Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World | Clay Routledge | EP 199

You could kind of think of existential psychology as having a dark side and a light side in some ways. Terror management and Becker was kind of, you know, the edgier dark side, which is ultimately what meaning is about. It's a defense system, right? Like people are afraid. People, you know, people are aware of these vulnerabilities, and it makes them afraid. So they dogmatically cling to beliefs in order to reduce that fear.

So that's right. It's an extension of Freud's notions of religious belief as a defense mechanism. You can see the Freudianism slipping through there. And that is the issue: what's the difference between a defense and an adaptation? On one hand, culture, you could say that your identification with your culture allows you symbolic immortality. But you could also say, yes, well, it builds your house so you don't freeze to death in the winter too, right? So it's not just symbolically preventing your death, say, or protecting yourself against your fear of death; it's actually stopping you from dying, which is not a trivial issue.

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Hello, everyone. I'm pleased to have with me as a guest today Dr. Clay Routledge. He's a faculty scholar in the Sheila and Robert Shelley Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, professor of management at North Dakota State University, and senior research fellow at the Archbridge Institute. Dr. Routledge studies, among other topics, meaning, belief, atheism, magical thinking, existential economics, and entrepreneurship. He is the author of "Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource" and "Supernatural Death: Meaning and the Power of the Invisible Word." He has published more than 100 academic articles, co-edited three books, and written numerous pieces for outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, and The National Review.

I first ran across his work in Newsweek, where he wrote an interesting article on what you might describe as the potential moral failings of universal basic income and its failure to address people's need for meaning in addition to their necessity for economic security. I looked up his website and found that his lab does unique work; there aren't a lot of psychological labs concentrating as intently as Dr. Routledge on meaning and belief and that sort of thing. I thought it would be very much worth talking to him, especially also given his emphasis on economics, which adds an additional twist to his interests.

So welcome, Dr. Routledge.

Clay: Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.

Jordan: Thank you for having me on, Dr. Peterson. It's a great privilege to be on your podcast.

Jordan: Well, so fill me in a bit. Tell me what your lab has been doing and how you got interested in doing what you're doing, and also how you managed it, because your research interests, I wouldn't say, are exactly center of the road by academic psychological standards. But you've been very successful with it.

Clay: Yeah, so I mean I'm a bit of an atypical academic in a lot of ways. One, when I was in college, I didn't even think I was supposed to be there. I remember I had a high school guidance counselor who said, "Well, you're not college material, so you need to figure out a job that you can do when you graduate."

Jordan: But why did he think you weren't college material?

Clay: I'm a late bloomer. I wasn't a great student. This was decades ago, and now I'd probably be diagnosed with ADHD or something like that. I was just a very active young male who wasn't particularly interested in sitting still in classes and reading books and things like that. I wanted to be engaged doing active things. So I wasn't a great student. But I think I was kind of a late bloomer, and then by the time I graduated, I thought, "Well, I should go to college. I should give it a shot." I went to a local community college, and I pretty much worked oftentimes full-time as a security guard and a bunch of other jobs. I had done martial arts for much of my life, and so I was a part-time martial arts instructor.

I was just going to college, and I was actually originally a criminal justice major because I thought, "Well, I should probably do something like be a police officer — something a little bit more active." I wasn't really into that. I took a psychology class, which is common as part of a criminal justice major, and I was like, "Oh, wow, this seems pretty cool."

So I got interested in psychology, but even still, when I finished my psychology degree, I had no intentions of going to graduate school. I spent a few years actually working in outpatient clinical mental health and also in social work, which we can get into later because I do think that some of those experiences have really influenced how I think about things — just the practical experience of working with people in the community. Sometimes it was because of severe mental illness; sometimes it was just people that had real social dysfunction and a lot of problems in their family and personal lives.

Jordan: So you had the opportunity to do something that was clinical to bring your knowledge down to earth, so to speak.

Clay: Yeah, absolutely. I had an undergraduate degree; I wasn't a psychologist, like a clinical psychologist or anything. I was basically a social worker, an outpatient caseworker. But I had dozens of clients that I was responsible for, you know, kind of checking on them, making sure they were medication compliant or doing the things they were supposed to do as part of their treatment plan. It was a very interesting and educating experience. I did that, but then decided, you know, "I want to go to school. I want to try graduate school." I had a professor who was an undergraduate who, she was very much like, "You should go to graduate school. You would be great. You would do really well."

Jordan: And you just weren't super confident about it?

Clay: No, I just wasn't super confident about it, but then I took the GRE, and I did pretty well, I think. I applied to a few programs. I only applied to four programs; I got into two of them. Then I went to school at the University of Missouri. So that's a long way of saying when I started school, which was in September of 2001, that was when 9/11 happened — like within my first week or two of classes. In fact, I remember I went into this really — I had this ANOVA — you know when you're in grad school, you take these quantitative site classes. I think it was just called ANOVA. You know, I was in this class, and then it was kind of announced that, "Hey, there's this attack happening." I saw some of it unfold before I left the house in the morning, but we didn't know what was going on. Then I was in this grad seminar, and our professor actually sent us home and said, "Everyone needs to go home. There's a terrorist attack." Something's happening.

Jordan: So this was at the very beginning of my first semester of graduate school.

Clay: At the time, I was in more of a personality and social psychology health lab. It was an alcohol lab, and so we were really looking at very practical outcomes related to risky behavior, as predicted by individual differences. But when 9/11 happened, I just started thinking about — I mean, it just really astonished me how you had these people that are, because of a cause or something they believed in, are willing to sort of override their self-preservation instinct and die in service of an ideology.

Jordan: Yeah, well that was something that really compelled me too. I was very curious all the way through my graduate school career about what it was about belief that was so compelling that people were willing to risk their lives or to kill or to commit atrocities, all of that.

Clay: So what is it that belief does that's so psychologically significant that it seems to override everything else? It's a hell of a question, right?

Jordan: Right, right.

Clay: And so it just happened by chance that I was at the University of Missouri doing my, you know, starting graduate school after this happened, and I was thinking about these questions. There was a scholar there, Dr. Jamie Arndt, who—this was his whole area of research—was he was in an area, I don't know if you’re familiar with, called terror management theory.

Jordan: Yes.

Clay: And so he was doing research in his lab, not on terrorism or anything like that, but on this notion of what does it mean to be an organism intelligent enough to be aware of your the inevitability of your own mortality? Right? That's based on Ernest Becker's work, "The Denial of Death," which is a great book. I think he's fundamentally wrong, but it's a great book nonetheless. He's wrong in a very interesting way, and he's a very, very smart person. "The Denial of Death" is a great book, and I'm familiar with some of the major researchers in the terror management area. I've met a couple of them, and we've had some discussions.

Jordan: Excellent.

Clay: So yeah, so that's how I kind of got started. So I ended up changing labs, which people might not—your listeners and viewers might not really know what that means, but that's kind of a big deal. It's kind of a dicey thing to navigate in graduate school. As you get accepted, typically you're accepted by a person to work with them in their lab. Then to be like, "Well, I want to move to a different lab," it's kind of a big—it's like switching an apprenticeship, right?

Jordan: Right. And it can go quite wrong.

Clay: Yeah, so it's risky; it's a risky move. But you know, when I started grad school, I wasn't really sure what I was doing. I went to a small—one as an undergrad, I went to a small commuter college, and there was no — you couldn't work in a lab. There wasn't anyone doing research. So it wasn't like what a lot of my own students have the opportunity for. You know, undergrads to work in my lab and get a sense, “Is this for me?” So I had no idea. So when I started, I really didn't know what I was getting into. So when I had the opportunity to potentially change labs, I negotiated it carefully so no one would be offended or anything. I certainly didn't want to hurt my own future prospects in the field, but everyone was fine with it.

Jordan: What did you find compelling about terror management theory, and can you outline it a bit for everyone? We could have a bit of a discussion about that as well.

Clay: Yeah, yeah, of course. So what I found compelling about it was, and I do have, you know, I do have some issues with it; I'm not in total agreement with it in its purest form. But what I found compelling about it was really the writing of Ernest Becker that it is based on, which is this notion of what does it mean to be so smart that in a lot of ways where, you know, as Becker pointed out, humans have godlike imaginative capacities. Right? We can fantasize about all sorts of things. We can do all—you know, we can engage in all sorts of mental exercises in which we can transform this planet, right, and even send people into space. What does it mean to have that intelligence yet at the same time know that you're a biological organism, that no matter how smart you are, you can't outsmart your own demise? And not only that, that it can come without warning.

So you can exercise and wear your seatbelt and drink green tea and everything else you're told to do, and maybe if you're lucky you'll avoid an early death. But that doesn't change the fact that, you know, when this podcast is over, I could take a walk out the door, feeling pretty good about my day, and get run over by a truck. And you know, so that's what—so what Becker and then ultimately some of the terror management scholars pointed out was, or they argued, was that it's always kind of in the background, right? The threat of mortality—it's not you're not—consciously thinking about it most of the time, but we're aware of it.

And Becker tried to bring closure to Freudian psychoanalysis, and so people who are interested in Freud could read Becker because he did a good job of modernizing Freud. He claimed that we needed an immortality project to set up against mortality and the terror that it held for us, and that we were compelled to identify with large-scale systems in an attempt to muster a kind of immortal heroism as an antidote to the terror of death. He thought of that, I think, essentially—although he wavered somewhat in the book—essentially as delusional. And I think in some sense, from my perspective, that was where he went wrong because I'm not convinced precisely that it is delusional in its fundamental essence. But plenty of people would debate that.

Jordan: I think you and I are on the same page about that. I would agree. I don't think it's delusional. And you know, there's some other issues maybe I think that people can take with some of the theorizing. But ultimately, the terror management theory, for people who aren't familiar with it, is taking those ideas of Becker, of saying that, well, because of this awareness of mortality, which Becker argued would otherwise be paralyzing if you didn't have this hero project to engage in—and that's why the book's called "The Denial of Death"—right? At some level, you have to deny that's it, right?

And you have to transform yourself into something symbolic. One of the arguments that Becker made is that as humans live in kind of two worlds, we live in the material physical world that, you know, every morning when you wake up, have your aches and pains, and need to go to the restroom, you become well aware of your animality, right, your creatureliness. But we also live in this imaginative, symbolic world where we're able to create works of art, world religions, all sorts of interesting things. And that world is the world of meaning that we seek to create. Ultimately, that is the world that's immortal because I know that, you know, I'm going to die.

But I can be part of a project. Like you said, I could be part of a heroic project that outlives me. So in a lot of religious traditions, that might be very literal, right? And their belief in an afterlife. But Becker also argued that we have the ability to engage in symbolic immortality projects as well. So passing down our genes or creating works of art or building communities or things that outlive us. To the extent that I can say part of myself is in those projects, then part of myself lives on even if I don't physically.

So that takes us back to the terrorism idea because one of the arguments was that, well, you're going to die, and there's not much you can do about that. But if you invest yourself in something bigger than yourself, and that thing lives on, then you have some type of immortality.

Jordan: Do you remember that movie "Braveheart"?

Clay: Yeah, I interviewed the director a few weeks ago on my podcast.

Jordan: Oh really? Well, there's a great scene in there where William Wallace is trying to motivate the people to overcome their fear of what is clearly a lopsided battle. And he does, like everyone, he has this speech where it's like, you could all go home right now, and maybe you'll live perfectly fine complete lives. But one day you'll be old on your deathbed, and you'll look back on this, and maybe you’ll wish that you would have gone for it, right? Because this is a bigger, this is going to be a more enduring meaning project than you just going home and having a normal life course.

Part of what got me about Becker, I mean Becker said at the beginning of "The Denial of Death" that he never read Jung, and that was a big mistake because much of Carl Jung's writing centered on the immortality project from a different perspective than Freud. Jung didn't consider the participation in the hero project as delusional; he thought about it as centrally adaptive. And it seems to me—I mean, the attack I've taken is that the meaning that people derive from being embedded in significant projects is an antidote to the terror of not so much mortality but fragility, I would say, because there's actually things you can be a lot more afraid of than death, I believe. And that's not illusory. I mean it can be, right? It can become delusional. But it's not reasonable for me to believe that the projects that we undertake, the heroic projects, let's say even such things as raising a family, are the denial of death; they're an attempt to extract meaning out of finite life.

And I suppose it's also too much of a cognitive theory for my liking because it doesn't take other elements into account, like the existence of a religious instinct, let's say, or something like that. So despite that, I have a lot of regard for the book. I think it's a brilliant book.

Clay: Yeah, no, no, I agree with you. But that's kind of how I got started is I entered this lab at the University of Missouri, and we were doing—so the idea was: the people who started terror management theory, I think they wrote like a theoretical article or something and presented it maybe at a social psychology conference in the early 80s. People were like, "Hey, that all sounds really cool, but it's totally untestable."

Jordan: Yes, the initial reaction.

Clay: So what they did is they tried to create a series of hypotheses that they could test. One of them, you know, the most common one, but certainly not the only one is what's called the mortality salience hypothesis, which basically is if it's true that, you know, the awareness of death is the thing that provokes our investment in these belief systems, as well as the self-esteem project which, you know Becker talked about a lot, then temporarily heightening people's awareness of mortality should in turn temporarily heighten their defense of these systems.

Jordan: Right, so that's when they started doing experiments.

Clay: That was Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszynski, correct?

Jordan: Right, yeah. They wrote a book called "The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life," that came out in 2015. I haven't looked at that book. I've talked to Greenberg and Solomon about their work before. They'd be good to have on this podcast, actually. I hadn't thought about that.

Clay: So yeah, so they would bring people into the lab and remind them in various ways of their mortality and then look at the effects on their beliefs, the putative effects. They also had a hell of a time publishing their work to begin with—they were resisted quite stringently, quite assiduously, by people in the field.

Jordan: Yeah, I think so. I mean, one of the resistance, it seems to be—this is too philosophical, it’s too abstract, it's hard to pin down. Understandably, because one of the challenges, you know, one of the challenges that people have made to the theory is when you make people aware of their mortality, or when you heighten people's awareness of mortality, regardless of how rigorous of a control condition you have—so you can say, for instance, well, maybe the problem with death is that it's separation; it's isolation, right?

So maybe it's really a social thing. Maybe you're being separated permanently from loved ones, and so it's triggering these defenses is something social. So you can try to control for social exclusion or things like that. But one of the challenges is regardless of what type of control condition you have, by nature, death is a real thing; it's not an abstraction, and it's multifaceted, it's multi-dimensional because you do worry about all these things. Right?

We—and there is some Israeli social psychologists who were also Victor Florian, I don't know if you've heard of him, and Mario Mikulincer—they were also doing this kind of existential psychology, and they were looking at the awareness of death more through this multi-dimensional perspective. When people are—the fear of death isn't just a fear of annihilation, which is kind of what Becker focused on, but it is the fear of uncertainty about what's going to happen after you die. There is a social element of it too, which is I'm going to be separated from the people I love.

There's a fear of pain. I mean, so there is a whole bunch of other stuff packed in there, and it's hard when you make people aware of death, you're bringing online all of that stuff, and so how do you—it's a bit complicated to disengage.

Jordan: Yeah, it's not obvious too whether death is a subset of uncertainty or uncertainty is a subset of death terror. I mean, part of the problem with Becker's theory is that a lot of beliefs are actually representations of ways to act in the world that stabilize the world, right? So if you have a theory about something, you act it out, and you get what you want; then you validate the theory, and you indicate to yourself that your knowledge is sufficient to protect you from uncertainty.

Well, the ultimate uncertainty, in some sense, is your annihilation. I mean, you can make that case. But you can't say that all belief systems function to specifically inhibit the fear of death. I mean, he would say that that's the worm at the core, which is, of course, what Solomon Greenberg and Pyszynski talked about in their book. But I'm not even completely certain of that because, like I said, I think there are things that you can be more afraid of than death. Pain might be one.

Clay: Yeah, so I agree with that. So there are the kind of hard-line terror management people that take the position you just articulated, which is this is the core existential issue. But then there are people more like me who see death as one of a number of potential existential threats. In addition to that, even though early on in my career—because I worked in the terror management lab, and so I was largely running these types of studies where you make people aware of their death, and then you measure a bunch of things after that.

I really started getting more into what I would consider a more complete existential psychology. This is an oversimplification, of course, but you can kind of think of existential psychology as having a dark side and a light side in some ways. Terror management and Becker, that was kind of the edgier dark side, which is ultimately what meaning is about. It's a defense system, right? Like people are afraid. People, you know, are aware of these vulnerabilities, and it makes them afraid. So they dogmatically cling to beliefs in order to reduce that fear.

So that's right. So it's an extension of Freud's notions of religious belief as a defense mechanism. And you can see the Freudianism slipping through there. And that is the issue: what's the difference between a defense and an adaptation? On one hand, culture, you could say that your identification with your culture allows you symbolic immortality. But you could also say, yes, well, it builds your house so you don't freeze to death in the winter too, right? So it's not just symbolically preventing your death, say, or protecting yourself against your fear of death; it’s actually stopping you from dying, which is not a trivial issue.

Right, right, of course. But there’s the second side—you know, we might call the light side—which is more of what people might be familiar with in the positive or humanistic psychology tradition, which is humans aren't just trying to defend; you know, they're not just in this defensive mode. We also are explorers; we're growth-oriented, right? So part of what we're striving for isn't just to defend the world as we know it; it’s to create new beliefs and to explore new ideas.

Even when I was in grad school, because there were some positive psychologists in the department, and then I was in this terror management lab, I had the opportunity to work with different—collaborate with different people. That was what was great about our program—is that they very much encouraged people to go work with other professors. So even starting in graduate school, I was starting to explore the tension between psychological defense and psychological growth motives.

This idea is that you need both, right? Because, like in artistic or creative pursuits, sometimes you can do things that bring you so outside of the structures that provide protection, that provides psychological defenses, that they can leave you very vulnerable to anxiety and to chaos, right?

As you know, and then so you might kind of retreat a little bit, look for your protection. So balancing that, yeah, that’s just like when a child—you see this in children. I mean, when they start to explore, they move out away from usually their mother, but it can be anybody they're stably bonded with. They move out to explore until they hit a threshold where the fear of being isolated overwhelms the compulsion to explore, and then they run back to become comforted.

That meaning that's associated with exploration isn't the same thing as dogmatic protection from uncertainty, right? So there are at least two things going on there. There’s the orienting that dogma gives you in the world, which is your crystallized knowledge, let’s say, but there's the meaning that's intrinsic in extending that knowledge that also seems like an existential antidote to suffering and even to mortality assailants because you get lost in that, right?

And that's, yeah, you get immersed in that, engrossed in that, and that’s central to the idea of meaning, I think.

Clay: Yeah, yeah, totally; I totally agree with that. So I became very much interested in that, and I was using these kind of regulatory self-regulatory models of like approach/avoid behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation. That was something I became very interested in, was what shifts people towards, you know, a threat shifts people towards defensiveness, right? Because you face a threat, and then you're like, "Well, now's not the time to be super creative or open-minded; now's the time to be vigilant," right?

Jordan: You saw that after 9/11, right? Everyone was shell-shocked and retreated for a while in a state of surreal existence.

Clay: Right, yeah. So that's kind of how I got started in existential psychology. Then I ended up—this is going to seem like it's a bit off message, but it connects. I ended up studying the psychology of nostalgia. It turns out there wasn't, you know, there’s a long history of the theoretical writing and kind of case study and anecdotal writing on nostalgia speculating things like it's a neurological disease to it's a form of repression and all these different things. But there wasn't really much empirical research on it except in the area of marketing.

Marketing researchers were doing some neat stuff, but they weren't interested in kind of getting down to the mechanics, the psychological mechanics of nostalgia. Instead, what they were doing was just seeing does nostalgia predict consumption? Right? Does if you're nostalgic for something, do you want to go buy it? But why? You know they weren't really answering why. So I started doing research in psychology of nostalgia.

Again, this was in grad school and part of my motivation for that was similar to the ideas we've been talking about. You know, people turn—just like people are aware of the temporal consciousness, right? Our ability to move the self through time allows us to go into the future and think about our mortality, as we've been talking about. So we think that's somewhat unique to humans, right? That we can think long into the future and think about a future without us.

So what I thought was interestingly that might provoke us to turn to the past because if I'm thinking about a future and it makes me anxious or uncertain, I can look to the past at meaningful memories. I can comfort myself to be like, "No, you know, I have had a good life; I have people that care about me; I've done interesting things," and that can make me feel that can kind of reinstate or boost my meaning if I'm feeling meaningless because of the inevitability of my mortality.

So that's why I started studying nostalgia as a psychological defense. But what's cool about doing research, as you know, is you might have ideas of how things are. So you propose hypotheses and you test them, but then there's also this kind of discovery process. You know why you're doing a bunch of studies where you're looking at the data and you're just thinking, "Oh, wow, there's some—there's a story here that I missed."

What I was finding when we were doing nostalgia research is we were asking people to detail in writing a memory that makes them nostalgic. And so we have all these long narratives of people talking about nostalgia. And one thing that I thought was interesting but did not expect was how much of these narratives were actually kind of future-focused.

What I mean by that is people would say things like, when I was a kid, I used to spend summers at grandma's house, and, you know, this was awesome, and it was a great time, and I—and I'll always cherish these memories. It makes me sad that my grandmother's no longer alive and so that's gone. I can't return to that experience, but it makes me hopeful for the future because I want to do that for my grandchildren someday.

What I saw in a fair amount of these nostalgic narratives was this kind of self-regulatory process where people were like dipping into the past to bring to mind a memory that they found particularly meaningful and that felt—that was comforting. It was also a little bit sad; you know, nostalgia is an ambivalent emotion. But then they were using that as inspiring; like that was motivating them. That was saying, you know what, that was special, so I should orient my life in a way that allows me to reproduce something well.

Jordan: Well, that’s the purpose of memory, right? I mean people think that the purpose of memory is to remember things as they happen and that’s really a rather shallow conception psychologically. I mean you remember bad things so you don’t repeat them, and you identify good things so that you know what good things are and you can pursue them.

It's a very pragmatic process when it’s functioning properly. There’s no reason just to have an objective record of the past in your head; you want to mine it for significance. And so it's very interesting that nostalgia took that future-oriented turn. So you think people get meaningless, let's say, and they get a little bit desperate, so they turn to the past and they look for things. They search for places that were meaningful. They think, "Oh, that was valuable; maybe I could pursue that in the future."

Clay: Yeah, I think so.

And so I've now done dozens and dozens and dozens of studies on the psychology of nostalgia, which has led me, and not just me, but a number of other researchers to kind of position nostalgia as this being a motivation that has this self-regulatory or motivational purpose, which is exactly what you just said, which is I might be experiencing loneliness or even boredom or, you know, something’s going on and I don’t feel totally stable in life; I’m missing something.

And so I reach into the past. And I think it's good to think about it that way. It’s not because a lot of there’s a popular conception of nostalgia that it's hiding in the past, that you're avoiding your problems, that you’re avoiding the future. And so there's a very negative attitude in some quarters of like nostalgia is bad because it gets in the way of progress.

But my argument is no, what happens is you’re not running to the past and hiding; you’re reaching into the past to pull into the present experiences that will help guide you, and then that puts you on the path forward. And you know now we've done a number of studies in which we find that, you know, after people engage in a nostalgic writing task, that they subsequently feel more optimistic and motivated, and it also increases actual behavior.

So when people write about a nostalgic experience, which is typically social, it's typically an experience shared with loved ones, they subsequently want to go out and do things with people. They’re like, "Hey, that was really good, I should do that again." So I think that really got me thinking more about this—not just a growth-oriented approach, but that people move back and forth between defense and growth.

Jordan: You can also imagine that that could become pathologized—like anything, you know? I mean if you're, you know, if people fantasize about what they want, and then out of those fantasies, they can derive goals and begin to act in relationship to those goals, or they can just spend more and more time elaborating the fantasies and not moving at all, and that can lead to delusional thinking if it's taken to an extreme. But that doesn't mean that fantasy per se is a pathological activity; just that when it becomes a substitute for action, then it can become pathologized.

Clay: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, I always say nostalgia is like a lot of things that are generally good for you that, you know, people can—I mean there are people who over-exercise, right? That physical fitness is good, but there are people that spend too much time at the gym and then it ends up causing injury because they’re doing too much of a good thing, right?

There are lots of people who drown from drinking too much water, as it turns out. So, you know, anything in excess can be a poison.

Jordan: Yeah. So I’d say for the typical person, nostalgia is a relatively healthy activity that helps them kind of figure out what's important in life. Do you know what elicits it in particular? Is it loneliness or what? Are there particular eliciting factors?

Clay: Yeah. Yeah, so there's two general classes of nostalgia triggers. One is very obvious because it's just, you know, what we call sensory inputs, which is you hear a song come on the radio or somebody puts a photo up on social media. And so that's a direct trigger.

Jordan: Right. The smell, right?

Clay: Yes, scent evokes nostalgia; it’s very powerful. So there's those—what you know, what we call direct triggers—and there's what we call psychological triggers. They tend to be negatively affect—typically loneliness, but other things as well.

So we've done this where we've induced—we've used emotion inductions. We've had people watch video clips that either make them happy or sad or have a more neutral effect. And so it's not just the case that any emotion provokes nostalgia; it tends to be negative emotions.

So when people feel sad, when they feel loneliest — when we've asked people, loneliness is the most common trigger. But we've also looked—even at boredom. We've done these experiments where we have people do these really, really boring tasks, where they’re just spending a period of time writing down concrete—mixture, you know, the formulas for concrete mixtures or things like that.

So it just seems like a meaningless task, which subsequently increases nostalgic feelings. We’ve looked at, like, meaning threats. We've had people read existential philosophy essays that remind them of how insignificant their life is, and you know, that increases nostalgia.

Jordan: But because of the social nature of nostalgia—and that is most nostalgic memories do involve time spent with loved ones—do you suppose that’s an analog, do you think, of the security-seeking behavior that we discussed a little bit earlier?

Clay: You know, when a child goes out and explores and then hits a wall, they return to something comforting.

Jordan: Right, and you know almost all higher cognitive functions are elaborations of something that’s much more basic. So I mean affection between adults looks like it’s an elaboration—like deep affection. It looks like it’s an elaboration of infant attachment circuitry.

And so you make people bored, or you put them in a bad mood, and then they return to the security of social interactions in the past. You could think of that as purely defensive, but it also indicates to them what they did find meaningful, and they can use that in a positive way.

Clay: Yeah, yeah, I think exactly that. I mean in fact, we’ve looked—I've done some work looking at nostalgia and attachment theory, and it does seem like nostalgic memories kind of, you know, they’re basically bringing online these attachment schemas, these frameworks that people use.

In fact, when you look at interactions between people's scores on attachment scales, it is the people who score high in attachment security or what modern psychologists would say low attachment anxiety or low attachment avoidance—right? So these are these are healthily attached people who had decent maternal relationships.

Jordan: Right, and that’s another indication that this isn't psychopathological.

Clay: Right. So they, those people get the most social benefits out of nostalgia. One, when you look at the content of their memories, people who score high in attachment security, those people have their nostalgic memories tend to be more social, and they tend to be more intimately social.

So nearly what I mean by that is if you ask somebody to write down a nostalgic memory or to just share with you a nostalgic memory—for nearly everyone it's social. But if you look at the writings of people who are high in attachment security, they tend to get into more intimate or more detailed narratives; it carries more themes of love and strong bonds.

And so again, like the attachment system—they're really saying they have these very deep secure bonds. They s—they approach the interesting—you know, to see if people who are indulging in nostalgic memories that are associated with attachment, to see if they’re. . . it would be interesting to see if they were analgesic to pain.

Clay: Because they know that loneliness and social isolation look like they’re pain-related phenomena, at least according to people like Jaak Panksepp. And so hypothetically bringing to mind a social attachment memory that's deeply meaningful should make you more pain tolerant.

Jordan: We used to use this thing that I referred to as a finger crusher, which wasn't—it was just a weight, a weighted blade, a dull blade that pushed on a finger here like that, and then the pain sums across time until you tell the people to take your finger out when you think a reasonable person would. You can ask them when does it hurt, and then you can measure when they take it out, and you can do it with a couple of fingers to get a good, you know, repeated measure.

We tested—I never did publish this study, but we tested at Harvard with an undergraduate. We had people interact with a dog; they had to like the dogs, and then tested them for analgesia afterward, and they were more analgesic as a consequence of interacting with the dog.

Clay: Hmm. That’s interesting.

Jordan: Yeah, no, that would be—that would be a really cool study.

Clay: It's not the same thing, but there—and this isn't research I did, but there were some researchers that looked at nostalgia in the context of feeling of actual physical feelings of warmth.

And the idea was kind of like what you’re talking about — we associate relationships with comfort and warmth, and emotional warmth, right? So they did things like manipulate the temperature in the room and in the lab, and then had people, you know, kind of estimate it. And you know, people in the nostalgic condition thought their room was warmer.

Jordan: I would say that is analogous. And that's a good example too of how these sources of meaning are not merely cognitive, right?

I mean one of the things that I studied pain responses for quite a long time in their differentiated form, and so frustration produces a pain-like state, disappointment does, grief does. And people use tactile contact as a mediation for pain and for grief.

It's about the only thing we know of that's actually useful for grief: real touch and pain. One of Panksepp's—one of the people that was affiliated with Panksepp did massage with premature infants in their incubators and accelerated their growth up to the rate of normal neonates.

And the effects—this was three ten-minute massages a day. The effects were measurable six months later in terms of physical and cognitive development. And so these aren't cognitively mediated meanings; they're really embodied. It's interesting though because you can call them to mind, which is an abstract cognitive representation of something that's much more physical and tangible. But they're not delusional and they're not just meaning systems; they're something far more basic than that, right?

Do you know what the state of the science is on—I remember years ago there was a lot of excitement about some social neuroscientists that were, they were arguing that social pain, the neurosystems built upon the same frameworks as physical pain. And so that it may be that you could even, I think they were doing studies where they were giving people like acetaminophen or—I can't remember.

Yeah, that was Paul Mescher.

I don't know what the status of his research was, but I regarded that as pretty well established. I mean, if the pain system is very, very ancient from an evolutionary perspective, you'd expect it to have branched out and differentiated into all sorts of higher functions.

And if you look at the drugs that affect response to frustration, disappointment, grief, they tend to be opiates, so that's another line of evidence that's all documented quite nicely in Jeffrey Gray's book, "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety" because he talks a fair bit about the difference between pain and so that would be physical punishment, what it elicits as a state, which would be pain-like, and anxiety, say, which is elicited by threat of punishment and not punishment itself, and opiates are good at moderating punishment-like responses, pain, essentially.

So I think it's well established in the animal literature; some of that the human researchers caught on to that, but it was the animal researchers who nailed it down.

Clay: Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, so that’s kind of the area that I started doing work in nostalgia specifically that kind of branched me away from just thinking about, well, we’re doing these kind of defensive studies where we threaten people and then see what they defend.

Jordan: Both intentions just out of curiosity, another thing that would be interesting is if nostalgic memories of attachment ameliorate feelings of depression, because depression looks like a pain phenomena as well, at least in some of its manifestations.

Clay: Yeah, I don't know if there's—I haven't done anything looking at actual clinically depressed people, so most of the nostalgia work I've done has been, for lack of a better term, what we call the normal population, right? So I haven't done work with clinical groups, but certainly in our research among the normal population, we find that nostalgia does have effects that you would predict would reduce depression because it does reduce loneliness, it does reduce negative affect, it does reduce anxiety, it increases positive emotions, and it does things that counter depression, like it increases optimism and inspiration.

So, you know, but it's an open question about, well what if you looked at severely depressed people, right? But no, all those pieces of evidence that you cited do suggest that at least with normative levels of depression, it would have an ameliorating effect.

So, yeah, and there is a whole other literature on reminiscence therapy. And, you know, the stuff we've done has been more experimental, but I think that you could certainly connect nostalgia to being a big part of the reminiscence therapy.

Well, the reason I think that, you know, we haven't really is because a lot of the reminiscence therapy people, they're not particularly interested in basic scientific questions, so they're not trying to tease apart the specific cognitive and affective mechanisms. They want something that works, right?

So they kind of deliver a whole package, and in the reminiscence therapy work, a lot of it is what we would consider in the experimental world kind of confounded, right? Because they're doing a bunch of stuff at once. They're bringing to mind nostalgic memories, but they also typically are in the context of a group setting where they're talking to other people and sharing memories with other people.

So then, you know, you have to get into, well, is it the nature of this conversation that they're having with people where they're talking about things that are really important to them? Or is there something specific about the actual memories that they're engaging in?

But what I think our research does is it complements that by saying, well, if you just isolate the experience of bringing to mind the nostalgic memory in a laboratory cubicle where people are by themselves and you get these positive effects, it suggests that at least part of what's happening in reminiscence therapy is this individual-level experience of bringing nostalgic memories to mind, revisiting/ reconnecting with them.

Then you're sure it only helps if you have the opportunity to talk about those memories with other people, share those memories. In fact, that's a new area of research that we don't have anything published in yet, but I had a PhD student who actually just graduated, and this is what her dissertation was on—is what she called shared nostalgia.

Her argument was what we do in the lab is not very typical of how most people actually experience nostalgia, which is people tend to be nostalgic when they’re around others. You get together with family members and you talk about memories, especially in the context of loss. You go to a funeral, or what do you do? You’re sad, of course, but then you talk about memories you shared with that person, and oftentimes people are laughing and, you know, trying to honor that person’s life but also trying to connect over, you know, over the meaningful memories you had together.

Jordan: So a lot of people are.

Clay: So a lot of people share in that.

Jordan: It reminds you of your affiliation with those other people too, which would be a great thing to have happen when you’re experiencing a significant loss.

Clay: Yeah, absolutely. So I do think that there’s some more research to do in that area, and we’re—like I said, we’re just kind of getting started into how do people actually share nostalgia? And might it serve even beyond the individual and beyond like the more interpersonal relationships?

We're also interested in nostalgia at the cultural level because there are ways that we might pass down traditions and rituals intergenerationally that connect. So I might have a lot of things that are different in my life and the experiences that I've had at the time period in which I grew up than somebody 20, 30, 40 years older than me.

But to the extent that there are things that are passed down in the family or in the community that can connect me to that person, that might help with intergenerational community life, right? And so for just, to make social cohesion period, right? Now, if we’re strangers to one another and then we can identify elements of our past experiences that we share—maybe like a shared love of a particular band or something like that—then we’re identifying areas of commonality and perhaps decreasing our distrust of one another.

I mean, Robert Putnam has demonstrated that, you know, communities tend to be more generous politically when they view those in the community as importantly similar to them. So you can imagine that going through the search for a shared past and identifying commonalities might be also a way of generating a shared history across time as part of what unifies people together.

Clay: Absolutely. So this is what we call collective nostalgia, what you just articulated, which is I might—you know, I might have never met somebody who lives across the country, but to the extent that we have— as Americans—that there is something that we've expected, that we identify with, like even music, like you said, or a movie. If you remember when—it was a I don't think they were particularly good movies, but when the new Star Wars movies came out, people were really excited about them because there was, you know, there was this collective nostalgia of we all remember when we were watching the original Star Wars movies, and that was, you know, kind of like a quintessential late 70s, early 1980s American thing to do that we could bond over.

Jordan: Yeah, well it’s part of, it’s part of experiencing a shared myth. It’s not trivial! I mean, it’s true in one sense, but it’s not true at all in another. I mean, we don’t exactly know what it is that bonds people together in a community, family, a community, a nation, any of those things. And the idea that it’s shared positive memories is—well that’s got to be part of it.

Clay: Yeah, I actually talked to a screenwriter a while back about this, and he made an interesting point. He was talking about how because we have—and the way with the internet and with all these different entertainment options we have now—you know, his argument was we might be losing some of the shared media, shared entertainment.

Now people talk about this when they talk about news all the time. They say, "Oh, people consume different news," but to the extent that he was making even the point that we have all these dedicated children's programs, where he was talking about when he was a kid, he had to watch whatever his dad was watching. And so his dad would introduce him to western movies or whatever, and the whole family would watch the same thing. And so you had this shared cultural artistic experience that connected you.

But now he’s like, you know, you might—the kids might be in the backseat of the car, each with their own screens watching totally separate things, and you're listening to your own thing, and the whole family isn't crowded around the TV together in one room sharing the same experiences. And so we might have very, very individualistic, very tailored media experiences that make it harder to have those socially connecting entertainment.

Jordan: Yeah, well it makes it harder to communicate too, because you know to communicate with anyone, you have to mostly share their experience and then talk about a little bit of variation. I mean if you're totally opaque to one another in terms of what you've experienced, there's so much to talk about that you can't even gain a toehold. And you do wonder if this incredible explosion of entertainment options, let’s say, but it’s far more than that; it’s cultural options, does produce—well, perhaps does heighten the probability of the kind of fragmentation that we seem to be experiencing right now.

Clay: Yeah, well that might be why every so often something's popular enough to where everyone—like not everyone, but a decent chunk of people rally around it. It becomes the thing everyone’s talking about. So like Game of Thrones, that might be an example where there’s some kind of program that is either so well-executed or it just delivers the goods in whatever way, whether it’s a movie or television show, where a enough becomes a cultural phenomenon.

But a lot of the time it’s not that. Especially, I don't know if you watch streaming like Netflix or things like that, but like you can now kind of—it’s not like we all have to turn on the TV on Monday night at 7 PM if we want to watch something—because that’s our chance. Now we can—I can watch a show that you watched five years ago.

So not only is it the case that there’s a ton of options, they’re delivered at individual times. I can watch—I can, you know, what do you call it when people binge? I can binge-watch a show that, you know, you’re not going to watch for another year, if you watch it at all.

And again, I don’t know if there’s—well, it’s very peculiar too when you think about it that we have the opportunity to—think about something like a Marvel movie with its—that cost hundreds of millions of dollars—that we have the technology that enables us to experience that singly.

I mean, it’s completely preposterous. I’ve been associated to some degree with one traditional culture, and they use dance, music, storytelling, masks, religion—it's all integrated into one thing, and they all participate in that simultaneously.

And that’s really the core of their culture. I mean, without that, they're not a people. And when you're not a people, to be a people is to be very much the same as other people in important ways. And that's part of what makes peace.

You do wonder, though, the increasing atomization of our exposure to cultural material, what that leaves us to have in common, right?

Clay: So there's a provocative argument that some have made—people like, I don't know if you're familiar with Patrick Deneen and, you know, some of these, you know, like Catholic traditionalists.

I mean he wrote that book, "Why Liberalism Failed." And you know, I'm not—and it's not my expertise; I don't know anything about political history, and so I can't really, you know, I can't really like litigate his case form or make a case against it from that perspective. But from this perspective of psychology, I think that he's onto something.

And his basic argument is the success of liberalism is its ultimate failure, in that if total individualism means that I owe you nothing, right? That I can reject whatever, you know, I can reject whatever culture I was raised in and forge my own path, and in many ways that, you know, we can think of that as being good because it can mean we can escape being oppressed or, you know, we can get rid of bad systems that are barriers to my liberty.

But at the same time, that also means it's—you know, it's the atomization that you're talking about—that can be very alienating. And it can get, ultimately, it can get to a point where what he calls anti-culture, which is—it’s not just individualism as another culture, which is what cultural psychologists tend to argue; there are collectivist cultures and individualistic cultures.

His argument is that it's an anti-culture because it's a rejection of culture.

Jordan: Correct.

Clay: And again, I might—maybe I’m misrepresenting his case a little bit, but that is—that’s just one—

Jordan: Well, it’s at least an open question how much we have to have in common with one another to live in something approximating mutual understanding and peace. I mean, it can't be nothing, you know? And the people who've—I don't attend church, but I have some close friends who insist upon its utility and who are very intelligent people.

And part of the argument they make is a cultural argument. It’s like, “Well, at least for one hour a week, cynical about that though you may be, the entire community is doing one thing at the same time.”

That’s the same, and of course the churches used to be the center of the towns and orient the town towards temporality—all of those things. And so we don't really know what we've lost when we lose those shared rituals and shared beliefs.

Clay: Right, and we don’t know what we’ve lost when—part of the reason we've lost is of course people are, you know, people don't believe. And so people are becoming non-religious. But, you know, I have an argument that, you know, part of belief is kind of an individual difference.

And so it could be the case that there's always been varying degrees of people who are extremely committed to a faith versus people who are just tend to be more skeptical, regardless of the state of scientific knowledge. And this gets to what some people have argued as the extreme male brain idea.

Jordan: Is it related to interest in people and interest in things?

Clay: Correct.

Jordan: Oh good! Oh, I always wondered about that.

Clay: Yeah. So the people who are interested in things are much less likely to be religious believers, I would presume, correct?

Clay: Correct, so there is an argument that, so that religion very much relies on social cognition, right? It relies on the same neural processes involved in thinking about people, like you just said. Because to spirituality, you have to animate the world with minds in a way, right? You have to anthropomorphize.

So you could have a—in fact, in some cultural traditions, we have our big five personality model, of course. But in some cultural traditions, they have a spirituality dimension of personality. You know, it’s recognized that people just naturally vary.
In the West, we tend to be a little bit more blank slate-ish about religion. People tend to think, "Well, you just decide to be religious, or you were raised." It's just a matter of cold cognitive belief rather than a temperamental proclivity, right?

But, you know, at the same time, we say things like people have a calling. Or, and maybe secular people don't say that, but people kind of recognize that there’s individual differences in what—some people are good artists, right? Some people are just more artistic.

And some people just more likely to see the world as a little bit enchanted, whereas others are just more naturally skeptical. And so let's just assume for a second that that’s true, that there's this individual difference that’s always existed where you've had some people that are just more interested in things like you said.

And so they might even be somewhat at the extreme. They might even be somewhat mind-blind; religion might not even—they might not even totally understand it because they can’t really tangibly grasp it.

Whereas other people are—they can see the world as more magical. And even—a lot of people find themselves in this—the more you distinguish between function and purpose, the better off you are and they might think, well that’s a nice way to put it.

And we have this hunger for the meaningful in lieu of suffering. But we don't ask ourselves the important questions that should arise, which are why do we even have to believe? What do we owe our inherent humanness?

Clay: So we might see that throughout—sometimes the secularization can produce very different forms of belief, and it manifests with these quasi-religions. And so I've kind of been reading a bit of a revival among some traditional conservativism religion because they're talking about these frameworks that people can unite around, and then they can engage with them in a really meaningful way to reduce the disconnection of modern society.

Jordan: Yes, I think we both agree that the question is a profound one—a layered question, I think. Very layered.

Clay: If you look at, because it seems like despite all of our efforts to say, "We want to be a just another high-minded society," the fact is that as human beings we can't get away from the need for hierarchy.

Jordan: Right?

Clay: Because it’s deeply embedded within systematic structures of human nature that we need to redistribute certain things, which means the old taboos are heading back, and if we're not careful, they might actually make a total return-the way they were before.

Jordan: That doesn’t change, right?

Clay: Yeah, and it can't; it can't—it's a universal truth!

Jordan: So the human choice doesn't contribute to a better world?

Clay: Not necessarily, I think it’s important that we temper our focus on individualist perspectives against the need for social capital within a worthy hierarchy, especially as we chart a way forward to discovering new ways of reacting to each other's intelligence through unity alongside integrity.

Jordan: Clay, that was really insightful. Thank you so much for talking with me today.

Clay: Thank you! My pleasure.

Jordan: And I hope we can do this again.

Clay: Yeah, me too!

Jordan: Take care.

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