Thirty years later, Davidson is still researching and writing about the intersection of neuroscience and emotion — he currently teaches psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his new book, written with Sharon Begley, “The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live, and How You Can Change Them,” Davidson lays out a fascinating theory that parses out emotional style into six dimensions, giving readers a better understanding of where they stand on this emotional plane and how emotional styles affect the qualities of their everyday lives.

Last week Salon spoke over the phone with Davidson about how Botox injections disrupt our ability to emote, the connection between happiness and health, and why emotion has been unfairly and historically underappreciated.

There’s been stigma around the study of emotion in the past. Some people still frame emotion as pointless metaphysical leftovers that result from physiological processes. I think that your work has really come to show that that’s not true. In your view, what are the evolutionary and practical purposes of emotion and does it have intrinsic value?

I think that emotions are such an important part of our experience and behavior.. They came about over the course of evolution for a reason; to promote survival — to facilitate the adaptation of organisms to their environment. Emotions evolved to solve specific kinds of problems that arose over the course of our history. They wouldn’t be such a robust part of our experience if they didn’t have this deep evolutionary origin. Having said that, it’s also the case that we now live in an environment that is vastly different from our evolutionary origins. So some of the emotions that played a very important role in our past can be maladaptive when they are triggered in response to stimuli in our current environment. This is why developing strategies to better regulate our emotions may be particularly important for us now.

In the book you talk about some really fascinating research suggesting that emotional outlook, happiness or depression, can have a direct influence on our health.

There is an intuition in the popular culture that our emotions have something to do with our physical health, but we are just beginning to explore this connection. In our own research, we examined both the brain activity and peripheral biology of a group of individuals by giving them flu shots. It turns out that people who have a more resilient brain profile are the ones who actually have a bigger boost in their immune response when they get a flu vaccine. What it suggests is that more resilient individuals, when exposed to the flu virus, are conferred much greater immunity than a person with a vulnerable emotional style. It suggests that these brain circuits directly communicate with peripheral biological processes, in this case certain features of the immune system, and directly regulate them in ways that are consequential for our health.

In the beginning of the book, you talk about a discovery that set the course of your career in motion — this distinction between people with more right prefrontal cortical activity and those with more activity in their left prefrontal cortex.

We had been doing research looking at the neural correlates of particular short-lived emotions. We were specifically looking at neural changes during different fleeting facial expressions. The idea that we could actually identify brain mechanisms that underlie different emotional styles was not in the lexicon of science in the past. At that time the neuroscientific study of emotion was conducted mostly in rats and focused on subcortical brain regions, regions below the cortex.

What we noticed was that this right versus left activation patterns of the prefrontal cortex varied more across people than it did within one person during different emotions. So we did further studies to demonstrate that these individual variations were actually consistent for a person over time and directly related to important features of their mood and emotional styles. That’s what really launched us into thinking about emotional style and its brain bases.

Was it surprising that the prefrontal cortex was involved in emotion?

Well many psychologists and neuroscientists at that time regarded the prefrontal cortex as exclusively involved in higher cognitive function because the prefrontal cortex is among the most recent to develop over the course of evolution. In many ways it was regarded as the seat of the highest form of reason in humans. This assumption that the prefrontal cortex could not possibly be involved in emotion is, I think, part of a historical anachronism that regarded thought and feeling as two completely separate realms.

In the beginning of the book you lay out a theory that each of us has a certain unique Emotional Style, split up into six components. What are these six emotional dimensions?

One is Resilience, which refers to how quickly or slowly you recover from adversity. The second is Outlook; the duration that a person’s positive emotion persists. Then there is Context, and that is the extent to which we modulate our emotional responses in a context-appropriate way. So for example, when we are with our boss we know that it’s not permissible to discuss the same topics we might discuss with our spouse. That’s called context modulation. The fourth is Social Intuition, the sensitivity to social cues, the extent to which a person is sensitive to facial expressions or vocal expressions. The fifth is Self Awareness, the extent to which a person is aware of signals within their own body, which are important to emotion. Finally, Attention, how focused or scattered you are. Attention isn’t often thought of as part of emotional style, yet our work indicates that it significantly contributes to a person’s emotional makeup. Is your attention easily pulled by stimuli in the environment or are you able to more skillfully focus your attention on what it is you wish to attend to.

You did a really interesting study looking at how the genes that code for our temperament can actually be modified by life events and environment. What did you find?

We have learned over the last decade, and more specifically really the last five years, that the genome itself is not changed over the course of a life, but the extent to which genes are expressed can be influenced by our environment or the behavior in which we engage. This is referred to as epigenetics, the regulation of gene expression. We know that there are sites on genes that code the extent to which another gene is actually turned on or turned off. And it can be turned on and turned off in a graded fashion.

And the study looked at how kids reacted to a toy robot that approached them …

It was a longitudinal study that followed kids from age 3 to their early teens. It tracked their brain development in conjunction with the development of certain temperamental features, one in particular called behavioral inhibition, which refers to shyness. What we found is that kids can significantly change in their expression of this temperamental characteristic over time. What we also showed is that to the extent to which temperament changes, the brain also changes. So brain activity during these early years in life is not fixed and can be changed by environmental factors and activities. This is really just an example of what we refer to as neuroplasticity; that the brain can change in response to experience and training.

Another study that I found really interesting and amusing involved women who had recently had cosmetic Botox injections. How did the results speak to this mind-body connection?

That’s a great example. Beginning with Darwin’s book in 1892, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” we have known that facial expressions are very important for emotion, and recent theories suggest that facial expressions provide feedback to the brain and influence the emotional state of a person through that feedback. It suggests that if we eliminate feedback, as Botox does, we deprive the brain of certain signals that it uses to determine one’s own emotional state. The women in our study were getting Botox in the muscle just above the eyebrow, temporarily paralyzing it. That particular muscle is used in frowning and several different negative emotions. What we found is that Botox injections actually impaired their capacity to perceive negative emotion when they read negative sentences, and this suggests that we use our bodies to help decode the emotions of others by subtly simulating their emotions and mirroring their emotional state with mini-facial expressions of our own. If we can’t make those facial expressions because our face is paralyzed, then our ability to understand their emotional state is impaired.

Neuroscience has shown certain kinds of activities can influence changes in the brain, but one of the major points you make in the book is that purely mental exercises can too. How did meditation become part of your research?

I’ve had a longstanding interest in meditation personally, but it wasn’t until 1992 when I first met the Dalai Lama that that interest was catalyzed into a major component of my own scientific research. The Dalai Lama pointed out that if I could use the tools of modern neuroscience to investigate emotions like fear, anxiety and depression, then I should also be investigating kindness and compassion. So I made a commitment to put these positive qualities like kindness and compassion on the scientific map. Meditation practices are said to enhance and nourish these qualities, so we began to investigate the extent to which these kinds of meditation can lead to changes in the brain and can promote behavior associated with positive qualities of mind.

You give examples of exercises at the end of the book to help people take advantage of their own neuroplasticity. For example you say that by delaying gratification, which is associated with planning, you can strengthen the connection between your prefrontal cortex and a brain region called the ventral striatum, which increases one’s sense of well-being.

I think that we’ve learned a lot about what can induce these plastic changes in the brain. It’s quite similar to engaging in physical exercise or learning to play a musical instrument or chess. All of these require regular practice in order to become more fluent in them, and it’s the same for happiness. Well-being can be thought of as a skill; you learn it better when you practice it over time. Many of my suggestions in that last chapter of the book come from different strands of research, but they all point to the idea that we can take responsibility for our own brain. Often, we leave our emotional patterns to happenstance and we don’t intentionally cultivate them. But we shouldn’t think of emotional style as any different than cognitive skills, or activities with a tradition of intentional training. Eastern contemplative tradition, and particularly meditation, is exactly this technology of mental exercise. It fosters better habits of mind, and our neuroscientific research has shown this.

You are also sensitive to the fact that some people might not be able to change their emotional styles, especially if they are on an extreme. What are some coping mechanisms for those of us who might have a harder time changing our emotional styles?

We are all different, and for some people, certain styles may be easier to change than other styles. One of the things that I suggest at the end of the book is that instead of changing your style, you can alter your environment to make it more compatible with that style. If you are the kind of person who is terrible at picking up on social cues and who doesn’t really get a lot of enjoyment from social interaction, you can try to arrange your work life so that you don’t interact with a lot with other people and picking up on social cues is not something that you need to rely on for success. I think that the hope with this book is that people learn more about their own emotional style so they can figure out what makes the best sense for them.

Salon spoke with Gerber over the phone about her new book, out this week from University of Chicago Press. She was kind enough to share her opinion on everything from how fatness and gayness are valuable points of comparison, the often heartbreaking measures “ex-gays” take to curb same-sex urges, and how evangelicalism is a little bit queer sometimes.

In the book, you focus on two specific evangelical ministries: Exodus, a moderate ex-gay group organized around helping members overcome homosexuality, and First Place, a weight-loss ministry. Why were these important groups to compare and contrast?

I have often been interested in the intersection of fatness and homosexuality. They are both places where there is a lot of social energy, and social hatred toward people who represent fatness and gayness. If you think about what fatness and gayness represent, they are similar. One is a sort of excess; the idea that fat people have this excessive desire for food, and gay people are depicted as having this excessive sexual tendency. Excess is directly linked to social efforts to control those excesses, to get fat people down to size and gay people into the “correct” sexual orientation.

In ex-gay ministries, they have a somewhat psychoanalytic explanation for how homosexuality develops in childhood. What is their theory exactly?

They draw on some pretty psychoanalytic ideas to explain their theory. Basically the theory is that homosexuality is not a problem of sexual attraction to people of the same sex, it’s a problem of gender identification. So if I am a homosexual man, the issue is not so much that I want to sleep with other men, it’s that I don’t see myself as adequately masculine enough. The idea is that people are attracted to what they feel that they are not. So if I am a hypothetical gay man, that means that I think of myself as more female (because they frame it with only two genders). Their idea is that to shift sexual orientation one needs to shift one’s gender identity. A hypothetical gay male needs to start feeling more grounded in his masculinity in order to find his attraction toward women. They say that a homosexual person’s “gender deficiency” is the result of a breakage in the relationship between the same-sex parent during childhood. It’s interesting because this can be anything from abuse to perceived abuse to perceived neglect. It can be anything from the most intentional egregious violation on the part of the same-sex parent to the most unintentional slight that the child experienced.

In the book you explain that Exodus has to maintain this delicate balance; to make gay people feel accepted while at the same time attempting to fundamentally change who they are. How do they manage this?

What they want to do with these “strugglers” is give them a place. They really don’t want people with same-sex desire to leave the church, because their thinking is that once they leave the church, they go into the gay culture and they’re lost forever. They want to give them a place that feels like a home within the church. On the other hand, they believe that homosexuality is a sin, and they have to emphasize that homosexuality is a sin if they want their institutional allies. Ex-gay ministries have this paradoxical effect where people who are struggling with same-sex desires can be out about those desires, there is a place where they can talk about it without getting kicked out, there’s a place where they can acknowledge it, but they have to acknowledge it as “ex-gay.” So that’s the price.

There’s a chapter in the book that I found really compelling about the differences between change in theory and change in practice within the ministries.

In the book I argue that in evangelical culture there is a deep impulse to make a conscious initial choice about one’s faith. To choose God, recognize oneself as a sinner, and make a choice to become a disciple of Christ is a very strong value in evangelical culture. The notion is that this decision becomes a real place where all kinds of transformations can happen: The sinner becomes saved, the drunk becomes sober, and the gay becomes straight. Then the choice has to keep being made over and over again. In First Choice, the initial choice to lose weight brings this endless opportunity for choice where every time I eat I ask myself, is my eating in alignment with God’s will? Once you have been in either ministry for a long time and don’t become straight or lose weight, it shifts to this notion that change is a process. There is this balance between the initial, simple choice and this ongoing pathos to get further and closer to the goal. I think that is also a common polarity in therapeutic culture. There is a similar back and forth between making the first decision, and making a lifestyle change that is going to take a very long time.

In the beginning of the book, you talk about how evangelical Christianity is defined by paradox: the desire to identify with but also to distinguish itself from American culture.

There is a famous argument in academic circles that evangelical culture is a subculture. A subculture works by trying to distinguish itself from the mainstream culture. It does a lot of symbolic and discursive work in order to make that difference. What is interesting in evangelical culture is where they choose to accentuate difference. Clearly homosexuality is a place where they have really chosen that point of distinction.

And they are really proud of that.

They see it as a bold line in the sand that can’t be crossed. The extent to which evangelicalism has been willing to make their identity almost conterminous with their opposition to homosexuality is remarkable.

How does the weight loss ministry, First Place, differ?

Evangelicalism is very much part and parcel with the mainstream weight loss culture. I don’t know that they would consider it an intentional effort, but I think it’s a real reflection of how very deep the overlaps are. For example, Dr. Oz, the weight loss guru, just started working with Rick Warren, a pastor from one of the biggest evangelical churches in the country. They have a new weight loss plan called the Daniel Plan. Evangelicals have a proprietary sense — this deep identification with American culture. There is a notion that they do things just like the rest of Americans, just with more piety. First Place is like secular weight loss programs except the Bible is involved. It gives opportunities for Christians to explore a range of American culture within a Christian context.

Are both fatness and gayness considered sins?

Exodus, as part of its definition, believes homosexual sex, defined as genital acts between people of the same sex, is a sin. First Place is more vague about sin. They call weight a “fleshly problem with a spiritual solution.” They want to fall short of calling it a sin. In First Place, they are also not exactly sure what the sin even is. Is it being fat? Is it in excessive eating? In Exodus, they really limit the sin and say that only genital acts are sins because they want to make a breathable space for people who have same sex attraction to feel welcome.

And in the book you have some heartbreaking accounts about the extents to which some of these people would go in order to fight their urges and try to have this God-oriented agency.

The one that really sticks in my mind is this man I interviewed, an ex-gay man from a very cold state in New England. He wanted to stop fantasizing about men before he went to bed at night, so he would lie in bed and if he found himself veering into this realm of fantasy, he would get out of bed without a blanket and lie on the cold floor of his apartment and read the Bible until he fell asleep. That was his choice to do. That’s not a practice that Exodus necessarily endorses, but it definitely goes to show the extreme choices that people made in order to curb their desires.

What happens when people in these groups end up failing, either with weight loss or with their “struggle” to become heterosexual?

The goal post for success can be very porous. There’s a lot that counts for success. For example, at First Place, members have nine commitments that include things like following a certain eating plan, getting exercise, doing Bible study, showing up at meetings, encouraging others in between sessions, etc. If people aren’t necessarily losing weight, it becomes easy to call upon one of these other standards as success. In the case of the ex-gay ministry, they overtly say that the opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality, it’s holiness. Well, holiness may in fact be easier to achieve than heterosexuality for a lot of people in the ministry. When people actually fail, when they actually transgress, when a man goes and has sex with another man, for example, there is the opportunity to repent through confession. They tell the group what they did, they are adequately remorseful, and they return to the group’s good graces and submit themselves to the group’s discipline once again.

In the conclusion you note something really fascinating, which is that in American culture we tend to construct an opposing duality around the secular and the religious.

I have a good example of this. In terms of this secular/religious question, there is a common-sense understanding that American culture has become increasingly secular. Well, I would argue that certain forms of religious sensibilities have become secularized. They’ve become so common-sense that they are unmarked in American culture, or their underlying religious concerns have become obfuscated. The image that kept coming back to me is one that I saw at First Place. The first thing that folks do in the meetings is a weigh in, and at First Place, before you get on the scale you have to recite your Bible verse for the week. You go in, step on the scale, recite your Bible verse, and the group leader records whether or not you lost weight and whether or not you got your Bible verse right. It’s like the idea of putting your flag on the moon. Is it religion giving its deference to what is actually the moral authority in this culture, weight, or is it just making clear the compatibility between Christian ideals and the weight loss dogma?

Which do you think it is?

I tend to go back and forth, but I do think practices like that reveal the deep religious sensibilities underneath programs like weight loss and things that are addressed in scientific and health-related language. In some ways I think First Place just returns the explicit religious marks to something that seems to be secular, but actually has very deep moral concerns undergirding it.

At the end of the book, you make a really nice observation that evangelicalism can actually be really progressive and queer in certain unexpected ways.

One of the interesting things about the ex-gay ministries is, in a certain sense, how queer they are. I went to Exodus International’s 30th anniversary conference. Jerry Falwell was there to address Exodus, and he is quite controversial because of what he’s said in the past about gay people. The act that preceded Jerry Falwell was a skit from a Christian theater troupe about a former drag queen trying to join a church Bible study. At one point in the skit, the former drag queen talks about how he used to fantasize about a handsome hero taking him away. Eventually he realizes that Jesus is his real hero, and another character says, “That makes it sound like Jesus is your lover! That’s biblical!” So in front of Jerry Falwell, an ex-gay ministry said that it’s biblical for a man to call Jesus his lover! There is a certain kind of playfulness and queerness that is possible in their world to a degree that’s really surprising to me. And Jerry Falwell didn’t get up and leave.

In his new book, “Borrow: The American Way of Debt,” Cornell professor Louis Hyman writes, in essence, a biography of American debt. He traces debt through American history: from the late 19^th century, when unpaid dues meant public ignominy, to the 1920s, when the auto industry changed the face of borrowing to the mortgage fallouts that led the Great Depression to the invention of the credit card as we now know it, all the way to the current shambles of our national economic livelihood. Along the way we meet characters like the Henry Ford, the xenophobic inventor of the Model T whose scorn for the liberal age of borrowing got the best him, and Lower East Side grocery clerk Joseph Miraglia, whose miraculous $10,000 spending spree in 1965 made history as one of America’s heftiest credit cart blunders.

Salon got a chance to speak with Hyman last week about America’s long road into debt, the problem with applying morality to economics and, of course, that scene in “Pretty Woman” where Julia Roberts goes on a shopping spree.   

Your background is in history and mathematics. How did you become interested in debt?

When I was in graduate school I was fishing around for a history topic that hadn’t been done or worked on before. This was in 2003, before financial history became fashionable again and before people knew there was going to be a crisis.

Little did you know… or maybe you did know, what would happen with the recession?

Unfortunately, as a historian of labor and business, I noticed that a lot of working people were struggling with debt. I thought it was a good topic to get some perspective on.  As I got into the topic it was something that lent itself well to the kinds of questions I that interested me. Historians are look at how things actually are, rather than economists who are interested in how things ought to be. My work is in people’s choices, and how our choices are constrained by institutions. It lends itself to a more readable history than just a history of charts and graphs.

In the first chapter of the book you discuss how debt was extremely stigmatized in the 1920s. What was society’s moral view on borrowing then as compared to now?

People approach their checkbook not from a math point of view, but from a moral point of view. I think that’s really a key to understanding all of this. It is shocking how commonplace debt is today, but another difference between then and now is the financial infrastructure of debt. We are told that our grandparents didn’t borrow. That’s not true. People borrowed in the 19^th century, they just did it surreptitiously, illegally, or at the margins. It was always stigmatized. That stigmatization arose out of the belief that a mortgage or a debt could easily bankrupt you, or the economy would change, and you would lose everything. In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s the atmosphere around debt changed: New federal programs and financial institutions, from the FHA to department stores, enabled people to borrow more safely. So that fear that everything could be lost went away in the middle of the 20^th century. In the last 30 years that changed again. Those institutions born in this era of growth have persisted into our era of stagnation.

Is debt being re-stigmatized because of our most recent financial crisis?

Absolutely. In the 70s and 80s, it was like in the movie “Pretty Woman”; how glorious it was for Julia Roberts character to use a credit card. That was because most people in the ’80s didn’t have credit cards. In the ’90s, credit card use started to take on a different cast; it started to be seen as somewhat irresponsible. Mortgages maintained that shine of responsible adulthood until the financial crisis. Now people are questioning whether it’s good to go into debt for houses in a way that they certainly haven’t for 70 years.

In the book, you talk about the balloon mortgage and mortgage-backed securities, which had a big part in the economic collapse in the housing market during the Great Depression.

What’s shocking is that the balloon mortgage and the mortgage-backed security are things that we imagine were invented in the last ten years. At least I did before I started this research. But actually, they were commonplace in the 1920s. Banks would issue bonds to local investors who would use that money to lend interest-only mortgages (or balloon mortgages) to consumers. They were called balloon mortgages because they swelled up so that you’d only pay the interest for 3-5 years and at the end of the 3-5 year period you would just refinance it. The thought then was, you’d try to get the biggest house possible and make some money off of it a few years down the line. Banks had access to all this money to lend because they were selling “mortgage bonds” or “participation certificates.” But the bonds weren’t trade-able, they weren’t like mortgage backed securities are today. They couldn’t be resold. As the markets begin to go south after the crash people stopped buying the bonds, there were foreclosures, people started to withdraw their investments, and others were unable to refinance their mortgages.

And then Fannie Mae was created to help the government fund mortgage lending?

New Deal policy makers set up the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, which created a set of guidelines to ensure that houses would maintain value over time. They set up an insurance system so that lenders would be repaid in the case of a default, to prevent foreclosures. New Deal policy makers created Fannie Mae, originally called the Federal National Mortgage Association, to buy mortgages from local banks and mortgage companies and sell them to insurance companies and other investors. This way there was no longer a need for bonds.

In the book you give some fascinating historical information on how department stores, and later discount stores, changed the way Americans shopped and changed their intuitions about credit.

What’s interesting about department stores is that they are an amalgamation of a bunch of different kinds of stores, clothing stores, appliances, etc. Credit in the department store in the early 20^th century was a service, like delivery. The store didn’t make any money on it at all. That’s the most important thing to realize; that it was not a profit setter. It was something you did because it kept your customers happy. After the war, though, department stores begin to offer what they called “permanent budget accounts.” It allowed people to pay back purchases over many months, and the store was able to charge them interest. By the late 1950s, department stores had more money invested in consumer debt than in their own inventory, so they began to raise the interest rate on credit to 18 percent. It became profitable and they could resell that debt to finance companies. The subcontracting of debt enabled a whole system in which Americans got used to buying on credit and paying interest. Once debt could be resold, discount stores like Wal-mart and Kmart could sell for lower prices and offer the same services as department stores.

You also mention in the book that banks had an essentially trial-by-error process in learning how to profit from credit cards in the ’60s and ’70s. What were some of the regulatory and infrastructural changes that put banks at the forefront of the lending industry?

It’s important to realize that banks were not driving this shift in the ’70s. Banks didn’t come into the credit card industry until 1978 with the Marquette decision, which held that you could charge customers the legal interest rate of whichever state the bank was located in. So banks in states like South Dakota, where you could charge very high interest rates, could lend to people in Nebraska or New York City. That’s when Citibank moved its operation from Long Island to South Dakota, and charged very high interest rates across the country. This shift in the regulatory environment is key as well as the rise of interest rates more generally in the economy during the inflation of the late 1970s.

Why did consumers accept these high interest rates on credit cards?

If you are paying the customary 18 percent a year, it actually isn’t that much as long as you pay off most of your debts every month. And most of the credit cards that were lent in the ’70s and ’80s were to the well-to-do, who could handle the payments.

Nowadays almost anyone can get a credit card, not just the well off. When did that change?

It happened in the early ’90s. Banks continued to get more efficient at lending and their credit models, they believed, got better and better at differentiating between a good credit risk and a bad credit risk. It also became cheaper to borrow so that during the early ’90s from 1991 to 1996, during a five year period, nearly all the expansion in credit card debt was through securitization, when banks resell debt as credit card backed securities, just the way mortgages can be sold again as securities. Because it became cheaper to lend, banks could lend to poorer and poorer people with more vulnerable employment statuses because if these people defaulted,  it wasn’t as big of a deal. Statistically, they expected default, and they just thought they could manage those defaults through clever math.

What about the mortgage market in the ’90s? In the book you talk about how an influx of securities into the mortgage market made it ridiculously easy for people to mortgage new homes. How did this lead us into a speculative bubble?

People believed that house prices would go up and that they were good investments. Friends at work, at church, at the gym were telling each other how much money they had made on their houses over the last generation. By 2005 a lot of people bought secondary houses as investments. The speculative bubble happened for many reasons. The most important reason, we think, is that most Americans weren’t making as much money. Median wages stagnated. People couldn’t borrow to invest in the stock market, but they could borrow money from a bank very easily to buy a house. People thought investing in the housing market gave them leverage to make money quickly. You see the collision of a stagnating wage market with a rising house market during a moment of low interest rates. Wages hadn’t gone up for 30 years but wealth had gone up and concentrated at the top, amongst the wealthiest. That money had to be invested somewhere and it looked like housing was a safe, easy way to invest. This money went into houses rather than into business. It went into things that produced nothing rather than things that were economically productive.

You make a really important point comparing the housing market to a Giffen good. A Giffen good is a term, in economics, that refers to something for which demand will increase as its price increases, which works against our typical understanding of the relationship between price and demand.

In economic textbooks, Giffen Goods are described as an anomaly, like a mythical beast or a unicorn that could exist intellectually but never in the real world. But it’s exactly what happened with the housing market: when the price went up, demand went up. The key is that it was not just about borrowers but about lenders. Because there was this ready supply of capital to invest and these lenders were willing to fund all of these mortgages, the housing prices went through the roof. The market wasn’t self-correcting, and there was no equilibrium until there was a crisis.

If it were left up to you, how would you change the way capital is invested in this country? What needs to change?

I think it’s important to realize that we need to use our policies for productive investments. We’ve made it too easy to invest in consumer debt. We can use the same policies to steer money into productive investments. Businesses produce value, they produce jobs, they produce growth, and in our economy, it’s very hard to do that these days. You can get venture capital for fancy high-tech companies, but you can’t get loans for mom and pop operations. I think business investment is something that’s very moderate in a lot of ways from the left and the right. From my perspective it helps us think about how we can actually intervene in the economy rather than just scold people for borrowing too much or being predatory lenders. One of the most important points of this book is to get past moral arguments. We can acknowledge the importance of culture, but I think it’s important to see ways we can actually intervene and make things better.

Salon spoke with Sommers over the phone about Occupy Wall Street, online dating and Penn State’s Joe Paterno riot.

In the book you argue that this perception that, as you describe it, “What you see is what you get” is flawed and dangerous. Why are judgments based on first impressions misguided?

It’s our default assumption. It’s our fallback, automatic assumption about other people. It serves us well in a lot of respects. It makes the world a more predictable place. It allows us to make predictions about the world. But a variety of different research over the past few decades shows that this automatic judgment is a cognitive cutting of corners. It doesn’t give an accurate perspective on how human nature works. One of the really good examples is the quickness with which we turn to the “bad apple” explanation. When we read about bad behavior, whether it’s people committing crimes, rioting, etc., we immediately assume that that person is a bad apple, that we would never do something like that. It makes us feel better about ourselves at the end of the day, but it keeps us from solving some of the root issues at the heart of human nature.

In the book you discuss crowd mentality and conformity in detail. Reading these chapters, I couldn’t help thinking about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy Wall Street is all about power in numbers, but it seems that this may also be its downfall, since there’s no clear leadership.

It’s a good question. It can be related to the Tea Party rallies as well. I think conformity is the glue that holds our society together. Can you imagine walking down the street in Manhattan without conformity? It would be chaos, or more chaotic than it already is. The interesting thing is that we prefer being in groups of others who are similar. We like people who agree with us on issues, we even like people who imitate our own body movements. So, enjoying being in a group isn’t always the same thing as creating the most effective group. I think that is the big issue that faces the Occupy movement. Occupy has people feeling empowered, and surrounded by many other like-minded (or perceived to be like-minded) people. It feels good. At the same time, where is the mission statement or the list of directives? Where do you go from here? Conformity helps keep society together but it doesn’t always move us forward toward goals that are the most advantageous. That is one of the big challenges that Occupy is facing right now. You’ve got a bunch of people in the same place drawn together by similar concerns, but it’s unclear what those concerns are and where they are headed from here.

The Penn State riots over Joe Paterno’s dismissal in the wake of the Sandusky scandal seems to me a good example of crowd mentality gone awry.

As a social psychologist and a big-time sports fan from my days at Michigan, one thing I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t take much for any college football fan to riot. For most of us who don’t have a connection to Penn State, it was really jarring. We thought, How can you be upset about Paterno when we’re talking about dozens of children being sexually exploited? It seems crazy. It’s out of whack in terms of priority. But we need to remember what it’s like when something bad happens to a group with a strong affiliation. It’s amazing how able we are to rationalize things like this. As a Penn State fan, you are thinking, Paterno didn’t actually do anything wrong himself, he has done some great things for the University, he didn’t really know the full extent of Sandusky’s crimes, and now he is the subject of a witch hunt. You convince yourself into believing that. It’s not just being a sports fan, it’s human psychology to see the world through a self-serving filter.

I guess there is also validation in the self-deception when you have other people “on your team,” no pun intended.

Absolutely. There’s the bonding and validation of looking around and everyone supporting him. The library is named after him. They are thinking; I go to this university, Paterno is like a god here and he is a virtuous coach in a somewhat nefarious body of coaches in college athletics over the past couple of decades. You could see how, especially in a small town where everything is focused on football, you could view Paterno as being one of the victims here.

One point that I found particularly fascinating in the book is that we tend to have pretty skewed opinions of ourselves. You also mention that happier people are more likely to have an unrealistic self-perception.

I think most of us have the intuition that people who are sad or depressed are like Eeyore from “Winnie The Poo”: Woe is me, everything is terrible. What’s really interesting is that the research suggests that people with depressive symptoms often have a more accurate view of the self. People who are “normal” — or healthy, functioning individuals — tend to have a skewed view of themselves. It’s just skewed in a positive direction.

When you think about it, there are a huge number of tools in our toolbox of self-deception that make us look better to ourselves than we probably should. For example, 85 percent of us think we are above-average drivers, which is mathematically ridiculous. It ranges from that idea that “I’m better than average” to the behavior where we avoid situations in which we might not do well. There is research suggesting that people with more narcissistic personalities and high self-esteem are not particularly good at dealing with negative feedback. They don’t persevere when they struggle. Instead they cut their losses and try something else. The lengths we go to in order to feel good about ourselves are often considerable. Self-deception seems to be a pretty ubiquitous component with what we think of as “normal mental health functioning.” 

In the book you discuss the ways in which we tend to rely more than we should on preconceived “differences” between men and women. You mention our tendency to force gendered behavior onto children, and I found this really relevant. Raising children in less gender-specific environments is a progressive goal, but unfortunately, I don’t see the policing of children’s gender coming to an end any time soon.

It’s a really deeply ingrained norm and expectation that we have. Parents of newborns take only seconds after their child is born to describe their infant with different adjectives for a boy or a girl. I really do think some of it is owed to “what you see is what you get”; men and women have different bodies and we like to hang our hat on difference. But newborn babies are the same and they don’t act noticeably different at that age. We still treat them differently and I think it’s an illustration of how we get caught up in what we assume to be internal and immutable difference instead of a cultural institution. I go to the toy store and they have different shelves for boys’ and girls’ toys. The guy at the fast food restaurant still needs to know the gender of my child before he can give them a happy meal. It’s everywhere.

In the book you allude to how circumstance affects romantic relationships. We tend to think of love in the proverbial “fairy tale” terms. But in the book you point out that love is more practical than we’d like to think.

My wife hates that chapter but I actually think it’s still optimistic. You ask people what are the factors that influence their attraction to someone and they think in terms of body type, appearance and personal traits. But the circumstances and the context in which we live play an enormous role in who we are attracted to.

Proximity is first and foremost. Whether we are talking about romantic relationships or our close friends, most of us would have very different intimate relationships if we had gone to a different college, worked in a different building, lived in a different apartment or joined a different gym. Similarity is another one. There is this “opposites attract” theory but there is not a lot of support for it scientifically. Similarity seems to influence who we end up with both in terms of similar interests and backgrounds, but also similar appearance level and similar physical characteristics. If we look at online dating, people don’t just send emails to the most attractive profiles. Instead, people who are highly attractive tend to send emails to other folks who are highly attractive. People who are more moderate in their levels of objectively rated attraction tend to send more emails to other people who are in that moderate level. It’s like we have an implicit sense of who is “in my league.” Similarity and proximity are hugely important, but I’ve actually gotten booed before in class when I’ve said that. People think that conclusion renders love less real and meaningful, but that’s not what I’m arguing. I’m arguing that we have the potential to form romantic connections to a wide range of people. That’s actually liberating.

Your chapter on hate seemed to posit that we prefer others who are culturally and racially similar to us while we dislike difference. One interesting point that you make, which I found to be pretty accurate, is that people feel very uncomfortable admitting that these preferences are real. I’m thinking of the term “post-racial,” which came into popularity in conjunction with Obama’s presidency, but your research might suggest that we don’t in fact live in a post-racial environment.

We don’t live in a “post-racial” environment. Absolutely not. We have a way of viewing the world around us in terms of categories. It’s how we learn, as a child, to deal with things in our environment. We see people in terms of social categories like race, gender and age. This colors the way we interact with others and what we expect of them. A lot of people are resistant to accepting this or addressing it. If we continue to maintain this party line — the one illustrated by Stephen Colbert’s joke where he looks at a black person and says, “I don’t see color. Are you a black man?” — that doesn’t solve anything. My research suggests that that tactic backfires. People don’t tend to make a very good impression this way. They are viewed as disingenuous and distracted in diverse settings when they pretend not to notice race.

So how can we improve our approach to ethnic bias?

The more uplifting take on this is, if we can all accept that we see the world in terms of categories, we can make use of that information in navigating our social universe. We need to ask how to have these kinds of conversations and how to correct these kinds of tendencies. It’s a conversation we have on my university campus and in other organizations. It’s good to want diversity and to want to have people from different backgrounds together, but if we are going to pretend that we’re all the same, then it doesn’t really do us any good. I think that resistance to talking about race and accepting that race still makes a difference in our society and affects all of us, is a big problem. The “what you see is what you get” idea comes into bearing because often when we do have these discussions it becomes about who’s racist, is this behavior racist? And that’s a discussion that no one ever wins.

Salon spoke over the phone with Gaulin, who explained why one common ingredient in much of our food is making us fatter, why women are very different from men when it comes to weight and health, and how it really pays to think like an evolutionary biologist.

You and William Lassek co-authored the book. It’s surprising that two men would co-author a book on women’s health. How did each of you come to focus your research on this topic? 

When I was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, they had a policy that if you were over 55 and you weren’t trying to accumulate credits for a degree, you could take any course you wanted. Will, who was retired, showed up in my introductory level course, Sex and Evolution. From the first day he started asking questions that were so far over the heads of the students. So I told him to come to my office hours instead of confusing all of my students with a Ph.D.-level dialogue. Something we began to discuss was this finding that men have a preference for women with a small waist and larger hips. No one had really explained why men should have such a strong preference for this shape, and it’s not immediately interpretable in terms of comparisons with our close relatives. For example female chimpanzees don’t have that shape and male chimpanzees don’t seem to care anything about female shape when they mate. So it was a bit of a puzzle. That was the question that got us started and eventually led us to work related to women’s body type and weight.

In the first chapter of the book, you talk about the “polyunsaturated explosion,” during the 1950s that led Americans to eat much differently than they had in the past. What changed and why did it happen?

I don’t know if I normally subscribe to the principle that history is driven by the actions of a few influential people, but in this particular case there were two people who did exert a very big influence on our national diet. One was coming from an economic perspective and the other was coming from (what he believed) was a nutritional perspective. After Dwight Eisenhower had a major heart attack, when the American public became much more focused on heart health and nutrition, a popular nutritionist by the name of Ansel Keys made a lot of impact. He was committed to the notion that saturated fat was the culprit in the heart disease epidemic in the U.S. He advised Americans to replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats, in particular corn and soybean oils. Meanwhile Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, had been tasked to get food prices lower. He decided to heavily subsidize and commoditize corn and soybeans in order to make them really cheap. So corn and soybeans became the basis of our entire food production system. And it continues today. The amount of these oils in the American diet increases significantly every year.

And you point out in the book that corn and soybean oil are high in a compound called omega-6, which is detrimental to health, especially for women. What is omega-6 and why does it make people fatter?

Omega-6 is a category of fat. It is technically a fatty acid. Omega-6s are one category of polyunsaturated fats found in seeds and grains. Now, it’s not bad to eat grains, it’s not bad to eat corn, and it’s not bad to eat soybeans. What is bad is that food processors extract and concentrate these oils from plants. In an ear of corn there isn’t that much corn oil, but when you subject it to industrial processing and extract everything but the oil, now you’ve got a lot of omega-6. It’s this heavy industrial processing of seed crops that makes our diet so unnatural. Omega-6s make us fat in a variety of ways. They promote fat storage. Omega-6 is also the precursor for certain signaling molecules called endocannabinoids. Will likes to call them the body’s home-grown version of marijuana. Endocannabinoids give you the munchies just like cannabis does. So the omega-6s are telling the body, “Store the fat you have.” And they are also telling the body, “Eat more, I’m hungry!”

But later in the book, you also give some reasons why gaining weight is quite natural in women. You provide an evolutionary answer to the question: Why do women gain weight after having children? It’s not the typical reasons that many women tend to assume — being too busy to exercise, eating poorly because of stress, etc. 

Interestingly, human brain size plays a big role in why women need fat and why they tend to gain weight after having children. Humans have ridiculously big brains, which makes it more difficult to give birth to our infants. While chimps, orangutans and gorillas can literally sleep through a birth, human births, especially first births, are typically more than a day of very difficult labor. Women tend to weigh less before they have had their first baby because with a first infant, evolutionarily, it pays not to grow a baby that is too large. They can get stuck in the birth canal. It’s not so much of a problem for us in 21st-century North America because most women have fairly ready access to cesarean section. But for 99.99 percent of human evolution, it was a really big problem. The result of natural selection is that women tend to be lighter before they have a child because they need their first infant to be smaller in order to survive childbirth. Each infant that a woman has remodels the pelvis so that each subsequent infant can grow somewhat bigger. There is a positive correlation between birth order and birth weight. So the way to grow a bigger infant is for the mother to have more fat on her body.

American culture tends to vilify fat and fat people. You mention a particular instance in 2004 when the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appeared on national television claiming that obesity was approaching the No. 1 preventable cause of death. You think this crusade was misguided. Why?

Many M.D.s have bought this fallacious line that the optimal weight for women in terms of their health is what M.D.s call normal weight, a BMI between 18.5 and 25. And they have thought this to be true because women with higher BMIs exhibit a series of physiological measures that are indeed risk factors for disease in men. But they are not systematically risk factors for disease in women. If you actually look at the data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and data from studies done in other countries, the optimal weight for women who have had a kid is what doctors currently call “overweight.” I’m not saying that obesity is optimal, but all the findings show that overweight women survive better than normal weight women. We walk a fine line in the book because we argue that being overweight is not nearly as bad as your doctor has been telling you, but on the other hand, Americans are heavier than they need to be. There are diseases that still correlate with heavier weights, like diabetes. But if we ate a more natural diet, by that I simply mean the diet that we evolved to eat, we would all weigh less.

And we all seem to have a “set point” for weight. We have biological constraints that keep us from veering too far from our genetically determined “set weight.”

Yes, there are studies where they starve people and there are studies where they feed people huge amounts of food to see if they can fatten them up. In both kinds of cases, the body seems to have a lot of inertia in this regard. It does not want to lose weight and it does not want to gain weight regardless of where the person happens to fall on the BMI curve before the experiment. If you are starving the body, the metabolic rate slows down, the activity level goes down, a variety of mechanisms kick in to try to hold on to the weight that the body has. Likewise if we feed people twice as many calories as they normally eat, many are quite resistant to gaining weight. When we feed them three times as many calories, they finally gain weight, but the weight goes right away when they return to their normal calorie intake. The body knows where it wants to be. It’s interesting in that people differ greatly in what their set points are, but everyone seems to have a set point.

So what kinds of implications does this have for women who diet? Why do diets seem to fail women again and again? 

One thing that’s important for women to understand is that your set point can change. That’s what “yo-yo dieting” does. When humans were hunter-gatherers, they never could count on where their next meal was coming from. They didn’t have grocery stores or refrigerators. In cases of bad luck foraging for food, the only thing they had for backup was stored body fat. There is an optimal amount of fat to store, which depends on how frequent and how severe your food shortages are. That is the point; a diet tells your body that there is a food shortage. Your body doesn’t know that you’ve decided to lose weight. Instead, the body takes a diet and goes, “Oh damn, I live in a food insecure world. The next time I get some food I better up my set point so that I have more fat for next time!” It’s so natural and obvious isn’t it?

It’s kind of bitterly ironic when you think about the history and intensity of the relationship between women and dieting in this country. 

And it’s quite obvious once you start thinking like an evolutionist. But since barely half of the people in this country believe in evolution, a lot aren’t in a good position to think like one. Evolutionary biology isn’t just crazy theories about fossils from humans that are long gone, this is stuff that is highly relevant to decisions we make everyday in our lives.

In the book, you emphasize that instead of dieting to lose weight, women can change the way they eat in order to return to what you call a “more natural weight.” How do we determine what our natural weight might be and how do we get closer to it?

I think the best way to do that is just start eating the kind of diet that drastically reduces the amount of polyunsaturated omega-6s in the diet. The best way to do that is to stop eating processed food and to avoid commercially fried foods because they are always fried in these omega-6 fats. Potato and corn chips, for example, are a huge contributor of omega-6s in the diet. There is more than a gram of omega-6 in every single potato chip that a person eats. So that’s my solution. Many studies in the U.S. and other countries show that the single best predictor of how much a woman will weigh is how much omega-6 is in her diet.

Reading the book, I couldn’t help but consider how regional and socioeconomic factors might take influence over the different ways that women tend to eat. In the book, you advise women to eat wild (not farmed) fish, grass fed meat, as well as a diversity of organic fruits and vegetables. But is it possible for all women in the U.S. have access to this diet?  

I’m a big advocate of family farms. I don’t think there’s any reason why we can’t have family farms in virtually any part of the country. Because the U.S. has commoditized corn and soybeans, there’s been a progressive consolidation of farms into big industrial agribusinesses. But family farms, that raise animals on the land, are a really good alternative. And when animals are grass-fed it changes the fatty acid profile of their meat — how much omega-6 and how much omega-3 is in it, which makes it healthier meat to consume. I don’t think that grass-fed or free-range is an elitist kind of food, I think it’s the natural, normal kind of food that we could have anywhere if we patronized our local farmers.