Jessica Tracy || Shades of Pride

excited to have Jessica Tracy on the podcast. Jessica is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on the self conscious emotions of pride, shame, guilt, and embarrassment. In addition to numerous scientific papers, she's author of the recent book Take Pride, Why the Deadliest sin holds the Secret to human six us. Thanks for chelling with me today, Jessica, Yeah, no problem, happy, happy to do it. So. I'm a long time admirer of your

research and thank you. It's really innovative and builds important ways off of Darwin's work on emotions right and the kind of emotions he noticed. Yeah, no, absolutely, I think that was definitely the inspiration for a lot of what I've done is to sort of say, okay, well Darwin suggested this, and Darwin's work was largely theoretical. He made observations, and he had observations from other people he connected with.

But really Paul Ekman was sort of the researcher scientist who actually took Darwin's ideas and tested them in a way that was just incredibly thorough and groundbreaking. And so I'd say my work most closely builds off what Eckman did, but both of us are drawing and ideas from Darwin, for sure. Yeah. So Eckman he first identified six emotions? Was it? How many? Basis I five? Yeah, so first

I entify five. He added six later on. But so his basic emotions are, let's see, anger, happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, and well those are the five, and then he later added contempt as a sixth. So no pride, no pride exactly. No, you know what I mean. I think there's sort of a good reason for that, you know, from sort of a basic evolutionary standpoint of emotions that help you survive in a really direct way. You know, you see a

threat in the environment, like a wolf. You need to quickly kind of engage in some sort of action that's going to allow you to deal with that threat. An emotion like fear is going to be really useful for that, And you can make a similar argument for all of Eckman's five basic emotions. For pride, it's a lot more complicated. There is no simple situation in which you feeling pride or displaying the pride is going to make a life

or death difference. However, pride does serve important functions regarding status. It helps us attain status, it helps us get power over others, it helps us become influential, and that is ultimately evolutionary or adaptive in an evolutionary sense, but less directly so than something like fear or anger. Would Jeffer Miller make the argument that it is just as direct, but it's just their sexual selection processes, not natural selection.

You can make that argument for sure that status is a way of attracting mates, and so if pride is going to help you get status, it's going to help you attract mates. Sure, I still think it's indirect because you have to go through that status piece first, right, it's not you know, I don't know that pride per se is going to attract mats. I mean, there's some evidence, actually, we've done studies showing that men who display pride are

considered more attractive. So maybe maybe that's what it's about. But I think it does so much more than that that I wouldn't want to make a strong this is

just about sexual selection kind of argument. Yeah, I don't think I would either, but I just I could imagine if you was listening to this podcast, you'd probably make that argument, like one could make the argument that it's just as direct as Yeah, you know, so let's think about sort of what are these some of the basic needs that evolve that are related to the emotion of pride, the need for competence probably sure, sure, yeah, mastery that

sort of thing, Yeah for sure. I mean. So the way that we think about pride in my lab and my collaborators is that, you know, you can think about the pride nonverbal expression, and you can think about the pride subjective feeling experience, and it's often useful to think about them separately. So the nonverbal expression serves a signaling function.

It communicates something to other people. In our group. And what we found is that specifically when we see others show pride, we right away know that they're feeling pride. They're showing pride, we know what that is. It's recognized automatically without any thinking. People all over the world have this ability to recognize it, so it's not just something specific to our culture. And then after knowing or you know, at the same time as we know they're feeling pride,

we also see them as deserving of high status. Now we can override that, we can sort of look at it and say, wait a minute, I feel like they should be high status, but I don't think they deserve it, so I'm not going to give them high status. But our automatic tendency, kind of our gut reaction to seeing that expression is this is someone who's high ranking, and that's really important. Right, That's going to serve a really powerful function in terms of getting status in your group.

And there are a lot of profound narcissists who in their head they are deserving of high s status, so they project that sort of look on their face even though they're not actually deserving of it. Right, Yeah, I mean that's really it's a complicated issue. Right, So the question of whether you're deserving it and whether you show

it just because you're deserving it. I think that's a big, sort of open issue because it's very easy to show pride without actually feeling it, right, I mean, people can fake it. It's not a hard to fake emotion expression. It's basically pushing your chest up, standing up tall, tilting your head up a bit, smiling slightly. Almost anyone can do it. And so that sort of phrases the question of what happens if you show it when you don't deserve status, and you know, I think this is an

interesting issue where we're still kind of exploring. Our research suggests that even if you don't deserve it, people still have that automatic tendency. I think we're hardwired to have that tendency. It generalizes across culture, as we found, so I think it's sort of an innate part of being human to see the pride expression in that way. However, I think people do look for other information before deciding, Okay, I'm actually going to grant you status. I'm actually going

to treat you as if you deserve hy status. And that's where you know a narcissist who is kind of acting like a jerk, or hasn't done anything impressive, or you know, maybe even did something sort of that was problematic. You know, that's going to be a problem because observers will see the expression and think, Okay, maybe he deserves status. But then we'll very quickly be able to override it and say, no, you know what, he's just posturing he

doesn't actually deserve it. Yeah. You know, when I saw some of the pictures of the pride emotion in some of the papers and things, I think I saw one picture with it so a karate pose or something, and one to maybe yeah there' judo. Yeah. Yeah. I just can't help but see that face on Donald Trump every single time I see him. I don't see a smile from him ever. I see that Yeah, yeah, yeah, No,

I think that's it's fair. He definitely shows a lot of pride he and I mean, he's an interesting case where he displays the expression, but he also says things that are just incredibly grandiose and narcissistic in a way that most people don't. You know, one big thing that we found about pride in terms of the experience is

that there's two different kinds of pride. There's the pride that we feel when we have an achievement, and it's sort of about confidence and productivity, and there's a pride that we feel when we're kind of maybe feeling a little too good about ourselves. It's sort of more like arrogance and grandiosity egotism, and most people are really good, you know. It's interesting, like I think for some people it feels good. I think for other people it's sort of almost a source of shame that you know, you

might be arrogant in that way. But but what's you know, what's interesting is that most people sort of know okay. The norms of most societies suggest you've got to rein it in to some extent, and culture is very dramatically on the extent to which you need to rein it in. Authentic pride is usually okay in most cultures. And actually in my book, I argue that authentic pride is a

good thing. That it evolved, you know, to serve important functions, but also it can still serve really important functions without causing a lot of harm, whereas subristic pride can be really problematic. It can cause all kinds of interpersonal problems. You know, people who feel it a lot tend to have trouble making close friends, they're not typically well liked.

They often suffer from depression and anxiety. So there's a clear difference between these two prides, with one being you know, in some sense more psychologically adaptive, I would say, to experience than the other. Thank you for talking about that research, because I love that, you know, I love that research that you do. Thank you, But can you elaborate a

little bit, like, regardless of whether it's authentic or pubistic. See, you've done some really fascinating research that kind of like, regardless of authentic or hubristic, you've done some interesting individual differences trait work showing that people who tend to experience pride regularly in their lives that is cool, with a lot of a whole wide range of positive outcomes. Right, No, actually hubristic pride, No, it does not, regardless of whether

it's authentic or hebristic. Almost sort of, you know, almost every finding that we've seen with the two facets of pride suggest that authentic pride is positively correlated with all kinds of positive outcomes like you suggest, And I could list some of them if you're interested. Hubristic pride is correlated mainly negatively with those same things, and I'm trying to think positive things. Hubristic pride is correlated with its

correlated with approach seeking. So people high and hebristic pride tend to be kind of oriented toward approach others. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I thought that you had like a trade scale of just like general pride without the flavors. Okay, then I'm misunderstanding some research I've read. Okay, cool, that's cool. So h I would argue that if there is a skill like that and there, you know, people have measured pride using just the single word pride for example, Yeah,

that's typically picking up on authentic pride. So that's what our work has shown, is that the reason that you show these positive correlations is because when people think about pride, kind of the main thing they think about is authentic pride. And I should say in North American culture. It varies from culture to culture, and so when people think of just pride, they're thinking of authentic pride, and authentic pride

is related to all kinds of positive outcomes. Yeah, So I just love that research so much on those other different types of pride, and I'm trying to link it to doctor Cultner's work on power, whcause it seems there's so a lot of threads of literature that seem to be very related to each other. They're kind of saying similar things using different words. You know. It's like doctor

Keltner's studies power. He kind of defines it as the drive to like alter the states of others, and that can be in a kind of a positive or negative way.

And his research has shown that like different motivations that are wanting power, they can kind of kind of map onto hubristic versus authentic, you know, so he really does make the case for you know, he has like people working in groups that tend to show high need for altering the states of others in a way that they want to dominate the person as opposed to growth, you know, growing the person as well as themselves, and they're just

very different motivations. Trying to think of other research that maps onto this. Well. So I'm sorry just to you know, because I think we've done a lot of work distinguishing very similar to the two kinds of power you just talked about. We distinguish between dominance and prestige, and that this work is based and sort of it. It's similar to the power ideas and a lot of it, you know,

there's a lot of overlapping stuff here. What's unique about our account is it sort of ingrained in evolutionary theory. So it comes from an idea that Joe Henrich, who's an evolutionary anthropologist, first came up with back in the two thousand and one based on ethnographic research. So basically he noticed that and cultures all over the world, mostly small scale traditional societies, there tend to be two different ways of getting power, getting that is to say, influence

over others. And so people could effectively get influence over others by being what you call dominant, which means, you know, sort of taking control, being manipulative, being aggressive, you know, hostile in some cases, and essentially making others afraid so that they felt they had to give power to this person or else, you know, their life might be at risk or at least their well being or their resources.

But at the same time, in these groups, people were also able to get power or influence by being what Joe calls prestige, prestigious and prestige is basically almost sort of you could think of it as more merited power. It's earned. People earn respect by contributing something of value to the group. And typically these are people who are smart or wise, or have you know, certain skills or

knowledge that is going to benefit others. And other people want to learn the skills or you know, benefit from this person's knowledge, and so they essentially give this person, you know, they defer to them, they allow them to have influence over them in order to be able to copy them, to learn from them. And so these prestigious people essentially get power by virtue of kind of being

useful leaders. Right, They're contributing something to the group. Other people want to learn from them, so they look up to them, they genuinely respect them, and they kind of willingly give them power. Yeah, and I really like that. I used to write about that all the time when I used to blog for Psychology Day, like ages ago. I don't know if you ever saw my articles writing about your work like a long time. Oh no, that's awesome.

I'll send them. I'll send some of those likes. I'd be shocked, I've just talked if you did read them. You know, but I'll be I'll send them to you after this. Okay, So I really like the dominance label for that. My gut is not one hundreds of sold on the prestige label for what you're describing. I love

the distinction and I make so much sense. I'm just thinking about the prestige like it's funny because the people who like are really dominant, I mean, they would really like to be prestigious too, Like that's something that they really strive for as prestige. Even maybe note not always from an evolutionary standpoint. You know, the idea is that often people who who go for dominance have of particular skills or attributes that make that a more viable path.

So they may not be smart enough, and maybe they want to be prestigious, but they know they're not smart enough. Maybe they don't care because you know, they're big and strong and they know, look, this is an easy way to get power. Why should I either reading that book or learning that skill or being nice to people when I can just take control because I could threaten to beat them up. Yeah. So it's interesting because so yeah, so you are using social status in like you're fractionating

social status. And that is interesting because I'm getting stuck on the term social status because you know, like we find our research that like these things cluster together, like that's striving for power, they're striving for social status. Those motives cluster together. I think like a lot of people who have authentic pride, they don't actually have the motive

for prestige. I guess That's what I'm trying to say, is like, even though they end up being prestigious as a natural, organic outgrowth of there, that's not what they're

striving for. Yeah, I think that's totally true. I think that you don't necessarily need to motivated to get power in order to get it through the prestige route, right, And according to the original prestige dominance model, you definitely know that it's sort of Prestige is almost I wouldn't say accidental, but it's almost a byproduct of the fact that you happen to have a lot of knowledge and you allow other people to copy your knowledge, and so

as a natural effect of that, these people are going to defer to you as a way of you know, basically learning what you what you know. But you're right, the motivation to retain power I don't think is necessary to it. Yeah, yeah, and motivations matter so interesting. This is just so relevant to the world today, and well, lots of things going on in the world today, that's true, I agree, And you know, I did just see it

playing out in politics, you see. You know, you try to like you can kind of sense who's like authentically like in the Senate or in the whatever, because they want to make a change, in a positive change, and you could kind of see those who are there you try to like dominate and make laws that you know, lateral decisions, you know, like this is my decision, and therefore everyone should be this way. You know. Yeah, yeah,

you kind of see these different flavors. Oh, absolutely, No, absolutely, I mean I think you know, when I when I wrote my book, I sort of it was before Trump, before I started the book, before he was even running for president, but I still was using him as an example. And then once he got in politics, it was really

this perfect contrast. So I haven't compared him to former President Obama because he did a number of things the way he talked, the way that he behaved that really nicely exemplified prestige, and so it was a useful contrast that way, that's a really good contrast. So you've also studied I love to talk about shame a little bit as well, because you've studied shame as well. You've studied embarrassment. You studied a lot of these self conscious emotions, but

shame's another interesting one. Now, we had a little email exchange about this, and you said it's not quite right to say they are opposites of each other, pride and shame, but as a rough horristic you know, it is interesting too, Like, for instance, you look at certain research programs like I

study narcissism. I study the different between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, and the main emotion that underlies vulnerable narcissism is shame, whereas they the main emotion that underlies grandiose narcisism is hubistic pride, as you, But they're both narcissistic emotions because they're theory. Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of people don't think of shame as as self absorption, but it is.

It's an intense self absorption. Oh yeah, totally. No, I mean I definitely subscribe to sort of the I guess originally for any of you that narcissism is in large part sort of reaction formation to shame, right, that sort of you have your own deep seated feelings of shame and insecurity, and you can't handle them. So the way that you cope with it is to bury those feelings and then really express in a big, big way the opposite. And so you get hebristic pride, which in many ways

is this artificial, inflated pride. Right, it's not genuine because it's defensive, it's sort of manufactured as a way of allowing the person to cope with the shame. For helping the person cope with the shame, totally so working that, Yeah, I really thank you for working through so me because it seems like pride and shame are really closer cousins, I should say, I want to be very specificate, I'm saying hubristic pride and shame are a lot closer cousins

than maybe like soon would intuitively assume. Yeah, no, for sure, I agree, And they both, you know, cause lead to hostility, maybe in different ways. Heubristic pride maybe be more may more proactive aggression, then shame might be more reactive aggression. I don't know you had to test this, but it might be possible. I don't know. Fascinating, Yeah, that's sure. Well tell me more about So tell me more about the research you've done in shame. So we've done stuff

on the shame non verbal expression. That's kind of one of the main What does that look like? Teach me how to? I mean, it looks exactly what you would think, right, So it's sort of head tilted no, not like, yeah, it's head tilted down, show down, slumped, slump posture. Okay, I'm gonna take a screencapture and put it in the show notes. Okay, Okay, So that's okay, I got it. Now, I got it. You know, is a big part of it.

We've found so other people. Daker Keltner actually originally did a lot of this work with the shame embarrassment non verbal expressions, and we kind of built off what he did and we showed that people in Burkina Fasso, who are you, totally cut off from the western world, living in this little tribal village, they recognized the shame expression and the pride expression. And that's that's nice evidence that

these expressions are likely to be universal. Right, there are you know, people all over the world, including these people who are you know, really have no access to Western culture, at least they didn't back in two thousand and three when we did this research. They also identified these expressions as a shame and pride. So that's nice evidence for that, really cool. And I mean, have you talked to him and he must be really fascinated with your additions to

the literature. He was on my dissertation committee, so that's awesome, Jessica. Yeah, yeah, I know, he was super helpful and kind of helping me figure out the original ideas. My dissertation was all about the pride expression, and so Ekman was I was in California, and you know, so he was really a helpful person in terms of that process. Yeah. Cool. So so he updated his model of emotion this proem No,

you know, he's sort of largely retired. I think he's doing more kind of you know, working with criminal investigation stuff, and I don't think he's sort of super active in the research world now, so I'm not sure what has taken fair enough, Okay, so I want to talk about your exciting research on the cognitive processes that elicit self conscious emotions. Because there's some real implications here for therapy, right, and kind of changing people's cognitions and ways that helps

them recover from addictions and things better. Right. Sure, yeah, absolutely, we've done you know, we've done work with shame and addiction. Actually not with the cognitive processes, so we could talk about that. But we have found that, you know, when alcoholics who feel shame about their addiction are more likely

to relapse. And these are newly sober people, so people trying to kind of overcome the addiction and get sober, when they talk about the last time they drank and they felt bad about themselves for it, the more they display nonverbal expressions of shame, the more likely they are to relapse about four months later to drink again, suggesting that shame really is kind of predictive of relapse behavior.

And I think is you know a problem for addicts, right, Shame is sort of you feel shame, you think I'm a terrible person. And so while you might think, okay, well, so then you should change your behavior and stop drinking, I think actually the opposite happens. People sort of get caught in this spiral of there's nothing I can do. I can't change it. I'm just going to keep drinking.

And that does get it the cognitive aspects of it, because I think a lot of what shame is this global stable belief that the self is bad in some way, And if you do have that belief, you can understand there's really no way to kind of get past it. There's no out, there's no way to say, well, I just did it this one time, or I'm okay, I just messed up. It's really just this is who I am, and so that can lead to all kinds of problematic

behaviors totally. That really dovetails nice too with our research on the cognitive distortions that are associated with shame and stuff. Yeah, that's really cool. You know, let's give our listeners hope here. You've also found that narrating addiction related events and redemptive

terms can promote better recovery. So there's a way out, right, Like if we have a listener, we have a listener who really is caught in the cycle, this negative spiral, and they feel like they're addicted there, but they're kind of deserved it in a way, like because they're worthless. Like, what suggestions do you have for they can change, right, Oh, of course, I mean, you know, I should say I'm not you say, of course, A lot of people don't,

don't think of course, you know a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. I can imagine it's a really it's a hard place to be, you know, and I think I would say shame is really sort of one of the worst things psychologically speaking, in terms of recovery. There's some evidence to suggest that, you know, attributing your addiction to specific behaviors. So instead of feeling like I'm a bad person, thinking Okay, you know, I slipped one time, I had

a hard day. I can do better. Tomorrow's a new day, I can start again. And that's the kind of attribution that should lead to guilt instead of shame. So June Tank has done a lot of work suggesting that guilt is about a specific behavior, shame is about the more global, stable self, and guilt is much more positive outcomes. It can lead to recovery changes in behavior, you know, or

changes I should say, more adaptive behavior. So that's you know, that is one possible suggestion, and then yeah, you're right. We have this other study with alcoholics where we found that the way that they told their story. So those of them who sort of told the story of the last time they drank in such a way that it was kind of a redemptive story that yes, this was bad, I hit rock bottom, but then it led me to

change that. Actually the bad event was almost a cause of why things are better, of how I came to realize that's not how I want to be, that's not how I want to live my life. People who were able to do that, they were much more likely to stay sober over the next four months and hopefully, you know after that as well. That's awesome, and I want to I'm sure that could have played lots of addictions. Nute,

I would think, so. Yeah, I mean I think that's you know, an impairical question at this point, but I absolutely agree theoretically it makes sense like that. Okay, so let's talk about some of your alternative research programs, things like you're studying the emotional underpinnings of morality right a little bit. Yeah, this is something we're kind of just

getting into right now. Yeah, I forget that our listeners can actually see the video of me, like when I put things in quotes or whatever, they're not going to see what I'm going to say, you know, yeah, like I just put in quotes alternative, you know, just like you know these I know these are like more new

emerging research programs. Yes exactly. Yeah, Yeah, we're doing some work looking We're doing some work kind of trying to figure out, you know, the extent to which there's a lot of research on discussed, and the extent of which discuss drives moral decision making. So, you know, if I judge something is morally wrong, is that because I'm disgusted

by it? Or do I just say that I'm disgusted by it sort of like you know, as a placeholder or word that kind of conveys my extreme judgment about it without actually feeling nauseated, you know, actually truly disgusted or physiologically disgusted. So that's one thing we're kind of looking into right now. We're also looking into the links between self conscious emotions and moral thinking. So self conscious emotions have kind of always been called moral emotions. A

lot of researchers are referred to them that way. So pride and shame and guilt are the moral emotions to some extent, or at least shame and guilts are, and so we're trying to Very little research has actually connected those emotions with moral thinking. There's sort of the research on moral thinking moral judgments, and then there's the research

on self conscious emotions, and they're largely separate. And part of that is because I think the moral thinking research typically happens about how we judge others, whereas self conscious emotions are much more about how we judge ourselfs. So we're trying to integrate those two kind of literatures by looking at how self conscious emotions influence our moral judgments

of ourself. Essentially, Well, that is so cool. That seems to link really well to what you were just saying earlier about how shame is linked to kind of this. I feel as though I'm at the root no just no good, you know, like there it is exactly. There does seem to be a link there between someone who propetually feel shame and whether or not they feel like

they're a moral person at all. Yeah, exactly, And to some extent, this might be part of why we have an emotion like shame, that it's a way sort of an internal signal telling us, hey, what you're about to do. That might be something that is wrong. Right. It might be sort of part of how we learn and encode moral beliefs of our society because we learn from others in our culture. Okay, well, you know killing is wrong, and then if we you know, killing is an extreme example,

but stealing is wrong. If we find ourselves doing something like that, we should feel shame because we've learned. Okay, this is something that violates a key moral principle in our society, and we should feel badly about ourselves as a result. Why are people But it seems like people who do the worst things in the world are those with the least shame or guilt for what they've done. That makes sense, right, because if you feel a lot of shame about it or guilt about it, you're not

going to do those behaviors. These emotions are punishing, right, yeah. Yeah, So it sort of like you lack that internal punishment, which is why we need the external punishment of you know,

police officers, gotcha. So that's just I guess. So that's an explanation for why that is that characteristic around those who do it more often because they don't feel those emotions that are stopping them, right, exactly, psychopaths feel very little shame and guilt, for example, right, they seem to, and they don't tend to be particularly happy in our research, Yeah, like they Antagonism is negatively correlated a whole bunch of

well being variables, as well as of course growth. I mean, it's hard to grow when you're just like clunking out one over the head. Okay, why you tell me some new areas or research that you're going into, or any other research that you haven't talked about today that you'd like to talk about. You do a lot, You do a lot. Yeah, No, totally, I'm trying to think. I mean,

it's hard. The stuff that I'm doing now is sort of all on the preliminary stages, so it's harder to kind of talk too much about it because you know, we're kind of in the process. I don't want to talk about findings that may not replicate and that kind of thing. I think that's I want to give the wrong idea about something. I mean, I think we've covered the majority of sort of you know, pride expression, two distinct facets. We talked about dominance and prestige. I mean,

we're doing more work on all these areas. So we're studying dominance in prestige now to see you know, we know that leaders who adopt each strategy tend to be effective at getting influence over others. Both kinds of both strategies essentially lead to power, but we don't know whether one might be better for groups than another. So, in other words, if you are led by someone who is highly dominant, we think, okay, that's going to be bad

for the group. People are going to be unhappy, maybe performance will suffer, whereas being led by a prestigious person should be really good for the group. Preliminary research suggests that might not be the case. That actually dominant leaders might help the group come to good outcomes, at least in terms of solving problems, possibly because dominant leaders are more willing to sort of forego consensus and not worry about what people think and just make a quick decision.

And there are times where that can be really useful. So this is sort of an ongoing line of research. Well, really look forward to seeing that line of research. Thanks thanks the collective. It's really important to look at good stuff. Well, I just want to thank you so much for chaling with me today. This has been a long time in the making this podcast chat between us, So thanks so much for chaling with today and for the great worker cool. Yeah,

you're welcome. It's been fun. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast. Also, please add a rating and review

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