Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (29 page)

In contrast, participants’ brain activity in the MPFC while seeing the persuasive messages predicted their sunscreen use over the next week quite nicely.
The more participants’ MPFC was activated in response to the persuasive messages, the more those individuals increased their sunscreen usage later on, regardless of what they told us they planned to do.
The activity in this brain region did a much better job predicting their behavior over the next week than anything the participants consciously told us.
Relating this back to the idea of a Trojan horse self, this study shows people changing their mental representations of the value of using sunscreen in a way that drives behavior but, at the same time, in a way that they are unaware of.
People didn’t realize the actual change that was taking place within them.
And the site of this change in the brain is the MPFC.
Once again this suggests that this thing we call our “self” is far less private and hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world than we believe.
As it turns out, the way our MPFC responds to an advertisement not only predicts how we will change but also how entire populations will change.

Neural Focus Groups

John Wanamaker, a nineteenth-century pioneer of retail sales, once quipped, “I know I’m wasting half of my advertising budget… .
I just don’t know which half.”
Ever since, people have been trying to predict which advertising campaigns will succeed or fail before committing their advertising dollars.
In truth, we aren’t very good at figuring this out because the typical method involves asking a “focus group” what they think.
Does this ad make you want to buy the product?
Do you think it will make other people want to buy
it too?
Which of these two spokesmen made you want the product more?
Focus groups don’t work all that well
because people don’t actually have introspective access to the answers to these questions.
Using a focus group might be better than throwing darts at a dart-board in a dark room—but not much.

Based on our sunscreen study, Emily Falk and I suspected that it might be possible to create a
neural focus group
from which we gathered neural responses elicited in response to ads in order to predict how successful the ads would be when they were aired on television.
Our first step in doing this was to replicate the sunscreen study, but
this time we used antismoking ads
shown to people who were about to attempt to quit smoking.
We measured the amount of carbon monoxide in their lungs the day we scanned them (that is, before quitting) and a month later as a biological measure of how much they were smoking at each point in time.
Our sunscreen results replicated beautifully: while participants watched the antismoking ads, activity in the same region of the MPFC predicted successful smoking reductions much better than the participants’ self-reported beliefs and intentions.

The next thing we did was
separate the ads based on the advertising campaign
that they came from.
The ads came from three different campaigns that had aired in different states at different times during the year.
I’ll call them campaigns A, B, and C.
Simulating a focus group, we asked each of our smokers which ads would be most effective in helping smokers quit.
They told us that campaign B was the best, followed by A, with C coming in last.
But when we looked at the activity in the MPFC in response to each ad campaign, we saw a very different pattern.
The participants’ MPFC responded most strongly to campaign C and least strongly to campaign A.
In other words our subjects told us that the ads from campaign C were the worst, but their brains told us these same ads might in fact be the most effective.

How could we tell which was right—people’s words, their MPFC responses, or perhaps neither?
Luckily, each of the ads ended with a
specific request of viewers: “Call 1-800-QUIT-NOW.”
This is the National Cancer Institute’s antismoking hotline, and through our public health partners on this project, we were able to find out how many people called this number after seeing one of the ad campaigns.
As it turned out, people’s MPFCs were prescient.
Each of the ad campaigns was successful, but they differed in how much.
Campaign B, the one people said would do best, increased the number of calls tenfold.
Campaign A, the one people said would do next best, doubled the number of calls that came in.
But Campaign C, the one that people said would do worst and that MPFC “said” would do best, actually increased call volume more than thirty times over.
Campaign C was more than three times better than the next best campaign.

In addition to reaffirming the common finding that people aren’t very good at predicting their own or other people’s behavior, we found something of an antidote to the typical misinformation obtained when people make these predictions.
People may not be able to consciously tell you what they or others will do in the future, but their MPFC can sometimes provides more accurate predictions.
There are times when the brain contains hidden wisdom that if monitored could help us in various ways, whether in marketing, in lie detection, or even in predicting daily stock market fluctuations.
People might not “know” these things, but it’s possible there is diagnostic information waiting to be uncovered in the folds of our brains, the most sophisticated computer in the known universe.

The second thing this study did was put a nail in the coffin of the idea that our self is what makes us distinct from others.
From both the hypnosis and the sunscreen study, we have seen that the region of the brain that is so strongly linked to our conceptual sense of self is also the superhighway by which others influence our beliefs and behaviors.
In the neural focus group study, rather than representing what makes us unique and different from others, the MPFC is actually serving as a proxy for how countless others will respond—hardly a marker of our uniqueness.

Not So Self-ish

If the MPFC is in fact a conduit for us to assimilate the values and beliefs of those around us, then the self may truly be a mechanism of, and for, the social world.
The existence of the MPFC, more than any other mechanism in the social brain, ensures that a common set of values is largely shared by those in a long-standing community.
The MPFC-mediated self may be the mechanism by which cultural norms and values are likely to flourish—lodging notions in our heads that we are committed to before we realize it, so that they are part of the common background of our identities and beliefs.

Although the adolescent years might be a time when we’re particularly self-absorbed, most of us eventually embrace an identity that centers on our relationships to friends and loved ones, as well as on the various groups to which we are connected (for example, religious, political, or athletic groups).
Once we stop trying to define ourselves exclusively in terms of our uniqueness and accept a more balanced social identity, we often feel that we are finally who we were meant to be.
As philosopher Alain de Botton wrote,
“Living for others [is] such a relief
from the impossible task of trying to satisfy oneself.”
Albert Einstein conveyed the same sentiments decades earlier,
“Only a life lived for others is a life worth while.”
In an interview, the comedian Louis C.K.
similarly described how his identity changed after having kids:

I don’t really remember what it was like before
.
Whatever I had going on, it was bullshit.
It wasn’t important.
It’s kind of a nice thing about being a dad.
My identity is really about them now, and what I can do for them, so it sort of takes the pressure off of your own life.

I have certainly experienced this in my own life.
Having a wife and a son has given me great focus and clarity on what matters to
me.
Nothing I came up with on my own before having them in my life ever came close to giving me the same sort of solid stable identity.
The modern world has created an extended period of adolescence and self-discovery, and thus, we think of this search for our unique identity as the most natural thing in the world.
But I’m not so sure the self evolved primarily so that the Marilyn Mansons and Lady Gagas of the world could make a living out of being as different as possible from everyone else.
Prior to the modern era, humans spent a few years being cared for
as children and then moved into the workforce, often with responsibility for others, by the teenage years.
Most had no time for soul searching—life was about being cared for or taking care of others from beginning to end.

Each of us is a blend of the distinctive and the common, the unique and the shared.
But we often think of ourselves in a pitched battle between being true to our self, which is all about standing apart from the crowd, and our need to fit in, which causes us to conform against our wills.
In a commencement speech,
Steve Jobs warned the new graduates
not to let the “noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice” but rather to “have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
The data we have seen focusing on the MPFC suggests that this isn’t the right story to be telling.
Our sense of self, our “heart and intuition,” is actually part of what ensures that most of us will conform to group norms, promoting social harmony.
Our self works for the group to ensure that we will fit in.
This may not have been true for Steve Jobs, but it is true for the vast majority of people.
We have selfish impulses and we have socially created beliefs and values that are also internalized as part of the self.
There may be a battle between them, but by the time the battle is happening, it usually isn’t us against them.
It’s us against us—two parts of our own identity duking it out.
Fortunately, evolution had one last trick up its sleeve to help the socially internalized impulses win their battles against our more self-interested impulses.

CHAPTER 9
Panoptic Self-Control

I
am a psychologist, whether I’m on the clock or not.
Psychology is the filter through which I see life, read books, and watch reality television.
It may come as little surprise then that I occasionally examine my son’s social brain development a bit more explicitly than most other people do.
I haven’t put him in an fMRI scanner or attached EEG electrodes to his scalp (yet!), but I do pay attention to various milestones commonly associated with the maturing of the social brain.
Babies have been shown to imitate their parents
almost from the moment of birth, but our son, Ian, didn’t imitate for the better part of his first year.
On the other hand,
babies typically pass the mirror self-recognition test
at around two years, whereas Ian was obsessed with his own reflection by the six-month mark.
When Ian was two and a half, he passed a Batman–Iron Man variant of the Sally-Anne false belief task, but we failed to replicate that Theory of Mind result in several additional tests.
My favorite study of Ian’s social brain development was definitely the
Popsicle test
.

We live an hour away from Disneyland in Southern California, so Ian was a veteran at a very young age.
When he was two, we took him to Disney, and despite being the first ones into the park at 8 a.m., we could barely drag him out of the park at 11 p.m.
Not only was that day clearly the best of his 800 days of life up to that point, but I would be willing to wager that it had the greatest volume of sheer joy he will experience in a single day for the rest of his life.
When Disneyland came up with their tagline that it’s “the happiest place on earth,” they clearly had Ian in mind.

A month before Ian turned three, we asked him whether he would rather have a birthday party or go to Disneyland for two days.
It took him all of two nanoseconds to answer.
The night before his birthday, he was excited to go, and it was obvious that there was nothing he wanted more than to get to Disneyland the next day … or so I thought.
Thus began the Popsicle test.
He had just finished dinner when he asked for a Popsicle for dessert.
Naomi got the Popsicle out of the freezer, unwrapped it, and was about to hand it to him before I stopped her.

“Ian, where are we going tomorrow?”
I asked

“Disneyland!!!!”
he replied with intense excitement, arms waving in the air.

Ian stared intently at the Popsicle while I asked the next question: “Ian, if you could just have one of these two things, which would you rather have?
Would you rather have this Popsicle right now or go to Disneyland tomorrow?
If you could only have one of them, which would you choose?”
We have video of this episode, and the first thing you can see after I ask this question is a moment of existential dread on Ian’s face.
He gets it.
He wants both of these things intensely but can have only one.
The moment evaporates, transforming quickly into his cheerful reply, “The Popsicle!!!”

Despite Disneyland’s being Ian’s favorite place on earth, he was willing to give up that entire day for the Popsicle that was compelling more for being right in front of him than for the brief and modest pleasure it would actually give him.
He could not resist a pleasure in the here and now, no matter how tepid it was, compared to its alternative the next day.
Yes, we still took him to Disneyland (we aren’t cruel), and, yes, it was much better than the Popsicle.

You may recognize this as a modern-day variant of Walter Mischel’s famous
marshmallow test
, pitting a smaller immediate reward against a larger later reward.
In the 1970s,
Mischel tested preschoolers between the ages of three and five
on their ability to wait for a more desirable reward when a less desirable replacement could be had with no delay.
The best-known variant involved marshmallows and a bell.
The children sat at a desk and were told that the experimenter was leaving the room and that if they could wait until he returned (fifteen minutes later), they could have two marshmallows.
However, the children also had the option at any moment of ringing the bell to alert the experimenter to return early, at which point they could have one marshmallow (but not two).