February 21, 2012 • 21 mins
Pride: What is pride, and why is it considered such a bad thing? Is pride actually an evolutionary virtue? Join Julie and Robert as they take listeners on a guided tour of the so-called seven deadly sins. Tune in for a look at the science behind pride.Painting by Jacques de Backer (Luciano Pedicini/© Alinari Archives/CORBIS)
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglass. Julie,
you're familiar with the Seven Deadly Sins? Right? Oh yeah, yeah, gluttony,
I'm all over that. Well, well there's more than just glatton. Yeah,
that's there's there's a loss, there's gluttony, there's greed, there's sloped,
(00:25):
there's rat there's envy, and then that the queen of
the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride, the queen so called by
Pope St. Gregory, right, yeah, who largely popularized this, this
list of seven deadly sins, drawing on older did traditions. Uh,
I mean you look back to like the Book of Proverbs.
You have King Solomon dealing with like seven deadly is
(00:48):
in a sense. Uh so there's an older tradition there.
But Gregory is really the popular really popularized these these
seven deadly sins. So we're thinking, hey, let's examine these.
We're all into talking about science meets human experience, philosophy
and science kind of duke it out. What's going on
with various parts of the human experience. So let's uh,
(01:09):
we've decided we're gonna tackle each of these seven deadly sins,
and uh, just in case we get slothful and don't finish,
we figured, let's let's start with a big one. Let's
go and tackle the the mother of of sins, Pride,
which I have to say, I was a little bit
surprised that this is considered the mother pride. I mean
that doesn't you know, pride coming before the fall? Though? Right's?
(01:31):
I mean, I I instantly think back to uh to
to the divine comedy, uh, Dante's Inferno at all. And uh,
it's interesting. There's you know, you have all these these
various circles and uh bulges in um in in Dante's
Hell that they did shot various punishments. So there's like,
you know, like the lustful or punished in one way
(01:53):
and then their heretics in another, and and it goes
all the way down to where at the very bottom
you have say himself and various betrayers and deceivers. They're
frozen in this lake. So but but it's what's interesting
is that there's not really a particular circle in hell
that's devoted to the prideful, because there's there's a lot
(02:14):
of pride going on in hell. Do you encounter prideful
individuals at various levels? For instance, there's Farranata. Uh, it's
a pretty proud heretic that you encount. There's a thief
by the name of Vanni of Fusie. There's this really
awesome part where he is essentially so prideful. Uh. He's
in Hell and he's basically giving God the finger. But
it's not the finger. It's this Italian thing called the
(02:35):
figs where oh is this this modern thing too? Uh,
there's just a Italian term that I know. Well, it's
where you you take your thumb, you make a fist
and then stick your thumb up through your middle and
the index finger, and then you kind of and then
with the with your knuckles facing out, you kind of
(02:56):
like shake your fist and then ideally you do this
on both hands, like like like our friend the thief
in Dante's Inferno and he has shakes them at the
heaven doing this right now. Yeah, So, um, I'm always
mindful that there's there's actually apparently in Um in twelve,
the citizens of the Storia Um fixed two of these
(03:18):
figs on on this marble tower and aim them at Florence.
So you had like whole buildings making figs at other cities.
It's pretty amazing. If if memory starts right, I believe
that figs have a phallic Yes, it's a very phallic thing.
It's you know, masculine female. You know, you know, you
don't really have to use your imagination all that much
(03:40):
to see if you're looking down, if you've done this
and you're looking down at your hands right now, and
you're gonna be like, that's a little creepy looking. Yeah,
um so uh so you have various prideful individuals, and
pride is a part of all these other sins and
and Dante sell though. If you travel up to the
Mount of Purgatory, which is the focus of the second
volume in the Divine Comedy, in Purgatory, you have the
(04:02):
Mount of Purgatory, which is this mountain that connects Earth
to Heaven. And if you are not you're not bad enough,
say to wind up in hell, but you still have
some work to do. You still got some some rough
corners to buff out before you can actually walk through
the pearly gates. Then you need to go through purgatory.
And purgatory is this mountain with these various terraces, and
(04:24):
on each terrace, if you start out at the bottom,
you have seven ps um on your forehead, these seven marks,
and as you travel through each terrace, you work off
one of these marks until you're you're pure enough to
actually enter the earthly paradise and ascent. So the first
level that you have to go through on the amount
of purgatory deals with pride. And so you have you
(04:46):
have individuals walking around on this terrace carrying heavy rocks
in their backs, so the weights forcing them to walk slowly,
their bodies are bent low to the ground. So that
is probably the most direct way that pride itself is
dealt with in the divine con me though it it
pops up time and time again as a as part
and parcel to other major sins like I mean, Satan himself,
(05:07):
the great Deceiver, the great center. Uh you know, it's
his fall is all about pride. Well, yeah, and from
what I read to you about la Viathan, the snake
is the spirit of pride right and actually is masquerading
as the Holy Ghost and might enter someone and displace
This is my interpretation God is the center, right, so
(05:29):
you're replacing God with yourself as the center. Is that
perhaps this is why it's the queen of all sins
and and certainly outside of the Christian tradition, you see
pride show up the major downfall in human nature, for
instance the wheel of life and Tibetan beauty Buddhism the
wheel of sensara. You see these various realms in which
(05:50):
the human may become reincarnated, the various states of being.
So there's like an animal realm, there's a human realm,
there's their their hell realms, and then there are these
these up realms of existence, including the data realm. And
this is like the realm of the gods where these
mighty beings do their thing. But they're so consumed by
ego and they're so blind to the suffering of others
(06:12):
that even though they're long lived, when they die, they're
often reincarnated into the lower realms. And to say that
the hell realms, because their lives ended up having such
nasty results and were so charmatically awful. So just for
being a little bit puffed up, well they were more
than a little bit puffed up. They were they had
(06:32):
godlike pride and that was their their fault. And then
of course the other thing is that the baton Buddhism especially,
it's all about finding that balance, that equanimity. Uh. And
the human realm is the this, this desired realm, because
this is the room from which you can actually achieve
liberation and rise above all the other rooms, and a
rise above the cycle of endless rebirth and death, where
(06:53):
the individuals spiraling through all these different cycles of of
outrageous pride and outrageous to spare, outrageous violence and just
pure like animal existence eventually rises above all that through
liberation and the than the noble eightfold path. All right,
So that's the way that you would achieve this, right right, Um.
And that's the philosophical side. But let's look at the
(07:16):
science side of pride, because it turns out there is
a scientific part when you're talking about pride in the
human being. So it turns out that pride is actually
an adaptive virtue. Um. And this is from Discover Magazines
article I didn't send, it was my brain. Um. They
say that most of us perceive ourselves is slightly smarter, smarter, funnier,
more talented, and better looking than average. These rose colored
(07:39):
glasses are apparently important to mental health, the psychological immune
system that protects us from despair. This is from Julian
Paul Keenan, and he's the director of Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory
and Professor of Psychology at Montclair State University in New
Jersey and um, So, apparently this is something that we
need as social animals in order to bolster ourselves. And
(08:04):
they actually have found that we start expressing pride as
early as two and a half years old and by
age four able to recognize it. So we sort of
points to something being hardwired in ourselves to be able
to negotiate the social contract that we all um entered into. Yeah,
I mean, because that's the thing about pride, it's it's
(08:26):
you need to have pride in what you do. Like
nobody wants to be around somebody who who doesn't believe
in their own ability. Like like nobody wants to hire
somebody who who isn't going to say, yeah, I'm great
at what I do and you should hire me. I mean,
that's just well right, And we'll talk about that. We'll
talk about how the in terms of group think, people
(08:47):
are looking really as pride as a marker in someone,
and not only that, humility isn't always what it's cracked
up to be. And we'll talk about with that in
a little bit um, but I did want to point
out that there seems to be some sort of uni
versality when it comes to pride. Um. It looks like this.
It's a slight smile ahead, tilt with hands on the
(09:07):
hips or or your hands raised high and Dr Tracy
and David Matsumoto, psychologists at San Francisco State, analyzed spontaneous
responses to winning or losing a judo match during the
two thousand and four Olympic and Paralympic Games, and they
found that expressions of pride after a victory were similar
for athletes from thirty seven nations, including for fifty three
(09:30):
blind competitors, many of them who were blind from birth.
So the idea is that this isn't just a simple
act of imitation. In other words, we see one another
do it. It's not learned behavior. It's it's actually something
that's emerging. Yeah, cue exactly, there's something going on in
our brains that is pulling the puppet strings of expression
for pride. All right, we're gonna take a quick break
(09:51):
and then we're gonna get back to all of this,
So hanging there for one second and back. Obviously, there
are two sort of branches of pride. There's the sort
of authentic pride, uh, where yeah, you want to be
prideful about stuff that you're good at, you want to
believe in yourself, you want to have enough optimism to
(10:14):
carry out your your daily life. But then there's this
realm of hubris where you're just vain and prideful to
an annoying or just destructive extent. Yeah, that's more in
the category of narcissism and someone who is very arrogant,
kind of like jerk jerk pride. I guess you could say, yeah,
very much like this sinful like I'm Satan, I'm great,
(10:38):
uh kind of pride or the or the data pride,
you know, where the where you have these beings that
are just enormously powerful and just do not care about
the suffering going around around them. Yeah. Right, So I
mean that's that's the problem with pride, right. I think
there's the private empowers versus the private blinds, the private wounds. Yeah,
and let's talk about some of the Psychology about pride
in society. UM. There was a study on sixty two
(11:01):
undergraduates who took tests that were supposedly measuring their spatial
i Q, and really the patterns that were flashed before
them were going way too fast that they couldn't actually
um perform on this test. That wasn't the point. The
point is that afterwards the researchers took all of them
aside or some of them not, and gave them feedback
on how they did. And so they gave them They
(11:23):
either didn't give them any feedback at all, or they
said with little or no expression, you did very well,
or they completely gushed and said you did great. Um.
And of course again this they took this test and
it was it wasn't really about the results of it,
because I couldn't really finish it. But they didn't know that.
The participants then sat down in a group to solve
(11:43):
similar puzzles so that researchers could assess their behavior based
on the feedback that they had given them, and they
found that the puffed up, prideful students were perceived as
being both more dominant and more likable than those who
didn't get a seal of approval from the researchers, and
they were really surp pries about that because they thought
that the other students would be considered boastful or um,
(12:07):
just arrogant. They didn't realize that this was a big
social component that those people were actually looked up to
because they had pride and it also had there's something
to stay here to about the power of positive reinforcement,
you know, like build up. Uh, certainly the people that
work for you and the people around you, you know,
because that puts him in a better position to excel. Yeah,
(12:29):
that's yeah, that's a sort of a sidebar on that experiment.
So that's psychology of pride in society. But let's talk
about psychology of pride in your own self, Yes, in
the individual. And this is where the research of Julian
Paul Keenan is particularly interesting. Um. He's a director of
Cognitive neuro Imagining Laboratory and professor of psychology at Montclair
(12:49):
State University in New Jersey, New joycey uh And, and
as his title implies, he's done a lot of work
peering inside the brain and seeing what's actually happening in
moments of pride. Yeah, he did. He got into uh
into people's brains because what he started to realize is
that this is a quote for him, those who see
(13:09):
themselves as they truly are not so funny, a bad driver,
overweight have a greater chance of being diagnosed with clinical depression.
So he wanted to take this premise of people who
are a little bit more self aware and see what
was going on in their brains right, and he found
that it actually there's actually less mental energy typically involved
in puffing ourselves up then trrying ourselves down. Even though
(13:33):
they're they're they're they're very similar on a neurological level,
like they're both actions are tied to two more or
less the same region of the brain. In particular, Keenan
was interested in the m PFC and this is brain
train just behind the forehead, and this is what helps
shape awareness of self right. And he used a magnetic
(13:53):
field called transcreanial magnetic stimulation uh TMS. We've actually talked
about this before, applied to this ALPA volunteers, and it
temporarily scrambled the signals in this area of the brain,
selectively shutting off this region of the brain which I
neglected to say what mPFC stands for it is the
medial prefrontal cortex. So he has this means to briefly
(14:17):
shut off the mPFC and his volunteers, UH switches them off,
and then he watches as the normal everyday arrogance melts
away from these individuals. And apparently it's not a pretty site. No. No,
they see themselves as they really are, without glossing over
negative characteristics. Um so. And I think it's fascinating that
(14:37):
the whole TMS transcaranial magnetic stimulation, that you can sit
there with a magnet and actually manipulate that part of
the brain. Is just on a side note, very creepy
to me. Um But there's a study by Haidihikohikishi of
the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan and researchers
as volunteers to imagine themselves winning a prize or truncing
(14:58):
an opponent while their brain things were being scanned, and
they showed less activation and brain regions associated with introspection
and self conscious thought than people induced to feel negative
emotions like shame or embarrassment. So the conclusion is that,
as you had did before, we accept positive feedback about
ourselves readily right, there's less energy. We just go okay me,
(15:20):
except that rather than compared with something like guilt or embarrassment,
which is the brain really contends to go over a
little bit more. Another thing to come out of Keenan's
work that I thought was interesting was that he pointed
out that self deprecation and self deceptive pride. Yeah, they're
both located in the same region of the brain, Like
it's that and they both serve the same purpose, and
(15:41):
that is to advance in society, which makes it, you know,
makes sense. One person may say they're being really self
deprecating because they're they're sort of fishing for for boost
me ups there, They're they're looking for sympathy or like, oh, no,
you did fine, You're really not not that bad at
this thing that you you know, you're you're harping about,
versus the person who is, uh, who is just unrealistically
(16:03):
pumping themselves up because they're they're trying to make others
believe in this boastful reality that they're puting forth. Yeah,
I thought it was really interesting in that the unctious
ingratiating behavior, this this humility is masquerading really like it's
the difference. Like if one person was saying like, man,
I am so beautiful, and people were like, yeah, okay,
you are beautiful. You keep talking about it. I'm buying
(16:24):
into it now. And then the other person is saying, oh, man,
I'm so not beautiful, and then people are like, oh no,
you are beautiful. Like it's similar results of like in
terms of other people's what other people are saying and
or thinking about you, or I'm not as beautiful as
you are. You know what I'm saying, like ingratiating yourself
in that way, which is really interesting and it's really
(16:44):
I find that fascinating that using the same TMS he
was able to detect that and effectively study something that,
for the longest was was really not studied all that
much because it was sort of considered in the same
way that there's not a particular region and Andte's inferno,
there's not a particular circle that's just devoted to pride.
It was just thought that it was too elusive, that
(17:06):
it was just too it was too everywhere and nowhere
to really succinctly study. Well, it's not as you know, sexy,
as anger or fear people, right, they didn't think that
there was much to it, but in fact it's really
uh part and personal of the way that we interact
with one another and the way that we're perceived. And
I do, I do really find it very interesting that um,
you can see this taking place in the brain, you know,
(17:28):
when he is um, when Keenan is manipulating that one
area about self awareness and how all that just melts
away and someone can see themselves for for who they are,
which you know, we've brought this up before, but like wow,
I mean that that makes me think about how again
how much we constructed in reality and how much of
our brains really inform who we are, our personalities. So
(17:52):
the science kind of falls in line with some of
what we kind of already knew about pride in that
there's there's both ay, a light and a dark side
to pride. There is a there's a balanced level of
pride that allows us to to to go about our
daily lives and our professional lives and our personal lives
in a reasonable manner. And then there's a cases where
(18:12):
there's there's not enough pride, where one is more prone
to depression and uh, and then there's a there's overwhelming pride.
There's just pure hubrist where the individual is just violently
strutting forth like a peacock through life like a peacock
and a china shop. Yeah yeah, And I really like
this idea of it being therapeutic too though, sort of
(18:33):
a you know, fake it till you make it thing, Yeah,
I mean, and and to think back, you know, to
on these these example like you see writings of you know,
individuals like Saint Didditict who compares the pride and humility
to Jacob's ladder, this dream vision of this ladder that
allows one to reach Heaven and God and the idea
that um any like any kind of pride is a
(18:54):
step down the letter of the ladder, and then a
humility step of humility is a step up the ladder.
But then you have you know, you've had other people
and out that pride is really kind of a it's
almost kind of like a safety feature, uh with other
sins Like if you were enjoying food and it it
might it seem to be uh that you're going down
the road to gluttony. Well, then pride should should cut
(19:15):
in at some point and stop you and be like, whoa,
I should as as great as his food. Is I
also I am kind of prideful about how I look,
so I should maybe hold off so that I don't
ruin that with excessive burger eating. I see a book
in here like how to make a Seven Stans Work
for You? Well by Lamb. Well no, well they're those
books already exist. That they're one is called the Satanic
(19:36):
Bible by Anton LaVey. But because then because the whole
thing I read it in like in high school. But
like a lot of that is like him Anton LaVey
arguing it's like all these seven deadly sins, they're really
seven deadly virtues because they're all great and blah blah blah.
And that's the thing. There's certainly an argument to be
made for any of these sins, like at what point
is it is it really something that hurts us? And
(19:56):
at what point is it just a part of who
we are? And is it more hurtful to ignore it? Um?
Which is I That's gonna be a topic that's gonna
continue to come up as we examine each of these
uh so called sins from the standpoint of science, just
right in psychology and all that. Next up and the
next wepisview I believe it, since that's the second look,
(20:18):
all right, well, well tell us what you think. What
do you think about pride, how it factors into your
daily life, and how it factors into the various competing
world views in the world around around us? Do you
do you agree with St Benedict? Do you agree with
Anton LaVey? Let us know. You can find us on
(20:38):
Twitter and Facebook. On Facebook we are Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, and on Twitter we are Below the Mind,
and you can also drop us a note at Below
the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
How Stuffwork staff as we explore the most promising and
(20:59):
purple mixing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglass. Julie,
you're familiar with the Seven Deadly Sins? Right? Oh yeah, yeah, gluttony,
I'm all over that. Well, well there's more than just glatton. Yeah,
that's there's there's a loss, there's gluttony, there's greed, there's sloped,
(00:25):
there's rat there's envy, and then that the queen of
the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride, the queen so called by
Pope St. Gregory, right, yeah, who largely popularized this, this
list of seven deadly sins, drawing on older did traditions. Uh,
I mean you look back to like the Book of Proverbs.
You have King Solomon dealing with like seven deadly is
(00:48):
in a sense. Uh so there's an older tradition there.
But Gregory is really the popular really popularized these these
seven deadly sins. So we're thinking, hey, let's examine these.
We're all into talking about science meets human experience, philosophy
and science kind of duke it out. What's going on
with various parts of the human experience. So let's uh,
(01:09):
we've decided we're gonna tackle each of these seven deadly sins,
and uh, just in case we get slothful and don't finish,
we figured, let's let's start with a big one. Let's
go and tackle the the mother of of sins, Pride,
which I have to say, I was a little bit
surprised that this is considered the mother pride. I mean
that doesn't you know, pride coming before the fall? Though? Right's?
(01:31):
I mean, I I instantly think back to uh to
to the divine comedy, uh, Dante's Inferno at all. And uh,
it's interesting. There's you know, you have all these these
various circles and uh bulges in um in in Dante's
Hell that they did shot various punishments. So there's like,
you know, like the lustful or punished in one way
(01:53):
and then their heretics in another, and and it goes
all the way down to where at the very bottom
you have say himself and various betrayers and deceivers. They're
frozen in this lake. So but but it's what's interesting
is that there's not really a particular circle in hell
that's devoted to the prideful, because there's there's a lot
(02:14):
of pride going on in hell. Do you encounter prideful
individuals at various levels? For instance, there's Farranata. Uh, it's
a pretty proud heretic that you encount. There's a thief
by the name of Vanni of Fusie. There's this really
awesome part where he is essentially so prideful. Uh. He's
in Hell and he's basically giving God the finger. But
it's not the finger. It's this Italian thing called the
(02:35):
figs where oh is this this modern thing too? Uh,
there's just a Italian term that I know. Well, it's
where you you take your thumb, you make a fist
and then stick your thumb up through your middle and
the index finger, and then you kind of and then
with the with your knuckles facing out, you kind of
(02:56):
like shake your fist and then ideally you do this
on both hands, like like like our friend the thief
in Dante's Inferno and he has shakes them at the
heaven doing this right now. Yeah, So, um, I'm always
mindful that there's there's actually apparently in Um in twelve,
the citizens of the Storia Um fixed two of these
(03:18):
figs on on this marble tower and aim them at Florence.
So you had like whole buildings making figs at other cities.
It's pretty amazing. If if memory starts right, I believe
that figs have a phallic Yes, it's a very phallic thing.
It's you know, masculine female. You know, you know, you
don't really have to use your imagination all that much
(03:40):
to see if you're looking down, if you've done this
and you're looking down at your hands right now, and
you're gonna be like, that's a little creepy looking. Yeah,
um so uh so you have various prideful individuals, and
pride is a part of all these other sins and
and Dante sell though. If you travel up to the
Mount of Purgatory, which is the focus of the second
volume in the Divine Comedy, in Purgatory, you have the
(04:02):
Mount of Purgatory, which is this mountain that connects Earth
to Heaven. And if you are not you're not bad enough,
say to wind up in hell, but you still have
some work to do. You still got some some rough
corners to buff out before you can actually walk through
the pearly gates. Then you need to go through purgatory.
And purgatory is this mountain with these various terraces, and
(04:24):
on each terrace, if you start out at the bottom,
you have seven ps um on your forehead, these seven marks,
and as you travel through each terrace, you work off
one of these marks until you're you're pure enough to
actually enter the earthly paradise and ascent. So the first
level that you have to go through on the amount
of purgatory deals with pride. And so you have you
(04:46):
have individuals walking around on this terrace carrying heavy rocks
in their backs, so the weights forcing them to walk slowly,
their bodies are bent low to the ground. So that
is probably the most direct way that pride itself is
dealt with in the divine con me though it it
pops up time and time again as a as part
and parcel to other major sins like I mean, Satan himself,
(05:07):
the great Deceiver, the great center. Uh you know, it's
his fall is all about pride. Well, yeah, and from
what I read to you about la Viathan, the snake
is the spirit of pride right and actually is masquerading
as the Holy Ghost and might enter someone and displace
This is my interpretation God is the center, right, so
(05:29):
you're replacing God with yourself as the center. Is that
perhaps this is why it's the queen of all sins
and and certainly outside of the Christian tradition, you see
pride show up the major downfall in human nature, for
instance the wheel of life and Tibetan beauty Buddhism the
wheel of sensara. You see these various realms in which
(05:50):
the human may become reincarnated, the various states of being.
So there's like an animal realm, there's a human realm,
there's their their hell realms, and then there are these
these up realms of existence, including the data realm. And
this is like the realm of the gods where these
mighty beings do their thing. But they're so consumed by
ego and they're so blind to the suffering of others
(06:12):
that even though they're long lived, when they die, they're
often reincarnated into the lower realms. And to say that
the hell realms, because their lives ended up having such
nasty results and were so charmatically awful. So just for
being a little bit puffed up, well they were more
than a little bit puffed up. They were they had
(06:32):
godlike pride and that was their their fault. And then
of course the other thing is that the baton Buddhism especially,
it's all about finding that balance, that equanimity. Uh. And
the human realm is the this, this desired realm, because
this is the room from which you can actually achieve
liberation and rise above all the other rooms, and a
rise above the cycle of endless rebirth and death, where
(06:53):
the individuals spiraling through all these different cycles of of
outrageous pride and outrageous to spare, outrageous violence and just
pure like animal existence eventually rises above all that through
liberation and the than the noble eightfold path. All right,
So that's the way that you would achieve this, right right, Um.
And that's the philosophical side. But let's look at the
(07:16):
science side of pride, because it turns out there is
a scientific part when you're talking about pride in the
human being. So it turns out that pride is actually
an adaptive virtue. Um. And this is from Discover Magazines
article I didn't send, it was my brain. Um. They
say that most of us perceive ourselves is slightly smarter, smarter, funnier,
more talented, and better looking than average. These rose colored
(07:39):
glasses are apparently important to mental health, the psychological immune
system that protects us from despair. This is from Julian
Paul Keenan, and he's the director of Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory
and Professor of Psychology at Montclair State University in New
Jersey and um, So, apparently this is something that we
need as social animals in order to bolster ourselves. And
(08:04):
they actually have found that we start expressing pride as
early as two and a half years old and by
age four able to recognize it. So we sort of
points to something being hardwired in ourselves to be able
to negotiate the social contract that we all um entered into. Yeah,
I mean, because that's the thing about pride, it's it's
(08:26):
you need to have pride in what you do. Like
nobody wants to be around somebody who who doesn't believe
in their own ability. Like like nobody wants to hire
somebody who who isn't going to say, yeah, I'm great
at what I do and you should hire me. I mean,
that's just well right, And we'll talk about that. We'll
talk about how the in terms of group think, people
(08:47):
are looking really as pride as a marker in someone,
and not only that, humility isn't always what it's cracked
up to be. And we'll talk about with that in
a little bit um, but I did want to point
out that there seems to be some sort of uni
versality when it comes to pride. Um. It looks like this.
It's a slight smile ahead, tilt with hands on the
(09:07):
hips or or your hands raised high and Dr Tracy
and David Matsumoto, psychologists at San Francisco State, analyzed spontaneous
responses to winning or losing a judo match during the
two thousand and four Olympic and Paralympic Games, and they
found that expressions of pride after a victory were similar
for athletes from thirty seven nations, including for fifty three
(09:30):
blind competitors, many of them who were blind from birth.
So the idea is that this isn't just a simple
act of imitation. In other words, we see one another
do it. It's not learned behavior. It's it's actually something
that's emerging. Yeah, cue exactly, there's something going on in
our brains that is pulling the puppet strings of expression
for pride. All right, we're gonna take a quick break
(09:51):
and then we're gonna get back to all of this,
So hanging there for one second and back. Obviously, there
are two sort of branches of pride. There's the sort
of authentic pride, uh, where yeah, you want to be
prideful about stuff that you're good at, you want to
believe in yourself, you want to have enough optimism to
(10:14):
carry out your your daily life. But then there's this
realm of hubris where you're just vain and prideful to
an annoying or just destructive extent. Yeah, that's more in
the category of narcissism and someone who is very arrogant,
kind of like jerk jerk pride. I guess you could say, yeah,
very much like this sinful like I'm Satan, I'm great,
(10:38):
uh kind of pride or the or the data pride,
you know, where the where you have these beings that
are just enormously powerful and just do not care about
the suffering going around around them. Yeah. Right, So I
mean that's that's the problem with pride, right. I think
there's the private empowers versus the private blinds, the private wounds. Yeah,
and let's talk about some of the Psychology about pride
in society. UM. There was a study on sixty two
(11:01):
undergraduates who took tests that were supposedly measuring their spatial
i Q, and really the patterns that were flashed before
them were going way too fast that they couldn't actually
um perform on this test. That wasn't the point. The
point is that afterwards the researchers took all of them
aside or some of them not, and gave them feedback
on how they did. And so they gave them They
(11:23):
either didn't give them any feedback at all, or they
said with little or no expression, you did very well,
or they completely gushed and said you did great. Um.
And of course again this they took this test and
it was it wasn't really about the results of it,
because I couldn't really finish it. But they didn't know that.
The participants then sat down in a group to solve
(11:43):
similar puzzles so that researchers could assess their behavior based
on the feedback that they had given them, and they
found that the puffed up, prideful students were perceived as
being both more dominant and more likable than those who
didn't get a seal of approval from the researchers, and
they were really surp pries about that because they thought
that the other students would be considered boastful or um,
(12:07):
just arrogant. They didn't realize that this was a big
social component that those people were actually looked up to
because they had pride and it also had there's something
to stay here to about the power of positive reinforcement,
you know, like build up. Uh, certainly the people that
work for you and the people around you, you know,
because that puts him in a better position to excel. Yeah,
(12:29):
that's yeah, that's a sort of a sidebar on that experiment.
So that's psychology of pride in society. But let's talk
about psychology of pride in your own self, Yes, in
the individual. And this is where the research of Julian
Paul Keenan is particularly interesting. Um. He's a director of
Cognitive neuro Imagining Laboratory and professor of psychology at Montclair
(12:49):
State University in New Jersey, New joycey uh And, and
as his title implies, he's done a lot of work
peering inside the brain and seeing what's actually happening in
moments of pride. Yeah, he did. He got into uh
into people's brains because what he started to realize is
that this is a quote for him, those who see
(13:09):
themselves as they truly are not so funny, a bad driver,
overweight have a greater chance of being diagnosed with clinical depression.
So he wanted to take this premise of people who
are a little bit more self aware and see what
was going on in their brains right, and he found
that it actually there's actually less mental energy typically involved
in puffing ourselves up then trrying ourselves down. Even though
(13:33):
they're they're they're they're very similar on a neurological level,
like they're both actions are tied to two more or
less the same region of the brain. In particular, Keenan
was interested in the m PFC and this is brain
train just behind the forehead, and this is what helps
shape awareness of self right. And he used a magnetic
(13:53):
field called transcreanial magnetic stimulation uh TMS. We've actually talked
about this before, applied to this ALPA volunteers, and it
temporarily scrambled the signals in this area of the brain,
selectively shutting off this region of the brain which I
neglected to say what mPFC stands for it is the
medial prefrontal cortex. So he has this means to briefly
(14:17):
shut off the mPFC and his volunteers, UH switches them off,
and then he watches as the normal everyday arrogance melts
away from these individuals. And apparently it's not a pretty site. No. No,
they see themselves as they really are, without glossing over
negative characteristics. Um so. And I think it's fascinating that
(14:37):
the whole TMS transcaranial magnetic stimulation, that you can sit
there with a magnet and actually manipulate that part of
the brain. Is just on a side note, very creepy
to me. Um But there's a study by Haidihikohikishi of
the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan and researchers
as volunteers to imagine themselves winning a prize or truncing
(14:58):
an opponent while their brain things were being scanned, and
they showed less activation and brain regions associated with introspection
and self conscious thought than people induced to feel negative
emotions like shame or embarrassment. So the conclusion is that,
as you had did before, we accept positive feedback about
ourselves readily right, there's less energy. We just go okay me,
(15:20):
except that rather than compared with something like guilt or embarrassment,
which is the brain really contends to go over a
little bit more. Another thing to come out of Keenan's
work that I thought was interesting was that he pointed
out that self deprecation and self deceptive pride. Yeah, they're
both located in the same region of the brain, Like
it's that and they both serve the same purpose, and
(15:41):
that is to advance in society, which makes it, you know,
makes sense. One person may say they're being really self
deprecating because they're they're sort of fishing for for boost
me ups there, They're they're looking for sympathy or like, oh, no,
you did fine, You're really not not that bad at
this thing that you you know, you're you're harping about,
versus the person who is, uh, who is just unrealistically
(16:03):
pumping themselves up because they're they're trying to make others
believe in this boastful reality that they're puting forth. Yeah,
I thought it was really interesting in that the unctious
ingratiating behavior, this this humility is masquerading really like it's
the difference. Like if one person was saying like, man,
I am so beautiful, and people were like, yeah, okay,
you are beautiful. You keep talking about it. I'm buying
(16:24):
into it now. And then the other person is saying, oh, man,
I'm so not beautiful, and then people are like, oh no,
you are beautiful. Like it's similar results of like in
terms of other people's what other people are saying and
or thinking about you, or I'm not as beautiful as
you are. You know what I'm saying, like ingratiating yourself
in that way, which is really interesting and it's really
(16:44):
I find that fascinating that using the same TMS he
was able to detect that and effectively study something that,
for the longest was was really not studied all that
much because it was sort of considered in the same
way that there's not a particular region and Andte's inferno,
there's not a particular circle that's just devoted to pride.
It was just thought that it was too elusive, that
(17:06):
it was just too it was too everywhere and nowhere
to really succinctly study. Well, it's not as you know, sexy,
as anger or fear people, right, they didn't think that
there was much to it, but in fact it's really
uh part and personal of the way that we interact
with one another and the way that we're perceived. And
I do, I do really find it very interesting that um,
you can see this taking place in the brain, you know,
(17:28):
when he is um, when Keenan is manipulating that one
area about self awareness and how all that just melts
away and someone can see themselves for for who they are,
which you know, we've brought this up before, but like wow,
I mean that that makes me think about how again
how much we constructed in reality and how much of
our brains really inform who we are, our personalities. So
(17:52):
the science kind of falls in line with some of
what we kind of already knew about pride in that
there's there's both ay, a light and a dark side
to pride. There is a there's a balanced level of
pride that allows us to to to go about our
daily lives and our professional lives and our personal lives
in a reasonable manner. And then there's a cases where
(18:12):
there's there's not enough pride, where one is more prone
to depression and uh, and then there's a there's overwhelming pride.
There's just pure hubrist where the individual is just violently
strutting forth like a peacock through life like a peacock
and a china shop. Yeah yeah, And I really like
this idea of it being therapeutic too though, sort of
(18:33):
a you know, fake it till you make it thing, Yeah,
I mean, and and to think back, you know, to
on these these example like you see writings of you know,
individuals like Saint Didditict who compares the pride and humility
to Jacob's ladder, this dream vision of this ladder that
allows one to reach Heaven and God and the idea
that um any like any kind of pride is a
(18:54):
step down the letter of the ladder, and then a
humility step of humility is a step up the ladder.
But then you have you know, you've had other people
and out that pride is really kind of a it's
almost kind of like a safety feature, uh with other
sins Like if you were enjoying food and it it
might it seem to be uh that you're going down
the road to gluttony. Well, then pride should should cut
(19:15):
in at some point and stop you and be like, whoa,
I should as as great as his food. Is I
also I am kind of prideful about how I look,
so I should maybe hold off so that I don't
ruin that with excessive burger eating. I see a book
in here like how to make a Seven Stans Work
for You? Well by Lamb. Well no, well they're those
books already exist. That they're one is called the Satanic
(19:36):
Bible by Anton LaVey. But because then because the whole
thing I read it in like in high school. But
like a lot of that is like him Anton LaVey
arguing it's like all these seven deadly sins, they're really
seven deadly virtues because they're all great and blah blah blah.
And that's the thing. There's certainly an argument to be
made for any of these sins, like at what point
is it is it really something that hurts us? And
(19:56):
at what point is it just a part of who
we are? And is it more hurtful to ignore it? Um?
Which is I That's gonna be a topic that's gonna
continue to come up as we examine each of these
uh so called sins from the standpoint of science, just
right in psychology and all that. Next up and the
next wepisview I believe it, since that's the second look,
(20:18):
all right, well, well tell us what you think. What
do you think about pride, how it factors into your
daily life, and how it factors into the various competing
world views in the world around around us? Do you
do you agree with St Benedict? Do you agree with
Anton LaVey? Let us know. You can find us on
(20:38):
Twitter and Facebook. On Facebook we are Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, and on Twitter we are Below the Mind,
and you can also drop us a note at Below
the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
How Stuffwork staff as we explore the most promising and
(20:59):
purple mixing possibilities of tomorrow.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.