Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (18 page)

We are just as often competing with others as cooperating with them, and in these situations, accurately decoding the goals and intentions of others is all the more important, as others may intentionally try to misdirect us.
To the untrained eye, card games like poker seem largely luck-based along with a small amount of explicit knowledge about which hands beat others or the likelihood of drawing a particular card to complete a flush or a straight.
Any professional poker player will tell you it’s nearly all skill.
Skill #1 is patience.
We all want to play and win every hand.
It is more fun to be in the game than to fold and watch from the sidelines.
But most dealt hands are bad, and the urge to be in the action will wipe out your chips quickly if unchecked.
Winning big requires knowing when to cut your losses from moment to moment.
Skill #2 is
bluffing.
Can you persuade someone else that you are sitting on a full house when you have nothing but junk cards?
Can you get the other person to fold, in which case no one ever finds out that you were bluffing in the first place?
Skill #3 is identifying when someone else is or isn’t bluffing.
When players are matched on skill #1, the game is largely determined by battles between bluffing skills and bluffing detection skills.

The mentalizing arms race can escalate, with each side using countermeasures to outmaneuver the other.
In an old episode of
M*A*S*H
, Winchester, the arrogant blue blood doctor disliked throughout the army base, plays a series of poker games with Hawk-eye Pierce and others.
He cleans them out every time, and it drives them mad (and broke).
Toward the end of the show, they realize he has a
tell
, a sign that indicates he is bluffing.
They realize that Winchester whistles more loudly whenever his cards are worse than his betting would suggest.
By the end of the episode, Winchester has lost everything.
On the show, Winchester’s role is always to be the butt of the joke; in real life, however, he might have figured out that the others were on to his tell and then used it strategically to his own advantage.
He could have changed when and how he whistled to drive the betting up when he had a great hand and to drive others out when he did not.
Naturally, the adjustments could go on ad infinitum.

Giorgio Coricelli conducted a study that
captured this mentalizing arms race phenomenon
.
In this study, individuals had to pick a number between 0 and 100 on several different trials.
The rules for winning changed from trial to trial, but they always had to do with how the individual’s own guess related to the guesses of all the other participants in the study.
For instance, in one trial, the rule was that the winner would be the person whose guess was closest to two-thirds (2/3) of the average of all the guesses.
This meant each person’s guess affected what the right answer was.
Someone who was being completely nonstrategic might have generated a random guess between 0 and 100, ignoring the rule altogether.
A subject
who was slightly more strategic might have thought about all the nonstrategic players, assumed that their average guess would be 50, and thus guess 33 (that is, 50 × 2/3) for himself.
A more strategic person might have thought everyone else would be slightly strategic, assume that they would guess 33 on average, and thus guess 22 instead (that is, 33 × 2/3).
This strategizing could keep going until one ultimately reached a Nash equilibrium of 0.
In other trials, participants guessed a different proportion of the average guess (for example, 1/2 or 3/2).
Coricelli computed a measure of
strategic IQ
, which indicated the extent to which the individual made guesses that took into account the possibility of others being strategic.
Strategic IQ was highly correlated with activity in the DMPFC, but not at all with activity in the lateral frontoparietal regions commonly associated with nonsocial IQ.
Strategic IQ looks a lot like social IQ, and
it is linked to the mentalizing system in the brain
.

Information DJs

Growing up, I never thought too much about the disc jockeys (DJs) that I would hear on the radio.
My British friends in graduate school were obsessed with particular DJs the same way I was obsessed with my favorite band.
When I started going to clubs in Los Angeles, a ritual that has long since ceased, I finally understood what made some DJs great.
There is an endless amount of music out there in every genre, too much for me to ever sift through.
Great DJs spend their time filtering through all of it, and they have the ears and judgment to appreciate which tracks played at certain points in the evening at a particular venue with a specific audience will really get everyone going.
While most people listen to music primarily for personal enjoyment, music DJs listen to music to figure out whom they can share it with and how best to do so.

In a sense, the Internet and social media have made
Information DJs
out of all of us.
Millions of people post to Facebook and Twitter
every day in the hopes that something of interest to them will be of interest to others as well.
When I come across the latest research about the social brain or a really cool technology story on
Gizmodo
, I post them to Twitter because I know that many of the people who follow my Twitter feed are interested in these posts.
I don’t post pictures of my son doing silly things to Twitter because that’s the wrong outlet.
My family and friends follow my Facebook posts, so off to Facebook those go (with apologies to my Facebook friends who never want to see another picture of someone’s kids).
Being an Information DJ involves being able to select what to share and knowing one’s audience well enough to know how best to share it.

A few years ago, Emily Falk and I became interested in what goes on in our minds when we are first exposed to information that might be relevant to other people.
Do we initially take in information in a purely self-interested manner, focused on how the information is useful or enjoyable for us?
We wondered if perhaps people are always filtering new information to see how it might be useful or enjoyable to others we might share it with.
Being the bearer of good news or the teller of good stories is a great way to become more socially connected.

To examine this, we had people lie in a scanner
while we showed them information about possible television pilot ideas (that is, ideas for new shows).
We made up these pilots, and we showed people titles, descriptions, and iconic images for each show.
After participants got out of the scanner, they had a chance to share their views on which shows should receive further consideration and which should be canned.
They were asked to imagine they were Interns working at a television network (for example, NBC) helping to triage the submissions so producers could spend their time considering only the best ideas.
Other participants played the part of the Producers, and because they were never shown the original pilot descriptions, they knew only what they heard from the Interns.
Finally, we asked the Producers to tell us how excited they would be to pass each show idea on further to, say, network executives.

We were interested in what was happening in the brain of an Intern, the first person seeing the information about the pilot, as it related to whether that Intern would share that idea successfully enough such that the Producer would be excited to pass the idea on even further.
When Interns saw an idea that they would later pass on effectively, ensuring that it would spread beyond the Producer, the mentalizing system lit up like a Christmas tree.
With few exceptions, the rest of the brain showed very little sensitivity to whether the idea would be spread successfully to the Producer and beyond.

We might have expected reasoning or memory systems to be associated with this effect because committing the idea to memory would seem to help a person communicate better about it later.
But instead, we saw the mentalizing system.
This suggests that even at the moment we are first taking in new information, part of what we do is consider whom we can share the information with and how we can share it in a compelling way given the individuals we choose to share it with.
It’s important to note that this effect was not a result of some show ideas being universally liked.
Interns had very different rankings of the show ideas, and thus what we were seeing had to do with Interns’ ability to communicate their take on a show to the Producers.

We also looked at how the Interns differed from one another.
Some of the Interns were better than others at making sure that the Producers came away with the same view of each of the pilots as they had.
In other words, some of the Interns were better salespeople.
Thus, we looked for a
salesperson effect
in the Interns’ neural responses while they were seeing each of the pilots.
Only one region of the brain, the TPJ within the mentalizing system, was more active in those participants who were in general better at selling their ideas to others.
These findings suggest that, much more than we realize, the mentalizing system is always at work filtering the influx of information we are exposed to each day and selecting for what we should be passing on to others, to help them and to enhance our
social connections with them.
Once again, we see how mindreading promotes connection.

Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect

The mentalizing network does something incredibly special to facilitate our dealings with other people.
It allows us to peer inside the minds of those around us, take into account their hopes, fears, goals, and intentions, and as a result interact with them much more effectively.
It allows us to figure out the psychological characteristics of people we see every day so we can better predict their reactions to novel situations and avoid unnecessary feather ruffling.
We use these abilities to achieve cooperatively things that we never could do on our own, as well as to strategically compete with those around us.
The mentalizing system allows us to filter our experience to figure out the best information to share with others and how to do it.
We would be absolutely lost without our all-purpose mindreading machine.

How effortlessly does our mentalizing system work?
Does it work only when we are consciously trying to use it, like a working memory system?
Nobody counts backward by 17s unconsciously or accidentally?
Or does mentalizing work more like vision, which causes us to see, automatically, whenever our eyes our open?
The answer to this question is pretty complex; however, we have good reason to think that although the mentalizing system comes on spontaneously, it does operate
like a working memory system, a
social working memory system.
Meghan Meyer and I conducted a study in which we asked participants to perform a working memory task.
But instead of holding numbers or letters in their minds as in a nonsocial working memory task, they had to think about several of their friends in terms of how funny, persistent, or anxious they were.
Just as in a nonsocial working memory task, the harder the trials,
the less likely participants were to get it right and the longer they took when they did.
However, unlike nonsocial working memory tasks, for which harder trials turn off the mentalizing system, in this study, harder trials led
to greater increases in mentalizing system activity than easier trials
.
In a follow-up study,
we found that performance on a social working memory task
was essentially un-correlated with performance on more traditional working memory tasks, suggesting that it really is a distinct psychological process.

So the mentalizing system appears to require effort to function effectively in most contexts.
This matters because humans hate exerting effort and thus may not use their mentalizing system as well as they could in everyday life.
If there is a way to avoid exerting effort, we almost always do.
If there’s a mental shortcut we can take to avoid hard work, that’s the route we will take.
These shortcuts are called
heuristics
, and we use them all the time to simplify decision making.
Heuristic processes evolved because they do well enough in most situations and represent a reasonable trade-off between accuracy and effort.
But they can get us into trouble at times.

Heuristic shortcuts are no less prevalent when it comes to social thinking.
Even though adults may pass all of the Theory of Mind tests with ease when they know they are being tested, adults do not always fully apply this ability in everyday life.
There is a big difference between having the capacity
to do something and actually using this capacity unprompted.
In daily life, we often use a lower effort heuristic in place of the hard work of accurate mentalizing.
We often use our own mind as a proxy
for other minds, acting as if what we see, others see, what we believe, others believe, and what we like, others like.
Rather than figuring out whether our friend would like a movie based on a careful assessment of movies that the friend has liked and disliked in the past, we often just assume that if we liked it, our friend will too.
If you are thinking about
Avatar
, the most successful movie in history, this heuristic won’t get you into trouble too often.
However, if you are one of the handful of
people in the world who, like me, thought
Eyes Wide Shut
was a worthwhile film, it is not a good idea to assume others have this preference as well.

Boaz Keysar, a psychologist from the University of Chicago,
created an elegant paradigm called the
director’s task
that has been used to demonstrate the limits of mentalizing in adults.
Imagine sitting down with another participant at a table; between you is a 4-by-4 grid of shelves (see
Figure 5.4
).
Some of the shelves have a small object on them like a toy car or an apple.
Some of the shelves are covered on one side so that you can see what’s on that shelf, but your partner can’t.
In all, there are 16 spots.
You can see all of them, but your partner can see what’s in only 12 of them.
The game you are asked to play involves moving the objects in whatever way your partner (“the director”) asks you to (the experimenter has given your partner a script of what moves to ask for).
Let’s say your partner asks you to move the toy car down one space.
That’s easy.
Apple over two spaces to the right—no problem.
But there’s a special type of request that gets tricky.