Transcript: Emily Falk Value system is a constellation of brain regions that handle our choices, the choices that we’re making consciously between drinking a milkshake or not drinking a milkshake, between Whether we’re going to go out on a date with somebody or stay home and deal with our emails. And the value system calculates these choices in what neuroscientists call a value calculation. Shankar Vendantam So in some ways, it’s doing a sort of cost-benefit analysis? Emily Falk Yeah. Basically, for each of our choices, it’s identifying what are the different things that we’re choosing between. It’s assigning a subjective value to each of those different choices that depends on our current context, our past experiences, our future goals. And then based on that subjective value, that subjective reward that it’s anticipating from each of the choices, it chooses the one that it thinks is going to be the best for me right Here, right now. And then it is connected to other brain systems that take action that’s relevant to that choice. Shankar Vendantam So you raised something really important here just now, which is that the value system is really focused on the here and now. So when Emily says, I don’t want to eat too much dessert or too much sugar because that’s not going to be good for me in the long run, but then Emily is confronting three delicious desserts That are sitting in front of her on the table, the value system has to make a judgment and it has to prioritize either the short term or the long term. Emily Falk Exactly. So when I’m trying to decide whether I’m going to eat the delicious dessert that’s sitting in front of me, the short term reward of how delicious it’s going to taste is more salient, that Weighs more heavily in that value calculation than the long term consequence if I do that over and over again over the course of years or even how I’m going to feel tomorrow or later this Evening. (Time 0:18:03)
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Transcript: Emily Falk Well, you’re probably familiar with the party game, would you rather, where I might ask you different kinds of things that are usually not as simple as the option that you brought up, Like would you rather eat an apple or an orange, or would you rather eat a blueberry tart or a lemon cheesecake? Though, of course, the value system can handle those kinds of would you rather choices. But I also think it’s pretty incredible that it can handle the more abstract kind of choices that we usually give it at a party that are not inherently comparable. Like, would you rather have a cat’s tongue or would you rather have roller skates for hands? Right. Like those are totally different things. And it’s not like you can directly compare what the advantages and disadvantages would be, but you might have some intuition about which one you would choose. (Time 0:21:00)
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Transcript: Emily Falk The social relevance system is a set of brain regions that help us understand what other people think and feel. And so you might also hear scientists refer to a theory of mind system or a mentalizing system that helps us think about other people’s thoughts and feelings. And this social relevance system can help us connect and coordinate with other people. And it also shapes the decisions that we make. Like it keeps us aligned with other people. It can help keep us on trends, but it can also do harmful things like maybe diluting us into resharing a false social media post. (Time 0:24:28)
Transcript: Emily Falk One example that I really like is a study that researchers at Stanford did where they looked at people’s decisions in dining halls and they changed the labels of the foods to either focus On the long-term health benefits of things or the kind of short-term taste. So for example, they might have vegetables that were labeled as healthy choice turnips or balsamic glazed turnips or nutritious green beans or sizzling Szechuan green beans. And the dish itself is exactly the same. But when they foreground the tastiness of the option, people chose a lot more vegetables than when they foreground that sort of longer term health benefit. And so what I mean when I say that we can work with our value system is like building on what we talked about before, where people tend to prioritize the immediate or psychologically close Or vivid consequences of our choices, we can focus on what is gratifying, what is rewarding, what is immediately useful about the thing that we want to do. (Time 0:32:58)
Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Emily and other researchers find that our resolutions are more likely to stick when we can link them with aspects of our identity, or what researchers call the self-relevance network In the brain. Emily Falk I think one thing that we can do is think about how the goals that we have or the things that we want to do, but that we might not necessarily immediately connect with our sense of who we are, Could be connected to strengths we already have or things that we’re already doing. So one thing that happened for me was, you know, I go for jogs mostly to de-stress, to blow off some steam. And I have two siblings who are much more serious runners. And one day my brother was pitching me on the idea that if I did some targeted workouts, that I could get faster. And initially I sort of wondered, like, why would I care about getting faster in the first place? Like growing up, I was, you know, thought of myself probably more like as a nerd than as a jock. And it wasn’t immediately part of my identity to think of myself as a runner in that way. And my brother framed it a different way. He said, you know, academics often make really good runners because academics are good at planning. Academics are good at working hard on things that, you know, have some payoff in the long term. And so that shifted it from something where, you know, doing these harder workouts to get faster would just be to do it to something that I already had the skills, the disposition to do. He also added another social reward, which was that if I got faster, I could run with my brother and sister and hear the gossip, which, of course, is very motivating for me. (Time 0:38:13)
Transcript: Shankar Vendantam You say that one way to enlist the power of social influence is to make use of what psychologists call social proof. Now, we’ve discussed this idea previously on the show, but what is social proof? How does it work and how can we take advantage of it? Emily Falk Social proof is the idea that we are influenced by what the people around us are doing or thinking. And so when we see that other people are doing something, then that makes us think that it’s a good idea. And social proof influences people often outside of their conscious awareness even. So for example, in California, researchers studied the energy use of different people, of different households. And what they found was that when they asked people what they thought was influencing their energy use behaviors, that people said that, you know, their costs and other factors were Influencing it. But they didn’t actually think that their neighbor’s energy use was particularly impactful in their decisions. And yet, when the researchers looked at what was actually influencing their decisions, it turned out that other people’s energy use behavior was pretty predictive of what those folks Were doing. And so based on that, what the research team did was they ran an experiment where they gave some people messages that were focused on social proof. Like, for example, 77% of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer. So that’s a message that’s highlighting that a lot of your neighbors are doing this thing. And other people got messages that were focused on, you know, just asking them to consider how they might conserve energy. Like, for example, by using fans instead of air conditioning. And other people got other kinds of appeals. So things like saving money. And they found, the researchers found that the households that were told about their neighbors’ conservation efforts, that they ended up saving more energy than people in the other Groups. Folks who are influenced by the messages still reported that what other people were doing was the least important reason for them making the energy decisions that they were making. (Time 0:43:08)