Weird Science turns to drugs to ease the pain of surrealist films

tonystl

Existential crisis? There's a drug for that. And it's available over the counter. I've taken acetaminophen for various forms of physical pain a number of times, but I had no idea that it also eased the pain of social rejection. But that's not the weird part—that's simply mentioned as an aside during the introduction of this paper. Apparently, acetaminophen also eases the pain inflicted by surrealist films. And it eases the fear of death.

As the title of the paper itself implies, there's a "common pain of surrealism and death," namely an existential threat to whatever meaning we've assigned to our lives. Challenge that threat, and people tend to get, well, a bit grumpy. In the experimental condition here, those who weren't given any drug were more likely to demand harsh punishment for rulebreakers after watching a surrealist film or writing an essay regarding their own death. A placebo did not ease the pain, but acetaminophen did, reducing the levels of punishment doled out down to that of the control group.

It's not how much I'm getting, it's how little you are. Lots of things contribute to people's sense of happiness, including some obvious ones like money and sex. But money doesn't only contribute directly to happiness; it also lets you feel better simply because you have more than your fellow citizen. Apparently, sex works the same way. People are happier if they're having more sex, but happier still if they think they're having more than their peers. Or, as the authors put it, happiness is "inversely correlated with the sexual frequency of others."