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

Romance and fantasy books have taken the internet by storm in recent months. One of them is The Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros. These books became a bit an obsession for me. (What’s not to love about a college filled with love triangles and magical dragons?)

I devoured these books and so did many of my colleagues and friends. The mere mention of the series quickly elicited both gushing reviews and groans from those around me.

Despite the fun I had reading it, I found myself feeling the need to add a disclaimer before recommending the series: “I think it’s all a bit silly,” I’d say.

I became curious about the need to separate myself from the thing that brought me joy. Naturally, I decided to turn to science. What could that tell me about this guilty pleasure experience?

Maybe it’s your romance books like mine, maybe it’s video games, reality TV, or an obscure corner of TikTok.

I spoke to Oxford University neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach and several other researchers to get some answers.

This story is adapted from short wave episode.

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

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

Here’s what I’ve learned about why and how we experience pleasure and what makes offenders so good.

Wanting and liking use different parts of our brain

Kent Berridge is a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan who has worked with Kringelbach in the past. He says that he and other neuroscientists have long thought that the thing we call “pleasure” relates to a unique system in the brain, related to dopamine. But when they studied pleasure, they saw that it is only part of a cycle that includes wanting and liking, each involving different neural pathways.

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

Once we start drinking our morning coffee, we enter the “making love” phase of the cycle where we experience pleasure, says Berridge.

And while many people think of dopamine when it comes to pleasure in general, Berridge says it primarily drives that first part of the cycle, wanting.

Likeability or pleasure seems to be related to a different system in the brain.

In the brains of rodents, scientists see signs of pleasure or “love” — such as licking the lips after eating — when they stimulate tiny spots nestled right inside the brain’s network of reward structures. They’re like cubic millimeter-sized knobs, smaller than a grain of rice—what Berridge and Kringelbach referred to as “hedonic hotspots.”

Although scientists don’t know if these structures exist in humans, Berridge says recent work suggests we might have something similar.

The guilty pleasure part may be the outlet

Of course, humans—and our motivations—are far more complex than rodents. And since there isn’t a ton of neuroscience in guilty pleasures, I talked to a behavioral researcher.

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

Goldsmith and her team got people to think about guilt without being consciously aware of it—by doing things like having them decipher words related to that feeling. The participants then tried different types of chocolate and rated how much they would be willing to pay for the chocolate and how much they liked it.

People who were primed to think about guilt reported liking the candy more and said they would pay more for it than those who weren’t thinking about guilt.

Goldsmith says he thinks this finding could suggest that doing something we associate with guilt can give us a sense of agency in our often severely constrained lives.

“Most of us usually show up at work, eat breakfast, take the kids to school. It’s like holding a spring,” he says. “And when you get a chance to let go… It can actually feel great.”

Our pleasure systems can go awry

So yes, sometimes a reality TV marathon can be just the outlet you need at the end of a long work week. However, both Berridge and Kringelbach caution that it is possible for various stages of the pleasure cycle to become out of balance.

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

“In today’s modern world, we have many, many more pleasures than our ancestors had readily available,” he says. “All kinds of things from food to cultural things to all kinds of life enrichment. …[That] means we have brains wired to seek rare pleasures and now pursue frequent multiple pleasures. We can get caught up in it very easily.”

Kringelbach notes that his research has found that some of the most meaningful joys in life are those that connect us with others.

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

The “pleasure activist” says embrace what brings you joy

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

“I think it’s also related to childhood that it’s childish to love something really unashamedly,” she says. “And as adults we should have restraint in our emotions, and that includes our joy.”

Schalk says that often feelings like guilt or shame can lead us to cut off potential connections with others—ones that could bring us pleasure.

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

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

So when people say they love things like romance novels and reality TV, it’s like, “You shouldn’t like these things,” she says. “But if you do, you have to indicate it, you know it’s not good to like it or indulge in it by saying it’s a guilty pleasure, rather than just saying, I like this, I enjoy this, it’s for me pleasantly.” .”

Schalk writes and speaks about the value of accepting our pleasures—and he practices this in his own life. In 2019, she tweeted a video of herself dancing in a handmade silver cape and said she wanted to twerk with Lizzo. And… she did.

After talking with Schalke, I thought about all the times I pretended not to like a TV show or book for fear of being “uncool,” and I thought about all the potential conversations and experiences I might have missed with other people in my life who might enjoy those things too. I’ve decided that when it comes to the pleasures of romance, I’m ready to take the awkward moments and just share them with the world.