887: Examining Emotions and How They Affect Our Actions - Dr. Jessica Tracy

Introduction to Jessica Tracy

0:00Hi everyone, and thanks for joining me today for episode 887 of the People Behind the Science podcast, where we are revisiting our interview with our guest, Dr. Jessica Tracy. Listeners, Jess is interested in social and personality psychology. Her lab focuses on better understanding the self-conscious emotions that we feel when we are evaluating ourselves. So these are things like pride or shame. Now Jess shared some fascinating details about her work and great stories from her life and career in our conversation.

0:32So listeners, I hope you enjoy this episode of People Behind the Science. Every day, discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science.

0:58Hello, everyone, and welcome to People Behind the Science. Today, I am thrilled to be speaking with our guest scientist, Dr. Jessica Tracy. So Jess, welcome to our show today. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. How are you? I'm doing quite well, and I'm excited to chat with you more about yourself and your work in our conversation today. And I want to start off by telling our listeners a little bit about you and your background. So listeners, Jess is a professor in the Department of Psychology

1:28and Director of the Emotion and Self Laboratory at the University of British Columbia. In addition, she is a University of British Columbia Souter School of Business Distinguished Scholar and author of the book, Take Pride, Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success. Jessica received her bachelor's degree in psychology from Amherst College, and she was awarded her master's and PhD degrees in social personality psychology from the University of California, Davis. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship at UC Davis, Jess joined the faculty at University of British Columbia in 2006. Jess is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology

2:03and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She has also been the recipient of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Salary Award, the University of British Columbia Killam Research Prize, the Outstanding Early Career Award from the International Society for Self and Identity, and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar Career Salary Award. Now, in our interview today, Jess, we are excited to learn more about you as a scientist, but also you as a person. So can you start by telling us what you like to do when you're not doing science? I love science, but I think having a life outside of research is really important.

2:37I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is an absolutely beautiful part of the world and certainly North America. And there's lots of outdoorsy type stuff to do here. So I try to take advantage of a lot of that sort of hiking, running. In the winter, there's a lot of skiing. In the summer, spending time at the beach, all that sort of thing is kind of my main activities, I would say. That sounds amazing. I think you're lucky to be in such a gorgeous part of the country, too.

Defining Social and Personality Psychology

2:59Oh, yeah, totally. Well, wonderful to hear about life outside the lab, but I'd love to talk about your scientific side as well. And you do some really interesting research that's different from a lot of people we've featured on the show. So how do you describe your work to someone who's not familiar with your field? Well, I usually would start by saying that in terms of the kind of psychology I study, it's the areas called social and personality psychology. And what that means, I think it's the best way to describe it is really these are the aspects of how people are that most people are most interested in. It's really sort of why people are the way they are, how we behave when we're with

3:33others, why we form the relationships that we do, how we behave in social interactions, and why people are different from one another. So that's sort of social personality at the broadest level. In terms of my own expertise, I tend to focus mostly on the study of emotions. And within emotions, the emotions that I study most extensively are emotions that we call self-conscious emotions. And these are emotions that are essentially what we feel when we're thinking about how we feel about ourself, when we're evaluating ourself. So pride and shame are kind of key examples of self-conscious emotions.

4:04Very cool. Well, this is something I think that me and our listeners can relate to. We've all experienced these sorts of emotions at various points throughout our lives. And I look forward to learning more about your research as we go through our conversation. But I'd love to pause here to talk a little bit about what motivates you. I think being able to do cool research every day is an exciting part about life as a scientist. But I love collecting little quotes and sayings and bits of motivation from everybody I talk to. So Jess, do you have a favorite one of yours you can share with us today? I wouldn't say I'm the kind of person who sort of lives by quotes per se, but I did hear one recently that I

4:37really liked a lot. And I think it works for research, but it works for life in general. I don't know exactly who it's from, but the gist of the quote, and maybe the quote exactly, was essentially, when you see the demon, put your head in the mouth of the demon. And I think this is sort of a metaphorical, maybe philosophical, spiritual way of basically saying that if you're afraid of something, don't run away from it. Face your fear directly. And actually, when you do that, the fear goes away, or what you're afraid of essentially goes away. So resisting fear is kind of the major obstacle we have. And I really like this. And I find that

5:08it's hard to do. But when I can remind myself to do it, it's almost always effective. It's kind of amazing in that way. And with research and work and science, the way that this often manifests itself is if there's that thing that we're feeling really anxious about, whether it's getting a grant proposal in, or maybe applying for some position that we don't know if we're really qualified, or if we can compete for, or even writing a paper that seems really daunting, or writing a book, which is something that I did, and I really saw it as a major challenge. In all those cases, my general outlook is to sort of say, okay, if it's giving me anxiety, instead of avoiding it,

5:41I'm just going to tackle it head on. I'm not going to put it at the back of my to do list, I'm going to put it right in front and kind of get it out of the way. Absolutely. Well, I love that strategy. And I think it is so key for tackling a lot of these big challenges, you just have to do it, you just got to get in there and not let that fear prevent you from doing the things you want to do. And I think one of these things that's amazing that you just mentioned was that you wrote a book. And this is something that's amazingly daunting for a lot of people. So can you talk about what that process was like for you?

Writing a Popular Science Book

6:09Totally. I mean, this is something I think I wanted to do. I want to say forever, but that's probably an exaggeration. But certainly from when I was in grad school, and at that point, I had no idea if it was something I ever could do. But I always really like writing before I actually started grad school. After I graduated from college, I worked for a magazine and interested in writing type stuff. And that was always a fun thing for me. And I love science books and popular science books, psychology, and all that sort of thing. So writing one of those was always kind of a dream. And shortly after I got tenure, I sort of decided, okay, now it's time. I've actually had the time to focus less on getting research published. And I

6:44feel like I have a solid body of research that could make an interesting story. So when I went on sabbatical, I went ahead and put together a book proposal. And I threw some contacts I had. I got an agent and they managed to sell it to a great publisher for me, HMH. And the whole thing was hard in some respects. The first draft of my proposal, my agent called me up on the phone and said, wow, this just really missed the mark. He was not a fan of it at first, but he didn't give up on me. I'm very fortunate about that. John Brockman, this is, he helped me work through it.

7:14And we got the help of other people and eventually came up with something that actually sold. So the whole thing was just really a thrill for me. And I think what I would say, the most surprising part was then that I gave myself about two years to write the book because I want to give myself plenty of time. And it was really hard. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It was this thing I just had been so excited to do. And when it came down to actually doing it, parts were super fun. I learned so much. And I would say the chapters that I was writing from scratch, the chapters that I really knew the research less well and had to kind of dig into the

7:47literature more, those were the most fun to write. The chapters that were about my own work and really kind of reviewing in detail studies that I've done and going over reviews I've already written, but writing them for a more popular kind of audience, that was the hardest part. I just found it was such a struggle. Gotcha. Well, Jess, wonderful, wonderful accomplishment there. We will add your book, Take Pride, to our reading list on our website for our listeners to find there. But I love getting book recommendations from everybody that we have on the show. So do you have a book that you'd like to recommend, whether it's related to science or not, for me and our listeners to read?

8:18Whenever I'm asked this, the book I always mention is the book that I think when I was in grad school, I read and it became sort of my favorite book about science and a book that really shaped, to be honest, a lot of my thinking about evolution, psychological science, the work I do really. And that's Steven Pinker's book, The Blank Slate. If you haven't read it, and you're interested in evolutionary science or psychology, anything like that, human nature, it is really the book to read. It's just super well-written. It's a fun read. It really goes into depth on all the various topics and sort of how we know that the mind is part of human nature, essentially. And he's such a great

8:51writer. So I always really strongly recommend that. It's a bit of an older book. I think it's from like 2000-ish, something like that. In terms of books I've read recently, one book that I read this past year that I loved is Michael Pollan's most recent book, which is on the science and history of psychedelics and also research into psychedelics. It's called How to Change Your Mind. And that's a great one. Really fun tracing the history of what happened with psychedelics in the 60s and 70s, but also all this really neat science that's happening around these drugs now. So I recommend that one. Very cool. Well, Jess, thank you for these recommendations. We will add them to our

9:23website as well, The Blank Slate and How to Change Your Mind. And we touched a little bit on some fantastic people in terms of authors in these recommendations that you mentioned. And I think in science, there are so many people to look up to. So are there particular people who rise to the top in your mind who really served as role models, mentors, or just had a big impact on you?

Mentors and Academic Role Models

9:43I would have to say, of course, my graduate advisor, Rick Robbins, who is my mentor throughout grad school. He and I worked really closely together while I was in grad school. I think we were sort of really very much a team in all the early research I did on pride and the nonverbal expression of pride, as well as some work on shame and guilt. And I think I lucked into sort of landing with Rick at a time in his life when he was super motivated to get a lot of work done and very collaborative about it. So this was before he was married, before he had a kid, sort of the ideal time to hit up with an advisor, essentially. So we would spend many late nights working in his office,

10:17writing papers. And he was always happy for me to kind of stop by and talk about data or go through data output together or design a study. He was just incredibly generous with his time. And I learned so much from him about how to do research, what science is, what kind of research is valued, as well as academia in general. He was really great at the professionalism aspect of all this, which I think is super important. So I'm just really, really grateful for him. And the other person I always like to mention in this context is Paul Ekman, who is one of the leaders and certainly founders of the field of affective science, emotion research. He's a big name

10:51in this field. He's basically the guy who discovered that emotions are associated with universally recognize nonverbal expressions, which became this huge piece of evidence in support of sort of a human nature view or a naturalist view of emotions, which is the view that is pretty mainstream these days. And I was really lucky that when I began studying emotion expressions, Rick, my advisor, was very supportive, but it wasn't his area of research. And Paul actually lived in the Bay Area, which is pretty near where I was in grad school at UC Davis, and super welcoming to me. So I would go and

11:21meet him in the Oakland Hills at his house. And we would just talk for hours. And he would give me feedback on the research I was doing and tell me what he thought about it and tell me about his life. And he was one of these scholars who lived in this amazing house overlooking this incredible view of the Bay. And on his walls were all these photos that he'd taken when he was in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s, doing the very first research there, basically looking at whether people there could recognize American emotion expressions. So it was just a really cool environment to be in. And Paul is just incredibly smart. He's just really an interesting guy, very thoughtful.

11:55He's really one of the giants in the field. So I just feel really lucky that I had the opportunity to work with him and he ended up serving on my dissertation committee. And that was a great thing for me.

Discovering Psychology at Amherst College

12:03Absolutely. Well, it sounds like you had some of these great mentors along the way in the course of your training. But I'd love to rewind back even farther. Jess, can you think back to when you first started getting excited about this area of psychology or maybe excited about science in general? It's funny. I think that prior to maybe halfway through college, I always liked science, but I didn't think that's the direction that I would go in. I was sort of much more of an English writer, reader type person. I had some interest in poli sci and law and that kind of thing. I always thought I'd go to law school. And I think the two classes that changed my mind and made me decide to major in

12:36psychology and then eventually realized this could be a career field were my introductory course in psychology at Amherst. I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember the professor. It was one of the big classes, 200 people, all lecture. But it was my first exposure to the field. Before then, I really didn't know anything about psychology. And so I just was wowed. I just thought it was the coolest thing that you had this field of study that to me really integrates kind of my interest in science with my interest in the humanities. And I think psychology, I would say more than any

13:07other field really does this, that you kind of have to have this subjective perspective and think about how people feel, what people are like, really kind of a humanities perspective. But then you're studying it from this very scientific approach. So it's this really nice mix. And I love that. And then in my, I think, junior year, I took a class in personality taught by a professor named Amy Demarest. And she has a very different approach to personality than what's considered typically mainstream. She takes a narrative approach. And so she's really interested in kind of studying the lives of individual people and then understanding personality by kind of looking at their

13:40biographies. And it's called psychobiography, basically. It's sort of like the psychological life of various people. And she taught the class in an amazing way by basically kind of lecturing us on psychobiographies of the major thinkers in the history of personality. So we studied Freud and we studied his theories, but we studied them from the perspective of Freud's life. And then we did the same thing with B.F. Skinner and we did the same thing with Carl Jung. And it was just such a neat approach. And I just found thinking about all these theories and learning about them, it really just had a huge impact. We read the interpretation of dreams by Freud, which I loved. Freud isn't particularly in

14:14favor of mainstream psychology now, but his ideas are just amazing. And I loved Jung as well, another person who's certainly not in favor, but just really, really interesting stuff. And I think the idea that I could build a career around studying the ideas of thinkers like this who want to understand the psyche, they want to understand the contents of the mind, what goes on in people's heads that shapes how they behave, whether they're aware of it or not. I just found that really fascinating. And I think that's really what helped me shift toward deciding, okay, you know what, maybe I'm not going to go to law school. Maybe instead actually learning about the mind and how people behave. That's really what

14:49I want to do. Certainly. So how did you decide then to go to the graduate program at UC Davis? With grad programs in general and psychology with PhD programs, really, I think what the most important thing is the fit with the mentor. I don't know that I knew that at the time I was applying, but I certainly think that's the case now. It's really so much an apprenticeship. In the PhD program, you take a few classes at the master and the PhD level, and they're great. They're going to give you some background. But the thing that will determine your success as a grad student, as a scholar on the job market is basically your apprenticeship, how you work with your advisor,

15:21how much you're able to get done publication-wise, how much research you do, what kind of research you do. That's really the most important thing. And I think I just was really lucky. I was living in San Francisco at the time that I was applying to grad schools. And I ended up driving out to Davis to visit because there were a number of people there who I thought did really interesting work. I knew I wanted to study emotions, but I wasn't really sure beyond that. And I met with Rick, but I also met with five other people. There were just a lot of people there doing cool stuff. And I wouldn't even say that. Looking at the bios of what they did, Rick wasn't at the top of my list. But he and I ended up

15:51having this great conversation. We just chatted for an hour. And it was super fun. I felt really comfortable with him. He wasn't just lecturing at me or treating me like some undergrad who he just would tell stuff to. He actually was asking me a lot of questions and really engaged. And it was just a really fun conversation. And after that, he and I had a lot of emails back and forth, basically, while I was in the decision process. And he was really responsive. And I think the way that he showed me that he was going to be really invested in me as a student, that was really compelling for me. I sort of thought, okay, here's the guy who... He's going to be really a great mentor. And that seems like a good thing.

16:25Right. That and the fact that I was already living in the Bay Area. And I really liked it. And I had a community there and all that sort of thing. So Davis being only an hour away from San Francisco probably was relevant to my decision. But I'd like to think it was more about the science. But I'm sure it was all relevant. Certainly. And I think finding that perfect fit is important, not only for graduate school when you're looking for that advisor, but also when you're looking for a faculty position and that kind of program that's the perfect fit for you. So was that the case? Did you kind of know right away when you went to UBC? I definitely agree with you. That's super important. I had a great visit at UBC. It was the winter. And so I remember it was snowing,

17:00which is not typical in Vancouver. And everyone kept telling me, oh my God, ignore the fact that it's snowing. It doesn't snow, you know, all that sort of thing. And I just remember thinking, well, I see snow, but I'm looking at the beach. Right, right. So I wasn't too bothered about that. And yeah, they did a great job. I think I was here for three days. I had interviews, met with everyone, three different dinners with different groups of people, really hit it off with various people here, very much felt connected to a lot of people. The one thing that's kind of weird that I remember is for whatever reason, it was my first interview. I only actually interviewed at two places because I had a

17:31postdoc lined up. So I applied only kind of narrowly. And this was my first of the two interviews. And I just thought I totally biffed the job. I didn't think I did well. I just remember thinking, well, it's a great visit, but they're not going to hire me. Practice run. Yeah. I met with a good friend of mine, Alan Kingston, who's a cognitive psychologist in our department. The very last day, he'd missed my talk, but he was going to watch it on video. And we had this great chat where he was sort of saying things like, how can we get you to come here? And I remember thinking to myself, well, he says that now, but when he watches the video, he's not going to watch.

18:02So it's kind of funny, but I love UBC and I've just been so lucky to land here. And it's really just been such an amazing home for me. And it's only gotten better since I got hired. We've hired more people in my area who've been amazing as well as outside my area. And I love it. Certainly. And you are working on some really interesting projects in the lab, Jess. So I'd love to chat about some of them. Is there one in particular that rises to the top when you're thinking about the ones that you are most excited about right now?

Authentic Versus Hubristic Pride

18:27There's a few, I guess I would say. One that I've been working on recently with one of my grad students, Eric Mercadante, is picking up on my work on pride and actually looking at behavioral outcomes, which is really fun. So basically, one of the big findings that I've worked on for a while is this idea that there are two different kinds of pride, and we've called them authentic and hubristic pride. So authentic pride is basically the pride that you feel when you're feeling confident. It's associated with hard work and achievements. And it's basically the pride that motivates people to work hard and persist and essentially feel good about themselves for it.

19:01Hubristic pride is more a sense of arrogance, right? It's sort of conceitedness, cockiness. It's more into narcissism. And we found that these two kinds of pride, they're both associated with pride. People call them both pride, but they're incredibly different. They feel different. They're associated with different kinds of personalities, different social behaviors. So it's quite interesting. And what Eric has done is basically designed a bunch of studies to test this theory we had that hubristic pride should motivate people to engage in antisocial behaviors, right? But basically, one of the problems with hubristic pride is that it makes people care less about actually achieving and more about being seen as

19:35someone who's achieving. So our idea was if you look at someone like Lance Armstrong, and there's tons of people like this who are huge successes, really, really famous, incredibly talented, and then do something like cheat, which is just so hard to understand, because Lance Armstrong is undoubtedly one of the fastest, best cyclists in the world. It's kind of crazy, if you think about it, that he decided he had to engage in doping instead of just be as good as he possibly can be. So our thinking is, well, hubristic pride has to underlie this, that it has to be this sort of sense of, it's not just that I want to be great. I want other people to think I'm great. And once you get

20:08caught up in that, you sort of forget the fact that, well, gosh, if I cheat, then it's not really about me actually being great anymore. So Eric tested this basically by looking at whether people who tend to feel a lot of hubristic pride do in fact engage in cheating. And in particular, we thought, okay, well, they shouldn't just cheat indiscriminately, because hubristic pride, it's not just general psychopathy or sociopathy, where basically people are just like, I don't care about what people think. I don't care about the risks. I'm going to do whatever it takes. Hubristic pride is much more specialized. So the idea is that people should cheat if they're high in hubristic pride, but only if their status is on the line, right? If their status is threatened,

20:42if they're basically made to feel insecure, because maybe they're going to work with someone else who performed better than them at a task. So we put people in exactly that situation, give them the opportunity to cheat just by basically lying about how well they did on a bunch of anagrams. And we find that sure enough, the extent to which people feel hubristic pride does predict whether they cheat on this task, but only if they're faced with the status threat. If they feel like, oh gosh, I have to work with someone or I have to engage with someone who's better than me. I don't want them to think I'm not as good as them. I don't want them to think badly about me.

21:14So I'm just going to lie and exaggerate my score in that situation. So it's really cool, I think, because it's nice behavioral evidence in support of this idea we had about hubristic pride and the distinction between hubristic and authentic pride. And it might help address this bigger question about why these people who are already quite successful do in fact go ahead and cheat in certain circumstances. Certainly. Well, this is a fascinating study. And I can imagine that designing these types of studies and conducting the research and kind of exploring human emotions and how they impact behavior is fraught with challenges. It's not easy.

21:46And I love talking about some of the challenges and obstacles that scientists face on our program. So Jessica, can you think back over the course of your career and can you remember a particular failure that was difficult that you had to overcome or just a challenge you face in your everyday life now? I feel like prior to a certain point, maybe getting tenure, certainly getting a job, every time a paper was rejected that I cared about, it just felt heartbreaking. And I think this is something grad students find, gosh, if this is going to be my life, do I even want this career? To all those grad students, I would say it gets better. When papers of mine get rejected now,

22:18I'm certainly bummed, but it doesn't ruin my week. Often doesn't even ruin my day. You kind of get past it. But there's a point at which, yeah, when a paper gets rejected, which happens, it's part of how the field works. It's heartbreaking. And I think probably every major paper I have, every journal article I have that I'm most excited about that I think is some of my best research, I'd like to think that all those articles are in really strong journals. But the interesting thing is almost all of them were rejected first. And not only by a different journal, but by that very journal. In a lot of these cases, my articles that ended up in really good journals, I kind of had to fight to

22:51get them there, right? I had to do more research, write back to the editor, say, hey, I have more studies, I can address these issues. Because the first time was just considered not good enough. And I think every time it feels like a huge failure. I can pick any one of them and say, yeah, it's not exactly a failure story, because in the end, the papers get published. If you're doing good work, and the studies are strong, it's going to get published somewhere. Maybe not your first choice place, but it will get published somewhere. But it always feels like a huge failure when it gets rejected. And that does happen to everyone. Definitely. So how do you cope in those sort of heartbreaking moments when you get the bad news?

Navigating Rejections and Failed Submissions

23:24This is something I learned from my advisor, Rick. The first thing I do is definitely scan that letter, really read it hard, the decision letter, and see, is there a way that we can fix it? Is there an opening in here? The core issue that they're raising, can we address that with new analyses? Can we address it with new data? Can we run another study and try to go back there? Just trying to don't let the challenge win you over, but really say, okay, can I go back? Is there a way? Is there an angle to fight this? And I have to say, it doesn't always work. I've been in situations like that where I've seen that angle. I've written to the editor. The editor says, sure,

23:56go for it. We've done the additional study. We've addressed all the issues. And then the editor still says, no, it's not good enough. And that's heartbreaking. That's really incredibly frustrating, right? I mean, I also am a journal editor, so I see both sides of it. And as an author, you always feel like you've addressed all the issues. And as an editor, you're kind of seeing a bigger picture and these are competing perspectives. So I get it. The best way to deal with these kinds of failures is really to think about the next thing. Either this thing, how can I make it better? What's the next journal we want to go to? What's the next plan?

24:27Kind of staying engaged and staying motivated. And I think the failures that for me are hardest is when if there is no next option, if it's sort of like, okay, well, you got to wait until there's another opportunity. That I think is much harder. I don't have a good way of dealing with failures where there's not a clear next step or next path. Definitely. Well, thank you so much for sharing your strategy for overcoming some of these difficult things in science, because you're absolutely right with the rejections and the failures are going to happen. And that's just something you sort of have to get used to and have to get to the point where it just kind of rolls right off your skin. And like you said, doesn't ruin your day. So thank you for talking about some of your

25:00experiences, but I'd love to chat about your successes as well. You mentioned that many of these journal submissions had a happy ending, but we'd love to talk about more of these successes. So do you have a favorite story you want to share with us today? I don't know if I have a favorite story, but I can tell you about a recent one, something that happened just last year that was just a real huge challenge for a very long time and ended up with a happy ending. So this was research that originally was led by a former student of mine, Connor Steckler. He ended up leaving the field. He decided for various reasons that he didn't want to be an academic and he now works for Google. And I think he's loving that.

25:32So it's a great life choice there. But Connor was incredibly creative and he had this great idea, which was basically, there's the whole literature in moral psychology, basically on disgust and whether when we say that we're disgusted by a morally inappropriate or morally wrong behavior, like incest, do we actually mean that we're disgusted in the sense of we feel nauseous, we want to throw up? Or are we just saying disgust as a way of saying, I think this is really wrong. I'm angry. I'm upset about it. And disgust really kind of conveys a high level of moral

26:03approbation. And this is actually something that had not really been resolved in any way in the literature, because it's almost impossible. If you think about it, it's very hard to design a study that's going to kind of target that and figure out what's going on there. And Connor ended up coming up with a great solution, which was let's inhibit feelings of nausea using ginger. So ginger root, people often take it for nausea and seasickness and morning sickness. So it's known to be effective for reducing nausea. So we basically had people in our study, we gave them pills that were filled with ginger or a placebo, which was just sugar.

26:36And then we had them read a bunch of morally questionable scenarios. And these are scenarios that are used in this research. And they're things like, how do you feel about siblings getting married, a morgue worker touching the eyeball of a corpse, someone eating their dog after it dies, things like that, that we just don't really think are okay, typically. And what we found was that, in fact, when people were on ginger, they found these scenarios to be less morally wrong. But we found that only for scenarios that were kind of in the mid-range of wrongness.

27:07So some things that were just really clearly wrong, and I think sibling incest was one of the ones that was just clearly wrong. For those, ginger had no effect. And I think that makes sense, right? That if you just know cognitively this is wrong, you don't have to turn to your gut feelings to see how you feel about it. But for things that were more ambiguous, where it was just sort of less clear cut, whether it was wrong, it turned out ginger had this real effect, suggesting that when we're not sure if something is morally wrong, we actually do lean on those gut feelings, right? We sort of turn to our physiological symptoms and think, okay, well, how am I feeling? And if we're not feeling so nauseous, because we're on ginger, we actually rate the scenarios as less wrong.

27:42So I thought this was just a massive finding, really, really important. But of course, you know, in science, we like to replicate things. So we replicated it, but in the replication, it was not so clear cut. It didn't come out as a main effect. It only came out in interaction with an individual difference variable that we predicted that made a lot of sense, but it was still sort of ambiguous. But basically, we ended up with sort of a three study package, two showing the basic effect and then one showing interaction. And we basically got repeated series of kind of editors and reviewers saying, this is really cool stuff. This is amazing. We love it. But is the finding

28:14really consistent? And they give us a revise and we submit and say, can you do more analyses? Can you do this? What can you do to show us? And these were like the top journals. And three different top journals gave us this revise and resubmit and then ultimately rejected the paper because the findings weren't consistent enough. And this was just incredibly frustrating because in this field, this is very typical that sometimes you get a main effect. Sometimes you get interaction with this individual difference variable that we were looking at, which is essentially a variable of how sensitive you are to bodily sensations. And you can imagine that's something that's going to play a role here.

28:44So we thought it all made sense, but it was sort of heartbreaking. So finally, we thought, okay, you know what? We have to try to replicate it again. And if we can't, that actually might mean this was just a fluke. And if we can, okay, well, then we're really onto something. So we did one more major study, huge sample. We pre-registered our predictions, which is a new thing people are really into doing right now in my field. And we did this whole thing and we replicated the effect. So we went back to one of the best journals, JPSB, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And we said, hey, we got the effect. Can we get it? And the editor was

29:17great. He said, yes, go ahead and resubmit. And in the end, he accepted it. And I'm really proud of that paper. It took a ton of work. By the time we did that fourth study, Connor had left. And so I had another grad student working with me on it. And it's one of these things that I just think is such a cool finding and really kind of tells us something that we didn't know before about how our moral psychology works and how our emotions work. So that was a great one. Well, congratulations to you and the team that worked on this project. And I think it really highlights the perseverance necessary to be successful in science. Oh, yeah, totally.

29:47Well, wonderful to hear about one of these stories of success. And we've talked about some different aspects of your work and some of the places that you've been for your training. But I'd love to chat a little bit more about some of the places you've been able to travel for your work, because I think this is an aspect of the career that many people don't necessarily appreciate as part of it. So do you have a favorite place, Jess, that your science has taken you?

Fieldwork in Burkina Faso

30:07I feel like I have a unique position in this question. For me, this is a really easy one, because when I was in grad school, for my dissertation research, my advisor and I and his partner and my partner went on this massive trip to Burkina Faso, West Africa, to do research in this little tribal village in the eastern part of this country in West Africa. And it was incredible. It was by far the most incredible research experience I've ever had and probably ever will have. We kind of we lucked into the situation where we discovered this recognizable expression of pride

30:38that people in California seem to all agree was pride. But the key thing with this research is you want to say, OK, well, is this something just that Americans know or is it universal? And what Paul Ekman, as I mentioned before, the way he addressed this for other emotion expressions was he went to Papua New Guinea and he asked people who had never seen a Westerner, right? They'd never seen a white person before. He showed them photos of American emotion expressions and asked if they recognize them the same way. So we wanted to do something like that. But it's obviously quite hard to do that. And a friend of mine in grad school actually knew someone through family connections who had been part of basically the chief family in this area of Burkina Faso and still had connections

31:16in a tiny little village there called Tusiana. And she was able to connect us with him. And so I was collaborating with him and his wife, who's American. Basically, he'd come here and married an American woman and then they'd gone back there. So we worked with the two of them and they helped us do the study. And then we went out there. And it was just amazing. We were in this little village and he had spread word that something was happening at his... He has the central home in the village. And all of a sudden that day, 40 people showed up, most of them kind of walking from 5 to 10 kilometers away. Oh, wow. The women all carry potatoes on their head and babies on their back. And it was amazing.

31:50And we just did the research right there. We hired people from the community who could read, and they would read the script and ask people questions and none of our participants could read. So they would just respond aloud and people would write down their answer. And it was just amazing. It was an incredible research experience. It was just so cool. So did they recognize the emotion as pride? They did. They sure did. Yeah. A recognition rate that was 57%, which is way better than what we compare it to, which is chance. And it's also comparable to how they were for all the other emotion expressions. I think the best recognized emotion was happiness at like 80%, but then pride was the

32:23second best. So they're recognizing pride at higher rates and they're recognizing things like anger and fear and surprise. So that was a good sign. Oh, that is remarkable. So what was it like walking into this village in sort of a remote part of West Africa? Oh, it was amazing. It was such a cool thing. We spent a few days there, obviously. At first, we worked with the interviewers and our collaborators just to go through the whole protocol and make sure everyone knew what they were doing. And that was hard because Burkina Faso is a former French colony. So no one speaks English. Our American friend, of course, does. And her husband,

32:54Jean, who is the chief guy, he does somewhat, but mostly it's all French. So Rick's partner, Simona, she was fluent in French. So she did most of the talking for us. She's totally bilingual. So that was fine. But we're translating from English to French and then French to two different local dialects, which don't have a written language. So our interviewers are reading materials in French and then saying the key words aloud in these local dialects that don't have a written form. And then they get a response in the local dialect and then write down the response in French.

33:25I mean, it's all really, you know, you can imagine the room for error. That's why we don't expect particularly high recognition rates for partly that reason. But that was amazing. And then when the day happened, there wasn't much we could do because of course we can't speak to people and cultural norms sort of prescribe us. They would have not been comfortable with us anyway. So we kind of just hung back and took photos. And these people, they live in mud huts. There's no electricity. There's no plumbing. There's chickens running around everywhere. It's hard to describe the scene. Usually I show photos, which help show the scene, but it was amazing. John, one of his stepmoms, basically his father was married several times and they have multiple

33:59marriages there. So one of his stepmoms was brewing this millet beer for days before the people came because when you have people to your home, that's what you do there. And so she just had these giant vats of beer that she was stirring. And that was kind of amazing. And the whole thing was just such a different experience than what we were used to. Certainly. Well, thank you for sharing these stories because I think it is really great to illustrate to everybody out there that science careers do afford this opportunity to get outside your comfort zone. Absolutely. Yeah. And we touched on some of the great people that you're able to work with in this project. And I

34:30think that's another thing in science that I love to highlight as a great part of the career is you get to work with some amazing people and scientists aren't necessarily what we look like on TV, right? It's not the same stereotypes of the white lab coat, the bubbling liquids in front of us. And I think that's something that not everybody appreciates. So we try to break some of these stereotypes on our program by sharing just the stories of the fun and funny things that scientists do when they're together, the quirky traditions that you experience in laboratories. So Jess, do you have one of these stories that you can share that really just shows this human side of science?

35:01In my lab, I have a great group right now and have for the whole time I've been at UBC. We typically have lab meetings every other week. And there's a bunch of grad students who I work directly with as well as students who are kind of peripherally involved, but want to come to the lab meetings. And they're always serious. We cover research, people give presentations, we give feedback, but there's also absolutely a fun element. And we do an annual holiday party and we do it with another lab. And typically our latest thing the past couple of years is we have a lab on lab dessert competition, which is pretty fun. So basically my lab versus the other lab tries to make the best

35:33desserts and the other lab director and I provide all the other food, but the students make the dessert. And so it gets pretty intense where there's a lot of trash talk. And then in the end, of course, we have a tremendous number of desserts, which is probably too much, but the students love that. So it's kind of fun. So who judges this competition? So the other director and I are typically key judges. And then there's often students who just don't fit cleanly in one lab or the other. So there's one student who's in both labs. So he'll be a judge. Partners, because everyone's invited to bring partners to the holidays. So partners end up

36:04being judges. Whether the judges are totally unbiased, I don't know, but we hope so. Right. So do you remember, was there one particular dessert that just really stands out in your mind as something that was so phenomenal? The one I remember, it's funny because people, someone made like this tart that was super delicate and beautiful and someone else made these amazing cookies and there was a pecan pie that was good. One that I remember, I think from two years ago was actually my student, Eric, who I mentioned before, who does not know how to cook or bake, but basically had this thing he could do, which was basically marshmallows and chocolate in a pan. And I don't know how he did it. It was clearly the kind

36:39of thing like he and his buddies in college used to make or something, but it was really good. And you'd kind of dip graham crackers in there. And it was sort of like this homemade s'more situation. And I remember, I was like, you know, that might be the award winner there. It doesn't sound impressive, but sometimes it's the simple things. So, well, just wonderful to hear about some of these fun traditions you've experienced in your lab. And I think these are key to kind of building that sense of camaraderie and community and kind of bringing the lab together because you are addressing some really fascinating questions in the science that you're doing.

37:09But oftentimes there are things standing between you and being able to answer those dream questions. So Jess, I want to challenge you today to think big. If we gave you everything you could dream of, whether it's funding, staff, technology, addressing feasibility issues, whatever you can think of, what is the one question you would most want to answer? To be honest, you might not like this answer. I think my answer would be not necessarily a question that I don't already answer, but more method. I think we already sort of, I always, when I do research, I like to focus on questions just because that's what interests me. And I think

37:42if you focus on the question, good research naturally follows. So when students come into me and say, Hey, we can do this thing. I would say, well, why would we do that? What questions answering? And students often don't think that way. So you kind of have to train them to think that way. But I think, you know, if money and feasibility and all that weren't an issue, there are so many things we could do to answer all the questions we're currently answering so much better than we are. I think so much of the research we do is on paper. We now use online participants a lot. And so we've come up with really clever methodologies to get people online. In the study I was telling you before about the cheating, that all happens online.

38:15They're doing a task online. They're cheating online. So that's pretty cool. It's actual behavior. At the same time, if we had as many participants as we needed and could get them in the lab or even measure, observe them in the real world in a situation where they're actually cheating or actually engaging in group interactions. And we've done some of this, but those studies, I think, they're the most informative. They're the hardest to do, most time intensive, most space intensive, most expensive, but they're by far the most informative. You get real people doing real things, interacting with each other in groups. We've done studies where we look at how hierarchy

38:46forms by getting people to interact in groups. And that's really cool. But what if we could do that by actually watching people in the real world in these kinds of situations? That is a good and acceptable answer, Jess. I like it. Well, wonderful to hear about how you would improve the research kind of given these unlimited resources. And we talked about some different aspects of your career, these different stages that you went through and some of the people who helped you along the way. And I think these people can be great sources of advice at critical moments in your career. So I love providing some advice for our listeners out there who might be at a critical moment themselves. So do you have a favorite piece of advice or one that really helped

39:20you that you can share with us today?

Career Advice for Scientists

39:22One piece of advice I got that I have not followed, but it's one that maybe should be followed is every paper or even project you start, you should finish. Now, like I said, I haven't done that. And I think there are probably are times where it's better to cut your losses. But this is something my advisor always said and certainly believes in is that if he started something, he was going to finish it. And that's probably why he has as many publications as he does. And I think for someone trying to get a lot of publications, it's good advice. If you start something, if you just make sure, hey, I started that thing, I'm just going to kind of keep tabs

39:55on it and someday finish it. That's the kind of attitude that will certainly help your CV. So that's something I guess. Well, great advice. Wonderful message to give our listeners today, Jess. Is there any other message you want to share with us or a note of inspiration you'd like to end our conversation on today? So I guess this is sort of a maybe caveat to that advice, which is that I think that's great advice for pre-tenure, right? When people are trying to get a job, when they're trying to get tenure, the thing you have to focus on most is the publications, right? That's just publish or perish. It's always been true. And I think it still is true. But I would say that once you've

40:28done that, once you have tenure, once you're in a job that you feel happy with and you feel comfortable where you are, then I think it's good to think about more than just publishing. It's a really hard stage in the career of any scientist of sort of thinking, okay, wait, now I have tenure. I don't have to keep putting out these papers that maybe aren't that exciting. They're sort of incremental work that aren't really groundbreaking. And at that point, I would say that's a time to think about what excites you, what interests you, what's the most fun to do? What are the big questions you're really interested in? Do you want to take a step away from the field that you've spent the most time in and actually look at something different? And I think that's something that really everyone should think

41:02about. For some people, the answer might be, no, I love what I've been doing and I just want to keep doing that. And that's great. But I think just asking the question is really, really important. And it's hard because we all work with grad students and they still need to publish your parish. So you've got to spend at least some of your time doing that work that you know is going to be solid and get in good journals. But at the same time, I think taking some time for yourself to kind of ask bigger, broader questions, that's I think really important and useful. Definitely. Maybe write that book you've always dreamed of writing too. Exactly. Well, wonderful advice for me and our listeners. Jess, thank you so much.

41:34What is a good way for our listeners to get in touch or to learn more if they are interested? Well, if they want to check out my lab website, there's all kinds of information there. All of my published articles, our labs articles are available there and lots of media stuff. So all the we've been covered in the news and that kind of thing, more information about my book. And there's also email addresses there. So that's probably the number one best source of information. And that's www.ubc-emotionlab.ca. That's probably the best way. I'm also on Twitter. If people want to

42:05follow me or get more information or contact me on Twitter, I'm Prof Jess Tracy on Twitter. So those are two good ways. Awesome. Well, listeners, definitely check out that website. Follow Jess on Twitter. And Jess, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you today. Thank you for joining us to share a piece of your story. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a lot of fun. And listeners, great to have you here with us as well. We'll see you next time on another episode of People Behind the Science.

42:35People Behind the Science.