6: John Cacioppo
Welcome to Episode 6, where Professor JOHN CACIOPPO and I talk about inferring causal associations between mind and body, and how to be human is to care for others. John is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor, and the founder and director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, at the University of Chicago John’s contributions to the fields of Social Psychology, Psychophysiology, Social Neuroscience (an entire field he helped create more or less from scratch), research methodology, philosophy of science…on and on…would be hard or impossible to overstate. He is a quasi-religious figure to me in that I’ve been reading his methodological critiques and recommendations about mind-body research, as well as his work on the Elaboration Likelihood Model, Electromyography, and Loneliness, for my entire career. I’ve described his groundbreaking book, PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY (later, the HANDBOOK OF PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY) as the holy text of my scholarly origin story, and I mean it. It was published in 1990, right about the time I went back to college as a nervous 21-year-old, and soon after going to work in John Gottman’s lab. There, the book was literally required reading. As I moved through graduate school and well into my career, John has been a guide to the work I do, conceptually, methodologically, and philosophically, and the same can be said of a relatively unknown ocean of researchers all across the globe. John’s recent popular book, LONELINESS, covers decades of work he and others have done documenting the cost of social isolation, whether “objective” isolation (as he calls it) or perceived. It turns out that perceived isolation may be the most harmful of the two kinds, and in any case, isolation kills. We are not a species that relies on our own resources to survive just long enough to reproduce. We are a species that cares for others, and that expects to be cared for. At any rate, I hope you enjoy this chance to spend a little time with one of psychology’s most prolific and restless minds. I know I did. * * * As always, remember that this podcast is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship. Plus, we're a member of the TEEJ.FM podcast network. AND... The music of CIRCLE OF WILLIS was composed and performed by Tom Stauffer, Gene Ruley and their band THE NEW DRAKES. You can purchase this music at their Amazon page.
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Jim Coan
From VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship, this is episode six of Circle of Willis, where I chat with social neuroscientist and demigod John Cacioppo about inferring causal associations between mind and body and about how to be human is to care for others.
Jim Coan
Hey, everyone, it's Jim Coan. This is my podcast Circle of Willis. In this episode, I'm chatting with John Cacioppo who is (ready for this?) the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor, and the founder and director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, all at the University of Chicago. John is one of the founders of the whole field of social neuroscience. He's the author of more than 500 scientific articles, chapters, reviews, commentaries. This guy, he's authored or edited more than 20 books. He has... I just... I can't get through all of this. I can't do it. Listing all his awards and honorary things and advisory posts and board memberships would be just like reading one of those begat sections of the Bible that just drones on and on. Now, right away, I want to say there was a big problem with recording this conversation. Not a big problem. There was prob- there was an issue, okay? For about the first seven minutes or so of our chat, my recording setup... Well, the details don't really matter. The good news is I caught it pretty quickly and all was basically okay. But I do feel there are certain moments, brief clips, from those early minutes, that seven minutes that went awry, that went wrong, that I just can't live without. Here's one example right now.
Jim Coan
I've been reading John Cacioppo work in one form or another at least since 1990, 1991, somewhere around there. And that's when I start working with John Gottman and his lab. You know, we had the compulsory readings of principles of psychophysiology. It was like the Bible. You were like one of the prophets.
Jim Coan
It's funny that I mentioned the Bible right out of the gate. I sort of can't help but use religious metaphors when I talk about John Cacioppo. I even... I thought it would be kind of funny in the introduction to refer to him as a demigod, because... because he sort of is for me. Or, if he isn't a demigod, then he really is like one of the biblical prophets. And that early book of his that I mentioned, Principles of Psychophysiology, it's like my Bible! The holy text of my scholarly origin story. It's funny, if all my metaphors for John Cassiopeia are religious, John's metaphors for himself have mainly to do with childhood and play. He's always talking about how he never had to have a job, that he always loved brain teasers and puzzles as a kid. And that brain teasers and puzzles are sort of what he continues to do in his work, which he doesn't even like to call work. And I want to say a little bit more about that in a moment, you know, sort of what counts as work, because I think it's related to his background, which, by the way, we didn't get too much into. I would like to have gotten more into his background, but I did get a little bit. I got this, for example:
John Cacioppo
My high school years were in St. Louis. I was the first in my family to go to college. And so, I went to the University of Missouri. My undergraduate degree was in economics.
Jim Coan
So what did your folks do? Your folks were in St. Louis in high school...
John Cacioppo
They were. My father was a businessman. He had a small business that he operated and my mother stayed at home with the kids. And I had two older siblings who went off and did their things and, you know, I didn't want to go to work. So I went to school, I went to graduate school.
Jim Coan
Work was crummy.
Jim Coan
I love that line. "I didn't want to go to work" he says. He never says this directly at any point during our conversation, but I suspect that part of the reason he doesn't characterize his own job as involving real work is that he's a first generation college student. It reminds me actually of the time my stepfather Duane asked me what I did to make money when I was in grad school. And I told him, you know, the sort of things that I did back then, and he was quiet for a little while. There was this pause, he was trying to be respectful, and he said, as earnestly as he could manage, "But, what do you do?" He didn't even get that what I was describing was the work part. That was all like prelude. He was waiting for me to produce something, to make a thing, to do something for other people that was tangible. And I wasn't. And so, it didn't really seem like work to my stepfather. And I wonder whether John Cacioppo, you know, because he's a kind of a first generation guy. He just... it's never occurred to him that the stuff he does all through his adulthood is really work. You know, in John Cacioppo's telling, he's sort of a big kid still, playing with his brain teasers and puzzles and having the time of his life.
John Cacioppo
It doesn't feel like I've ever had a job.
Jim Coan
Really?
John Cacioppo
Because like, as a kid, I like brain teasers and puzzles, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And it seems like, I'm still enjoying brain teasers and puzzles.
Jim Coan
And in the meantime, he's generated a body of work that few scientists will ever match, or should even aspire to really, if they value their health. I don't worry about John working too hard, because he has this almost manic energy to him that feeds a voracious interest in how social life affects and is affected by the body. This interest has manifested in all kinds of ways. In the conversation that follows, we mainly talk about sort of the inferential minefield of mind-body associations. You know, sort of how and why the mind and brain affect and are affected by our physiology. John's contributions to research methodology in this area and, really what I would call the philosophy of mind body research, are pretty hard to match. And he's always got a lot to say about it, and he says a lot here. But we also talked about his interest, going on about 25 years now, in the physiology and neuroscience of loneliness. An interest that has led him, in his own telling, to a really deep understanding of the human animal, and an even deeper appreciation for the social world that he inhabits. I already mentioned how the first part of our conversation suffers from a recorder malfunction that renders it a little tough to listen to. It's not too big a deal, it's only about seven minutes or so, but it does mean that we do enter the conversation were about to hear somewhat midstream, you might say. So, here's where we were: After schooling me a bit on the degree to which psychology was dismissive of biology throughout the 1960s and 70s, I asked John, why so early in his career, when so few people were really doing it, he pursued a biological view of psychology? What specifically was the value of looking at the biology of human social life? And here's what John Cacioppo had to say:
John Cacioppo
The value is not that I can describe it in biologic terms. The value is that those social factors are operating on the biology. They operate through the biology, but they also operate on the biology.
Jim Coan
Yeah, right. Right. Right.
John Cacioppo
For the multi level analysis, there's more than one cause, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
For many complex phenotypes.
Jim Coan
Yep.
John Cacioppo
Those causes, when you put them together, aren't always additive. So you have to understand both, for instance, genetic and environmental factors when you're dealing with gene environment interactions or between environment correlations, Or, for that matter, some biologic non-genetic factor like arousal or affective states, and a psychological or behavioral factor, and reciprocal determinism. And, you know, natural selection operates on phenotypes, not genes. And so, not too surprisingly, those phenotypic expressions can influence gene expression, but also just genetic selection or other biologic processes. And one of my favorite examples is we know that testosterone and male rhesus monkeys predicts sexual advances. The public knows that, that's not a surprise to anyone.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
But that line of research also showed that the testosterone in those male monkeys was a function of the availability of receptiv e females in the colony.
Jim Coan
So what's really driving- yeah, right, I know.
John Cacioppo
It's not just reductionism, it's trying to understand the system as a whole.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
So that was the approach we took, so that's what's calibrated for reduction. It's going back and forth.
Jim Coan
But you're not thinking that yet, right? I mean, are you thinking along those lines in... When were you finishing up undergraduate school? When are we talking about? '75?
John Cacioppo
'73.
Jim Coan
Are you like reading Bateson or something? You're thinking, you know, systems... Is this just coming up whole cloth?
John Cacioppo
I was more likely to read a chemistry text than I was a philosopher at that point. But you know, you think about emergent properties in chemistry?
Jim Coan
Yes.
John Cacioppo
It's exactly the same thing. To understand covalent bonding, we couldn't just work at the atomic level, you had to work at the molecular level to define the properties of the atoms that permitted the kind of bonding that they saw between atoms to give you certain kinds of molecules.
Jim Coan
Yep.
John Cacioppo
And so, that calibrated reductionism is going back and forth so that you can inform more completely how the elements are producing the whole, and often, they are not just additive. That's what's so magical about, in fact, how humans interact is that we have synergisms. We don't simply add people and add effects. Now, you look at economic analysis of productivity over the 1000s of years before the Industrial Revolution, it was described in terms of additivity. The productivity of countries depended on the number of workers in the fields. That's the model of it. All right?
John Cacioppo
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
But if you actually think about what makes us special, it's the non additivity. I'll give you a simple example. Let's say I'm moving furniture by myself.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
I'm going to hurt my back, break the furniture, and scratch the floor.
Jim Coan
Yep. I do it all the time.
John Cacioppo
Right. Now, let's say you and I are going to work together to do it.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
If we take the simple additive approach, we're both going to hurt our backs, break furniture and scratch the floor. But we'll finish twice as fast.
Jim Coan
Right.
John Cacioppo
But that's not what we did.
Jim Coan
That's not really how it works.
John Cacioppo
Right. In fact, you get on the other side of the table, we carry the table. Neither one of us hurt our backs, neither one of us break the furniture, neither one of us scratched the floors. That's synergism. But, you know, when you go back 40 years, it's not that I could articulate it as completely then as now. And what I really was turned on by [...] was that all of a sudden, data held the answer. I was good at arguing, which was why I was going to law school.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And what I could do is I could take a position, win an argument turn around, take the other position, win the argument, and it proved to me I knew nothing. Right? And I found that frustrating. And, you know, with data, it makes you humble.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And with that humility, you can then learn tons. Now, you have to follow certain procedures, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
Philosophy of science, methodology of science are incredibly important to follow and adhere to and there's ways to do it that get you- I kind of think about it as the turtle and the hare race, right? If you take shortcuts, a program of research efficacy... I've got nature, I'll never know the true form of nature, right? But science gives me a chance to probe and become closer to it. And so I might have a hypothesis. Now, I'm not divine, so that hypothesis is not going to be accurate. It may be close, but one doesn't know. By the scientific method, if I do everything right;
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
Don't take shortcuts. Don't worry about instrumentality. Don't worry about tenure, I just do the right thing, then the likelihood that I'm going to be accurate, that what I am reporting is reproducible and replicable, then the next thing I do, the next thing I do, the next thing I do, should be getting me closer. And the accuracy of that fifth, sixth hypothesis in a program of research is the joint probability of the accuracy of all the preceding. Right?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
What if I'm taking shortcuts? Now, that might be point eight, instead of 0.99, it's 0.8, and 0.8, and 0.8. When you go out 0.8 to the fifth, you're not dealing with very high likelihood. So you're actually moving away from truth, not toward truth. Not that I'll ever know when I get there, but just, in concept, conceptually, I'm getting closer. And so, I can do programs or research, other people can come along, and are likely to be able to see roughly the same thing, and now the literature starts to inform me in a more important way. The other thing I know about the literature that, you know, I find students often don't appreciate, is that this is like having an army of RAs who have already gone out there and asked relevant questions.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
But that means what is relevant is the methods and the results, not what the scientists say about it. What are the methods and results? I may have a completely different take on what they're doing and the questions they asked. And so, what's really relevant are: What was the study? What did the data [say]? And then, you know, their interpretations become irrelevant but that's secondary. It's really, what did the data [say]? It's like having an RA come in and say, "Here's what it means, Professor Coan." and you go, "Well, let me look at the data, because we'll determine what it means."
Jim Coan
Right? Let's figure it out.
John Cacioppo
That's right.
Jim Coan
That's a likely story. It's an interesting story. But we need to know how it maps.
John Cacioppo
Right. And the fact that you can come up with a story that's consistent with data just means you're clever, it doesn't mean you're right.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
I mean, if in fact, we can never know absolute truth, only proximal truth, through science, then that means that I should be able to come up with more than one story. It's a test of my intellectual cleverness as to how many plausible stories I can come up with. And the more I can come up with, the more exciting it is to look at the next set of data. The other thing that I suggest is, you never design a study that has to come out a certain way. It's not worth doing,
Jim Coan
You never design a study that has to come out a certain way. Right, got it.
John Cacioppo
To be a quote "interpretable or useful" because you're not learning anything. And if you're going to use proximal truth, each study has to be probative. It has to give you some useful information to get closer, even by saying, "Hey, I was wrong before." That'll get you closer.
Jim Coan
Now, let me let me push back a little bit, because I wonder if there's another axis. I mean, you sort of brought it up, and I don't think you're really devaluing it, but you said everything has to be probative. But, you look at, you know, Festinger's early work, Schachter and Singer; these are not particularly probative studies, but hugely influential studies. So I wonder about the effect of, you know, like the heuristic value of some of these studies when the data and the methods are really quite flawed.
John Cacioppo
We're at a different point in science in our field than we were, you know, 80 years ago. And that's because at that point in time, in the middle of the 20th century, when these individuals were proposing these new theories, they were looking at particular single causes. They were looking at small questions. I mean, they were big in a field, but, you know, no one outside of social actually cared what they found.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And that was okay, because people were differentiating, they were specializing, methods were being developed, new frameworks for thinking about phenomena within that field of inquiry was being developed. And there were a lot of things that were being overlooked. I mean, Occum's Razor applied, keep it simple. And they did.
John Cacioppo
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
If you remember in Schechter's study, it was supposed to be about physiological arousal. Yeah. Well, Valence came along shortly after and took a microphone and did this, right? [beating on microphone] Simulated a heart rate, simulated speeding it up, and that was found to produce the same effects from which they concluded the physiology is irrelevant. May I point out, that's not a logical interpretation. It means to believe is sufficient. Not that it's sufficient and necessary.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah. Right.
John Cacioppo
So, you know, people did simple thinking. Not the most sophisticated thinking, but it was understandable, because they were all working in what then were very complicated uncharted territory. We're in the 21st century. And, we now can stand on their shoulders and look out, and we see that our field is one of many fields of inquiry that's relevant. This is where the social and bio was, right? You can see that many of these fields are relevant. So how do we bring them together to ask bigger questions? And now Occum's Razor doesn't work. Because it's not about keep it simple, because you find an effect and you say, what else can produce it?
Jim Coan
Yes.
John Cacioppo
S.S. Stevens' handbook said when you find an effect, the next question on the part of a scientist is natural, whether you're a physicist or a psychologist. You ask, "How general is it?"
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And that's not what one should ask. One should say, "What else is producing that effect?" so that I can better understand the outcome that I'm trying to actually model. Right? Because if I asked about generality, I might have a replicable effect, but no one else will be able to find it. And so, it looks like your effect isn't replicable. So, there's reproducibility. If you look at my data, do you get what I get? If you analyze my data, do we get the same things?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And there, you know, openness, public sharing of data, is critical.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
The second is replicability. If I do a study and you do the same study, do we get the same thing?
Jim Coan
Yes, yes, yes.
John Cacioppo
Third is generalizability. And may I point out, if I have multiply-determined phenomena, if biologic and social and multiple social factors are operating, you're gonna have issues of generalizability.
Jim Coan
There's gonna be moderators, and on and on.
John Cacioppo
Right, what are the factors operating and under what conditions do these different processes operate? That becomes the relevant question. So it's not a methodological problem, it's a theoretical question. Let me just give you a very simple example. We use brain imaging, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And the assumption is that activation of an area means that area is involved and the failure to activate an area means it's not involved.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
So, let's say that it's maybe early March. All right. Is it warm in Virginia in early March?
Jim Coan
It can be.
John Cacioppo
Okay, so let's say it's early March.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
It isn't warm out.
Jim Coan
No.
John Cacioppo
So I'm going to use a new imaging procedure and a contrast methodology to study something that it's hard to put your fingers into and grab, right? I'm going to look at temperature as a function of time of day; six o'clock in the morning, 10 o'clock in the morning. I'm going to use thermal imaging, and I'm going to take the two images, I'm going to subtract them. And lo and behold, I find the material basis of temperature. It's my radiator.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah.
John Cacioppo
That's involved.
Jim Coan
Makes sense.
John Cacioppo
But, of course, I look and I say, "Well, my LED on the thermostat is also the basis of temperature." The point is that just because it's active, just because you see something doesn't mean it's contributory or relevant. Now you, seeing that, immediately replicate the study. All right? And so, you do exactly the same study in Virginia at 6 and 10 in the morning. You subtract the two images and your radiator and LED are not illuminated at all.
Jim Coan
Right.
John Cacioppo
But your curtains are blazing.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
So curtains are the material base.
Jim Coan
Because the sun is beaming... Yeah, right. So... oh, geez. Yeah, it gets very complicated very quickly.
John Cacioppo
Right. So I need to know what the sources are, and then the processes, and then the conditions under which.. and that's not a methodological problem. That's not a statistical problem. That's a theoretical problem.
Jim Coan
See, that is a really... that's just such a great take on theory and theorizing. Because theorizing, it has been popularly understood as storytelling.
John Cacioppo
It follows! This follows logically from the notion that I have multiply-determined non-additive processes, or outcomes, right? And social phenomena are complicated. If I have a very simple cognitive mechanism, there may be one determinate... In many cases, they are kind of simply determined. But as you move along, we know this about the brain, as you move forward, you get more and more integrative, more and more complicated, more and more malleable organizations. If I look at the spinal cord, it's a pretty simple organism.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
As I move up that spinal cord, the neural axes, the neural behavioral axes are differentially controlled, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
All of a sudden, you have no more stimulus inflexibility, it's not as stereotyped. So I have different antecedents that can operate, I have contextual control and have behavioral flexibility. If I reach out and touch a burning wall, I immediately withdraw my hand, right? That's a spinal cord reflex. But if your child is standing across that wall that's on fire, you can force yourself to go through that pain. But, you don't immediately. You look and say, "You know, there's a door here that's not on fire. I'm gonna go through that." The spinal cord can't do that. All right? So that kind of flexibility also means I'm going to have multiple determinism. If I know that structure, then logically what I just said follows. Occum's Razor can be misleading. Because I'm going to say, "Look, the bulk of the studies I did are only showing this antecedent, so your antecedent doesn't win in a meta analysis." Well, that's simply a function of the literature that may exist. So, it's about theoretical sophistication. So, instead of Occum's Razor, we use Einstein's Razor. The notion is keep it simple, but not too simple.
Jim Coan
Yeah, no simpler than it has to be.
John Cacioppo
No simpler than it has to be. But you know...
Jim Coan
I think people fear complexity.
John Cacioppo
There's a good thing to keep in mind.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
When we were all kids, we liked brain teasers, we like puzzles.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And we're just dealing with bigger and more complicated but just as appealing of puzzles. I love puzzles. And, you know, if you remember, there are certain rules you use in making those puzzles. Take a jigsaw puzzle.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
You don't randomly start putting together pieces, because it'll take you forever to put the puzzle together. Right? You find the four corners. Once you find the four corners, you find the edges. Once you find the edges...
Jim Coan
Colors...
John Cacioppo
Right, there's a certain process, and it works across all jigsaw puzzles.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
So when you have these complicated problems, like we're talking about, the epistemology we just discussed is like finding the edges. It's like finding the corners, then find the edges. If you know that, you don't try to reject other antecedents, you try to understand under what conditions. You say, "I don't know whether this is replicable, or whether this is a problem of replicability, or a problem of generalizability." But both are possible.
Jim Coan
So, I want to just shift gears just a little bit, because I don't want to miss this. You know, since I've got you here, right? You know, I definitely think of you as this great methodologist. A sort of a theorist of theory within psychophysiology. Well, I used to call myself, by the way, a social psychophysiologist, and now it's social neuroscientists. Great. But when I think of you from a content perspective, I think of you as having multiple, you know, moments of content that are the focus as you move through applying these these inferential theoretical principles in ways that have an influence in a lot of different ways. But then, this emerging content area comes of sort of social relationships, loneliness, where does that come from?
John Cacioppo
So, I always wanted to put the social and bio together.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And I thought, you know, there's a lot of correlative work. It's about some broad process like marital status and disease.
Jim Coan
Disease or... longevity.
John Cacioppo
What's the mechanism? What are the transduction pathways? "No, this an epidemiology study, we don't ask that." How do you know it's causal? How do you know that this... you know, if I eat broccoli, does it really stop cancer? Or is it that people who eat broccoli are also wealthier? And they're more likely to have good medical...
Jim Coan
Yeah, or that matter, if I smoke a cigarette, does it really cause cancer? And that was the pushback the cigarette companies were saying all the time, "Well, what's the mechanism? You don't know whether this is causal."
John Cacioppo
At least they had animal studies that they bothered to do relevant animal studies.
Jim Coan
Eventually. Yeah, right.
John Cacioppo
You know, to me, it's really important to be able to specify mechanism. And the assumption all along, of course, is that the brain is the transduction. That's the engine that's actually moderating our social relationships, it's moderating what contextual rules are operating, it gives me the behavioral flexibility, and the stimulus control is more flexible, because it's symbolic as well as physical.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And so we... you know, all of a sudden, the attention gets pointed to the brain. And, you know, the whole approach is, what are the neural hormonal, cellular and genomic processes that underlie and implement these super organismal structures and processes that define social species? And so, to address that question, it required I change the kind of research I was doing. You know, it's not enough to lay out the question. If you really want to kind of make the point, get a productive line of research showing there's an answer. And so, I took a traditional neuroscience approach. If I want to know what a gene does, I create a knockout mouse, right? And I compare the neural or behavioral processes I see between that normal mouse and the knockout mouse. I'm not actually interested in the absence of the gene. But, by having that focus, I can figure out what that gene is doing. Yeah. When, you know, studies of Phineas Gage before and after the tamping iron obliterated his orbital frontal cortex were informative, not because the hole in the head did anything, but because the changes in behavior told us what filled that hole before the action. Right? It's a method of deletion. And so, if I want to study how these social connections, and stable social connections are one of the defining features in biology of a social species, then I can look at people without those. And there's two ways to define the absence. One is objective, one is perceived. Well, if the brain is the transduction mechanism for these processes, perceived is where the money's going to be.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
Now, epidemiologists had been studying objective since 1979, and it already identified that as important. And the reason in their model was it was health behaviors.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
I didn't need to go inside the body, there's nothing biology relevant, right? And of course...
Jim Coan
And it was really health behaviors, because somebody's telling me to do a thing. Somebody's telling me to go to the doctor, someone's reminding me to take take pills.
John Cacioppo
That's right. It's called the social control hypothesis. And so, we started studying objective and perceived social isolation. And you know, it didn't take long for someone to point out that perceived social isolation is called loneliness. You're studying loneliness.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John Cacioppo
And honestly, I almost stopped studying it at that point, because I didn't really want to be a loneliness researcher. I mean, at that point, loneliness...
Jim Coan
Such a mundane construct from a certain perspective.
John Cacioppo
Absolutely, it's very important, it's kind of this trivial personality characteristic and it had been studied by, you know, personality theorists in the 80s, and it was kind of no longer of interest. And, you know, I wasn't particularly interested in that, but I thought, "You know, what, the scientific value of this... I mean, the logic is there, so just stick with it." And, I like to work on areas until I'm starting to make marginal contributions. Kind of the remarkable thing to me was loneliness turned out to be much more important than we thought. It's like fish in water; we don't understand its impact on our brain, on our neuroendocrine system, on our cellular functioning, or, for that matter, on gene expression.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
It's incredibly wide in... kind of the areas of inquiry it has pushed us. We've learned new social processes like contagion of loneliness, new molecular mechanisms underlying some of those effects. And so, I keep discovering new things that keep me in this field. I never thought I'd study something for 20 years.
Jim Coan
Well, you find a thing that bears fruit, right? Not only results that are interpretable, valid, reliable, but also that are valuable.
John Cacioppo
Well see, I get bored. So I mean, with the elaboration likelihood model. That was a research engine. I mean, we were just making JPS... [unintelligible] ...because it was making accurate predictions that surprised people. And Rich still does work in that area and continues to surprise me by...
Jim Coan
Really flesh it out, yeah.
John Cacioppo
But I became bored. It wasn't that interesting any longer because most of it had been laid out, and these were interesting and important, but I just, I wanted to go do something else.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
I continued to study loneliness because it continued to surprise me. So you know, with PNAS that came out, you know, Steve called John Capitanio.
Jim Coan
When was that? That was 2007...
John Cacioppo
2015.
Jim Coan
Or... No, no, this is the most recent one. I think about the gene expression one from about 10 years ago.
John Cacioppo
There was one in 2007, There was one in 2010....
Jim Coan
Yes, that's right.
John Cacioppo
This one had longitudinal data for humans, so we could say in fact, it was causal, and in fact, it was reciprocally causal. And then we replicated in monkeys.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And you can get these immunologic or genomic changes, but are the gene expression variations in these tweaks of immunology of any real important? So, we infected the monkeys with the virus, and in fact, they got sicker. The lonely monkeys got sicker. So, you know, a lot of like the ratio of CD-4 to CD-8 cells that you see as a result of mental arithmetic, probably have no real immunologic importance.
John Cacioppo
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
But, a vaccine challenge or a viral challenge is how you can test whether there is something of immunologic importance. And so that's what we did, and we found it to actually contribute to that.
Jim Coan
And so, why?
John Cacioppo
So, natural selection is going to operate on processes that promote survival, reproduction, and a genetic legacy. Now, I've added that third, and here's why: If I'm studying insects, as most geneticists have done, because, you know, if I study humans, I'm never gonna get my dissertation done. I have to have multiple generations to do right?
Jim Coan
Yeah, right.
John Cacioppo
So fruit flies are great, because I can do my dissertation in no time.
Jim Coan
And you can actually study fitness.
John Cacioppo
Right.
Jim Coan
Can't do that in humans.
John Cacioppo
Now, for fruit fly, their genetic legacy depends on how many fruit flies they spawn, right? But humans aren't like that. Mammals generally are not like that. Because let's say that we live in conditions of predation. And let's say that I'm the economist, I'm concerned- I'm the invertebrate, right? I'm concerned about only my short term interests and it's all about me.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
You are a homo sapien. The wise one, rather than the rational one. For whatever reason, you have this mutation, where you form connections and bonds and caring and empathy with others, alright? But we're both in these very difficult conditions of predation. So, I may well survive longer than you. I may spawn more offspring because I have no compunction. I'm the consummate psychopath out there, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
I'm only concerned about me; I don't share food, I don't share defense. And those offspring that are left uncared for, unprotected, unfed, all perish. This is a one generation elimination of that type of gene if there's no one else kind of caretaking. But you can see, so we have others taking care, but not at the same rate as if you're the one doing the defense, you're the one feeding, you're the one sharing food.
Jim Coan
Right.
John Cacioppo
So your genetic legacy, even though you had fewer offspring, is actually going to exceed the Homo economicus walking around. And so, that's why I say survival, reproduction... but those are not sufficient in mammals, because we have offspring who are born dependent. Humans, the longest period of dependency, given the life span. And so, one has to also have these biological carrots and sticks that make us care, that form these connections. And in biology, social species are defined as conspecifics who interact sufficiently frequently that they form recognizable bond societies. And so, those connections become a defining feature, which is why I also study the absence of them. So, the evolutionary theory that we posited says that when... and it's not just humans, it's phylogentically so deep, we're unaware that we do this. But, when you feel isolated... and you can feel isolated when you're around others, that means I don't know whose friend or foe.
Jim Coan
Sure, sure, sure.
John Cacioppo
A soldier on the streets of Kabul may be in the middle of the busy streets of Kabul. That doesn't mean they feel connected.
Jim Coan
Because you don't know who you can depend on. We think of it as outsource to, you know? You don't know who you can- you can let someone else take this cognitive biological operation on, instead of me doing it myself.
John Cacioppo
Well, you don't have mutual aid and protection. As simple as that.
Jim Coan
Yeah, mutual aid and protection.
John Cacioppo
Without mutual aid and protection. I've lost one of the real benefits of my species.
Jim Coan
Yeah, what I'm for.
John Cacioppo
Whether I'm with the others or not, I'm now on the social perimeter. And it's not only that we feel sad, we felt like it makes us want to connect, and that's one of the purposes of it. But these seemingly paradoxical effects as well, and it is that you become hyper-surveillant implicitly of social threats, and you become focused on yourself. Now, again, other social animals besides humans, you can see behavioral evidence of this same self-preservation. It promotes short term self-preservation. All the physiological changes, all the metabolic changes, all the hormonal changes, and, for that matter, the neural changes we see in service of that endpoint.
Jim Coan
So it's initially- it's serving a function that's hopefully reparative, right?
John Cacioppo
Well, the part about this surveillance in preparation for attack is not to repair those connections. It's to keep you alive long enough.
Jim Coan
Okay, so it's self reliance.
John Cacioppo
Right. Now, there is also these reparative mechanisms, but many of the behavioral and physiological effects are working against that. If I think you might be a friend, and I'm wrong, then that's a one time error, right? I don't get to try again.
Jim Coan
Right.
John Cacioppo
So, it's probably better than I try to make you a friend, but I do it after standing back.
Jim Coan
After running you through some tests.
John Cacioppo
That's right.
Jim Coan
Yeah, I often think that the most dangerous thing for a person is not actually to be alone. It's to believe you're not alone when you are. It's like to be... let's think of that as vigilance. You know, you're out, you're in scary territory, dangerous territory. And you believe that so-and-so is watching out for you a little bit, so you relax your vigilance a little bit and root around for some berries on the ground, and then you get eaten because they didn't give a shit about you. They're just.. there has to be some kind of protective method.
John Cacioppo
That's exactly right. And so, the notion is your brain goes into self-preservation mode. And, you know, in the annual review paper last year, we outlined a neurobiological model for this and it is: The prefrontal is making that comparison of friend-foe and do I have mutual aid and protection or not. It links to the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. You know, the amygdala is responsible for short term changes. The bed nucleus is contextually driven. If I'm in a dangerous circumstance. I don't have anything to respond to yet, but I need to be ready to respond.
John Cacioppo
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And so, we actually think it's the bed nucleus who's feeding back to the periventricular nucleus and down the sympathetics, and actually raising all of these and adjusting cellular functioning, like the release of myeloma tissue from the bone marrow earlier, which produces different epigenetic expressions, which is producing cortical steroid resistance over time and organismal inflammation, changes from viral defenses to bacterial defenses. In an evolutionary world, these changes actually make sense.
Jim Coan
Makes perfect sense. This is your body... that's what I meant by the body's sort of re-budgeting, your brain is re-budgeting, it's like, "Whoa, this is not a good investment. Let's invest this way."
John Cacioppo
But there are cognitive effects.
Jim Coan
There's always trade offs.
John Cacioppo
Right, there are cognitive effects or behavioral effects that, in evolutionary time, have a great adaptive value but, in contemporary society, are coming to work against us. And so, one of the features, it promotes social withdrawal, for the very reason you said, because if I go jumping out at people in approaching everybody, I'm gonna get my head handed to me.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
And so those processes make it easy to withdraw behind Facebook.
Jim Coan
Right. Well, I was just gonna ask you, speaking of contemporary society, where are we headed?
John Cacioppo
So, you know, Facebook, social media is a tool, just like your car. If I use a car, and I drive around, and I see my friends at parties and families, and I wave to them and drive by, I'm gonna feel lonelier. It's not gonna solve that, right? If I use it to drive to the party, get out of the car, and meet people face to face, and then have enjoyable commerce, then that's going to lower loneliness. So, when it's used as a destination, when Facebook or similar social media outlets are used as a destination, they tend to be associated with higher loneliness or higher depression.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
When it's used as a waystation, like internet dating is, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah, or Tinder, even. Something like that.
John Cacioppo
Then, it's likely to lower because it's promoting new interactions with potential new friends,
Jim Coan
Which are the interactions that our body is designed to have,
John Cacioppo
Right.
Jim Coan
And I keep grounding it for myself, I have to keep grounding it in the body because, you know, brains are not little solipsistic, you know, devices just doing the thing for themselves. They're body moving machines, you know, and we have all kinds of stuff that we need to do and feel and sense.
John Cacioppo
Let me come back.... You know, this notion of mutual aid and protection, it underscores a particular thing about what it means to have a new and quality relationship. And that is, it's not about interacting with them so I get things. It is the mutuality, the reciprocity.
Jim Coan
It's the communal... the joining, the linking, the sharing goals.
John Cacioppo
And the synergisms that come from that.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
So, if I'm out there just getting things, it doesn't solve loneliness. And think about it, if it did, people in hospitals wouldn't be lonely because they press a button and the nurses there, right?
Jim Coan
Right.
John Cacioppo
And she or he will bring whatever resources, or sit and talk to you, you know, but that's not the relationship that really provides needs.
Jim Coan
Absolutely.
John Cacioppo
It's about being able to give and take, not just take. Remember Chelsey Sullenberger?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
Who brought down that very big plane, full of passengers, and he brought it down on the Hudson River safely?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
Okay. That was not something humans are designed to do. But he had been an F4 pilot, he had done 20 years of commercial piloting. He was not only a glider pilot, he was a glider pilot trainer.
Jim Coan
He had reflexes...
John Cacioppo
...training...
Jim Coan
He had over learned it.
John Cacioppo
That's right. He was the perfect person to be in that situation, so he was lauded a hero.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
But what went unnoticed was he was not sufficient for those passengers and crew to survive. Within three to four minutes. commercial boat captains...
Jim Coan
...were on the scene, people were coordinating.
John Cacioppo
They were first ones there. They were also necessary for that passenger and crew because it was the winter, right? They were in the middle of the Hudson River. I don't know how many would have successfully swum to shore. And they saved those- they violated their commercial interest by taking the time to go save those passengers. And none of them were lauded heroes, because that what we do as a species, so we overlooked it. We didn't notice it.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
John Cacioppo
So, we need systematic studies of what the mind is doing, not a phenomenological approach, to actually tell the public and to, you know, to learn for ourselves how can one best negotiate or solve the problems that we're facing in society, including how do we live a long, healthy life that's productive, not only for ourselves, but for the next generation? Because we care about that.
Jim Coan
And do you think that we have sufficient knowledge so far from your work and others to say things like... I mean, I told people like Barbara Haggerty, who we both talked to, that sometimes I feel like there ought to be, you know, a public health service announcements, right? Public Health announcements. Like, you know, we all know that we're supposed to follow the food pyramid, we all know that we're supposed to exercise. And exercising is an investment, we don't want to exercise, right? You know, until it becomes a lifestyle. But we don't think about structure and maintenance and investment in our social world, that's just supposed to happen. Like the people helping Sully, you know, get the people off the plane. It's just supposed to be the thing that happens.
John Cacioppo
So I think... here's what we do know, we know enough to know that the model of humans as Homo economicus isn't the right one. And so, public policies that we implement with that alone in mind, they're inefficient, because they're not actually capitalizing on our very nature.
John Cacioppo
All right. Well, John, thank you so much. This was phenomenal. Really appreciate your time.
John Cacioppo
Enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
Jim Coan
Okay.
Jim Coan
Okay, that's it. Thanks to Mr. John Cacioppo for giving it his all, as usual, as is his want. He doesn't... John Cacioppo doesn't do anything half heartedly. After that conversation, I was sort of exhausted. In a good way, of course! And before I left his lab, he took me on a little tour. The place is amazing. And I want to thank him for that too. Anyway, look for some bonus John Cacioppo material in the next few days, and remember that the music on Circle of Willis is written by Tom Stouffer and Gene Ruley, and performed by their band, The New Drakes. For information about how to purchase their music, check out the About Page at circleofwillispodcast.com. Don't forget also that Circle of Willis is brought to you by VQR, and the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, and that Circle of Willis is a member of the Teej FM network. You can find out more about that at teej.fm. Now, folks, if you liked this podcast, how about giving us a little review at iTunes and letting us know how we're doing? It's really easy, and we like it. I want you to do that for us, if you can. Or just send us an email by going to circleofwillispodcast.com and clicking on on the Contact tab. In any case, I'll see you all at Episode Seven, where I talked with neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni. I love saying that name. Iacoboni. It's fun for me. Anyway, he's of the University of California at Los Angeles, otherwise known as UCLA. Until then, bye bye.