Why are we drawn to guilty pleasures like romance novels? Neuroscientists Weigh In: Shots

In recent months, romance and fantasy books have taken the internet by storm. One of these is the Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros. These books became one LESS an obsession for me. (What’s not to love about a college full of love triangles and magical dragons?)

I devoured these books and many of my colleagues and friends devoured them as well. A single mention of the series quickly prompted comments and groans from the people around me.

Despite the pleasure I had reading it, I found myself feeling the need to add a disclaimer before recommending the series: “I mean, it’s all bullshit,” I would say.

I became curious about this need to separate from this thing that was bringing me joy. Of course, I decided to turn to science. What can it tell me about this experience of a guilty pleasure?

Maybe yours is romance books like mine, or maybe it’s video games, reality TV, or obscure corners of TikTok.

I spoke to neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach at the University of Oxford and several other researchers to get answers.

This story is adapted from a short wave episode.

Kringelbach, who directs a center devoted to the study of human flourishing, pleasure and meaning in the brain, says experiencing pleasure is critical to the survival of mankind.

“We have to be able not only to survive for ourselves, but also to survive as a species,” he says. “Which means the basic pleasures are where we can have food that gives us the energy to go on, but also sex that allows us to essentially work as a species.”

Here’s what I learned about why and how we experience pleasure and what makes the guilty person so good.

Desire and liking use different parts of our brain

Kent Berridge is a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan who has collaborated with Kringelbach in the past. He says that for a long time he and other neuroscientists thought that what we call “pleasure” referred to a single system in the brain and was related to dopamine. But as they studied pleasure, they saw that it is only part of a cycle involving desire and liking, each involving different neural pathways.

Kringelbach used the example of his morning cup of coffee to explain the first part of this cycle: desire. When he gets up and starts thinking about coffee, his brain may be fixated on how it will taste, smell, or feel. He says these things fuel the “want” and ultimately motivate him to go to his coffee maker and make himself a cup every morning.

As soon as we start drinking our morning coffee, we enter the “liking” phase of the cycle, when we experience pleasure, says Berridge.

And while many people think of dopamine when it comes to pleasure in general, Berridge says it mainly drives this first part of the cycle, cravings.

Likeability or pleasure appears to be linked to a different system in the brain.

In the brains of rodents, researchers see signs of pleasure or “liking” — such as licking the lips after eating — when they stimulate small areas located precisely within a network of reward structures in the brain. They’re like cubic millimeter-sized buttons, smaller than a grain of rice – Berridge and Kringelbach referred to them as “hedonic hotspots.”

Although researchers don’t know if these structures exist in humans, Berridge says recent work suggests we may at least have something similar.

The guilty pleasure part may be an outlet

Of course, humans – and our motivations – are much more complex than rodents. And since there isn’t much neuroscience in guilty pleasures, I spoke to a behavioral researcher.

Kelly Goldsmith, a marketing professor at Vanderbilt University, did a series of studies in 2012 testing people’s associations between guilt and pleasure. And she found that feeling guilty about something can make people enjoy it even more.

Goldsmith and her team got people to think about guilt without being aware of it—by doing things like sorting out words associated with the feeling. Participants then tried different types of chocolate and rated how much they would be willing to pay for the chocolate and how much they liked it.

People who had been primed to think about guilt reported liking candy more and said they would pay more for it than those who hadn’t thought about guilt.

Goldsmith says she thinks this finding may suggest that doing something we associate with guilt can give us a sense of freedom in our often limited lives.

“Most of us, most of the time, show up for work, eat breakfast, take the kids to school. It’s like holding a spring,” she says. “And when you get a chance to let loose … it can actually feel pretty good.”

Our pleasure systems can go out of whack

So yes, sometimes, a reality TV marathon can be just the outlet you need at the end of a long work week. But Berridge and Kringelbach warn that it’s possible for the various stages of the pleasure cycle to get out of balance.

For example, we can get stuck in the “want” stage and become especially motivated to do something – even when it no longer brings us pleasure. While Berridge usually studies this in the context of addiction, he says many people experience it with things like smartphones and video games that trigger our reward system.

“In today’s modern world, we have many, many more pleasures available to us than our ancestors,” he says. “All kinds of things, from food to cultural things to all kinds of life enrichment. …[That] it means that we have a brain hardwired to seek infrequent pleasures and are now chasing multiple frequent pleasures. We can get caught up in that very easily.”

Kringelbach notes that his research found that some of the most meaningful pleasures in life are those that bring us together with others.

He says the key to finding balance with the things we love may be focusing on social pleasures — things like cooking with friends and family or being part of a community. “You have to share the love,” he says.

A ‘happiness activist’ says embrace what brings you joy

One reason we may feel guilty about some of our pleasures is fear of how we’ll be perceived, says pleasure activist and gender studies professor Sami Schalk. She says many of us feel particularly vulnerable about the things we love.

“I think there’s a connection to childhood as well, when it’s childhood to want something really unashamedly,” she says. “And as adults, we need to have restraint within our emotions, and that includes our joy.”

Schalk says that, many times, feelings like guilt or shame can cause us to cut off potential connections with others—ones that could bring us pleasure.

Schalk also encourages people to consider why they feel guilty about certain things that bring them pleasure.

“Nobody says opera is ‘my guilty pleasure’ because it’s something we think of as very respectable and important and associated with whiteness and upper class,” she says. “But often these other things that we refer to as guilty pleasures have these moral and social values ​​to them that are often associated with marginalized people in our culture.”

So when people say they love things like romance novels and reality TV, it’s like “you shouldn’t quote them unquote, like these things,” she says. “But if you do that, you have to signal that, you know, it’s not a good thing to like or enjoy saying it’s a guilty pleasure instead of just saying, I like this, I like this, this is pleasant for me. .”

Schalk writes and talks about the value of embracing our pleasures—she also practices this in her own life. In 2019, she tweeted a video of herself dancing in a handmade silver cape saying she wanted to make moves with Lizzo. And… she did.

After talking to Schalk, I thought about all the times I’ve pretended not to like a TV show or book for fear of being “unpleasant,” and all the possible conversations and experiences I might have missed with other people. in my life that you can enjoy those things too. I decided that when it comes to the pleasure of romance, I’m ready to embrace the hard times and just share it with the world.