From ‘romance’ to reality TV, why we love guilty pleasures so much

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

I devoured these books and so did many of my colleagues and friends. A single mention of the series quickly generated both enthusiastic reviews and groans from those around me.

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

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

Maybe yours are romance books like mine, or maybe they’re video games, reality TV, or obscure corners of TikTok.

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

This story is adapted from an episode of Korte Golf.

Kringelbach, who heads a center dedicated to studying human flourishing, pleasure and meaning in the brain, says experienced pleasure is crucial to the survival of humanity.

“We need to be able to survive not just for ourselves, but as a species,” he says. “That means that the basic pleasures are the ones where we can get some food that gives us the energy to keep going, but also sex that allows us to basically work as a species.”

Here’s what I learned about why and how we experience pleasure and what makes the guilty kind sooo 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 for a long time he and other neuroscientists thought that what we call “pleasure” referred to a single system in the brain and was related to dopamine. But when they studied pleasure, they saw that it is just part of a cycle of 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 the idea of ​​what coffee will taste, smell or feel like. He says these things stimulate “wanting” and ultimately motivate him to go to his coffee maker every morning and make himself a cup.

Once we start drinking our morning coffee, we enter the ‘liking’ 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 mainly drives this first part of the cycle, the wanting.

Liking or pleasure appears to be related to a different system in the brain.

In rodent brains, researchers see signs of pleasure or ‘liking’ – such as licking the lips after eating – when they stimulate small spots located in a web of reward structures in the brain. They look like buds of a cubic millimeter, smaller than a grain of rice. Berridge and Kringelbach called them ‘hedonic hotspots’.

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

The guilty part of pleasure can be an outlet

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

Kelly Goldsmith, a professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University, conducted a series of studies in 2012 to test people’s associations between guilt and pleasure. And she discovered that experiencing guilt about something could make people enjoy it even more.

Goldsmith and her team got people to think about guilt without them being aware of it – for example, by having them unscramble words associated with the feeling. The participants then tried different types of chocolate and rated how much they were willing to pay for the chocolate and how much they liked it.

The people who had thought about guilt reported that they liked the candy more and said they would pay more for it than those who had not thought about guilt.

Goldsmith thinks this finding could indicate that doing something we associate with guilt can give us a sense of agency in our often tightly limited lives.

“Most of us usually come to work, have breakfast and take our kids to school. It’s like pressing a spring,” she says. “And when you just get a chance to let go… it can actually feel pretty good.”

Our pleasure systems can go haywire

So yeah, sometimes a reality TV marathon can be just the outlet you need at the end of a long work week. But Berridge and Kringelbach both warn that it is possible for the different stages of the pleasure cycle to become unbalanced.

For example, we can get stuck in the ‘wanting’ stage and become extremely motivated to do something – even if it no longer brings us pleasure. While Berridge typically studies this in the context of addiction, he says many people experience this with things like smartphones and video games that activate our reward system.

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

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

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

‘A ‘pleasure activist’ says: embrace what brings you joy

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

“I think there’s also a connection with childhood: it’s childish to really love something unabashedly,” she says. “And as adults, we are supposed to keep our emotions in check, and that includes our joy.”

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

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

“No one says opera is my guilty pleasure because that is something that we find highly 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 like novels and reality TV, it feels like “you’re not supposed to quote this stuff without quotes,” she says. “But if you do, you have to indicate that, you know, that it’s not good to love it or indulge in it, by saying it’s a guilty pleasure, instead of just saying, I like this, I enjoy this, this is enjoyable for me. .”

Schalk writes and speaks about the value of embracing our pleasures – she also puts this into practice in her 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 to Schalk, I thought about all the times I pretended not to like a TV show or book for fear of being “uncool,” and all the possible conversations and experiences I might have missed with other people in my life who could. enjoy those things too. I’ve decided that when it comes to romance-induced fun, I’m ready to embrace the awkward moments and just share them with the world.