Temptation and Our Ability to ResistMike Rappaport
Another marvelous post from
A candy bar is a superstimulus: it contains moreconcentrated sugar, salt, and fat than anything that exists in theancestral environment. A candy bar matches taste buds that evolved ina hunter-gatherer environment, but it matches those taste buds muchmore strongly than anything that actually existed in thehunter-gatherer environment. The signal that once reliably correlatedto healthy food has been hijacked, blotted out with a point intastespace that wasn’t in the training dataset – an impossibly distantoutlier on the old ancestral graphs. Tastiness, formerly representingthe evolutionarily identified correlates of healthiness, has beenreverse-engineered and perfectly matched with an artificial substance. Unfortunately there’s no equally powerful market incentive to make theresulting food item as healthy as it is tasty. We can’t tastehealthfulness, after all.
The now-famous Dove Evolutionvideo shows the painstaking construction of another superstimulus: anordinary woman transformed by makeup, careful photography, and finallyextensive Photoshopping, into a billboard model – a beauty impossible,unmatchable by human women in the unretouched real world. Actual womenare killing themselves (e.g. supermodels using cocaine to keep theirweight down) to keep up with competitors that literally don’t exist.
And likewise, a video gamecan be so much more engagingthan mere reality, even through a simple computer monitor, that someonewill play it without food or sleep until they literally die. I don’tknow all the tricks used in video games, but I can guess some of them -challenges poised at the critical point between ease and impossibility,intermittent reinforcement, feedback showing an ever-increasing score,social involvement in massively multiplayer games.
And don’t miss the You Tube on Dove Evolution. Sausage, Legislation, and Supermodel Images.