No Stupid Questions - 126. Why Do People Love Horror Movies?

Episode Date: December 11, 2022

When are negative emotions enjoyable? Are we all a little masochistic? And do pigs like hot sauce?

I know everyone says this is dumb, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, why do some people love horror movies? It is so gory, it has caused audience members to pass out and vomit. to pass out and vomit. Angela, we have a listener email from Skyo who writes to say,

why are people into horror movies? I couldn't for the life of me bring myself to watch one from start to finish. By the way, Skyo, I am so on your side. Anyway, Skyo wants to know what is the psychology behind fear

seeking when there exist many other ways to experience stimulation? Angela, this is a good question. It's such a good question. I want your answer. I can tell you about horror movies I've seen. You've seen at least one, right? Can I just give you a blanket? No. What? I actually looked up on Rotten Tomatoes, the 10 scariest horror movies ever. Okay. Tell them to me. I want to hear. All right. We'll see how many you've seen. And then each one, I guess each one, you're going to say you haven't seen any of these. It's a waste of breath because I have not seen any of them. Okay. You're zero for 10. I'm going to do my score. All right, here we go. Number one, The Exorcist. Check. Hereditary. No. That's from 2018. The Conjuring from 2013. No.

The Shining. Yes. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. No. The Ring. I did not see that. Halloween. Yes.

Insidious. No. And let's see, this is capital IT. I can't tell if that's supposed to be it or if it's actually IT. It's it. Stephen King. I mean, I think I-T can be pretty scary. No, this is not your system crashing. That I would watch, Angela. Okay, so you've seen about, what, four or so? Was that the list? Was that all?

Yeah, that's the list. That's 10. I was also going to say, like, Poltergeist, Carrie, Silence of the Lambs. Okay, so with a different list, you would have had a higher hit rate. But Skyo and I are on team do not watch horror films. Okay, it's complicated, Stephen. I just want to tell you I'm now on your team. What do you mean? I realized listening to that list that any of the more recent horror movies,

really there's almost zero chance that I've seen them because I'm in my 50s now and I do not watch horror movies now. I don't think I watched them in my 40s and I don't think I watched them in my 30s either. So it was really like a teenager, young 20s thing. So I have to say you fit the data really, really nicely. Horror film numbers are up lately over the past five or six years, but they're still relatively low. So as a share of all ticket sales, I guess this is assuming that people actually go to theaters to watch movies. So we may actually be dealing with a different population too, because it may be that there are people who watch a lot of horror films at home and not in theaters. But it looks as though

horror films represent 10% of all tickets sold. Now, it could also be that only 10% of films made are horror films. That may be fairly representative. But if you look at age, it's definitely a younger person's game. So it's probably not so surprising that neither you or I are seeing any lately. I think it's also not surprising because the feature of behavior called sensation seeking, like, hey, let me try that. I've never done that before. I know everyone says this is dumb, but I'm going to do it anyway. That tends to peak during adolescence, late adolescence,

early adulthood, you know, late teens, early 20s. So that makes sense. Horror films are one example, let's say, of sensation seeking. But what else might there be? There might be eating spicy foods or might be jumping out of a parachute. What do you count as that? Well, this is all what Paul Rosen, who is one of my favorite psychologists, he also is at my university, University of Pennsylvania. He calls all of these things benign masochism. Good phrase. Isn't that so good? Can I just say, as a non-academic who's read a lot of academic work, I am so appreciative

when someone, whether it's a psychologist, an economist, anthropologist, whatever, has come up with a phrase to describe something that makes the lay brain really get it. But I feel that there are so many brilliant people out there doing research and they want to communicate their findings to the public and their peers, of course, but they don't have the ability or maybe the desire or maybe they don't want to seem as though they're trying to dress it up or dumb it down or something. But I find that it's incredibly useful when there is a name. Okay, I have to digress for a minute here.

You're going to digress on my digression? I am. Just for a second. We'll come back to horror movies. But growth mindset is a pretty sexy phrase, right? Absolutely. And now if you ask a CEO or a head of a PTA committee at your kid's school, they probably know what a growth mindset is. But Carol Dweck only recently, relatively, started using that phrase.

She used to call it implicit theories of incremental. I know, right? I can't even remember. It was like incremental intelligence theory. There was some multi-syllabic, multi-word phrase. And I believe she had to come up with some terminology when she was writing her first, last, only, at least for now, popular book for a lay audience. And, you know, implicit theories of intelligence and, you know, incremental versus whatever,

these were not going to fly. And so growth mindset ended up being the terminology we all know and love today. So I agree with you. And can I just say up being the terminology we all know and love today. So I agree with you. And can I just say, I don't mean to disparage any academics who don't come up with a phrase to describe an idea or a theory or their work overall. And I realize that for the most part, people like you, Angela, academic researchers are writing primarily for each other in journals. Now, we've talked about how journal writing typically is, what's the word? Horrible, maybe? Yeah, I think we use the word horrible.

Yes. It's not writing that the average person would forget about, enjoy, but even comprehend. So I just do want to say to all of our academic listeners out there that I, as a medium-informed layperson, really do appreciate when you take time to essentially label your idea in a descriptive way because I think it leads to a lot more interest and therefore understanding and therefore theoretically application of that idea into fruitful policy and so on. Well, not only have you just sent Paul Rosin and his collaborators a little Stephen Dubner thank you note, you're going to want to keep that stationary out because this is the title of their paper. I love this title, Glad to be Sad and Other Examples of Benign Masochism. That is good. Which was published in the not-so-sexily-named Judgment and Decision-Making Journal. But, you know, isn't that great?

Glad to be sad. So what Paul Rosen wants to argue is that he can explain not only going to watch, you know, The Exorcist, but also why you would get on a roller coaster, why you would listen to, like, sad music, why you would eat really spicy hot sauce. The list goes on. In fact, he had people rate on a scale from, I think, zero to 100, how much they would want to do these things that are, you know, on the face of them, things that you shouldn't want to do, because all of these emotions that you know these activities produce are negative emotions. Yeah. So I want to tell you what the subscales are on this.

Let's start with fear. That's one subscale. Sadness is another. Sad movies, sad novels, sad music, etc. The sensation of burning, particularly food. So, you know, spicy food and then all the things that it makes you do, like cry and sweat and so forth. There's a disgust subscale.

You know, of course, Paul Rosen is beloved for his. The king of disgust. The pioneer of the psychology of disgust. But, you know, like pinching pimples. Oh. Or like looking at like disgusting images. You're like, oh, my God, come here to check this out. And then you keep scrolling through like more.

You keep scrolling through. I don't keep scrolling through. Oh, come on. You've never done that. I don't. You've never gone on YouTube and watched people like pop these like huge zits. Believe it or not, I haven't. It's just me.

I'm getting a whole different image of what you do in your spare time. I thought you were just reading a bunch of academic journals, maybe seeing your family once in a while. But this is all about the zip popping. I contain multitudes. You know, separately, we got another listener email asking a very similar question about horror movies. But this one was more specific. So this is from a listener named Stephanie who wrote to say,

recently, a few friends of mine heard about a horror movie being shown in theaters. It is so gory, it has caused audience members to pass out and vomit. Although I know movies often make these claims to generate buzz, this still repulsed me enough to never want to see the film. My friends, however, upon hearing these claims, immediately decided they had to see it. When they went, someone sitting a few seats away from them did throw up about 15 minutes in followed by at least one other person later in the movie so my question stephanie writes is why are many people drawn to consume media that they are pretty certain will horrify disgust and

possibly traumatize them on a deep level i was so intrigued by this email that i wrote back to stephanie ask her what was the movie. The movie is called Terrifier 2, she says. And then she added, please don't watch it. I feel guilty for putting you onto it. And whatever you do, don't show it to Angela. She must be protected. Wait, I want to see Terrifier 1 and 2. What are you talking about? Of course you do. Gory movies, by the way, on the Paul Rosen scale, for whatever reason, did not, quote unquote, load with the horror movies. And what I mean by that is, you know, I told you that he was asking people, like, on a scale from 0 to 100, like, how much do you like these activities, even though the emotion that they produce is negative? though the emotion that they produce is negative.

What loading means is like, does that item, in this case, gory movies, does that correlate with the other items on the fear scale? And you're saying gory and fear don't correlate. Or they don't correlate enough. They probably correlate, but they don't hang together as much as you think. So I interrupted you.

You gave us four categories. There was fear, sadness, burning hot food, and disgust. What else? Yeah, and I have four more. There was fear, sadness, burning hot food, and disgust. What else? Yeah, and I have four more. Okay, so there's pain. So do you enjoy, say, getting a really hard massage or, you know, the flash of pain when you experience your hand in ice water? There's the alcohol subscale, and this is in particular beer and scotch. I think I can get on board with this subscale. An attraction to those represents what?

I think in this case, the argument is that these are bitter or burning, right? I think scotch has like... Unless you think they're just delicious. Well, you know, one way you can think about these things is that in many cases, babies would not like these things, right? Like babies don't like pain. They don't like fear. I tried so hard to get my babies to drink scotch and they were just terrible at it.

Yeah, well, so there you figured it out. You didn't need a random assignment study for that one. Okay, just two more. One is the feeling of physical exhaustion. And then the last subscale was bitterness. I guess like coffee is on this scale. So maybe when I was talking about whiskey just then, which was on the alcohol subscale, maybe there's like a different feeling. But all of these things, they're all what Paul

Rosin calls benign masochism. I have to say, I'm also really interested to know what our listeners are thinking about this. Here's what I would love listeners to tell us. Since nobody, including Paul Rosen, thinks they have a complete explanation for benign masochism, it's an open question. Why do you think people watch horror movies, eat spicy foods, go on roller coasters, listen to Whitney Houston sing I Will Always Love You? Why do we do these things? I put in the Whitney Houston plug because it's sad. Not just because you don't like Whitney Houston saying, I will always love you. Why do we do these things? I put in the Whitney Houston plug because it's sad. Not just because you don't like Whitney Houston. No, I love Whitney Houston, but it's sad. I see.

So anyway, I'd love to hear theories of benign masochism. You can send us a voice memo. Just use your phone, the voice memo app. Make a nice, quiet recording. Send it to us at nsq at Freakonomics.com. And maybe we will play your voice memo in a future episode. Still to come on No Stupid Questions, would Aristotle have been a fan of horror movies? Such productions, the great philosopher argued,

serve to purge viewers of their pent-up emotions. Kind of like a pimple being squeezed. Now, back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about horror movies and benign masochism. So, Glad to be Sad and other examples of benign masochism, the title alone suggests to me that many, many, many people are attracted to these difficult or weird or bitter things because it must trigger some positive response. Is that what we're being told? I actually asked Paul about this relatively recently. You know, the paper is almost a decade old. decade old. And he now believes that the reason why we like to do things that are suffering experiences, the reason why we put ourselves through pain is because we have this kind of mind over body sense of control when we're able to withstand it. So he thinks that it's like this

sense of I've got this. I'm in a state of fear, but I'm making myself do this. And so it's kind of a sense of control. So you challenge yourself and you meet this challenge and feel better for that. That's right. You don't really think that you're in danger when you're in a horror movie. Right. You don't really think you're going to have a heart attack when you're eating like a spicy taco. So this kind of sense that you're subjecting yourself to something which is aversive, which is negative, but they're all safe threats. Also, you know, for example, when people go and exercise really hard, the body produces endorphins.

That then creates a kind of analgesic and even euphoric effect in large amounts. So you could also argue that, like, there's another mechanism at play. In addition to this sense of control that we get when we engage in these safe threats, there could be these, like, oppositional defenses that the body has against these threats, and then we get to enjoy them. Right. Or even just the cessation. Like, when you get out of a horror movie, you're like, oh God, thank God that's over.

And so the relief, the absence of pain. Those all make a lot of sense to me, and I appreciate the explanation. But let me just say, I don't have that desire. None. Well, you did use the phrase suffering experience to describe all of these. I would say Scotch is not a suffering experience. Oh, yeah. You would have had a little blip for the scotch and whiskey. And then bitterness, too.

Unsweetened coffee, which is you. And even hot food. Do you eat spicy food? things that changed my idea about this. One was Robert Sapolsky writing about how many people get so fixed in their appetites and habits of everything, food, music, places they go, the people they see, by the time they're roughly 35, that they just sort of calcify. When I read that, I thought, oh, crap. Not I, said Stephen Dubner. Yeah. And so I'm a person who I think is relatively eager to try out new things, but that sort of gave me even more motivation to do so. Additionally, then I read something about how as you get older, your taste buds sort of dull.

And so I read that many older people therefore start eating spicy food even when they didn't like it before. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I'm going to try. And in the last like five, 10 years, I've been eating a lot more of it. And it turns out that I't like it before. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I'm going to try. And in the last like five, 10 years, I've been eating a lot more of it. And it turns out that I just like it. And I don't think that has anything to do

with taste buds being duller. I think I just was scared of it for some reason. I grew up eating a kind of, you know, meat and potatoes-ish rural farmer bland diet and spicy things seemed a little bit strange and foreign. And now I eat a lot and I like it. I want to double click on this. Believe it or not, Paul Rosen has done a spicy food study with pigs. And so I'm going to tell you about it. But before I do, what spicy foods do you eat? So the primary spicy food I eat is from one restaurant in New York, which is just a really good

Sichuan Chinese restaurant called Han Dynasty. Wait, is it the same one in Philly? It is. Oh my gosh. Philadelphia gave New York Han Dynasty. I go there all the time. It's very good. Very spicy.

I love, love, love, love it. And every dish at Han Dynasty has a spice scale on it. Zero to 10. So what do you get there? I mean, my parents, well, my mother is from Sichuan province. That's like famously, you know, like the province in China with the hottest food. My grandmother used to make food for my father, who is not from that part of China. And he would weep.

It was so spicy. And my grandma, whatever, she was like 75 and cooking this incredibly hot food. Anyway, my point is that at Han Dynasty, I am not a 10 person. I am more of a three or four person. I recommend the garlic chicken, which I think is a three. Yeah, the garlic sauce is for wimps. I know it's like the equivalent of chicken breast, but I'm venturing up. And just today I put some, you know, that sauce that comes out of the rooster container, that like hot sauce that everybody uses on what's it called? It's like a clear bottle and a green top. Anyway, I put it on my food just today. Congratulations. So what have we established? Spicy food is not unpopular among the two of us. That took us a while to establish that.

But no, I wanted to tell you about this Paul Rosin study. Oh, about pigs. Yes, about pigs. But here's what Paul Rosin did. And I think it underscores this idea that benign masochism, like so many other things, has to be multiply determined. It can't just be the pleasure of escaping a safe threat or relief from pain. So Paul wondered how it is that we end up eating spicy food

because around the world, even in the province of Sichuan or the country of Mexico where there's this long proud tradition of adults eating spicy food, babies and very young children don't, and they don't like it. No baby likes Sichuan peppercorns. Or scotch, as we've established. Or scotch, as Stephen has established with his own children. So what Paul was inspired to do, because I think at the time he was in Mexico, but I'm not 100% sure, and he was living in this rural village, and he noticed that the families would feed their pigs

by just throwing out the slop of what was left over. Spicy slop. And then he thought to himself, well, how does a piglet learn to eat hot food? Do they like the hot food or are they just hungry? So what he did, and I think he did this with Cheetos. So he would take a Cheeto and he would put hot sauce on it. You know, basically Paul made up his own flaming hot Cheeto. He should get credit for this. In the control condition, he just had the plain one. And then he would put them next to each other in the yard where the pigs were. He wanted to see which one it preferred, which one it would eat first.

which one it preferred, which one it would eat first. And to his surprise, over and over again, these pigs preferred the non-spicy Cheeto. They had lived for a long time on the spicy food, but clearly they didn't like it. So if the pig could talk, the pig would have said, hey, human handler. Enough. I've been eating this spicy slop you've been giving me. I've never enjoyed it. My eyes are tearing. I'm sweating here. Come on. So then Paul says, OK, now that's really interesting.

Like babies, pigs don't like spicy food. How the heck is it that kids do eventually turn into adults who eat spicy food? So then he started just sitting in on these meals and he told me the story of this particular family. There was like three kids in the family. So there's little kid, middle kid, older kid. I guess they would have these like tortillas and there wasn't actually much to put on them, but you added spicy sauce to make it palatable. And then just as you would go down in age, the pattern was that the child would eat less and less of the spicy food. And what he saw was that the littlest kid would just like take their tortilla and then like all little kids look to the older ones and just see what they were doing. But he speculated that when we have a role model, when we have a higher status person in our midst who does something like eat spicy food, watch a horror movie, go on the

internet and look at disgusting pimple pictures, whatever it is, we can learn that that is something that we should like. And this generally gets to a topic that Paul has been obsessed with for his whole life, which is like, how do we come to like what we like? To me, the dividing line is the things that are put in front of us, like the pigs and the kids, and the things that we seek out, like the horror films. I can see how we're adaptable so that when things are put in front of us and when we have no choice set, really, we habituate to things, even though the pigs were probably not very happy about it. But to go to the trouble to make plans to go to a movie that I know I'm going to hate, that would make no sense for me. So then I realized, well, there are people who plainly really love that enough to go out of their way to do it.

that person different from me. I try to think through how I would have to be to want to do that. So I could see two different directions. One is that I'm a very secure, settled, unafraid person, and I can watch a really horrible, scary film for what it is and have fun with it. Like a tourist visiting a country that I wouldn't want to live in, but it's okay because I know I'll be going home. So that's one. The other is really opposite, which is I feel the world itself is so chaotic and scary and weird that it's nice to have that perception upheld to some degree in this film version that I can see the darkest elements of human behavior. Oh, interesting. see the darkest elements of human behavior. Oh, interesting. Like dystopian movies and TV series which are all the rage right now

because we seem to be living in dystopia itself. Exactly. And it makes me feel like I'm not wrong for seeing the world that way. And so it could actually uphold my perception of the world. I know that people these days are watching all kinds of dystopian miniseries and movies. I hate them. I'm like, oh my gosh, life is hard and the world is melting. The last thing I want to do is sit on the couch and watch disaster unfolding on the screen.

So let me ask you this. If you avoid that kind of we'll call it horror, dystopia or whatever, do you also avoid news about terrible things? I think I do. I would be very curious to know if the fans of horror films also consume a lot of social media and other media because, you know, media generally veers toward the negative i believe we've talked about that on this show before the power of bad and all that but also it just sells and when i look at social media i think even more in the last year or two than it used to be it can be remarkably nasty negative designed to enrage and I do wonder if that is scratching a similar sort of itch as the horror film is scratching, especially keeping in mind what I mentioned earlier, that the demand

for horror films has gone up in the last five years. So I do wonder if that and social media and bad real news in the world may be somehow connected. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. At least I haven't seen any study that I thought really teased these things apart well. Because anything correlational like that, you're like, yeah, but could it be this? Could it be that? Like, what else could be going on? Now, I've only glanced at this Paul Rosen et al. paper. And I did see there was a quick reference to Aristotle's notion of catharsis. And I see here that Aristotle did put forth a theory of horror as catharsis. Very, very dark things, betrayals and stabbings and the murder of family members and others.

So this piece is saying that such productions, the great philosopher argued, serve to purge viewers of their pent up emotions. Kind of like a pimple being squeezed. Yeah. In a safely walled off fictional world, thus preparing them to deal with the anxieties of real life. Do you buy that? You know, the idea of catharsis, which may have started as early as Aristotle, but was a central part of Freudian psychoanalysis, has pretty much been debunked. So even though it's intuitive that we should like release our emotions, like let me get the anger out.

Let me get it out of my system. It turns out that the modern science of emotion regulation and psychotherapy suggests that in most cases we just kindle. And it's worse to vent, to kind of like be cathartic. And it's much better to take some psychological distance, some space between you and the emotion. So it's a charming concept. Like, get it all out. But it turns out not to be true. So let's go back to Skyo's original question, to the last part of Skyo's question.

What is the psychology behind fear-seeking when there exist many other ways to experience stimulation? And let me add one last question onto that. I think I understand why we experience fear. We want to be scared of things that may endanger us. But why, when there is no real danger, why would we want to seek out the same emotion like fear in a horror movie? How does that make sense to you? Well, I said that on behalf of Paul, there is this idea of experiencing fear and other negative emotions, but knowing that it's imaginary or an unreal threat.

So there's this feeling of mind over matter, this feeling of control. That's one thing that we talked about. We also talked about, you know, maybe there's the relief after the fear passes. You get the pleasure of not having the fear anymore, right? The second reason. Third is like maybe there's some like social peer and modeling influences. Like we watch other people and they, you know, go on roller coasters and watch horror movies and that encourages us

to do it as well. But there is just one additional thing that I'm now thinking about because you said catharsis and that brought up Freud. So I spent some time with George Valiant, the Harvard psychiatrist who was, as most psychiatrists of his generation were, trained as a Freudian. And he pointed out to me Freud's idea of defenses,

these ego defenses, things that we do to help us through life, but especially the pain of having what Freud thought were these like deep unconscious conflicts. So one of the defenses is called anticipation. And in anticipation, you pretend in your mind that something truly horrible has happened, like you play out the worst case scenario. And I'm not even going to ask you to utter it in this conversation, but you can just imagine like, what would be your worst fear come to pass? For me, it absolutely has to do with the loss of loved ones, but I can only use abstract language because I can't even bring myself to say it. When you play that out, when you imagine it happening, you're kind of habituating to it. You're like kind of coming to tolerate it.

And so if and when that does happen or some version of that happens, you will be prepared. So that's another layer of this. We're kind of preparing ourselves. You know, we're practicing what it would be like and what we should do. So, Angela, let me ask you one last question. Has this conversation made you more or less likely to watch a horror film in the near future and why? It has not changed my aversion to horror movies. Has this conversation made you more or less likely or neither to engage in some form of benign masochism

in the near future? This conversation has made me want to order hotter food from Han Dynasty in the very short-term future, possibly tonight. What are the odds that you're going to see Terrifier 2 and Vomit? Oh, that? I'll give it at least 20%. Maybe while I'm watching Terrifier 2, I'll have some spicy don-don noodles. No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now, here's a fact check of today's conversation. In the first half of the show, Stephen reads Angela the media review website Rotten Tomatoes' list of the top 10 scariest movies of all time. He actually skipped number nine, the 2012 movie Sinister, directed by Scott Derrickson and starring Ethan Hawke.

As with the other modern horror movies, Angela has not seen this film. Later, Angela forgets the terminology that Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck originally used to describe the idea that she ultimately called growth mindset. The phrase Angela was looking for is an incremental theory of intelligence. This is the opposite of a fixed mindset, which Dweck originally called an entity theory of intelligence. Also, Angela has difficulty differentiating Paul Rosen's alcohol subscale from the bitterness subscale. Rosen and his colleagues write that the flavor of alcoholic beverages isn't bitter per se, but rather, quote, innately negative. Stephen would obviously

disagree. Next, Angela cannot remember the name of the hot sauce that she's been experimenting with. She was thinking of Sriracha, a condiment named after the town of Sriracha in Thailand, where it was first created by home cook Thanam Chakapak. It was later introduced to the United States in the 1980s by Vietnamese immigrant David Tran, who began selling his own version of the sauce through his company, Hui Fong Foods. Finally, Angela describes University of Pennsylvania psychologist and king of disgust Paul Rosin's research on whether pigs enjoy spicy food. The experiment took place in the 1970s in Oaxaca and involved both pigs and dogs. Ros Rosen did not, as Angela recalled, use Cheetos.

Instead, he offered the animals a plain cheese cracker and one laced with hot sauce. Rosen said that the animals would eat both snacks, but always chose the mild cracker first. That's it for the fact check. Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some of your thoughts on our recent episode about automation. Here's what you said. Hey, what's show, let's hear some of your thoughts on our recent episode about automation.

Here's what you said. Hey, what's up, guys? My name is Anwar, and I am an ER doctor in one of the busiest trauma centers on the East Coast here in Atlanta. I would love to see a lot more automation in my life, particularly with these two things. One being more autonomous driving. particularly with these two things one being more autonomous driving i think if people really had an idea of the amount of carnage and dead bodies that i've seen over my career they would probably be more sensitive to letting the cars drive themselves on the highways humans are awful drivers the number two thing is radiology reads you guys kind of mentioned it. Where I work and a lot of other places have off-hours reads, meaning the films were done not between business hours of nine to five.

Those reads are a lot of times completed by a trainee. I think that that is like two standards of care. So I want to see more automation of radiology scans, at least in the off-hours. Thanks, guys. Love the show. Hi, NSQ team. Today, I listened to your show about algorithms. I see a lot of uses for them, but one of the hardest things about those algorithms comes when they try to tell you not only who you are, but who you are compatible with. And I'm thinking a lot about online dating sites. I had an experience where I was told that I was highly compatible with this person. And as I read his profile, it became clear he was a white supremacist. I was really upset. I took a break after that because it was just

too painful. So, you know, algorithms are great, but they need to be used wisely. Hey, Stephen and Angela. This is Allison from Narberth, Pennsylvania. As a former admission officer who now works in the ed tech space, I think a lot about automation. The idea of devising an algorithm to read applications or letters of recommendation may be intriguing to bleary-eyed admission officers who often work late nights and weekends reading applications. However, with the sticker price of highly selective colleges, I can't imagine the parent of a student being satisfied knowing their kid's application was even partially read by a robot. However, it would be great if we could train a robot to handle the screaming phone calls we

used to get when a student was denied. That was, respectively, Anwar Osborne, a listener who would like to remain anonymous, and Alison Hurgett. Thanks so much to them and to everyone who sent us their stories. And remember, we'd still love to hear your thoughts on benign masochism. Why do you think people enjoy controlled suffering? Send a voice memo to nsq at Freakonomics.com. Let us know your name, and if you'd like to remain anonymous, you might hear your voice on the show. Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, how do you become a better conversationalist? I'm just gonna mimic Barack Obama.

You sound a lot like Barack Obama now that I think about it. That's next week on No Stupid Questions. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and Freakonomics MD. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Jeremy Johnston. Catherine Moncure is our associate producer. Our executive team is Neil Carruth, Gabriel Roth, and Stephen Dubner.

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