Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (31 page)

A similar finding has been demonstrated with framing effects
first discovered by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
Consider the following scenario.
Would you rather win $10, no strings attached, or instead flip a coin and win either $20 or nothing at all?
Most people go for the sure thing rather than the coin flip.
Now imagine a second scenario.
This time the experimenter starts by handing you $20.
He then gives you the option of giving back $10 to him or flipping a coin to either lose the entire $20 or lose nothing at all.
Here, most people go for the coin flip.
The strange thing is that the two scenarios are financially identical.
In both cases, the sure thing leaves you with $10 more than when you showed up to the study, and the coin flip leaves you with either $20 or $0, relative to when you arrived.
People make different choices because the first scenario is framed in terms of winning (that is, winning $10 or having a chance at winning $20), whereas the second scenario is framed in terms of losing (that is, losing $10 or having a chance to lose $20).
Psychologically, we are more sensitive to losses so we try to avoid what feels like a sure loss, what Kahneman and Tversky refer to as
loss aversion
.

An fMRI study examined which brain regions
were more sensitive to this sort of framing.
They found that brain regions in the limbic system were more sensitive to the framing than to the actual
facts of the choice.
In contrast, the rVLPFC was one of only two regions whose activity was more sensitive to the facts than to the framing of them.
As in the belief bias study, rVLPFC activity was associated with overcoming a cognitive impulse.

Perspective taking.
In
Chapter 5
, we focused on the mentalizing system central to mindreading.
A lot of mindreading is the same as perspective taking.
For instance, in the Sally-Anne false belief task, children succeed to the extent that they appreciate that Sally has a different perspective on things than they do.
Typical fMRI studies of mentalizing
do not report rVLPFC activity, but a patient, code-named WBA, has provided insight into this region’s involvement in perspective taking.
WBA had a stroke that selectively damaged his rVLPFC and very little else in the brain.
WBA was asked to perform two variants of a false belief task.
One of these was easy for WBA, and one was virtually impossible for him.

In one version, WBA watched while a man placed a ball in one of two identical containers, say the one on the left.
WBA could also see that there was a woman in the room who was also watching the ball placement.
At this point, everyone had seen where the ball had been placed (the container on the left).
The woman then exited the room, and while she was gone, the man switched the two containers so the ball was then in the container on the right.
When the woman returned, WBA was asked where the woman would look for the ball when prompted.
WBA should have pointed to the then empty container on the left because that was where the ball was when the woman last saw it.

In the second version of the task, WBA knew that the man was placing the ball into one of the containers, but he could not see which container it went into.
However, the woman could see where the ball was placed, and WBA knew that she could see this.
As in the first version, she then exited the room, and while she was gone, the man switched the containers.
This time, the experimenters wanted to know if WBA himself could figure out where the ball was.
To help him out, the woman who had returned offered
to help him out by indicating that she thought the ball was in the container on the right.
Even though WBA never saw where the ball was placed, he ought to have inferred that whichever container she pointed to must have been the wrong container because she didn’t see the containers being switched.
Thus, if she thought that it was in the container on the right, WBA should have chosen the container on the left for himself.

Superficially, these tasks are similar to one another, yet WBA performed magnificently on one and abysmally on the other.
Can you guess which was difficult for him?
It was the first version—when he could see with his own eyes where the ball was placed, he couldn’t do the task at all.
In both versions of the task, WBA was aware that the woman had been duped as a result of the container switch while she was out of the room.
When that was all that he knew, as in the second version, he had no problems at all using his Theory of Mind to assess what the woman believed.
But when he had direct personal knowledge of where the ball actually was, as in the first version, this immediate experience overwhelmed his logical knowledge, leading him to indicate that the woman would look for the ball in the same location that he would.
Without his rVLPFC intact, he could not overcome his own first-person perspective and behaved with the same egocentrism of a two-year-old who acts as if everyone sees what he sees and believes what he believes.

We have recently seen something similar in my lab.
Imagine being asked the following two questions.
First, I offer you $60 to stand in front of Joe’s restaurant for an hour, wearing a large sign that says “Eat at Joe’s.”
Would you do it?
Second, if I asked lots of people, what percentage of them do you think would say yes?
Psychologists have long known that the answer to the first question dramatically biases the answer to the second for most people.
If you would wear the sign, you will tend to think most people would.
If you would not wear the sign, you will assume most people would also say no.
This is called the
false consensus effect
because we tend
to
believe the world at large shares our beliefs and point of view more than they actually do.
Put a different way, we tend to use our own perspective as a proxy for the likely perspective of others.
Sometimes this is reasonable, but in many cases this gets us into trouble in social interactions.

To examine the neural bases of the false consensus effect, my graduate student Locke Welborn and I asked UCLA undergraduates lying in an MRI scanner to judge on a scale from 1 to 100 how much the typical UCLA undergraduate would endorse certain positions (for instance, “school prayer” and “abortion rights”).
From earlier ratings, we also knew what each participant’s own view was on each issue, as well as the actual average response of UCLA undergraduates.
With this information, we could tell whether participants’ judgments of the typical UCLA student were more in line with reality or were being pulled toward participants’ personal views on each issue.
As expected, participants did indeed show the false consensus effect, generally judging the typical student to have attitudes closer to their own than they had in reality.

Important to note is that people varied, such that some were better or worse at overcoming this impulse to project their own attitudes onto others.
How did people overcome this bias when trying to appreciate the point of view of others?
The rVLPFC was one of the only regions of the brain that was more active in participants who were better at resisting their own attitude when considering the typical attitudes of others.
The rVLPFC appears to have helped participants appreciate that others might have a perspective different from theirs.

In a sense, both of these studies are like belief bias, only taken into the social domain.
We have an immediate intuitive sense of things being a certain way, and it takes self-control to set this perception aside to consider alternative ways of processing the same information.
This is an endlessly handy kind of self-control to have in everyday interactions.
But on its face, it is so different from the
kind of self-control necessary in the go/no-go task that it is difficult to imagine that both kinds depend on the same mental machinery.

Keeping Your Cool

In the summer of 1984, the Gillette Company released a series of advertisements promoting its new antiperspirant Dry Idea.
Each of the ads featured someone famous giving a list of three “nevers” central to their line of work.
Perhaps the best-known variant was Dan Reeves, NFL coach for the Denver Broncos, describing the three nevers of being a winning coach.
In a relaxed pose, he says, “Never let the press pick your starting quarterback.
Never take a last-place team lightly.
And, really, no matter what the score, never let them see you sweat.”
His final line of the commercial was, “Everyone feels pressure.
Winners don’t let it show.”

This is the classic image of keeping cool under pressure.
You might be making a pitch in the boardroom that you are terrified of blundering, but on the outside you keep your composure as if you have all the confidence in the world.
This is a form of emotion regulation that psychologists refer to as
suppression.
This name is a bit misleading because
suppression isn’t used to suppress one’s experience of an emotion
but rather to control one’s facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language to make sure others can’t tell what one is feeling on the inside.

If suppression is the brute force approach to emotion regulation,
reappraisal
is the more cerebral approach.
Great thinkers throughout history have commented on our ability to change the way we see things so that they are less distressing.
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius had a penchant for this strategy, suggesting, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
My favorite author, Haruki Murakami,
condensed this idea to a bumper sticker:
“Pain is inevitable
.
Suffering is optional.”

In essence, reappraisal is a process whereby we consider a new perspective that changes how we experience something that is upsetting us.
Many reappraisals take the “when God closes a door, he opens a window” approach.
You may have gotten fired from a job, but you quickly realize that job wasn’t the right job for you anyway.
Now you can pursue your lifelong dream of writing jingles for fast-food commercials.
From the outside, this realization might seem like rationalizing, just an overly optimistic story that people tell themselves, without changing reality.
However, psychologically,
our reality derives from the stories we tell ourselves
, at least the ones we believe.
If you can honestly find ways in which you might be better-off now that you have lost your job, this reappraisal will actually help.
Of course, if you believe the job you got fired from was your dream job, it might be hard to believe the reappraisals you come up with.

Personally, I tend to reappraise most when flying.
I’m not a big fan of turbulence.
When a plane drops five feet suddenly because of an air pocket, my body screams “danger.”
My heart races, my body starts to sweat, and I search for a window to see if there are any gremlins on the wing.
These threat reactions are orchestrated
in part by the activation of my amygdala, which is involved in making rapid assessments of the emotional significance of whatever is going on and preparing my mind and body to react swiftly and decisively (though not always intelligently).

I calm my turbulence-induced nerves by thinking of a series of turbulence-relevant facts.
First, I think about the fact that my amygdala is not calibrated to make good sense of these quick vertical shifts because such shifts were almost uniformly absent during our evolutionary history—airplanes, elevators, and roller coasters are modern inventions.
In other words, I remind myself that even though my amygdala can’t make sense of what just happened, I
can.
Second, I remember the statistics showing that it is incredibly rare for a commercial plane to go down from turbulence.
Both of these thoughts help remind me that turbulence and my body’s reaction to it are not strong indicators that something is really wrong.
The third thing I do, assuming the plane has Wi-Fi, is Google “turbulence reports,” which shows a map of all the spots in the U.S.
airspace where pilots have reported turbulence today.
Simply knowing where the turbulence is, when it will stop, and the fact that all those reports came from pilots who survived the same turbulence I am currently experiencing helps me feel better.
Changing how I understand the significance of the turbulence changes how my brain and body respond.

Suppression and reappraisal differ
in nearly every way.
Suppression is better at making you look like you aren’t distressed, whereas reappraisal is better at making you feel less distressed.
Suppression is more mentally distracting, and if you engage in suppression during an interaction with someone, it will actually interfere with your memory of the interaction.
Reappraisal doesn’t cause the same memory deficit.
Reappraisal also seems to be employed primarily when you are not in the most intense parts of an emotional reaction.
Perhaps it requires a degree of mental clarity to generate good reappraisals, and being emotionally aroused interferes with that process.
Suppression and reappraisal also have a different effect on other people in the room.
You will probably enjoy being around suppressors less, perhaps because they are giving off fewer emotional signs or maybe because they are preoccupied.
Being around suppressors will even increase your heart rate more than being around reappraisers.

Despite these differences between suppression and reappraisal
, experientially, cognitively, and socially, they both seem to depend on the VLPFC for their success.
For people who reappraise
, studies have shown that the VLPFC is activated early on in the emotional episode, and for those who suppress, activity in the VLPFC is turned on later in the emotional episode.
But both involve the
VLPFC.
In the case of suppression,
VLPFC activity is linked to our success
at hiding an undesirable facial expression.
In reappraisal, VLPFC activity has been linked
to diminished amygdala responses and self-reported distress.
The longer the time a person spends reappraising
, the more the neural activity moves from the left VLPFC over to the right VLPFC, suggesting that the left VLPFC may help initiate the process, while the right VLPFC does more to get the job finished.