"Would You Rather Be a Dog or a Ghost?" Is the Perfect Party Question
There are more than seven billion other people living on Earth, so the odds that I will run into somebody I do not know at one of the many parties, events, and galas I am regularly invited to are very high. I do not mean to brag, I am simply stating a basic fact about my life. The skill of small talk is a necessary one; as a party rule, people generally like to make polite conversation. (I am just including this information in case you do not regularly attend parties, events, and galas.)
In an effort to avoid talking about politics with strangers, I have found the perfect question to ask any person that is also doomed to walk this Earth...
Would you rather be a dog or a ghost?
I’ve also discovered that all people are either dogs or ghosts, and there is no third option.
Ask your work neighbor. Ask your budding love. Ask your mom, your boss, your dog, or a ghost. Notice how most people answer immediately as if their reply tugs at a core element of their humanity. Notice how their reply comes without follow-up questions, like, do I get to talk to other ghosts? Notice how your friends become ghosts or dogs before your very eyes, having fulfilled the blood covenant that, until now, has bound them to their human flesh.
It is important that the question is posed without any context. We do not know if ghosts can commune with one another—we do not possess the technology to find out. We do not know if dogs can lead emotionally rewarding lives. However, dogs do have feelings—an adult dog's cognition is equal to that of a three- to five-year-old human, although famous dog whisperer Cesar Milian posits that these emotions don’t include “ulterior motives or doubt” and generally lack nuance. They do pick up on “energy.” Just something to think about!
Dogs are gregarious, friendly, attention-seeking, soft, sometimes loud, small, and not small. They are young, compared to humans. (No person I asked over the age of 30 said they would be a dog!!! More on this later.) Their brains light up like the 30 Rock Christmas tree when they smell the scent of their owner. Their chief emotional states are joy and hunger. Their favorite love language is physical touch, followed closely by every other love language.
Ghosts are spooky, mischievous, old, translucent, beautiful in an ethereal sense, quiet, solitary. According to Bibleinfo.com, ghosts are Fallen Angels who intend to deceive humans, but I prefer the more secular definition of spirits who are simply waiting to pass into the Afterlife. Ghosts are not inherently malicious, but they are moody and can be spiteful.
People are either dogs or ghosts. Why?
According to Tomer Ullman, a professor at MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, answers to this question (and all far-fetched Would You Rather-type choices) are barely at all affected by a person’s personality, or any demographic information.
“They affect these sorts of decisions,” he says, “but we’re talking pretty weak effects.”
(Ullman is a scholar in Would You Rather-type logic, having authored a paper alongside John McCoy and Laurie Paul last year about modality perceptions, the choice-making that governs these questions.)
The most exciting conclusion of Ullman’s study is the self-revelatory consequences of answering dog or ghost: That we learn more about ourselves upon answering.
Ullman proposes the existence of a “black box” decision maker within our brains, which spits out an output (dog or ghost) in response to an input (would you rather…). “This isn't so strange,” he says. “Think of watching a cat walking into a room. As far as your awareness goes, you just know the cat walked in. You don't have access to the complicated computations your visual cortex is carrying out in reaching this conclusion.” Upon answering, we learn something about this unknowable mechanism within us, and thus we learn something about the inscrutable inner workings of our psyche.
Incredible. I would like to thank Professor Ullman (a ghost), his child (“a dog, obviously”), and Sam, the display associate at Anthropologie Chelsea Market who posed this question in the first place.
And thank you for asking—I am a dog.
