The Domesticated Brain (28 page)

It is through our social interactions that most of us find meaning in life – through the emotional experiences they generate. Pleasure, pride, excitement and love are feelings largely triggered and regulated by those around us. When we create or strive, we are not just doing it for ourselves – we seek the validation and praise of others. But others also hurt us when they cheat, lie, scold, mock, belittle or criticize. Living in groups has its ups and downs.

Social norms

Since we are social animals, it is in our collective interest not to lie, cheat or take advantage of each other in our group. This is something that good persuaders and con artists manipulate. They know that most people are kindhearted and willing to give others the benefit of the doubt when there is conflict of interest. These expectations form the basis of social norms of behaviour – what is expected by members of a group. Social norms can be so powerful that we will even apologize for something that is clearly not our fault.
Anthropologist Kate Fox deliberately bumped into commuters and jumped queues at Paddington Station in London to provoke characteristic responses that she calls the ‘grammar’ of social etiquette.
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As you might have already guessed, Fox found that there is almost an automatic reflex to say ‘Sorry’ when we bump into strangers in the street. Failing to apologize in such a situation would be considered rude – the violation of a social norm.

We are remarkably susceptible to the power of others when it comes to conformity. A classic set of studies by American psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s demonstrated that individuals were also prepared to deny seeing something with their own eyes if there were enough people in the room to say otherwise.
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He set up a situation where a real participant was part of a group with seven other confederates who were in on the true purpose of the experiment. They were told that it was a study of perception and that they had to match the length of a test line to one of three other lines. The experimenter held up a card and then went around the room, asking each person to answer aloud in turn. The real participant was among the last to be called on. The task was trivially easy. Everything was normal on the first two trials, but on the third trial, something odd happened. The confederates all began giving the same wrong answer. What did the real participant do? Results showed that three out of four of them conformed and gave the wrong answer on at least one trial.

For many decades, this research was interpreted as evidence that we comply with the group consensus. People merely said something they did not believe in order to gain
social approval. It only took the presence of one other person who disagreed with the answer for the real participant to stick to their guns and give the correct answer. However, this finding has been undermined by many studies that show that even when responses are anonymous, people still go with the flow.
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One remarkable possibility is that people’s perceptions are indeed changed by the group consensus. To get at the difference between public compliance and private acceptance, you can look at brain activation. In a recent brain-imaging study,
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men were asked to rate photographs of 180 women for attractiveness. They were then placed in an fMRI scanner and asked to rate all the faces again, but this time they were provided with information about how each one had been rated by a group of peers. In fact, the group ratings were random. If the group said ‘hot’ but the participant had originally rated ‘not’, the participant shifted his rating higher and there was an increase in activation in two areas associated with evaluating rewards, the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex. Both areas light up when viewing sexually attractive faces.
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When the group rated a face that the participant had originally thought beautiful as less attractive, there was a corresponding downward shift in his rating and brain activity.

We are so keen to fit in with the group that our behaviour can be easily manipulated. You may have noticed this with the signs and messages left for guests appearing in some of the hotels you stay at. When a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Arizona, left a variety of different message cards in their guests’ bathrooms in the hopes of convincing those guests to re-use their towels rather than having them laundered every
day, they discovered that the single most effective message was the one that simply read: ‘Seventy-five percent of our guests use their towels more than once.’
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This technique has recently become used to nudge people into making economic decisions that previously were imposed by the state, often raising a degree of resentment. Authorities can more easily persuade people by nudging them rather than threatening them, as a better way of influencing their behaviour.
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When a pension fund sends out a letter saying, ‘Most people are willing to invest a proportion of their earnings towards their pension …’, the fund’s managers are relying on our herd mentality to conform with the group rather than threatening us, which is less effective.

Hypocrites in the brain

How does conformity work? One answer is that when we are conforming we are avoiding the experience of discordance in our brains. It has long been known that humans need to justify their thoughts and actions; especially when they behave hypocritically. For example, if we expend a lot of effort to attain a goal to no avail, rather than accept that we have failed, we are more inclined to reframe the episode in a positive light such as ‘I didn’t really want that job’ or ‘That relationship was never going to work out’. We would rather re-evaluate the goals as negative so that we avoid discord. Aesop wrote about such ‘sour grapes’ in his fables as when the fox abandoned the grapes that were out of reach, dismissing them as probably inedible anyway. The reason we justify our actions is because of cognitive dissonance – the
unpleasant state that arises when a person recognizes inconsistency in his or her own actions, attitudes, or beliefs. In the same way that we generally prefer truth over lies, we like to believe that we are true to ourselves.
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This belief means that we will frequently be disappointed in ourselves. All too often in life, we let ourselves down, which presents us with a state of dissonance – when things do not match up to our expectations. None of us is a saint – we are all flawed to a lesser or greater extent. We may cheat, lie, deceive, be economical with the truth, slack on the job, contribute less, fail to help, be hurtful, cruel or misbehave in other ways. We are often hypocritical – congratulating others through gritted teeth when we would have preferred to win the competition.

These flaws stand in direct contrast to the positive attributes we believe we possess – trustworthiness, kindness, helpfulness and generally being a good person. Very few of us are full of self-loathing or un-hypocritical. That is why there is a dissonance. Presented with the evidence of our wrongdoing, we may realize there is a contradiction. When people experience the unpleasant state of cognitive dissonance, they naturally try to alleviate it. This can be achieved by revising one’s actions, attitudes or beliefs in order to restore consistency among them. So we say, ‘They had it coming’, ‘I didn’t like them in the first place anyway’, or ‘I always knew that they were a bad egg’ – anything to reframe the situation so that whatever negative thing we have done becomes justified as a reasonable way to behave.

In one fMRI study of cognitive dissonance,
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participants were scanned while they entertained the contradictory
notion that the uncomfortable scanner environment was actually a pleasant experience. They were told that after forty-five minutes in the scanner they would be asked to rate the experience by answering questions. Half were asked to say that they actually enjoyed the experience in order to reassure a nervous participant who was waiting outside to do the study. The other half was a control group who were told that they would receive $1 each time they answered questions by saying that they enjoyed the experience. Imaging revealed that two regions were more active in the participants who had to endure the cognitive dissonance condition. These were the ACC, which detects conflicts in our thoughts and action, and the anterior insula, which registers negative emotional experiences – the same two regions that lit up during the study measuring what happens when we have to disagree with others. Not only were the ACC and the insular regions activated, but on a follow-up set of questions when there was no need to lie, the participants in the cognitive dissonance condition also rated the experience as more pleasant than the group who were paid, proving that they had indeed experienced a shift in their evaluation of the experience. In other words, they had convinced themselves that it was not such a bad experience, whereas the ones who had been paid knew they were lying for cash.

Cognitive dissonance is something that persuaders can so easily exploit. Imagine someone pushes in front of you in a queue to use a photocopier. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer
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found that six out of ten would not object if the person said, ‘Excuse me, I only have five pages, can I use the photocopier?’ Even when the apology is not intended, more
than half still let the queue-jumper in front. Why is that? For one reason, most people want to avoid conflict and so do not confront the individual. They may be annoyed but not to the extent that it is worth doing something about it. Very often under these sorts of situations we will rationalize our response by reasoning that our own inconvenience is minor and thus not worth the effort. As soon as the person gives a reason such as ‘Excuse me, I only have five pages, can I use the photocopier because I am in a rush?’, nine out of ten do not object. By providing a reason, they have made it easier for the people waiting patiently in the queue to justify their decision to acquiesce.

We are compliant because saying ‘no’ is uncomfortable. Of course, there are some individuals who seem perfectly happy to barge to the front of the queue and are indifferent to others, but many of us would squirm with embarrassment. Unless, of course, we apply our own cognitive dissonance by justifying our actions, for instance by convincing ourselves that ‘My needs are greater than others’. This allows us to realign our self-concept so that we do not have to entertain a contradiction that we have jumped the queue but are still really a nice person. With cognitive dissonance, we can be comfortably rude in the belief that our needs really do outweigh those of others. It is the self-deception that we discussed in the last chapter but one that applies to our whole concept of what we think we are like. Cognitive dissonance is dangerous because we can convince ourselves that we are doing the right thing even when we are not aware that we are distorting the truth. It enables us to live with our selfish behaviour and all the contradictions that entails.

Undercover racists

Most of us do not think we are hypocrites. As Aldous Huxley once wrote, ‘There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.’
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We like to think of ourselves in a positive light and very few of us would want to have all our attitudes exposed as racist, sexist or generally bigoted. And yet, despite the balanced, reasonable persona that we would like to present to the rest of the world, most of us may hold implicit ugly attitudes that are not acceptable in decent society. We know this because you can measure the level of implicit attitudes by asking participants to undertake a speeded response test where they have to match negative and positive words with different pictures.
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It could be different races, men and women, young and old, liberals and conservatives – any of the various groups that generate stereotypes. Although most of us do not consider ourselves bigoted, the implicit attitude test reveals that we are faster to associate negative words with members of other races and positive words to members of our own group. Deep down in our unconsciousness, we have stored vast amounts of associated thoughts that reflect all the experiences and exposure to attitudes that we have encountered over our lives.

Even if we do not hold deep-seated racist attitudes, then we can still be prone to stereotypes. This has been shown in a study where white and black US adults were presented with faces of their own in-group (same race) or out-group (other race) on a computer screen.
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When the face presented on the screen changed, they were given a painful electric shock. Eventually participants learned to associate all face changes
with pain. Then the experimenters turned off the shocks to see how long it took participants to unlearn the painful association. Participants were much quicker to return to normal when the face changes were from their own race compared to faces from the other race. They took longer to become more trusting and less fearful of the other race even though they were not racist on measures taken before the test.

Does that mean that we are hard-wired to be racist irrespective of our wishes and desires? Not necessarily, because the effect was restricted to male faces and the race bias was not found in participants who had dated a member of the other race.
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Male faces are more characteristic of threatening individuals because males are more often portrayed as aggressive. However, the racial effect can be counteracted by exposure and experience of other races. What is clear is that despite our good intentions and choices that we know we should make, biases lurk deep down in most of us that influence our decisions. These findings do not mean that we behave like this in real life, but they do reveal the problem of undercover attitudes that might surface under the right circumstances.