they would behave. Julie went through rigorous ethical clearance to conduct the study. After it was over, she debriefed the volunteers and gave them the option of pulling their data. What explains the enormous gap between what women think they do and what they actually do?

When we're asked to anticipate how we would respond, we don't take into account one how our emotional state in that moment, especially if it's a highly charged moment, will impact our behavior. We're not thinking about how being in a hot state might affect us. We also don't understand very well, I think, the strength of the situation and just what would be the cost of leaving, how would people receive us? They're not thinking about how they're going to be feeling, they're not thinking about even really the other people in the situation, they're just thinking about what

would they do? It's like wanting to build a house and showing up to the ground breaking with only a sketch, a sketch that doesn't take into consideration any of the context or any of the obstacles, like the engineering requirements or the zoning laws or the funding. If you had outlined the scenario that Nina Fuller found herself in, she would have told you ahead of time that she would have walked out of the massage parlour. What she would not have been able to factor into her thinking was the change in her emotional state, her surprise,

her fear, her shock, and how those emotions might have affected her ability to act. You know, if you were to think about that, you would say, oh, I'd be so mad. I'd be so mad at that guy. Like, what's he thinking? But in actuality, she's alone in a room with a guy. She doesn't really know like what this whole situation is except that she's been hired to give a massage and she has no experience doing that.

And she's probably feeling afraid. She's not feeling angry. One thing to confront someone turns out to be just one step in actually confronting someone, and it is not even the first step. First you have to interpret that something happened, that actually is sexual harassment. Then you have to interpret the event as confrontation worthy. So is this event worthy of confrontation? Or is it really not that big of a deal?

Then you have to actually take responsibility to confront. Then you have to decide, or you have to come up with different response options. What am I actually going to do? And then you actually have to do it. So when most people think about confrontation, they think about it being just one step. You know, I'm either going to confront or I'm not going to confront. I'm going to ask it, you know, someone to make it stop or I won't. But in actuality, it's five pretty separate big steps that you have to take to be able to confront at the end. Listening to George Lowenthal and Julie Woodzica made me think about sexual harassment prevention programs.

Many of these programs try to address the abuse of power that drives so much sexual harassment. But many also ignore the hot cold empathy gap. The advice given to participants is, respect other people's boundaries. Don't say and do things, you would later regret. People listening might think, sure, that's easy. They're in a cold state and they can't imagine how sexual or

out-zole can turn them into the kind of people who violate boundaries or make colleagues uneasy. The training programs also tell potential victims and bystanders, don't be silent, report problems. If you see something, say something. People listening think, of course I would never be silent in a situation like that. They go back to their desks with the feeling that they know exactly how they would act in these situations. The hot cold empathy gap doesn't just make us draw the wrong conclusions about our actions and motivations. It can make us unfairly judge mental to what others.

We hear what someone else did, someone like Anita Hill, and think, I would never have done that. I would have acted differently. It's very difficult to make sense of other people's behavior, people who are acting under the influence of emotions that you're not experiencing. George Lowenstein says, our unrealistic sense of how we would act is at the root of our failure to understand others. When we assess whether another person's actions are reasonable, we first imagine how we would behave in that situation. The problem is our perceptions are out of whack with reality. We think we'd be able to control

an addiction or slog through pain or confront a harasser. When we come back, we may never be able to avoid the hot cold empathy gap, but there are ways to compensate for it. I was like, I don't know if this is worth it. You know, my legs hurt, my body hurts, I just want to go home and go to sleep right now. I'm Shankar Vedantam and you are listening to Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. All of us see and do things we would never anticipate saying and doing.

When we are in the trough of intense emotions, we are impulsive when we should be cautious. We freeze when we think we will be brave. When we look back on our behavior, we are often baffled because we have forgotten how we felt in the heat of the moment. Psychologist George Lowenstein calls this an empathy gap. We often can relate to the other person we become in a different emotional state. We might think that one way to bridge this gap is to see how we behave when we are in the grip of an intense emotion. Surely, after we see how we act in one of these emotional states, we won't be as naive the next time around. We think experience functions like a powerful vaccine once inoculated forever protected. All my research suggests that experiencing something yourself does not provide any

inoculation against the empathy gap. If experience was a simple fix, Georgia's colleague wouldn't have believed he'd be able to keep his hand in ice water the second time around. Irene would not have had unprotected sex with a no underwear no condoms guy, twice. Most of us don't even get to the point where we recognize how different our hot and cold cells are, but even if we did, that would not be enough to change our behavior. We have to develop the muscle memory to override our instincts in those states. George has found an effective way to do so.

Training. Well, I think what training often does is it diminishes the hot state. So, for example, when I started out in public speaking, I found it very, very painful, anxiety-making. I would get dry mouth, things like that. And then, the more I did it, the less miserable I found it. I still find radio interviews totally miserable. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. There's an entire American institution devoted to bridging the hot cold empathy gap in situations far more physically taxing than a radio interview. It's the Army. Military leaders have long understood that there is a way to get soldiers to perform well in battle.

Put them in hot states and teach them, through repetition, to stifle their natural impulses. My name is Anastasia Fish. I'm a second lieutenant in the United States Army and I'm an armor officer. On a February morning in 2019, Anastasia had her roommate drive her to Camp Darby in Georgia. As they approached the camp, they passed a black and yellow sign that Anastasia had seen her friends pose in front off in their Instagram photos.

The sign read, not for the week or faint-hearted. It's a warning and a boast for Army Ranger School. The school puts recruits through a grueling training program. Graduates often go on to elite units and important assignments. On the first full day of training, Anastasia says she had to take a test. You have two minutes to do 49 push-ups. You have two minutes to do 59 sit-ups. You have 40 minutes to run five miles, and then you have to do six pull-ups right afterwards. In the weeks that followed, Anastasia had to drop

from a rope into cold water and swim, wearing her full uniform. She was kept awake for hours on end. She recalls a stretch of nine days where she only got 10 hours of sleep total. She was constantly distracted by hunger. Relicted some videos online of Army Ranger training, it's hard to believe human beings could survive those challenges. Get back up for love, all right! Ranger! All right!

All right! All this suffering had a purpose. To put trainees like Anastasia into a heart state, even though her instructor has called it something else. As far as ranger school goes, they like to use the term stress inoculation, so they create a lot of stress, and then they teach you how to live in that and how to cope with it. The stressors were both physical and psychological.

She was asked to oversee a dozen people in a simulated military mission. She had to organize a surprise attack. At first I was very nervous about it. She had to force herself to calm down and think through what needed to be done. I kind of learned how to take pieces of the task and effectively execute the pieces. And I could look at basically a five meter target instead of a 50 meter target.

And I could take my little five meter targets. And I could very, very easily accomplish those tasks. She used simple tools, a notebook and pen, and made checklists. And then anytime that I'd start to feel kind of panicked or anxious because I was like, things aren't happening fast enough because everyone's tired. Or things aren't happening fast enough because people are distracted. I was able to look at my list and think about the things that I could check off or things that were going to be checked off soon.

And that really actually helped me relax because I knew that things were getting done and the more check marks I had on my list, the better I knew I was doing. Anastasia learned to control her behavior in different hot states, but it took weeks of round the clock training to get to that point. Few of us could handle what it takes to get our hungry, achy, exhausted selves to behave like our cold state selves. But not all challenges involve leading a team into battle. In civilian life, there can be less daunting ways to train yourself to respond to everyday challenges. Self-defense classes are designed to teach you

how to respond if you're attacked. Fire drills are designed to teach you to keep your head during an emergency. Julie Woodzica is developing a training program to help women respond to sexist comments and jokes. It's called fighting fire with fire. So, for instance, a guy tells a sexist joke and then the woman says, wow, still single, hum, Mark, which is funny, but the guy knows that like, oh, she don't like that. Every woman that you talk to can think of a time

that they walked away from a situation where something sexist was said. And 10 minutes later, they think of the perfect comeback. I wish I had said this. And of course, in the moment, you don't think of it. So we're thinking if we can have a couple that are kind of in your back pocket, can you repeat you repeat that and hear you over my eyes rolling or just things that are, you know, easy to say and would apply to a lot of situations, maybe

we can help women to confront in more subtle ways. Because it's hard. It's hard to tell people that they're being sexist. Julie thinks that in a better world, women wouldn't have this burden of devising comebacks. But for the moment, these one-liners give women tools. George Lowenstein says some hot-called situations are too challenging for us to manage as individuals. I think the solution is good public policy. Specifically he says public policy should make it easier for people in a heart state to make the same decisions they would otherwise choose in a court state.

Condoms, he says, should be quickly and easily accessible. So, for example, condoms should be kind of ubiquitously available. In other cases, George believes that policy should be designed to slow down our actions. If I got really angry at someone I could just go down to Walmart and buy a gun today, that shouldn't be possible. When you combine the instant availability of guns and empathy gaps, That's a very toxic mixture. He also sees implications for our criminal justice system, where judges and juries determine how to treat people who have acted in hot states.

Take drug addiction, for example. People who have never experienced drug craving, they are not going to have any understanding of how powerfully motivating it can be. I sometimes ask my students, suppose you were addicted to heroin, can you imagine ever abandoning your children or stealing from your parents? And everyone says, of course, I would never do that. But if they were addicted to heroin, it's very likely that they would do that. So in so many of these different situations like in the criminal justice system, it's so easy for people to condemn the behavior of people who are experiencing states that

they themselves are not experiencing when they make the judgment. We might need policy to constrain our decisions, but one thing we can do on our own is to be more compassionate when we're judging others and ourselves. Nina Fuller, the woman who can't let go after one night in the massage parlour half a century ago, doesn't consider herself judgmental of others. But for decades, she's had trouble extending such compassion to herself. I was ashamed that I wasn't a strong enough person. I said, no, I can't go. I got to do this.

You know, I was ashamed of that. The hot cold empathy gap makes other people feel more different from us than they actually are. When someone does something we can't imagine that we would do, it's easy to be judgmental. To conclude they are weak or worse that they are bad people. This gap also makes us feel extrangers to ourselves. So the next time we confidently announce that we would absolutely do this or we would never do that, we would be wise to remember that the people we are now are very different than the people we might become.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Laura Correll, Kristen Wong, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Special thanks to Doyle Dean, Ivory Keetley, Alex Curley and Rosanna Summers. Our unsung hero is NPR's Daniel Schuchin. Right around the time when we first published this episode, we were having some technical problems getting the episode out into the world.

No matter what we tried, the audio didn't sound quite right when we tried to upload the episode. Daniel worked with us late into the evening to troubleshoot the problem. We're so grateful. For more ideas about human behavior, as well as brain teasers and moments of joy, be sure to check out our weekly newsletter. You can subscribe at news.hiddenbrain.org. That's N-E-W-S dot hiddenbrain dot org. Next week we continue our YouTube.no series with a look at how we can improve our marriages

by asking less of them. We have some control over the extent to which we interpret our partners in considerate or rude behavior in a way that's more generous and kind, and the kinder approach will make us happier in the relationship and our partner will probably be happier too. I'm Shankar Vedantin, see you soon. Oh, you know, I actually used the Amazon gift card. I bought a dress and the dress came and the dress was like so ugly. And in my head I was like, okay, that's karma for buying a bunch of stolen stuff. What did you do with the dress? I just have it. I just have it. Like all the other stuff I got from that guy, just sitting

in my house. You didn't return it to Amazon? No. Because I was like, I just serve, I just serve an ugly dress. Have you actually worn the ugly dress? No. That would be car make punishment if you had to wear it, don't you think? That's true, maybe I should wear it so that my karma is like completely satisfied.

No, that would be carmic punishment if you had to wear it, don't you think? That's true, maybe I should wear it so that my carma is like completely satisfied.