Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (34 page)

Reminders that we are the kind of creatures that can be seen, judged, and evaluated engage our self-restraint in the service of pro-social outcomes like not cheating and conforming to group norms.
These three processes (being evaluated, engaging in self-restraint, and complying with social norms) seem quite distinct from one another taken at face value, and yet there is reason to think they are each tied to rVLPFC functioning, efficiently converting our sense of being judged by others into self-control efforts that result in social compliance.
We have already encountered plenty of evidence on the role of the rVLPFC in self-restraint, so let’s focus on the other two processes.

Imagine an experimenter gives you $100 and asks you to decide how much you want to give to another person in the experiment.
You won’t ever meet that person, but he is real, sitting in the next room, and he knows you’ve been given the money to split between the two of you.
You have complete control over the money.
How much do you give?
What are the options that go through your mind?
Given that neither of you earned the money, the social norm of fairness prescribes that you should split it down the middle, fifty-fifty.
However, selfish motives dictate taking as much as you can get away with.
Under these conditions, people tend to give around 10 percent when they know there will be no further interactions with the other person.

Manfred Spitzer and Ernst Fehr ran this study
in the scanner along with another condition in which participants felt pressure to comply with the social norm.
Imagine that the person in the other room could punish you after finding out how you had decided to split the money.
He could use some of his own money to dramatically decrease the amount of money you ended up with; for every dollar he spends, you would lose $5 that you had allocated to yourself.
Knowing that he could punish you, how much would you give to him now?
In this condition, people came much closer to the fifty-fifty norm, giving about 40 percent of the money to the other person.

When people complied with the fairness norm in this study, it is not as if they wanted to give that much money.
If they truly wanted to, then they would have given 40 percent in the control condition as well.
Instead, they do it because they feel pressured to act fairly.
The rVLPFC was one of a handful of regions that was more active during the social compliance trials.
Of course, this region might be sensitive to the threat of losing money, rather than to the pressure to comply with a social norm.
To address this, Spitzer and Fehr compared their results to other conditions during which the participants played with a computer rather than with a real person.
The threat of punishment produced more right VLPFC activity when the threat came from a real person, even though the financial dynamics were the same in both cases.
In other words, this region
seems to be involved in converting the threat of social sanctions into compliance with social norms.
As it turns out, other studies have shown that merely seeing another person rate something highly, like a song, can move us to rate that thing more highly too.
People who conform most to this kind of norm
set by others show increased activity in the rVLPFC and actually have more gray matter in this region.

These compliance studies focus on situations in which our initial plans or evaluations differ from those of others around us.
The notion of panoptic self-control suggests that the mere possibility of being socially evaluated is sufficient to engage self-restraint.
Although no one has looked at this directly,
there is research indicating that just imagining what others think of you
is sufficient to activate this rVLPFC region.
The most striking finding on pan-optic self-control is that merely seeing yourself, with no one else around, can promote self-restraint as well.
Can you guess which brain region
is most consistently activated when you see a picture of your own face?
Yes, the rVLPFC.
When you see a picture of yourself, reminding you of how you look to the outside world, you turn on the same part of your brain that is responsible for self-restraint and for compliance with social norms.
The connection between these three functions within the rVLPFC has not been systematically investigated yet, so its true significance is still a mystery.
However, one intriguing possibility is that these processes became linked over the course of evolution in order to ensure that we would use our fear of not fitting in socially to engage our capacity to override our more indulgent self-interests.

That is about as far as one could get from the version of self-control we started out with.
Our intuitive notion of the role of self-control is to promote our individual private goals and values.
This new evidence suggests it is more of a mechanism to help shape our behavior to be in line with the group’s goals and values when they conflict with our own.
We tend to think of people who conform as lacking in courage and initiative—as weak-willed sheep following
the herd.
Yet the current analysis suggests that in certain situations, people with the greatest capacity for self-control will actually conform more than other people.
Sometimes the threat or perceived threat of sanctions from the group makes conformity the smart choice, and those with more self-control will be better able to overcome the urge to act impulsively.

The Self Is For?

In the West, our conception of the self is as a treasure trove of thoughts, feelings, and desires that represent who we really are.
To “know thyself” allows us to expend our limited resources seeking out and working toward the things that will truly make us happy and to avoid the things that will make us unhappy, whether in the short term or the long term.
And this account definitely holds some water.
It’s useful for me to know what kinds of foods I like, what kinds of social events make me uncomfortable, and which kinds of work will help me feel most fulfilled.
Having a theory of my own mind is an eminently useful thing.

What we fail to appreciate, however, is the degree to which society has shaped the contents of our minds—the way we form our goals and beliefs, and what causes us to exert our self-control in different situations.
From infancy, we are surrounded by a social world that is more than happy to tell us what good people want and do, to tell us which of these desirable characteristics we have, and what kind of life is worth leading.
However, all of this input from the outside world would amount to nothing if we weren’t born with a Trojan horse self that is built to soak all of this up like a sponge, without us realizing where these foundational worldviews came from.
We believe these are our deeply personal private stock of beliefs, and that notion makes us work hard to defend them.
It rarely dawns on us that others put them there.
When we defend our beliefs, we are usually defending society’s beliefs.
This alignment
between our private beliefs and the beliefs of those around us motivates us to be useful members of society.
It helps to ensure that others will like us, and it increases the ratio of social pleasure to pain we will encounter in our lives.

Self-control to us feels like a source of power—the willpower that allows us to drive our personal agenda forward.
It may be easily depleted, but it has the unique capacity of overriding our momentary desires in order to implement our personal long-term goals.
But as we have seen, our personal, long-term goals nearly always benefit society as much as or more than they benefit ourselves.
And when there is a conflict between our personal values and those of society, simply being reminded that we can be seen and judged by others activates our panoptic self-control to override our impulses, bringing our behavior in line with societal expectations.

These are very counterintuitive notions.
The idea that our personal values were snuck into us by society at large and that our self-control exists in part to restrain, rather than support, the self is anathema to our way of thinking about “who we are.”
Yet brain science is helping us to see the fundamental truth behind these claims—that our most deeply personal sense of self and sources of willpower may most often serve to keep us in the good graces of the group.
Harmonizing is hard work, but apparently evolution thought it was “worth it” to make our attitudes and beliefs aligned with those of the group rather than at odds with them.

Our Social Brain

And that’s the story, folks, at least the neuroscience part of the story.
Over the course of millions of years of evolution, our brains have marched ever increasingly to the beat of a social drum.
To have larger brains that could solve all manner of problems, evolution had to first solve the problem of getting those brains out of the womb.
The solution was immature brains that would do most of their
growing outside in the light.
This necessitated
connection
as a central mammalian adaptation so that mammalian young would be cared for during infancy and stick around to do the caring in adulthood.
We have seen that this necessity was implemented through dual mechanisms.
Social pain, via the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, sounds an alarm that motivates us to address threats to our connections.
Social rewards, via the ventral striatum, the septal area, and oxytocin processes, all play a role in the pleasure we take from feeling cared for and motivate us to care for others.

As primates emerged on the scene, the rudiments of
mindreading
evolved.
Mirror neurons in lateral frontoparietal areas allow us to imitate and thus learn from the actions of others.
Critically, these regions also appear to be central to humans, representing actions as actions, replete with psychological meaning.
With the emergence of the mentalizing system in humans, in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction, we are uniquely capable of reasoning about the actions of others and what that emergent ability tells us about their thoughts, feelings, and goals.
This capacity is so important that over the course of evolution it was selected for such that the mentalizing system comes on spontaneously whenever there is no other mental task occupying us.
This resetting nudges us to see the world in terms of its social and mental elements rather than its physical elements.
Indeed, this resetting involves the brain muting its own circuitry for nonsocial reasoning.
Mindreading is instrumental in rationally pursuing our social motivations: finding ways to enhance our social connections and avoiding the pain of social rejection.

The coup de grâce of evolution’s molding of a social brain is the twin stars of self-knowledge and self-control.
Our sense of self, as represented in the medial prefrontal cortex, is largely a deceit.
What it contains we believe to be private and inaccessible, yet in reality it is a conduit for the socialization of our beliefs and values.
Self-control, as mediated by the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, also
serves a purpose different from the one we first imagine.
Rather than pushing our own personal destiny forward, self-control often serves as an instrument of social control ensuring that we follow social norms and values.
In a sense, neither the self nor self-control end up serving us in the way we imagine they should.
They do, however, serve to ensure social
harmonizing
.
They make us more likeable and agreeable to others in the groups we spend our time with.
They make us strive to support the group, sometimes at the expense of our private unsocialized impulses, and this effort makes us more valuable to the group.
All of us operating with the same tendency to prioritize the group allows the group to thrive in the face of competing private interests that are ever present as well.

Living social lives is difficult, really difficult.
We depend on the most complicated entities in the universe, other people, to make our food, pay our rent, and provide for our general well-being.
This system is far from perfect, but evolution has bet time and time again on making us more social.

Part Five
Smarter, Happier, More Productive

CHAPTER 10
Living with a Social Brain

T
he message is clear: our brain is profoundly social, with some of the oldest social wiring dating back more than 100 million years.
Our wiring motivates us to stay connected.
It returns our attention again and again to understanding the minds of the people around us like a rubber band snapping back into place.
And we have this center to our being, what we call our self, which among its many jobs serves to ensure that we harmonize with those around us by lining up our beliefs with theirs and nudging us to control our impulses for the good of the group.
The biological depth of our sociality is important because it fleshes out a woefully incomplete theory most of us have about “who we are.”

We look around us and see people selfishly motivated by pleasure and pain and little else.
This is what we’ve been taught for generations, and it is true that these are powerful motivators of human behavior, but they are far from the whole story.
If we keep eyes open for it, we will see plenty of behaviors that we can’t quite square with self-interest as the sole motivator in our lives.
We have failed to understand them because we have failed to fully understand what kind of beings we are.

So where do we go from here?
Is understanding our social brain merely an intellectual exercise, satisfying an existential urge to know what it means to be us?
While that’s an itch I’m always happy to have scratched, I think understanding the nature of our sociality is far more significant than that.
Everything we do in life and all
the organizations that we are a part of are affected by our understanding of “who we are.”