The primary intuition pump it provides is showing something like, “What might go wrong if someone loses their ability to feel X emotion,” where X in the film is Sadness.
In the plot, when Sadness is missing, the protagonist Riley can’t express that something is wrong in a way that helps her family notice and help her. Once Sadness returns and is given control, Riley starts to cry on the bus, signaling to herself that she doesn’t actually want to run away from home. When she returns to her house, she starts crying more, no longer suppressing her sadness and showing them in a visceral, hard-to-fake way that she’s actually in a really bad place, and needs help.
Hm, I’d been thinking that I didn’t feel like Inside Out did a great job of showing why Sadness is useful.
I’ve only seen it once, when it was in cinemas. But the specific scene I remember was, Riley does badly in a hockey game or something, and feels sad, and her friends come to comfort her, and Joy realises “oh, sadness lets our friends know we need help!” But… why does she need help? Other than “because she’s sad”, it’s not clear to me. What help do her friends give? They cheer her up, i.e. make her not sad. (In my memory, we don’t hear any specific words they say.) So why not just skip the sadness?
Like, there are situations where “something is wrong, and I’m sad about it, and with help the wrong thing can be fixed and then I won’t be sad”. (My life has been work-sleep-work-sleep for weeks.) And then there are situations where “something is wrong, and I’m sad about it, and it can’t be fixed”. (It turns out I’m not as good as my opponent at Smash Bros.) If we’re saying the value of sadness is “it signals people to come help us”, then it doesn’t make so much sense in the second case, right? And I only remember the film showing the second case.
Maybe with the bus thing, the film also shows things being wrong that can be fixed, and sadness signalling that?
(And, what is the value of sadness in that second case? One possible answer is “we didn’t evolve the ability to emotionally distinguish between things that can be fixed and things that can’t”, which sounds plausible but is also a curiosity stopper. Another is “not wanting to feel sad when we lose pushes us to win”, which, idk, doesn’t feel good enough. Another is “even if the thing itself can’t be fixed we have cognitive distortions that can be (like I suck at Smash Bros, I provide no value to the world)”—that kinda rings true to me, but of course it brings up the “why do we have cognitive distortions” question....)
My interpretation of what Inside Out says about sadness is different from how people usually describe it:
Throughout the movie, characters constantly inadvertently signal to Riley that they don’t care about her. Her dad is preoccupied with his startup and sends her to bed without supper on a flimsy pretext. Her mom is preoccupied with the moving process and has to be reminded to kiss Riley good night. Her teacher calls on her in a way that ends with Riley being humiliated in front of the entire class. Her old friends have replaced her, and no one at her new school invites her to eat lunch with them.
Riley starts to worry that no one cares about her. To use an evolutionary just-so story, having everyone in your tribe see you as unimportant and disposable is probably pretty bad for your inclusive genetic fitness, especially if you are a child. If that was the case you’d want to do something about it, maybe something as drastic as running away to join another tribe. But before taking such a drastic action you’d want to test to see if your worries were well-founded.
At the end of the movie, Riley performs a dramatic display of sadness in front of her parents, and they respond with compassion and change their behavior to be more attentive to Riley’s needs. Riley is able to stop worrying that no one cares about her and go back to normal.
But if we imagine an alternate scenario where Riley’s parents responded to that display of sadness with anger and punished her for trying to run away, in that scenario her worries would be confirmed and she could be confident that a drastic change was needed.
So in this reading the purpose of sadness is as a performance for other people, to attempt to gain information about the state of your relationships and/or make a bid for other people to devote more of their attention or resources to you. It’s bad to never perform sadness because then you can never get that clarity. You’re stuck having a vague worry that something isn’t right, and having to choose either to act like nothing is wrong or to take a drastic action based on a worry that might not be well-founded.
As I said, I haven’t seen anyone else describe the movie this way. This interpretation also doesn’t really answer every question about sadness—people often feel sad even when there isn’t another person around to perform to. But at least to me it makes sense of the movie.
Yep, thanks for pointing this out; it often comes up in the class itself if people ask something like “What happens if people don’t care if you start crying?” but it’s hard to comprehensively address all these sorts of points without making each section two or three times longer.
Like, there are situations where “something is wrong, and I’m sad about it, and with help the wrong thing can be fixed and then I won’t be sad”.… And then there are situations where “something is wrong, and I’m sad about it, and it can’t be fixed”.… If we’re saying the value of sadness is “it signals people to come help us”, then it doesn’t make so much sense in the second case, right?
The functional purpose of sadness is to summon allies who show they care about you. That’s not the same thing as solving/fixing the problem, but ensuring that you aren’t as harmed by your loss, and confirming you still have a place in/support from your community despite the loss.
IOW, sadness is like filing a claim on your social insurance policy to get recompense for the loss, not to have the insurance company un-burn-down your house.
So the thing that I don’t remember the film answering, and that I think your comment doesn’t answer either, is: how do they do this?
Like, first we need to ask “if I didn’t feel sad, how would I be harmed by my loss?” That seems easy enough. If I accidentally flushed my wedding ring down the toilet: I’m down an item that has sentimental (and perhaps monetary) value. If I’ve lost a Smash Bros tournament: well, winning would have been some kind of gain, and I’ve lost the possibility of that. But perhaps there are also less obvious harms.
And then we need to ask “how is this harm lessened by my allies showing they care about me?” I don’t have a clear answer to that. I still don’t have my wedding ring or the possibility of a Smash Bros tournament victory.
We could say “well, you’re still just harmed by your loss, but with sadness you get extra friend time which is good, so the net is less overall harm”. But… I dunno, doesn’t ring true to me. Like for one thing this leaves out that on top of the object level harm, you get the unpleasant sadness emotion.
If we additionally stipulate that I’m worried that my friends and loved ones will all desert me, now that I’ve lost my wedding ring/the tournament—then sure, them coming to show their support fixes that. That kind of thing is what I was gesturing at with “cognitive distortions”, but tbf maybe it’s not always a distortion.
Your examples seem pretty modern and not that similar to what the emotion evolved for, which is likely more about things like injury, illness, loss of allies, failed hunts, etc., where compensatory action by allies to literally care for you (in the sense of “taking care of”) is quite immediately survival-relevant.
In this context, alerting your allies that you need extra help and/or backup to deal with your setback or loss of capacity seems quite valuable. Your examples don’t really require material support from friends to help you survive, but in the ancestral environment, having people able to provide assistance could easily be a life or death difference even in the very short term, depending on the loss.
The examples you gave are ones where your friends cannot reasonably help you “solve” the problem, in which case just having social support and signals of care is often the best they can do, and many do find that valuable.
But there are plenty of situations where friends can help with the thing that makes you feel sad or overwhelmed, and I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding your question. Do you not think those sorts of situations ever existt? Or are you asking why “sadness” is necessary to get them to help you?
Neither of those. I’ll try to recap the conversation from my POV:
In my first comment, I distinguish between
Situations where I’m sad, and my friends can help me fix the thing I’m sad about.
Situations where I’m sad, and my friends can make me less sad but can’t fix the thing I’m sad about.
(And my memory of the film is that the “oh! Sadness signals your friends to come help!” revelation is about a (2), which makes the revelation feel unconvincing to me. Like, I think the argument presented in the film isn’t very good; but I can come up with a better argument myself, so I’m not questioning the conclusion.)
Then I read pjeby as saying that in both types of situations, sadness signals allies to come help; but the help they offer isn’t to fix the problem, the help they offer is to do harm reduction.
And in my second comment, I’m specifically focusing on the (2)s, and asking how your allies do harm reduction in those situations.
1) When allies respond to your sadness with comfort and presence, they’re essentially saying “your wellbeing matters to me” and “you still belong here despite this loss.” This creates a buffer against secondary psychological harms you alluded to, like isolation, abandonment fears, or spiraling into deeper despair that might come from bad frames where losing the contest means you’ll always lose future ones, or wasted all your time practicing, etc. The original loss remains, but you’re not facing it alone and it’s not extending beyond what actually happened.
2) Even when the specific thing can’t be fixed, allies might offer practical support that reduces the overall burden. Some might try covering responsibilities so you can rest, like bringing food or helping with chores so you have fewer stressors and your capacity isn’t overwhelmed. This help can range from the direct to the indirect depending on how fungible the loss is; no one would pretend that buying someone a nice dinner would make up for the loss of a wedding ring, or even something much cheaper with heavy emotional significance, but it can still help take some of the sting out, especially if it’s something like missing a flight where the financial loss is a more significant fraction of the overall.
3) Seeing others who care about you remain stable and functional despite your loss can itself be reassuring evidence that this setback isn’t catastrophic to your broader social world. This may sound like 1, but I think it’s actually separate because it doesn’t require you to having additional negative beliefs that spiral out from the initial loss, but rather bolsters you more directly in continuing to try hard things or feel less of the sting from loss.
Also as an aside, the hockey ring situation is from Inside Out 2: in the first one Sadness signals to Riley’s parents that she is very unhappy and needs a lot more support and attention, which isn’t going to make up for e.g. losing her friends, but can help her feel more cared for in all three ways, to some degree.
Thanks. I have more thoughts but not gonna try to bring them out right now at least.
Also as an aside, the hockey ring situation is from Inside Out 2: in the first one Sadness signals to Riley’s parents that she is very unhappy
I don’t know how accurate my memory is.[1] But the scene I remember is from the first movie. Joy’s spent the movie asking what Sadness is even good for, and then she sees some of Riley’s memories. In one of them, Riley is sitting alone on a swing under a tree branch, sad because some sport event didn’t go how she wanted, I think specifically because she didn’t perform as well as she wanted. And her friends come cheer her up, and Joy realizes (and exposits to the viewer) that Sadness shows people we need help.
(Actually, a thing just occurs to me about this scene. I don’t remember if her friends were also her teammates. But if they were, then “my friends all hate me now” is an at-least-vaguely reasonable hypothesis to hold, and them coming to cheer her up shows that they don’t. Though I still wouldn’t frame this as “Sadness shows people we need help”.)
I assume the thing you describe also happens, but I don’t remember it :p. Assuming the scene I remember happens at all, my guess is it happens before yours? In which case Joy’s realization and exposition aren’t driven by your scene, though they probably are driven by more than just the scene I remember.
Related anecdote: I remember that the sixth rule of Fight Club is “there is no sixth rule”. I remember the cadence and delivery of that line. That is not the sixth rule of Fight Club.
Ahhh, you’re talking about the memory. Yes, that was the moment of Joy’s realization for why Sadness has value. But before her friends/teammates show up to cheer for her, it’s her parents that show up to comfort her. I think it’s fair to say that her friends showing up to cheer for her probably meant a lot more to Riley than her parents’ comfort in that moment, since it was more tied to the specific thing that was making her feel bad, but Joy’s out-loud recognition was that Riley’s parents showed they cared about her when she was sad, which is the important parallel for the issue in the plot where Riley feels like her parents don’t care about her.
Indeed people often play low status, small, energy preserving lying down curling up, frowny crying—in order to signal other people for reassurance. This gets trained out of people like us who use screens too much, that no one will come unless you give a positive and legible cry for help.
The reassurance of course, is about status and reputation. We still like you. We’re here for you. We’re still cool. Consider status a measure of the health of your social ties, which many people terminally value and in present society still provides instrumental, material value (jobs, places to crash, mutual aid, marketing / audience building for your future startup, …).
It makes sense to think of relationships as things that are built that have their own health instead of purely thinking of material output. The future is uncertain. You can’t model that far. You might get more returns later by investing now. More speculative, i think the drive to relate to others is borne from an ancient desire to form contracts with other agents to combine into (partial?) superagents. like bees in a hive.
Hm, I’d been thinking that I didn’t feel like Inside Out did a great job of showing why Sadness is useful.
I’ve only seen it once, when it was in cinemas. But the specific scene I remember was, Riley does badly in a hockey game or something, and feels sad, and her friends come to comfort her, and Joy realises “oh, sadness lets our friends know we need help!” But… why does she need help? Other than “because she’s sad”, it’s not clear to me. What help do her friends give? They cheer her up, i.e. make her not sad. (In my memory, we don’t hear any specific words they say.) So why not just skip the sadness?
Like, there are situations where “something is wrong, and I’m sad about it, and with help the wrong thing can be fixed and then I won’t be sad”. (My life has been work-sleep-work-sleep for weeks.) And then there are situations where “something is wrong, and I’m sad about it, and it can’t be fixed”. (It turns out I’m not as good as my opponent at Smash Bros.) If we’re saying the value of sadness is “it signals people to come help us”, then it doesn’t make so much sense in the second case, right? And I only remember the film showing the second case.
Maybe with the bus thing, the film also shows things being wrong that can be fixed, and sadness signalling that?
(And, what is the value of sadness in that second case? One possible answer is “we didn’t evolve the ability to emotionally distinguish between things that can be fixed and things that can’t”, which sounds plausible but is also a curiosity stopper. Another is “not wanting to feel sad when we lose pushes us to win”, which, idk, doesn’t feel good enough. Another is “even if the thing itself can’t be fixed we have cognitive distortions that can be (like I suck at Smash Bros, I provide no value to the world)”—that kinda rings true to me, but of course it brings up the “why do we have cognitive distortions” question....)
My interpretation of what Inside Out says about sadness is different from how people usually describe it:
Throughout the movie, characters constantly inadvertently signal to Riley that they don’t care about her. Her dad is preoccupied with his startup and sends her to bed without supper on a flimsy pretext. Her mom is preoccupied with the moving process and has to be reminded to kiss Riley good night. Her teacher calls on her in a way that ends with Riley being humiliated in front of the entire class. Her old friends have replaced her, and no one at her new school invites her to eat lunch with them.
Riley starts to worry that no one cares about her. To use an evolutionary just-so story, having everyone in your tribe see you as unimportant and disposable is probably pretty bad for your inclusive genetic fitness, especially if you are a child. If that was the case you’d want to do something about it, maybe something as drastic as running away to join another tribe. But before taking such a drastic action you’d want to test to see if your worries were well-founded.
At the end of the movie, Riley performs a dramatic display of sadness in front of her parents, and they respond with compassion and change their behavior to be more attentive to Riley’s needs. Riley is able to stop worrying that no one cares about her and go back to normal.
But if we imagine an alternate scenario where Riley’s parents responded to that display of sadness with anger and punished her for trying to run away, in that scenario her worries would be confirmed and she could be confident that a drastic change was needed.
So in this reading the purpose of sadness is as a performance for other people, to attempt to gain information about the state of your relationships and/or make a bid for other people to devote more of their attention or resources to you. It’s bad to never perform sadness because then you can never get that clarity. You’re stuck having a vague worry that something isn’t right, and having to choose either to act like nothing is wrong or to take a drastic action based on a worry that might not be well-founded.
As I said, I haven’t seen anyone else describe the movie this way. This interpretation also doesn’t really answer every question about sadness—people often feel sad even when there isn’t another person around to perform to. But at least to me it makes sense of the movie.
Yep, thanks for pointing this out; it often comes up in the class itself if people ask something like “What happens if people don’t care if you start crying?” but it’s hard to comprehensively address all these sorts of points without making each section two or three times longer.
The functional purpose of sadness is to summon allies who show they care about you. That’s not the same thing as solving/fixing the problem, but ensuring that you aren’t as harmed by your loss, and confirming you still have a place in/support from your community despite the loss.
IOW, sadness is like filing a claim on your social insurance policy to get recompense for the loss, not to have the insurance company un-burn-down your house.
So the thing that I don’t remember the film answering, and that I think your comment doesn’t answer either, is: how do they do this?
Like, first we need to ask “if I didn’t feel sad, how would I be harmed by my loss?” That seems easy enough. If I accidentally flushed my wedding ring down the toilet: I’m down an item that has sentimental (and perhaps monetary) value. If I’ve lost a Smash Bros tournament: well, winning would have been some kind of gain, and I’ve lost the possibility of that. But perhaps there are also less obvious harms.
And then we need to ask “how is this harm lessened by my allies showing they care about me?” I don’t have a clear answer to that. I still don’t have my wedding ring or the possibility of a Smash Bros tournament victory.
We could say “well, you’re still just harmed by your loss, but with sadness you get extra friend time which is good, so the net is less overall harm”. But… I dunno, doesn’t ring true to me. Like for one thing this leaves out that on top of the object level harm, you get the unpleasant sadness emotion.
If we additionally stipulate that I’m worried that my friends and loved ones will all desert me, now that I’ve lost my wedding ring/the tournament—then sure, them coming to show their support fixes that. That kind of thing is what I was gesturing at with “cognitive distortions”, but tbf maybe it’s not always a distortion.
Your examples seem pretty modern and not that similar to what the emotion evolved for, which is likely more about things like injury, illness, loss of allies, failed hunts, etc., where compensatory action by allies to literally care for you (in the sense of “taking care of”) is quite immediately survival-relevant.
In this context, alerting your allies that you need extra help and/or backup to deal with your setback or loss of capacity seems quite valuable. Your examples don’t really require material support from friends to help you survive, but in the ancestral environment, having people able to provide assistance could easily be a life or death difference even in the very short term, depending on the loss.
The examples you gave are ones where your friends cannot reasonably help you “solve” the problem, in which case just having social support and signals of care is often the best they can do, and many do find that valuable.
But there are plenty of situations where friends can help with the thing that makes you feel sad or overwhelmed, and I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding your question. Do you not think those sorts of situations ever existt? Or are you asking why “sadness” is necessary to get them to help you?
Neither of those. I’ll try to recap the conversation from my POV:
In my first comment, I distinguish between
Situations where I’m sad, and my friends can help me fix the thing I’m sad about.
Situations where I’m sad, and my friends can make me less sad but can’t fix the thing I’m sad about.
(And my memory of the film is that the “oh! Sadness signals your friends to come help!” revelation is about a (2), which makes the revelation feel unconvincing to me. Like, I think the argument presented in the film isn’t very good; but I can come up with a better argument myself, so I’m not questioning the conclusion.)
Then I read pjeby as saying that in both types of situations, sadness signals allies to come help; but the help they offer isn’t to fix the problem, the help they offer is to do harm reduction.
And in my second comment, I’m specifically focusing on the (2)s, and asking how your allies do harm reduction in those situations.
Ahh, I see. There’s a few things here:
1) When allies respond to your sadness with comfort and presence, they’re essentially saying “your wellbeing matters to me” and “you still belong here despite this loss.” This creates a buffer against secondary psychological harms you alluded to, like isolation, abandonment fears, or spiraling into deeper despair that might come from bad frames where losing the contest means you’ll always lose future ones, or wasted all your time practicing, etc. The original loss remains, but you’re not facing it alone and it’s not extending beyond what actually happened.
2) Even when the specific thing can’t be fixed, allies might offer practical support that reduces the overall burden. Some might try covering responsibilities so you can rest, like bringing food or helping with chores so you have fewer stressors and your capacity isn’t overwhelmed. This help can range from the direct to the indirect depending on how fungible the loss is; no one would pretend that buying someone a nice dinner would make up for the loss of a wedding ring, or even something much cheaper with heavy emotional significance, but it can still help take some of the sting out, especially if it’s something like missing a flight where the financial loss is a more significant fraction of the overall.
3) Seeing others who care about you remain stable and functional despite your loss can itself be reassuring evidence that this setback isn’t catastrophic to your broader social world. This may sound like 1, but I think it’s actually separate because it doesn’t require you to having additional negative beliefs that spiral out from the initial loss, but rather bolsters you more directly in continuing to try hard things or feel less of the sting from loss.
Also as an aside, the hockey ring situation is from Inside Out 2: in the first one Sadness signals to Riley’s parents that she is very unhappy and needs a lot more support and attention, which isn’t going to make up for e.g. losing her friends, but can help her feel more cared for in all three ways, to some degree.
Thanks. I have more thoughts but not gonna try to bring them out right now at least.
I don’t know how accurate my memory is.[1] But the scene I remember is from the first movie. Joy’s spent the movie asking what Sadness is even good for, and then she sees some of Riley’s memories. In one of them, Riley is sitting alone on a swing under a tree branch, sad because some sport event didn’t go how she wanted, I think specifically because she didn’t perform as well as she wanted. And her friends come cheer her up, and Joy realizes (and exposits to the viewer) that Sadness shows people we need help.
(Actually, a thing just occurs to me about this scene. I don’t remember if her friends were also her teammates. But if they were, then “my friends all hate me now” is an at-least-vaguely reasonable hypothesis to hold, and them coming to cheer her up shows that they don’t. Though I still wouldn’t frame this as “Sadness shows people we need help”.)
I assume the thing you describe also happens, but I don’t remember it :p. Assuming the scene I remember happens at all, my guess is it happens before yours? In which case Joy’s realization and exposition aren’t driven by your scene, though they probably are driven by more than just the scene I remember.
Related anecdote: I remember that the sixth rule of Fight Club is “there is no sixth rule”. I remember the cadence and delivery of that line. That is not the sixth rule of Fight Club.
Ahhh, you’re talking about the memory. Yes, that was the moment of Joy’s realization for why Sadness has value. But before her friends/teammates show up to cheer for her, it’s her parents that show up to comfort her. I think it’s fair to say that her friends showing up to cheer for her probably meant a lot more to Riley than her parents’ comfort in that moment, since it was more tied to the specific thing that was making her feel bad, but Joy’s out-loud recognition was that Riley’s parents showed they cared about her when she was sad, which is the important parallel for the issue in the plot where Riley feels like her parents don’t care about her.
Indeed people often play low status, small, energy preserving lying down curling up, frowny crying—in order to signal other people for reassurance. This gets trained out of people like us who use screens too much, that no one will come unless you give a positive and legible cry for help.
The reassurance of course, is about status and reputation. We still like you. We’re here for you. We’re still cool. Consider status a measure of the health of your social ties, which many people terminally value and in present society still provides instrumental, material value (jobs, places to crash, mutual aid, marketing / audience building for your future startup, …).
It makes sense to think of relationships as things that are built that have their own health instead of purely thinking of material output. The future is uncertain. You can’t model that far. You might get more returns later by investing now. More speculative, i think the drive to relate to others is borne from an ancient desire to form contracts with other agents to combine into (partial?) superagents. like bees in a hive.