Just Blame the Stupid Cat
Cuz confirmation bias
Imagine life in the Stone Age. You and your family are alive and healthy, so life can’t get much better. The only thing you have to worry about is ensuring this glorious status quo. Your biggest threat? Uncertainty.
Since you know what to expect (drought, attack by sabertooth tiger, snow in the winter months), you can usually prepare for the challenges ahead. But the unexpected happens all the time. You’re confronted with things outside your realm of regular expectations. And they can really throw a wrench in your survival plans.
For example, just before you were about to harvest everything, an unforeseeable flood wiped out your house and all your crops. The careful planning for sabertooth tigers et al.? All for naught. But you’re lucky enough to survive. Understandably, protecting against future floods is a number one priority.
But the flood came out of nowhere and nothing like it had ever happened before. So how do you predict whether, or when, it will happen again?
Since only the explainable is predictable, you concoct the most likely explanation for it. Sadly, with your limited information and inability to learn much else about flood patterns, you decide your cat must have invoked the wrath of the gods.
That explanation has no practical implications in hedging your bets against future floods, but the only way you feel it can be disproved is if any future flood does not involve cats. In the meantime, the explanation affords you relative peace of mind. And when the next flood wipes out a nearby village that happens to have unruly cats, the whole thing feels comfortably familiar.
We’ve found ways of ensuring the certainty of food and a high probability of survival through the night, but we’re still hardwired to find confirmation for our intuitions. The example of a cat inducing a flood might seem needlessly stupid, but it’s a good way to illustrate our attraction to seeking confirmation bias—belief that something is true because we have no evidence to the contrary.
If you can think intuitively it’s a sign that life is good; there’s nothing that requires you to redirect your attention or mobilize mental effort. When things are going well you’re in a state of cognitive ease, which probably means you’re in a good mood, you like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar. Validation of our most superficial beliefs about the world is both a cause and consequence of that pleasurable feeling.
Surprise
Surprise is the most sensitive indication of how you understand your personal world. Circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity begin to feel normal. As these links are formed and strengthened, you base your interpretation of the present and your expectations of the future on these patterns.
Surprise is a signal that your model of the world might be wrong. Surprise engenders uncertainty about what will happen next. When surprise meant categorically bad things like floods, we tried to avoid it.
Suspense
Suspense = uncertainty relative to one’s desire for a certain outcome
Desire for a certain outcome = Your emotional investment in seeing things end the way they “should,” e.g., your team winning the match, our hero defeating the bad guys, etc.
Emotional investment = time + high stakes
A lifelong fan is more emotionally invested than a bandwagoner. The final outcome of a TV series is more important to you if you’ve followed it for multiple seasons.
High stakes = how much the protagonist stands to lose, e.g., money, reputation, life, etc.
Satisfaction
Characters get their just deserts; our beliefs about what should happen align with what actually does happen. We get the happy feeling that everything is right in the world.
We derive the most entertainment from heightened suspense: Intense hope for a certain outcome with little to no certainty that it will happen. We can see how this plays out in different forms of entertainment.
Sports
Games that aren’t very close (it’s clear from early on who will win) aren’t very entertaining to the casual fan. In fact, this is one of the very rare instances in which entertainment value can be negative. For fans of the losing team, belief as to who should win is doomed to be uncorroborated by the actual results, so they’d be better off not watching the game.
Of course, there’s always a small chance of an upset, but at about the midway point, it becomes clear that the expected outcome will prevail, and that’s why there’s usually a slight increase in entertainment for fans of the winning team (their beliefs look more likely to be validated), and a decrease in entertainment value for fans of the losing team.
More evenly-matched opponents optimize uncertainty about which side will win. Games at the end of the season, elimination tournaments, longstanding rivalries, and betting all increase emotional intensity, but the “winner-take-all” nature of sports games makes the stakes inherently high.
In the first part of the game, the drama is just starting to heat up—neither side is “winning” yet. Toward the middle of the game, dramatic lead changes prolong the uncertainty over who will win, which tempers any further emotional investment, hence the plateau in the value function. However, near the end of the game, stakes are at an all-time high, and emotional investment for fans of both sides skyrockets if each team still has a shot at winning.
What about the entertainment value for non-sports fans?
Lacking any prior knowledge about teams or even how the game is played, we’ll root for the underdog. We derive so much pleasure from suspense-laden entertainment that we’ll fabricate reasons for an emotional investment in these situations even when none exist.
Highly-formulaic scripted shows
Procedurals are usually police, hospital, or crime-related. Each episode introduces a problem, investigates it, and solves it. Sitcoms fit this genre as well, but are usually family or workplace-related instead. Familiar characters sharing a common environment afford viewers a low barrier to entry. In other words, you can enjoy an episode with no prior knowledge of the show. Enjoyment is not dependent on emotional investment.
This type of programming is, by our definition of prolonged suspense, the least entertaining. These shows’ repetitive nature, which induces cognitive ease and a comforting feeling of familiarity, makes them more enjoyable than entertaining.
Elimination-based reality competition shows
These include “The Voice,” “The Bachelor,” and “Survivor.” Relative uncertainty is always high at the beginning of these shows because there are lots of contestants. Prizes with life-changing potential make the stakes high, and the near-indiscernible differences between contestants who are sent home and ones who stay prolong uncertainty about the final outcome till the last second of competition.
These shows are more entertaining than sitcoms and procedurals, but uncertainty is prolonged under circumstances that allow for relatively little emotional investment: Viewers are forced to pin their hopes on different people if their earlier choices are eliminated.
Character-driven dramas
This form of entertainment allows for the most narrative inventiveness, which is why it’s the most suspenseful, and therefore the most entertaining. The unparalleled amount of time a story has to unfold allows for plot twists that veer way outside the realm of reasonable expectations. Characters don’t have to pursue goals that can be neatly wrapped up in a matter of minutes—their confrontation of issues like life and death, love, violence, and existentialism instantly draw us in because we’re desperate to figure these things out ourselves, or at the very least be reassured that we’re thinking about them the right way.
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