How Pleasure Works Quotes

“Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: Why we like what we like

“Some very common foods and drinks are aversive. Few people enjoy, at first, coffee, beer, tobacco, or chili pepper. Pleasure from pain is uniquely human. No other animal willingly eats such foods when there are alternatives. Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans—language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“It is not surprising that in the largest study ever of human mate preferences, looking at people in 37 cultures, the most important factor for both men and women is kindness.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“In one study, researchers got a team of women to attend different classes at the University of Pittsburgh. These women never spoke during the lectures and never interacted with the students. But the number of classes they attended varied—15, 10, 5, or none. At the end of the course, students were shown pictures of the women and asked what they thought of them. The women judged as most attractive were those who had attended class 15 times; judged least attractive were those the students had never seen before. This is a small study, but it fits a voluminous literature in social psychology on the “mere exposure” effect—people like what they are familiar with, which is a rational way for the mind to work given that, other things being equal, something you are familiar with is likely to be safe. Mere exposure applies to attractiveness, then, explaining some of the appeal of the girl (or boy) next door.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“By distorting experience, beliefs, including essentialist beliefs, garner support for themselves, which is one reason why it is so hard to change our minds about anything.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“That is, someone who prefers the taste of Perrier to other waters but fails a blind taste test is not dishonest or confused. Perrier does taste great. It’s just that to appreciate its great taste, you have to know that it is Perrier.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“will argue that the pleasure we get from many things and activities is based in part on what we see as their essences. Our essentialism is not just a cold-blooded way of making sense of reality; it underlies our passions, our appetites, and our desires.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“In fact, one of the strongest examples of essentialism concerns the difference between the sexes. Before ever learning about physiology, genetics, evolutionary theory, or any other science, children think that there is something internal and invisible that distinguishes boys from girls. This essentialism can be explicit, as when one girl explained why a boy will go fishing rather than put on makeup: “’Cause that’s the boy instinct.” And seven-year-olds tend to endorse statements such as “Boys have different things in their innards than girls” and “Because God made them that way” (a biological essence and a spiritual essence). Only later in development do children accept cultural explanations, such as “Because it is the way we have been brought up.” You need to be socialized to think about socialization. This research is ongoing, but there is an emerging consensus that children are natural-born essentialists. The scope of this essentialism is broad; we attribute essences to animals, artifacts, and types of people.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“Many significant human pleasures are universal. But they are not biological adaptations. They are by-products of mental systems that have evolved for other purposes.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“so we share many of the pleasures of other species. The psychologist Steven Pinker notes that people are happiest when “healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“The main argument here is that pleasure is deep. What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think that thing is.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“La teoria dei segnali di status può essere estesa a molti comportamenti, perfino all’acquisto di opere d’arte moderna. Chiunque può comprare, e apprezzare, un bel dipinto. Ma spendere milioni per acquistare un quadro astratto indica una combinazione di ricchezza e calcolo. Una volta che si comincia a pensare ai segnali di status, li si vede ovunque. A volte mi sono chiesto se questo è il motivo per cui negli istituti privati più costosi si insegna il latino. Le scuole sostengono che è un ottimo esercizio mentale, ma probabilmente questa scelta è tanto diffusa a causa della difficoltà della materia. La sua associazione con il potere, e la sua totale inutilità, ne fanno un simbolo ideale di status sociale.

Se si scoprisse che il latino aiuta i ragazzi a imparare le altre lingue e migliora le loro capacità mentali, anche le scuole pubbliche potrebbero cominciare a insegnarlo, e un esperto di teoria dei segnali di status anticiperebbe che presto le scuole private lo abolirebbero e chiederebbero ai loro studenti di passare un’ora al giorno a studiare il sanscrito o la calligrafia.

Di solito questa teoria riguarda i segnali che inviamo agli altri e, in quanto strategia, questo è indubbiamente il suo scopo. Ma a volte inviamo segnali anche a noi stessi. Forse abbiamo bisogno di rassicurarci che ci possiamo permettere di pagare per avere qualcosa di speciale, e che siamo in grado di apprezzarlo, e quindi compriamo l’acqua minerale Perrier anche se nessuno ci vede. Come dice una nota pubblicità: perché noi valiamo.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“(...) life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens... Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, 'Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.' This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“Regardless of their sex, good-looking faces light up the brain”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: Why we like what we like