The Hot-Cold Empathy Gap

So we know about all kinds of ways that humans miscommunicate and misunderstand one another, and we fail to accurately model the internal states of other people in our lives. And of course, you know, a lot of the work of being a good friend, being a good romantic partner or spouse, being a good coworker, any of these relationships is really in trying to improve our ability to empathize

with people in an accurate way. You want to understand how what you do makes other people feel, to sort of get inside their head and adjust your behavior accordingly. But one type of empathy shortcoming that apparently is quite real, but which we fail to even notice existing is our inability to accurately model and comprehend our own feelings when

we're in a different state. Now, Rob, this immediately made me think of something that I know you've mentioned several times before, that that quote from the warren Zevon song where he says you're a whole different person when you're scared. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's it's a that's a pretty solid track off the two thousand two albums I Rides here with the lyrics by Hunter S. Thompson Actually, and uh, I'd say it's not the most lyrically complex of warren Zevon songs that

you know. It has that kind of Thompson anxiety and doom uh groove going on, you know, not a concrete

ballad or anything, not one of Yvon's deeper songs. But the title and chorus always struck with me because they I think I've mentioned on the show before, because it often ends up mashing up with the realities of human cognition, right, and it certainly relates to the topic we're gonna be talking about today, which is a framework that is known as the hot cold empathy gap, and it has to do not just with fear, but with a host of

other emotions and visceral motivating states anger. Joy discussed thirst, hunger, pain, sexual arousal, fatigue, and so forth, anything that can be strongly motivating on human thought and behavior. And I think today's episode might help us see ways in which you're not only a whole different person when you're scared, you're also a whole different person when you're thirsty, and a

whole different person when you're sleep deprived. And not only are you a whole different person, that other person is someone who you do not really understand and whose behavior you are not really able to predict when you're not in that state. And finally, that the lack of empathy

between these two states is mutual. That's right. We're gonna get into a whole sort of chorus of of of selves situation in here where the we can kind of think of ourselvesselves as like a a jury that is arguing with itself, and none of these individuals can really see eye to eye on the important topics. Now, um, I think it's interesting to think about our relationship with

these different emotions, but particularly anger. Uh, you know, humans have have obviously pondered states of anger for a long time. As long as they've had self reflection, and as long as we've been capable of noticing that there are indeed changes in our mental state that impact behavior and also can seem far into us, at least on reflection. Right, Because this this gap can be both prospective and retrospective.

It's not only that you failed to understand exactly what you're going to think and feel and how you're going to act when you're angry. You can also look back on yourself having been angry five hours ago and not understand why you behaved the way you did. It can seem like that was somebody else, right, And of course there are various examples. You can turn to have supernatural attempts to explain this. You know what sort of spirit or demon beset me when I was in that state?

But then there are plenty of logical attempts to understand what's going on as well. So I was looking at a book by William V. Harris titled Restraining Rage, Dealing with Anger and Antiquity, and I was also looking at a write up of the book by Joy Connolly. I was taken by by this because Connolly cites another book that I've read from Elaine Scary is The Body and Pain, which is a very deep contemplation of the nature of pain.

I've I've sited on the show before. Um kind of a kind of a thick, deep read in many respects. But but but there's some wonderful bits to it. Um. A point that Scary makes in the book is that human language is severely lacking in its ability to plunge the subjective variety and depths of human pain, which, to refresh, entails not only nerve signals, not only just sort of basic information about what your body is doing or what's being done to it, but also emotional states about those

nerve signals, etcetera. Yeah, because pain is not only a physical feeling the same way something might feel warm or might feel fuzzy, uh, it is also a motivation state. Pain comes with a you must clause. So Connolly compares pain to anger in this a subjective power that is

also transformative and protean. Meanwhile, Harris's main area of exploration is that out of antiquity arises the popular idea that anger is something that can and should be managed in control, and by the Imperial Roman time, it's widely and popularly held you can simply live an anger free life if you know what you're doing and you're devoted enough to to this way of life. Yeah, I'd be kind of skeptical about how reasonable it is to expect that you

can do this totally for your whole life. But you can probably, uh curtail anger impulses to some extent. And I think this would be part of the philosophy of like the Stoics, right, who might say, try to try to observe your emotions as if they are something from happening, you know, at a distance that does not affect you, right, right, So it's I mean, it's it's not to say that controlling your emotions is not important. I mean, we all

have to be able to regulate emotions. But this idea that that anger just shouldn't be felt and you should never feel it, that's to a large extent contrary to modern understanding of anger, the idea that you know, anger is also something that must be felt and even released at times. It is not healthy to just bottle all that anger down and say and put it away, to

just push it all into your depths. Um. But by by the second century see Harris points out that there there are Christian thinkers like St. Augustine and others that acknowledge so, well, okay, there is such a thing as righteous anger. You can be angry and and and it's okay, it's there's there's like a light side to anger itself. Of course, then again, if you look at a lot of the things people actually do while believing they're acting in quote righteous anger, a lot of it is pretty

terrible stuff. So like so it's like, uh, yeah, there's a weird contradiction. I mean, anger is part of the suite of things that gives human life its character, and so it's kind of hard to imagine a rich and full life that doesn't have an anger component to it.

And yet most of us would probably realize that we're we do not make the best decisions when we're angry, and that even even in states where we're maybe truly righteously angry about something, a reaction to that situation might be better determined in a state of calm than in that state of anger. Right right, though, it is interesting to to to think about, like all the different states we go through trying to decide what states are the

best states in which to make various decisions. If you if you follow that that line of of of questioning too far, you you almost feel like you're venturing into astrology territory, like like, Okay, I have to make this decision. Is this a decision I should make um when I'm full or when I'm hungry? Or should I make it mid meal? You know? Is this a morning decision or an afternoon decision? A sleepy or an awake decision? How many cups of coffee should I have had before I

get into the deciding state for this decision? Well, that highlights another problem, which is that, of course, decision theory is goal dependent, right, So part of exactly what's going on in in that those contradictions you just highlight is that when we're in one state, we have different goals

than we do when we're in another state. I mean, usually the way you can think about it is that when you are calm and when you can think logically, you're able to prioritize the things that are like your long term goals or the things that mean the most to you that you wish in your other states you would prioritize. But then once you get into those states, you don't anymore you might prioritize some kind of like short term acquisition or relief that doesn't align with your

long term goals. Yeah, exactly. Now to go back to ancient thought and the topic we're discussing here today, Uh, there was still some some serious contemplation regardings, for instance, how anger interacts with reason. Harris In in his book

shares the following quote from Aristotle's Eudemian ethics. Quote, Anger thumos seems to listen to reason to some extent, but to mishear it, as do hasty slaves who run out before they hear the whole of what one says and then muddle the order, or as dogs bark if there is simply a knock on the door before looking to

see if it is a friend. So Anger, by reason of the warmth and hastiness of its nature, though adheres, does not hear and order and rushes to retaliate for reason or a mat genation, informs us that we have been insulted or slighted, and anger, reasoning as it were, that anything like this must be fought against, heats up of course straight away, whereas appetites do not obey reason at all, and are therefore more disgraceful, for the person who is unrestricted in respect of anger is in a

sense controlled by reason. Now, not everything in this quote is is useful for our discussions today, and it's it's clear even from this that there is a you know, there's a there's a contemplation though, of how how thumos affects logos, how anger alters the functionality of our reason and certainly from a modern perspective, our abilities to simulate the internal states of of of ourselves and others. This is just part of human reason. Now, to come back

to the idea of hot and cold. Uh, it's notable that this is exactly the way that Aristotle discussed anger and fear. He believed that anger caused the blood to radiate away from the heart, resulting in thoughts and actions of anger. And fear was the flip side of this, when the it contracts towards the heart, resulting in bodily chills and various symptoms of fear that were reported things

like trembling, sweating, and even your nation. Uh. Though I guess in the sense of the psychological principle, both of these would be hot states. Both anger and fear are states where you're being driven by your emotions. So the for the purposes of our psychological discussion here today, being in a state of fear is hot. But from Aristotle's point of view, being in a state of fear would

be cold. Sure, okay, not to be confused with being physically cold, which will also factor into the experiments will discuss. So as my main source on this, I was looking at a paper published in the year two thousand five in the journal Health Psychology by the Carnegie Mellon Professor of Psychology and Economics, George Loewenstein, and this paper was called Hot Cold, Empathy, gaps and Medical decision Making. Alright, so the first thing we need to do in talking

about the paper is a couple of definitions. So first of all, there is the concept of affect. What is affect, Well, the the ap A psych Dictionary defines it as quote any experience of feeling or emotion, rang ranging from suffering to elation, from the simplest to the most complex sensations of feeling, and from the most normal to the most

pathological emotional reactions. So as a mental shortcut, you can think about psychological references to affect as feelings so these would include common emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, discussed, surprise, and so forth. However, for the purpose of this paper, Loewenstein notes that he's using a more inclusive definition of affect, which pulls in not only these classically recognized subjective emotions

I just mentioned, but also motivational drive states. And these could include things like hunger, thirst, physical pain and discomfort, addiction, cravings, and so forth. And so in the other literature, affect might refer to just the emotions and not the drive states, but for simplicity's sake, he's going to say affect in this paper to refer to all of it. So what's the difference between affective states of cold versus hot? Basically, it is a cold state is whenever you are not

in some kind of affectively excited state. It's whenever you are calm able to think reasonably and make reasonable plans and so forth. Meanwhile, anytime you're feeling in an intense emotion or drive for something, this is a hot state. You are in an activated emotional or motivational place, and that that stuff is affecting your behavior, because it certainly

does affect your behavior. You might think of affective states as a kind of mode of the brain can occupy, and then within that mode, nearly everything the brain does works a little bit differently than it does in other affective states. So Lowenstein writes, quote, affect influences virtually every aspect of human functioning perception, attention, inference, learning, memory, goal choice, physiology, reflexes,

self concept, and so on. Indeed, it has been argued that the very function of affect is to orchestrate a comprehensive response to critical situations that were faced repeatedly in

the evolutionary past. So I think it's very reasonable to think about affect both in terms of these emotions like sadness or anger, and in terms of drive states like hunger or thirst, or or desire for sleep to be not just a thing you feel in your brain, but a sort of mode that takes over your entire brain and affects sort of becomes your person when you are

in it. And of course we know by this definition affect has has powerful effects on decision making, typically in this form, right, you know, So when we are in a cool and logical state, we can weigh costs and benefits. We can make plans. We can organize our behavior to serve whatever our long term goal is. So might think, you know, I want to reduce my sugar consumption, so I'm not going to eat six candy bars like I did yesterday. Or I want to be well rested tomorrow.

I'll be at my best if I'm well arrested, so I will go to bed early tonight. Or you know, I want to maintain a good relationship with my friends, so I will not blow up with rage at them about some minor thing they do that annoys me. Or you might think I want more money, so I'm going to ask for a raise at work. But then of course affect comes in and it can interfere with us following through on the things we planned to do when

we were in a cool state. So of course, maybe you planned not to eat the candy, but then you get hungry and you think I want them, and just the brain, it's like there's a different person guiding your brain. You might plan to go to bed early, but then that phone just kind of wants you to keep scrolling,

and suddenly it's three am. You felt like you couldn't stop for some reason, uh, and so forth, Maybe you know, you plan to ask your boss for a raise, but then in that meeting you suddenly get kind of scared for some reason that you and anticipate, and you just never bring it up. And I'm sure every single person listening has had experiences of this kind in one way

or another. It's it's a core contradiction of human life that we want to behave in a way we know we should behave to achieve certain goals in the long run, but then at that moment of choice, something else seems to take over and we behave in a completely different way than we plan to now. The core observation of the hot cold empathy gap is based on this contradiction,

but it actually takes the problem one step further. Not only do we often fail to behave the way we know we should in the moment, we are also really bad at realizing in advance that this might happen or understanding in retrospect why it happened. And Lowenstein writes, quote, people have difficulty predicting what they will want and how they will behave in affective states that are different from

their current state. So it's not just that we often give into these states that oil our long term plans and goals. It's that we fail to anticipate what we will think, how we will feel, and what we will do when we're actually in those states later. So this is the empathy gap, and research shows that it tends to go in both directions. So there are hot to cold empathy gaps and there are cold to hot empathy gaps. So the cold to hot empathy gap is more what

we were just talking about. Uh, you know, you're you're in a calm state and you just don't You're not able to predict how much you will be affected in the future when you're in a hot state. And the hot cold version is that people in hot states underestimate the extent to which they're thinking and behavior are influenced

by transient affective states. So, uh, if you're making decisions while you're angry, you might at some level recognize that you're angry, but you're still probably going to severely underappreciate how differently you're acting right now because of your hanger

than than you would be acting otherwise. And then he offers up three other categories of hot cold empathy gaps, so they can be prospective, retrospective, and interpersonal prospective empathy gaps, or when we fail to predict our own future behavior in an effective state different from our current One classic

example is the grocery shopping when you're hungry. I've done it many times, you know, like you you just don't realize how much you're not really going to want this thing you're buying later because you're you're hungry while you're buying it. Um Retrospective gaps are when you look back and realize you just you don't understand how or why you behaved as you did when you were in a

different affective state. Like you know, I, I know I was angry, but like, why did I yell at Jeffrey over nothing just because his shoes were squeaking on the floor. I don't understand why I blew up like that. And then finally, interpersonal gaps are the inability to understand and predict the behavior of another person who's in a different

affective state than yourself. I would propose that a huge person edge of the time you are analyzing the behavior of another person and you think to yourself, why would they do that? It doesn't make any sense. It's because they were in some kind of affective state that you are not currently sharing. Yeah, it's it's interesting to think. I mean you see various little tidbits of wisdom that often captured this. I remember we had a coworker us to have one over their death that said, like, each

person is fighting a great battle. Remember that each person is fighting a great battle or something that extent, which is to you could interpret as being like, consider the fact that anyone you're interacting with is in is in in an effective state. You know that that they are

you know, angry or angry, etcetera. But but I wonder does that sometimes sort of make you assume that anyone you're interacting with is going to be in some sort of an extreme state, And um, I don't know, it can I feel like it can make one wary of other people, you know, like, assume everyone is angry. It's

it becomes a very difficult world. Well, I would interpret that more to be like, uh uh, be open minded about what is motivating other people and that they actually maybe when their behavior seems unreasonable to you, it's worth remembering that it's possible. I mean, it varies by the situation obviously, but it's possible they are just reacting to something that's going on in their lives, where you would be reacting the same way if you were in the

same situation. But I mean, yeah, it's true that, yeah, there are all these aphorisms that try to communicate this. There's another paper by Loewenstein and a and a co author named Leaf and boven Uh that's looking into how how the hot cold empathy gap affects perceptions of thirst, hunger and thirst. And there's a traditional Irish proverb sited at the beginning of the paper that says, the full

person does not understand the needs of the hungry. And I think that's good because that's true not just of different people. Like when you're really satisfied, you you you don't understand the needs of somebody who is not satisfied in the same way. But you also don't even understand what you would be like if you were in the same situation of not being satisfied. Than in fact, we could go ahead and look at that that thirst paper

as one example, so Lowenstein in this article. So it's a number of different studies that have illustrated the hot cold empathy gap, and this one is in a paper called social projection of transient drive states published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in two thousand three. This is by George Lowenstein and Leaf van Boven and this was a study conducted at a gym. I thought this

was pretty funny. It goes like this, So the researchers asked people arriving at the gym uh if they're planning on a vigorous cardio workout, and if they are, if they would be interested in taking part in a short survey. The survey involved in eagining yourself in a scenario and then answering questions about the scenario. So you would read a prompt that that goes as follows, with a few

abridgements for length. It says, imagine that three vacation ers in Colorado this past August embarked on a short six mile hike. As the day wore on, they realized that they were hopelessly lost. Worse, because they had packed lightly for a short hike, they had not carried much in the way of food or water. In the space below, please take the perspective of one of the three hikers and describe your situation, how you got into it, how you feel now. Both physically and mentally and what you're

hoping will happen. And then after that prompt they were asked specific questions such as, which do you think is the most unpleasant for the lost hikers, hunger or thirst? Which do you think the hikers regretted not packing more water or food if you were in the hikers shoes, which do you think you would regret not packing uh? And then finally they were asked to rate, on a scale of one to ten, their current level of hunger, thirst,

and how warm they were. Now here's the kicker. After the people agreed to participate in the survey, they were randomly divided into two groups. One group did the survey immediately so just whatever you know, normal state they're in when they're entering the gym before the workout begins, and the other group did the survey immediately after they finished

their workout. Based on the hot cold empathy gap, the authors predicted that the people who just finished a workout would be much more likely to think that the hikers would regret not bringing water and to mention thirst in the open ended response, because they themselves would more likely be hot and thirsty after their cardio routine and the

experiment did indeed find what the authors had predicted. The differences were pretty strong, so like the difference in um people who rated the thirst as being more unpleasant than hunger. For the hikers, that was fifty guests thirst would be more important before exercise, using eight percent of the people thought thirst would be more uh important after they had exercised, And and similar trends broke through when they were asked to imagine themselves in the in that scenario as well.

Thirst is just a much more salient concept when you are actually thirsty, even though like you know rationally that in that situation you would be thirsty, that's not like a surprise. And yet somehow the fact that you are actually thirsty in this moment makes you realize it with much greater intensity. Yeah, this is this. I love this because this is one of those revelations that I think

too many people will not come. It doesn't seem like that much of a revelation, you know, like it may seem just like an outrageous overstatement of the obvious that yes, while you are yourself thirsty, you can relate more to thirsty individuals and situations in which one might be thirsty.

But uh, you know, here we see these various questionnaires prove this out, um, you know, and and ultimately like show even more important is the conditions in which we have the empathy, but then the conditions in which we are then removed from that empathy. That's the part that's really telling, right, I mean, I think it's not surprising that a thirsty person would rate thirst as very important

in a hypothetical scenario. I think what's more surprising about it is the level to which when you're not thirsty, you don't predict how important thirst is when you are thirsty. Right now. Of course, we all have moments there in a life where we're at least momentarily forced to confront that where we for instance, we we realize, oh, I didn't bring enough water for this hike. I brought the amount of water that that that that that fully satisfied me.

I thought was going to be appropriate, and that was incorrect, right right, Which is a really good example of the real world consequences of the hot cold empathy gap. You don't pack enough water on the hike because even though you know when it ants rationally that you will need water, you you just underestimate how much you will need water.

The thirsty you has a greater appreciation for that water need. Yeah. Yeah, there's one of those examples where like the it seems like an outrageous amount sometimes you know, like that's a lot of water. I don't need that much water, but you do need that much. That's why they're bothering to tell you, because they feel, you know, left your own devices, you might only bring like one flimsy bottle, you know. Lowenstein goes on to elaborate about this with an interesting

line of thoughts. So it starts with a general finding that we are uh somewhat different than the hot cold empathy gap, just that we're generally worse at predicting the behavior of other people than we think we are. Sometimes other people's thoughts and behaviors don't make sense to us. We don't know why they do it. We're not able to predict what they do. And the question is why why do we often fail to model the thoughts and

behaviors of other people? A common way of answering this question in the theoretical psychological realm is that we tend to underestimate or overestimate the differences between ourselves and others as people, sort of as in terms of fixed psychological traits, and these are concepts known as false consensus assuming that other people are like us and think like we do, or false uniqueness, assuming that we are unique and other people don't think like us or would do the opposite

of whatever we do. And these effects could both place some role, But Lowenstein in this paper actually argues that the largest source of error when we fail to predict how other people will act is not misjudging the gap between different people's fundamental tendencies and personalities, but in misjudging

the differences even within ourselves between affective states. So he writes, quote, when people attempt to predict the behavior of another person in a different situation than their own, they first attempt to predict how they would behave in that situation, and then adjust for perceived differences between themselves and the person whose behavior they're attempting to predict. Because they mispredict their own behavior as a result of hot cold empathy gaps,

they then mispredict the behavior of others. And I thought it was interesting how much this sort of aligns with, or at least connects to another psychology concept we've done episodes on in the past, the the idea of fundamental attribution error, which is the finding that when we observe what other people do, we tend to overestimate the influence of fixed traits like disposition and personality and underestimate the

influence of transient situational factors. So if you were to see somebody else I don't know, uh, steal a bottle of water or something, due to fundamental attribution error, you might think, Oh, they stole that bottle of water because they're a dirty, dishonest thief and they just steal. That's

what this person is like. But in fact maybe they did it even though they wouldn't normally steal, but because they're very thirsty, And in fact, you would do the same thing in that situation, but you're not very thirsty now, so it doesn't occur to you. The fundamental attribution raor episode was the one where we started with that that big thought experiment about alien you know, like the question of do you let Kine onto the ship and wilily refuses and so forth. That was fun, but thirst is

not the only effective state. Of course, Again, the hot cold tympathy gap seems to apply to basically any emotional or motivational drive state. Another one that is commonly researched is pain. So there's a study that Lonstein talks about here where he was also a co author. This one is by Daniel Reid and Lowenstein on It's called Enduring Pain for Money Decisions based on the Perception and Memory

of Pain in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. And this was studying the decision making of people who are asked to stick their hand in a bucket of ice water for money. Uh. That might sound kind of weird, but buckets of cold water are often used for psychological studies on pain tolerance because they succeed in causing extreme momentary discomfort with very little risk of permanent injury. And so this experiment used monetary pricing to test pain tolerance.

You know, it would be looking at things like, hey, would you dip your hand in this bucket of ice water for thirty seconds for five dollars? Would you do it for ten dollars and so forth? And an interesting finding here was that people who had experienced the ice bucket dip a week earlier demanded lower compensation to do it again than people who had done the ice dip

just moments before. So even though they had both had the same experience, people in a in the situation ironically named cold state, who were you know, it had been a while and they were calm, they were more willing to take the pain again for less money. And people in a quote hot state, the people who had just had the experience were less willing and demanded more money

before they would repeat it. Uh. And from here Lowenstein goes on to quote an interesting passage from um from a book called Shadows on the Waste Land by stroud N that was about crossing Antarctica, and it's talking about a figure in that story who was suffering from I believe severe frost bite, and the author is saying I could do nothing but reassure him that I understood, though I did not. Really, pain is a problem that cannot

be shared. Yeah, and this this is something that uh, this is one of the core points that Elaine Scary makes in the Body in Pain about you know, in particular, that there's just the pain is ultimately so impossible at times for us to relate from one person to another. And it also it is like basically the limits are

the imagination that it's Uh. This always makes me think of a line from Corey McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, where he talks about um, you know, contemplating all the world, the pain in the world, um, saying quote, he imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate. And he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless, and so had no way to

know the limits of those souls. And what he feared was that there might be no limits and scary into their hands, says quote. The only state that is as anomalous as pain is the imagination. Yeah. The example of pain is so interesting because while of course other people

have always experienced types of pain that you haven't. Everybody has experienced pain of some sort, and yet there's an ineffability to the experience of pain that, even having experienced it before, you sort of can't recreate in your mind without being in pain in the moment, Like you can acknowledge that there is something about pain that you just don't get when you're not in pain. You can realize that's true, and you still don't get it, Like realizing

that gap doesn't close the gap. Yeah. Absolutely, And this actually comes back to there's another example in the Lowenstein paper I wanted to mention briefly that was about drug craving as another thing that's been studied in the hot cold empathy gap research. So there's a study by Jordano at All in two thousand four conducted with people who

were in treatment for heroin addiction. Of course, quitting highly addictive drugs can cause a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort, you know, it is it is compared to various direct methods of pain infliction often. But so the people who were undergoing this treatment trying to get off of heroin, we're receiving a methodone like maintenance drug called bupreno frin or b up. And the study is summarized

as follows in Lowenstein. So it's talking about the people in the treatment here and they quote, uh, chose between getting an extra dose of b u P versus different money amounts, So for example, ten dollars versus an extra dose, twenty dollars versus an extra dose, and they got to pick which one they would prefer. Continuing with the quote, they were told that they would receive their preferred item from one of these pairs when they came in for

treatment five days later. The critical experimental manipulation involved whether they made this choice when they were currently deprived, right before receiving their current dose of BUP, or right after

when they could be expected to be satiated now. According to the hot cold empathy gap, the authors predicted that people who were currently experiencing drug craving would be better at predicting the value of a future extra dose than people who were not currently experiencing craving, and the hypothesis

was in fact confirmed. The people in the hot state of craving were better able to predict the motivating strength of future drug cravings than the people in a cold state who were doing okay at the moment uh, and the difference in terms of dollar value was almost double. So cold state patients who had just been satiated predicted they would value a future dose at thirty five dollars. Hot state patients predicted that they would valuate around sixty dollars.

And drug addiction isn't in many ways. An almost perfect illustration of the hot cold empathy gap because very often a person who's dealing with addiction realizes they would be better off if they were able to quit, and they may repeatedly plan to do so until the affective state of drug craving becomes overwhelmingly powerful, and the person who, in a cold state planned to quit is unable to anticipate how powerfully motivating their later craving state will be,

even though they have personally experienced it many times before. And this is one of the really surprising things about the hot cold empathy gap that you might think once you have experienced the difference, once you have have known firsthand a particular hot cold dichotomy, now you will get it and you'll be able to empathize with the hot state once you're in a cold state again. But no, this is not what the research finds. Mirror experience of the gap does not seem to close the gap, and

this part is crucial to understand. We have all experienced these gaps in various forms before, regarding a number of different effective states. We know that we're different when we're angry than when we're not angry. We know we're different when we're hungry than not hungry, and yet this somehow does not inoculate us against future empathy gaps. We still fail to predict the difference in both directions. Yeah, yeah,

this is the addiction model here is. I think it's fascinating because on on one hand, yeah, there's if you're if you're looking at this this gap between hot and cold states with people who have experienced the cravings, Like, imagine how you know, how great are the gap between people between with people who have never experienced these cravings. And I think that's that's important to keep in mind, particularly with drug addiction, when you're thinking about drug addiction

treatment and policies and so forth. Well, yeah, I mean, I think this manifests so easily, and like the glib idea where people just say, like why don't they just quit or something? You know, it's just you're just you're

failing to understand how powerfully motivating the cravings are. It also brings to mind and this is by no means limited to just addiction issues, but you you you sometimes see these situations where you'll have a prominent individual who is known to have once had, you know, certain struggles or addictions, and they may say something that that comes off as um as being highly hypocritical, you know, where someone will say, how can they say this when they

experience this themselves? You know, how can they say this when they themselves went through uh, you know, whatever the life experience might be, that's being um brought up in the scenario. And uh, the truth is, like, it doesn't It ultimately doesn't take long at all for someone to no longer be able to relate in their cold state to what it was like being in that hot state. Yeah, exactly, even if they personally experienced it, the gap can still

remain huge. Yeah, not to say you don't remember, you know, what it was like on some level, what it was like to to have cravings, what it was like to be hungry or thirsty, etcetera. But but it's not the same. It's not the same sort it's it's it's memory, but but not the the empathy, not the compassion level that would be there if you were actively uh in that hot state or closer to that hot state. Yeah, but

of course, sorry, I didn't mean to derail you. But yeah, we were talking about pain when we discussed drug craving. Because drug craving I think is in many ways analogous to the motivation state of pain. Yeah. Thank this brings us to the realm of of of torture, uh, which I realized as a heavy topic. But we're not gonna get too heavy into the like, we're not gonna talk about details of torture here for anyone who you know understanding why doesn't want to listen to that. But, um,

you know, on one hand, there are several problems with torture. Obviously, on one hand, there's the false confession problem. Um, you know, on top of it being a violation of humanitarian law and a grave war crime, it's also highly ineffective and drawing out actual information from an individual. Because on one hand, you have the torture victim and whatever truth they may hold, whatever values they possess, whatever will they have to resist, uh,

the you know, the inquisition or what have you. But on the other the torture has the unlimited nature of pain on their side. And this leads leads me to a wonderful quote from the Name of the Rose by on Berto Echo, and I believe this is um. This is brother William of Baskerville speaking on the nature of torture and truth, he writes, Under torture, you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions.

Everything you have heard teld, everything you have read, returns to your mind, as if you were being transported not toward heaven but toward hell. Under torture, you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond, this is truly diabolical, is established between you and him. These things I know, Ubertino, I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can reduce the truth with white hot iron.

Will let me tell you the white heat of truth comes from another flame. Yeah. I mean this is highlighting the difference between the incentives here, like, uh, of course tortured it does. Any pain is a highly motivating state, but it's not necessarily high highly motivating to actually give over true statements. Right, So you know, I think everybody out there pretty much is gonna fall in line with the rash now that torture is bad. Uh, torture is

not something that should be used. But but then we get into the question of well, what is torture and that leads us to another article on which George Lowenstein was was one of the co authors titled what constitutes Torture Psychological Impediments to an Objective Evaluation of Enhanced Interrogation Tactics by Nord Grin, McDonald and Lowenstein. It was published

in Psychological Science in two thousand and eleven. So the office here point out that, yeah, while nearly all nations condemn the use of torture, it can ultimately become difficult to define. Certainly, we we can look at really physically brutal means of torture, you know, techniques that produce blood and leave marks you know that are that may be fatal, and we can say, okay, well that's torture and that's bad, and we don't want to do that, nobody should do that.

But then you get into the whole realm of enhanced interrogation techniques that infamously leave a lot of room for interpretation. And some of the common examples here are inflicting bodily cold uh, you know, putting someone in a cold room not like an ice box. It's going to you know, freeze their limbs and cause frost bite and kill them but uncomfortable, but but otherwise not harmful cold, uh, sleep deprivation,

and also social isolation. So we end up in these situations where someone has to weigh in, like somebody's saying we should do this with people, and someone else is going to come in and decide, well, is this sort of thing we should be doing or we shouldn't be doing? Is this torture? What level of pain are we are we dealing with? Here? And again we get into the whole problem of figuring out like what is pain and

what sort of a discomfort other individuals are feeling. So based on research into the Hot Cold, Into the Gap, the authors here discussed the likelihood that anyone judging these techniques, you know, and we can easily imagine this could be military authorities, lawmakers, or or even just you know, random you know, people reading a newspaper article about about these

practices and the issues around them. So anyone not in the state of said suffering and and and on top of that, but likely never have experienced that state, are therefore severely limited in their ability to empathize with the suffering individual, making them far more likely to quote underestimate that state's motivational force and intensity. Yeah, and one thing that's interesting here. I think they do make this point.

Uh Is that so? So you mentioned that many of the people looking in from the outside making judgments about these practices have never experienced these states to begin with. But even if they had, the important point is, even if they had experience that stated in the past, just the fact that they're not experiencing it currently is enough

for the gap to be in effect. Absolutely so. The researchers here conducted three studies on the aforementioned examples of controversial technique solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and exposure to cold temperatures, and they also did a study on real versus simulated pain. So for the solitary confinement experiment, they took a eight undergraduates. They put them in three groups, including the control group, and one of these groups had a social exclusion mechanic

in play. So basically, for a couple of these groups there was like a ball game going on, just like a few individuals throwing a ball back and forth. And for the exclusion group, it was essentially a game of monkey in the middle with the the the the subject being the monkey and never getting to catch the ball, so they would feel excluded from you know, I'll be

at a very basic social scenario here. Afterwards, people in all three groups were asked to weigh in on us solitary confinement practices, and they found that individuals in the exclusion group, this is the monkey in the middle, perceived the pain of solitary confined individuals to be greater than the in the other two groups. Now this is profound because the kind of exclusion that this person would have experienced in the study is so much less than what

you would actually feel in real solitary confinement. It only takes a little bit of experiencing of exclusion to change your perception of what a more severe exclusion would feel like. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely important to know the researchers are not saying this

person experienced solitary confinement. Now, they just they experienced a fraction like actual solitary confinement orders of magnitude worse for an individual, but just by dipping their toes into that that effective state, they were able to have more compassion for the individuals in question. All right, Then came the sleep deprivation study. So this one, this it's always kind of clever how they end up, you know, trying to

to to model these and study these. But in this one, they tested this out on a hundred and nine part time NBA night course students, giving the questionnaire on this practice to one group before the night class and the other after the night class, believing that the fatigue on these already fatigued students who worked day jobs would be greater following the class, and ultimately they found that fatigued individuals are the ones that take the questionnaire at the

end of the class found sleep deprivation or they judge sleep deprivation to be more painful. They saw it as a more severe tactic. Yeah. Again, so you don't even have to get anywhere close to the level of sleep deprivation that could be arguably called torture here in order for it to sort of shift your perception, you know, to change to take you out of at least that cold state. All right. The third one here, and I think this one was perhaps the most interesting. Uh. This

one deals with with cold cold situations cold rooms. Um, and this is where we bust out the basins of cold water. So this one, they had seventy three university students put their arms in either cold water or room temperature water and then they bust out the questionnaires. So there's one group where you know, there there they put their arm in the cold water, and then afterwards they're immediately given a questionnaire about uh, you know, inmates and

individuals being forced to be in a cold room. Okay. And then there's another group where they get out of the they have their arm in room temperature water, and then they're given the questionnaire. And then there's this third group where uh, so bear with me, they put their arm in the cold water, and then immediately afterwards they're given a questionnaire about some unrelated topic, and then ten

minutes later they're given the cold questionnaire. And so the the interesting thing here is there's yes, the results were consistent with the hot cold empathy gap. Cold students were more likely to judge cold conditions is more severe. But if their question just ten minutes out then the then this results in the return to the full gap of empathy that's found in the room temperature water into duals. Wow,

ten minutes in the gap already rewidens to its regular aperture. Yeah, momentary distraction by another questionnaire in like ten minutes time, that's enough to to to make you completely to a certain extent, like you, you lose any empathetic advantage that

you gained by having that mild experience. And finally, in this particlarticular study, they did this real versus simulated pain study and I'm not going to go into the details on this, but basically, they just wanted to make sure that this wasn't due to people experiencing the pain and

then overestimating the pain experienced by others. They didn't suspect this would be the case, but they did a brief experiment to sort of drive that home and um, you know, and sort of firm up what they were looking at here, and their findings backed up the notion that no, it's underestimation of pain on the part of the pain for each judges. Yeah. So I think the hot cold empathy gap is is very well demonstrated by by a lot

of experimental evidence. It seems really clear that this is is a pretty much core feature of human brains, is that like when we're in that calm, cold state, we we don't fully appreciate how we're going to think and how we're going to act once we're in some kind of hot state. And this clearly has very significant implications for our lives, So it makes me think what could really be done about it? Um, So I was looking around for for things about I don't know, counteracting the

hot cold empathy gap. There are some ways in which it seems like it's hard to actually close the gap without being in the hot situation yourself at the moment you're thinking, so, maybe a better way to deal with the gap is to acknowledge the gap will be there and take precautions in advance, instead of trying to close

it in a way that's ultimately not really possible. So, for example, one thing it seems like you can do is um if you want the preferences that you prioritize while you're in a cold state to prevail later, you can't just trust that hot you tend an hour down the road is going to stick to them. Instead, you want to try to put like external measures in place while you're in a cold state that will limit your ability to make unfortunate decisions while you're in a hot state.

For instance, there are cupcakes around. You don't want to eat the cupcakes, but you've got to realize that hot you is going to want to eat the cupcakes. So the best thing cold you can do is get rid of all the cupcakes, right and give them away. Yes, get get them out of your reach. And so it's not enough to say like, Okay, I'll just remember not to eat them when I'm ungry later that you think that's gonna work, but it doesn't. But you can remove

them from your vicinity. There was another sort of counter measure idea that I came across, actually, so after we decided to do this, I discovered there was a Hidden Brain episode also talking about the hot cold uh empathy gap. This was from a few years back. I think it was called In the Heat of the Moment, and that focused on a lot of different aspects. I tried to keep most of the stuff we talked about different than that, so that if you want to listen to both episodes,

they'll they'll be different things. Uh So, a lot of interesting stuff they talk about in that one too. But there is one thing they get into that I didn't expect,

and it was army training. And the idea is basically that in a lot of armed forces training, essentially what you're trying to do is establishing habits and routines of behavior that you will follow when you're in a high stress situation such as the heat of battle, and that the nature of training for the armed forces is often creating high stress situations that are not actually life and death but kind of simulating those life and death situations

with high stress training, so that when you're actually in a high stress situation with life and death stakes, the the affect influenced decision making that you have to do is actually very minimal. There's not a lot of momentary judgment involved. Instead, you've follow habits and routines that you

have practiced over and over in advance. And that seems like an interesting response to me, Like you you sort of simulate a hot state that you know you will encounter in the future, and you practice, you practice what you do in that state over and over, so that when you're actually in that state, you have a habit to follow instead of a decision to make. Does that make sense? Yeah? Yeah, I mean it's kind of like,

you know, I've encountered encountered this before. Like it's one thing to know that you should maybe do a breathing exercise if you are if you were in a hot state. Let's say you get a bit a bit stressed or angry. Uh, but you can't really trust hot you to decide to do the breathing exercise. Like my or at least my experience with myself, is that if I get into to an anxious anxious mindset or an angry mindset, I'm probably not going to be like, hold on, I should do

a breathing exercise. But if you yourself in the habit of it, you know, that's that's where the benefit lies. Like this is just this is not something I am going to choose to do if the situation is right, this is something I will do this, Uh if I fall into one of these states. Yeah, exactly, that's exactly right. And I think that there's probably a lot to be

gained from sort of generalizing that sort of response. If there's a way that you know it would be best for you to react with when you're in a familiar hot state where you often might might do something that's disend vantageous to you or something you wish you hadn't done later, to sort of try to simulate that state when you're not actually in it, and practice practice something that you will do habitually as a response, and in general, just be prepared for the hot state, um with like

with the hangar situation, for example, Like, it's really easy in the cold uh state to just assume you're not going to need that snack, But yeah, maybe you should just go ahead and pack the snack anyway, have something on hand, because you know what's gonna happen. You know how this is gonna end. I've been through an extensive carrot stick munching regimen to prepare me for this moment. All right, we're gonna go and wrap it up there, But obviously we'd love to hear from everyone out there.

What are your experiences with the hot cold empathy gap? Um? You know what, what scenarios have you found yourself in? What what tips do you have for for dealing with it? What are some other ramifications of it applications as well that we didn't get into in this episode that you might want to bring up. We'll email us about it and we'll we'll chat about it. We may even chat about it on Mondays. That's our listener Manil episode and

the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Short Form Artifact or Monster Fact on Wednesday and on Fridays, we do Weird how Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.