Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (28 page)

Somehow between 1918 and now, our visceral reactions have done a full reversal.
Imagine that in the 1920s some trendsetters decided to assign blue to boys and pink to girls.
I’m sure they must have been laughed at initially and yet somehow the change caught on.
Over time, everyone’s associations slowly changed until blue for boys went from seeming so wrong to seeming so right.
Did each person reach this conclusion privately, or was there some process at work to make sure our way of seeing things stayed in line with what we perceived to be the beliefs of those around us?
Just like most of our beliefs, this visceral response to baby colors is something we pick up from the outside without even noticing it.
I don’t mean to imply this happens 100 percent of the time for 100 percent of the people.
It doesn’t.
But it is odd how frequently and easily we shift our attitudes along with the masses.

I have argued that evolution is moving us ever closer to interdependent social living, where we maximize what we can do together in groups.
If that is the case, having our beliefs and values injected into us from the outside in a “clandestine operation” would yield greater
harmonizing
among people in groups and lead to an improved balance of social pains and pleasures.
Each of us has a variety of impulses—desires that if acted on at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and with the wrong people, could bring civil society to its knees.

I would argue that the self exists primarily as a conduit to let the social groups we are immersed in (that is, our family, our school,
our country) supplement our natural impulses with socially derived impulses.
The social world imparts a collection of beliefs about ourselves, about morality, and about what constitutes a worthwhile life.
Because of how the self functions, we often cling to these beliefs as though they are unique ideas we came up with for ourselves—the products of our private inner voice.
It is not enough for us to recognize what the group believes and values.
We have to adopt the beliefs and values as our own if they are to guide our behavior.
In other words, just like the Trojan horse, much of what makes up our sense of self was snuck in from the outside, under the cover of darkness.
We might believe the self exists to help strengthen our resolve in the face of outside forces, but this theory of “who we are” overlooks the ways our brain uses those outside forces to construct and update the self.

In Your Eyes

Imagine you are sitting in a room with twenty people, and each of you is handed a card from a standard deck of playing cards.
You are not allowed to look at the card; instead, you hold it on your forehead for all others to see.
Everyone in the group is then told to try to “pair up with the person with the highest card that will pair with you.”
In the beginning, you can see everyone else’s “value” but have no idea of your own.
Within moments you will have a pretty good idea though.
The woman with the ace of hearts will have a crowd of admirers, hoping to be chosen by her, while the man with the two of spades will quickly realize why no one is returning his gaze.

George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, influential psychologists in the early 1900s, suggested that
learning about ourselves in the real world
is not so different from this little card game.
In many cases, it is hard to look inside and really know who we are, and thus we tend to look to others, both intentionally and unintentionally, to find out.
Mead and Cooley discussed a process that later became
known as
reflected appraisal generation.
At its simplest, a reflected appraisal is what I think you think of me.
We are bombarded with feedback from others about ourselves, sometimes in words but more often in the form of their nonverbal behavior and tone of voice.
Mead and Cooley argued that we use this information to find out who we are.
Rather than looking inward, we often look to others to learn about ourselves.
If psychologists want to study the self while it is still under construction, when a person is actively generating these reflected appraisals to flesh out their conceptual sense of self, we ought to be looking at the adolescents who devote a lot of time and energy to this.
When Jennifer Pfeifer was a graduate student in my lab, she convinced me to do just that.

We asked young adolescents (that is, thirteen-year-olds)
and adults to report on both their
direct appraisals
of themselves (for example, “I think I am very smart”) and their
reflected appraisals
(for example, “My friends think I am very smart”).
There are a few things we should naturally expect to see in this study.
First, direct appraisals should activate the MPFC, given that Bill Kelley and others have shown this link in dozens of studies.
Indeed, this was the case for both adolescents and adults (though adolescents showed greater activity than adults, consistent with adolescence being an intense period of self-focus).
Second, reflected appraisals should activate the mentalizing system as these involve figuring out what somebody else believes.
This too was observed in both adolescents and adults.

The results got more exciting as we moved into uncharted territory.
Before this study, no one had ever examined how a thirteen-year-old’s brain makes sense of itself.
Our adolescents produced strong activity throughout the mentalizing system while making direct appraisals of themselves.
The adults did not.
Recall that the mentalizing system is typically associated with thinking about the mental states of others.
These results suggested that even when we asked adolescents what they thought of themselves, they might have spontaneously brought to mind reflected appraisals, what
they believed others believed about them.
Rather than answering by directing their thoughts inward, adolescents may have unwittingly been focused on the minds of others when answering about themselves.

The other novel result from this study reinforces this idea of self-knowledge constructed from outside sources.
The adolescents in the study activated the MPFC both when making direct appraisals and when making reflected appraisals.
This is important because on the surface, direct and reflected appraisals are very different psychological processes.
A reflected appraisal is my assessment of what you believe—a standard mentalizing task that might not be related to my internal experience of myself.
In contrast, a direct appraisal feels like it taps into a personal place of self-truth that only I have access to.
Yet here we saw the MPFC involved in both.
Perhaps in coordination with the mentalizing system, the MPFC is taking our assessments of what others believe about us as a proxy for what we should believe about ourselves.
If this is true, then the medial prefrontal cortex is not the royal road to personal truth but rather a reflection of various sources by which we learn about ourselves—some personal and introspective and some generated from what we believe those around us think about us.
This suggests that the MPFC may be involved in a social construction of the self.
But is the MPFC actually involved in others’ influencing us and changing our beliefs?

Changing My Mind

In my twenties, I was a rabid fan of the Blue Man Group stage show (I am still a big fan, but the rabies have passed).
I’ve seen the show at least a dozen times, in New York City, Boston, Las Vegas, and Hollywood, and I have taken hundreds of people to see the show with me.
I even auditioned to become a Blue Man myself when things weren’t going so well in graduate school—my version of trying
to run away and join the circus.
If you haven’t seen the show—go see it.
I’ll wait.
The Blue Men are essentially aliens who have landed on our planet, trying to make sense of who we are, and they trying to connect with the audience through various means.
But the Blue Men are mute, and have their own inimitable way of doing things.

One of my favorite parts of the show involves a woman from the audience being brought up on stage.
The selected woman is always young and pretty, and more often than not, she is wearing a white sweater.
Once on stage, she sits between the Blue Men at a long table, participating in a scene that involves the Blue Men vacuuming pictures of furniture off a painting, eating Twinkies, and then “spitting up” all the food from a valve in a chest plate they each wear.
Throughout, each Blue Man works hard to curry favor with the girl, flirting as only Blue Men can, each trying to “one up” the others.

It’s a very funny scene with lots of expressive nonverbal behaviors (remember, Blue Men are mute), and the orchestration of the interactions is exquisite.
People assume that the girl is planted in the audience and works for the show because there is no way, without verbal instruction, she could hit all her marks in the scene so precisely.
After all, the Blue Men are not above sleight of hand.
Once, when I was pulled up on stage, a headphone was surreptitiously placed in my ear to give me instructions.
But years later, I got a chance to meet the Blue Men—Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton—and they assured me that in the Twinkie skit, the woman is always a regular audience member.

The skit worked because we humans are built to be influenced by those around us, to follow their lead.
In other words, we are far more suggestible than we know.
Each Blue Man behavior elicited an appropriate preordained response from the unwitting female accomplice.
In the West, we call this conforming, something looked down upon.
But in the East, the same behavior is called
harmonizing
, something essential for successful group living.

Suggestibility and the process of being persuaded have been
studied in a few different ways with fMRI.
If the MPFC not only represents our sense of self but also opens the gates to the Trojan horse self, allowing those around us to influence us, then the MPFC ought to be involved in suggestibility and persuasion.
Despite our intuitive sense that knowing ourselves is what keeps us from being unduly influenced by the social world, the MPFC is actually central both to self-knowledge and to being influenced by others.

If you have never been hypnotized yourself, you have probably seen someone else being hypnotized.
Hypnosis is real, though most people are not deeply hypnotizable.
For the few that are profoundly hypnotizable
, color images can literally be made to appear colorless, surgeries can be performed with no anesthetic, and lifelong smoking habits can be erased in an hour.
Amir Raz conducted an fMRI study examining the neural difference between people who were highly suggestible when hypnotized and those who were less so.
He had them perform a
Stroop task
in which they were shown color names (for example, R-E-D) that were printed either in the same color ink as the named color or in a different color ink.
On all trials, participants were asked to select the ink color that the word was written in.
It is well known that people are faster to identify a word written in blue ink if the word spells out B-L-U-E than if it spells out R-E-D.
Raz found that if highly suggestible individuals were given the hypnotic suggestion to see the words as nonsense words, instead of color words, their reaction times on the mismatch trials would speed up.
In other words, Raz was testing the hypothesis that if a person no longer saw the word written in blue ink as spelling R-E-D, then it shouldn’t produce the conflict that usually slows people down in this task.
On these incongruent trials, the highly suggestible individuals were much faster than the less suggestible individuals.
When Raz looked in the brain to see which brain regions responded differently in the two groups of individuals, the MPFC was one of the central regions observed.

Although people are rarely influenced through hypnosis in their daily lives, attempts to influence through other means are everywhere.
We are bombarded with persuasive messages everywhere; advertisements take aim at us through every form of media.
Emily Falk and I have conducted a series of studies to examine how other people’s opinions cross the blood-brain barrier and influence us every day to behave more in line with those opinions.
We were particularly interested in whether the brain contained information about this persuasion process that people could not consciously report on.
If so, this would suggest the Trojan horse self was particularly stealthy, influencing us without our awareness.

In our first study, we convinced undergraduates
at UCLA to use sunscreen more often.
Given that Los Angeles is technically a desert, daily sunscreen use is a good idea around here.
We brought students into our scanning facility and asked them a series of questions about their attitudes and recent behavior.
Mixed in among the questions were items about how much they had used sunscreen in the last week, how much they intended to use it in the next week, and to what extent they believed that people should use sunscreen regularly.
Then the person would get in the scanner and see persuasive messages about sunscreen use from places like the American Association of Dermatology.
After leaving the scanner, the individual was once again asked a series of questions, including two assessing their intentions to use sunscreen in the next week and general beliefs about regular sunscreen use.
A week later, we contacted each participant out of the blue to find out how many days in the previous week they had actually used sunscreen.

After scanning, some folks told us they had “found religion” and would start using sunscreen every day.
Other people said thanks, but no thanks, and they planned to continue on in their sunscreen-free ways.
The relationship between what people said they would do and what they actually did was negligible.
One would think that if people changed their stated intentions after seeing the persuasive messages, this would be a good indicator that they would really change their behavior.
But we need only think of our failed New Year’s resolutions to know intentions do not always become reality.
In our study, some people increased their sunscreen use, and other folks didn’t, but their actual behavior bore little relation to what folks told us they intended to do.
Just looking at their self-reports and their behavior, it all seemed a bit random.