May 15, 2023 • 37 mins
What’s happening when you stand in the supermarket aisle and stare at the shelf full of options? It may not look like there’s much going on from the outside, but inside there’s a war of networks raging. How is your brain's decision-making influenced by price, emotions, and your group of friends? How would you choose between a nice candle and a chocolate bar in the shape of a computer keyboard? And what does any of this have to do with Starbucks or Tiger Woods or Burger King?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
So what's happening in your brain When you stand at
the ice cream aisle at the store and you stare
at all the different options. It doesn't look like there's
a lot going on there, but inside there is a
war of brain networks.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
That are raging.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
So how does your brain make its decision about what
it's going to buy? And how is that influenced by price,
by your emotions, by your group of friends. How do
you decide whether you'd rather have a chocolate bar in
the shape of a computer keyboard or a nice candle?
Was an integrated match tickholder? And what does this have
(00:44):
to do with Starbucks or Tiger Woods or Burger King.
Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and in these
episodes we say fail deeply into our three pound universe
to understand why and how our lives look the way
(01:06):
they do. Today's episode is the second part of a
three part series.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
We're looking at how the.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Brain is a machine built of networks that live in conflict.
In the last episode, we saw that your brain is
a team of rivals. You have different networks with potentially
opposing opinions, and they all compete to steer the ship
of state. And today we're going to see how these
(01:41):
rivaling networks determine how we decide what to buy, like
which ice cream brand or which car brand, how much
should something cost? How do you get steered or manipulated
by emotions? And does it matter if your friends think
something is cool or lame. We're going to see how
an understanding of the brain exposes how we make our
(02:05):
daily decisions. As we found out in the last episode,
different networks in your brain care about different things, and
brain scientists all over the world have used imaging technologies
to see what the brain is up to when we
are faced with decisions like decisions about which fast food
(02:27):
restaurant you're going to choose on the block, or which
shirt to buy, or which internet service provider you're going
to sign up with. So let's start with the field
of economics. All of us who studied some economics in
college learned how humans make decisions, or that's what we
thought we were learning, But what we were actually learning
(02:49):
was an idealized version. We learned about Homo economicus, which
is a rational decision maker, and that decision maker always
works to maximize gain and minimize loss, and he's objective,
he's able to delay gratification. His decisions about what to
(03:11):
buy are unswayed by his emotions. And by the way,
if you put him in the same situation twice, he'll
behave consistently. But imagine I offer you two generic courts
of Rocky Road ice cream, and for one, I'm charging
you two dollars fifty cents. For the other one, I'm
charging you three dollars twenty five cents. As far as
(03:33):
you can tell, it's the same ice cream inside. So
if you're an economist, if you're homoeconomicist, the choice is easy.
It's straightforward. But now imagine that I rotate the courts
so you can see the labels, and one says Ben
and Jerry's and one says Hoggen Dawes. So which one
do you take?
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Now, Well, it's not so straightforward for real humans, because
suddenly there's branding and the emotions that you anticipate from
eating these and what your friends think of these brands,
and all your past experience with these brands, and all
this has led, in the last thirty years or so.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
To a new field called neuroeconomics. It's also known as
behavioral economics, and it comes down to the fact that
we have generally misunderstood how humans actually make decisions. So
psychologists and neuroscientists have been running experiments for decades now
to get a realistic understanding of the way people actually
(04:39):
behave rather than the way they're supposed to behave. And
what has emerged from this field is that real humans
are irrational. We care about immediate gratification, We ignore consequences.
Our decisions are massively swayed by our emotions.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
We behave and.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Consistently not making the same decision each time. We're easily
confused by calculations about risk. We're always influenced by branding.
So this is what we're going to talk about today.
How an understanding of the team of rivals in the
brain gives a clearer picture of how we behave. As
(05:21):
we talked about in the previous episode, you are not
an individual. In other words, you're not a single program
that's running. Instead, your brain is made of competing pieces
and parts, a society of mind, and these are always
battling to control your decisions. The outcome of the battle
(05:43):
determines what you do in the world. So, for example,
if I take some warm chocolate chip cookies out of
the oven and place them in front of you, part
of your brain says, great, that's a good source of energy.
Another part of your brain says, don't eat them, you'll
get fat. Another says, Okay, I'll eat them this time,
but I promise I'll go to the gym tonight. And
(06:04):
you can argue with yourself and eventually get mad at
yourself for your decision. You can curse at yourself, cajole yourself,
and as we'll see in the next episode, you can
even make contracts with yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
But who is talking with whom? Here? It's all you, right,
but it's different parts of you.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
And this is the sense in which humans can be conflicted. Now,
there are lots of drives that you have, but today
we're just going to concentrate on three of the main
networks that have come out of the last couple of
decades of brain scanning experiments. And these three networks are
among the biggest drivers of your decision making when you're
(06:45):
standing in the store. The first network that we're going
to talk about cares about the price of something. It's
made of a couple regions that sit on the side
of your brain in the northern part here above where
your ears are. The second network cares about the emotional experience,
or more specifically, the anticipated emotional experience. This is located
(07:10):
on the part of your brain just above your eyeballs.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
This is called the orbitofrontal cortex.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Because it's just above the orbits of the eye and
the frontal lobe. And this network cares about things like
what will these chips taste like compared to these Will
they be delicious or gross?
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Will this make me happy? Regretful? And the third network.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Responds to social context, as in do my friends think
this is cool or lame? And these regions right along
the midline of your brain between the two hemispheres near
the top. So I'm going to tell you this story
in three acts, one about each of these networks. So
(07:49):
let's start with the first, which is about how much
you think something is worth. A great book that summarizes
the psychology of this is predict to Be Irrational by
my colleague Dan Arieli, and I'll use some examples from that.
So let's say you're in the market for a pair
of Bluetooth headphones and you find it at a local
(08:12):
store and they're charging twenty nine dollars, so you think great.
So right when you're about to buy it, I ring
you up on your phone and I say, hey, I'm
two blocks away and I just found that headset you've
been looking for for nineteen dollars, so it's ten dollars cheaper.
The question is will you walk over to where I
am to buy the nineteen dollar headset instead of the
(08:35):
completely overpriced twenty nine dollars. Now, let's say you're in
the market for a new cell phone and you find
the one that you want at this store and it's
for five hundred and sixty seven dollars, and right when
you're about to purchase it, I call you and I say, hey,
I'm two blocks away and I found that phone you're
looking for for five hundred and fifty seven dollars, ten
(08:59):
dollars cheaper. The question is are you going to walk
all the way over two blocks to save ten dollars
five hundred sixty seven dollars versus five hundred and fifty
seven dollars. Now, the thing to notice is that these
two scenarios are exactly the same. I'm asking is ten
dollars worth the walk, or isn't it. It's the same
(09:20):
ten dollars either way. But in the first case, most
people will do it to pay nineteen instead of twenty nine.
And in the second case, almost nobody's gonna make that
walk two blocks just to pay five point fifty seven
instead of five to sixty seven. And this illustrates an
important point, which is that nothing is judged by itself.
Everything is judged in context. You are not homo economicus. Okay,
(09:47):
Now I'm gonna make you an offer. You can have
one of two things. I'm either gonna give you a
chocolate bar shaped like a computer keyboard or a candle
with a little drawer built into it that holds magticks.
So which one are you going to take? This is
a difficult decision, right because how do you translate these
(10:08):
into a common currency so you know which one has
more value to you. The reason this is a challenge
is because everything has to be converted into a common
currency to make a comparison, and this has to happen
at the level of neural activity, and that's tough when
you have such different items. This is the same if
(10:30):
I give you some other comparison like I'll give you
three apples, or a case for your sunglasses that shaped
like a hot dog? How do you convert that into
a common currency to make a direct comparison. So what
the brain is always looking for is context. It can't
make a decision about the value of something unless it
(10:53):
can do a direct head to head comparison. And this
ends up being an important clue for people who are
trying to sell you something because none of us know
how to price something, so we need to be told.
So here's an example. This happened with Williams Sonoma some
years ago. They introduced a home bread bakery. It's like
(11:16):
a large toast drub in that makes a loaf of
bread for you. And they put a price tag on
it around two hundred and seventy five dollars and it
was a perfectly good product, but sales wise, it failed completely.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
No one was buying it. Why.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
It's because people saw it on the shelf and they thought,
what is a home bread bakery anyway?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Is this a good one? Do I need it?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
So Williams Sonoma took on a research firm who advised
them to get a hold of a second homebread bakery
a slightly bigger one that was more expensive and put
it on the shelves next to.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
The first one. So they did that, and you know what,
the first bread bakery started selling. Why.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
It's because people did have to make a decision in
a vacuum. Now, now they could think, okay, well, I
don't know much about home breadmakers, but this one seems
to take up less counter space and it's less expensive,
so that seems like it's the right choice.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
So the customer's brains were given something that they.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Could compare and that allowed them to secure a decision.
And this trick of giving context, by the way, is
an old trick in real estate. So let's say you're
an agent and you're trying to sell someone a medium
sized traditional home.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
But the prospective buyers.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Are torn between that one and some modern home, and
they're stuck because these two homes are as different as
the chocolate keyboard and the candlestick. So what do you
do as the real estate agent to get them unstuck.
What you do is you show them another mid sized
traditional home, one that's a little bit worse. Maybe the
(12:55):
kitchen is outdated, or it's covered in wood paneling. So
This is known is the decoy effect, because you don't
expect them to buy this other home you've just shown them.
But what you're doing is you're giving their valuation systems
something it can understand. The brain can now compare the
slightly worse traditional home against the slightly better traditional home,
(13:17):
the one where the kitchen doesn't need an update.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
So they see this in context.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Now and it allows them to lock down a decision.
In general, everything in your brain is priced by comparison
to other things that are like it, and this is
because the brain stores its knowledge by association what is
related to what and how. So you're not going to
(13:44):
pay twenty five dollars for a bag of chips because
you have lots of experience with bags of chips and
they're not supposed to cost that much. But interestingly, there
is a way that companies can change where an item
sits in your network of associations. So, for example, some
of you may remember a time where you could drive
(14:05):
anywhere the na should and get a cup of coffee
for fifty cents. But when Starbucks launched, they didn't want
to sell their coffee for fifty cents, so they built
Starbucks to feel like a continental European coffee house, and
they had the place filled with the smell of roasted beans,
and they sold coffee presses and piscatti and croissants, and
(14:28):
they were creating a different experience, so different that we
wouldn't use the prices of the diners as an anchor
anymore for the price of coffee. So yeah, they even
changed the sizes they sold, so small, medium, and large
became tall, grande, and venti. And this made it so
(14:50):
that in your network of associations, you didn't link Starbucks
coffee with diner coffee, but instead with something different and fancier,
and therefore your valuation of the cup of coffee doesn't
feel off. So I was in Seattle a while ago,
and I saw a McDonald's billboard that was taking a
(15:12):
shot at Starbucks. The sign said four dollars for a
coffee is done. And what struck me as funny is
that homoeconomicists totally gets McDonald's message supply and demand and
so on, but real humans simply don't care. We get
something out of our experience with Starbucks, and therefore we're
willing to value a blonde vanilla latte differently. So now
(15:52):
I've told you how the brain thinks about value, how
much is something worth? But as I said at the beginning,
this is only part how the brain makes decisions. There
are other competing areas involved, and we turn to the
second act now, which is about emotions. Economists used to
think that all decision making in humans was a rational
(16:15):
process ua costs and benefits, and that tips your decision.
But recently the importance of emotions has come into the
spotlight because emotions are a critical part of the language
of the unconscious. It's not all about logic irrationality. We're
not just information processing devices. Our lives are richly painted
(16:38):
by emotion, and these influence decision making. So one basic
example is that you will make harsher moral judgments when
you're in a room that smells bad. This shows the
role of emotions like discuss in decision making about things
that you might think are higher level concepts. Okay, now
(17:00):
I'll give you another example, one that's been making the
rounds in philosophy for a little while. In part one
of this series, I mentioned the trolley dilemma.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Here's a quick reminder.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
A trolley is barreling down the train tracks out of control.
Five workers are making repairs way down the track, and you,
a bystander, quickly realize that they're all going to be
killed by the trolley. But you also notice there's a
lever nearby that you can throw, and that will divert
the trolley down a different track where only a single
(17:34):
worker will be killed.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
So what do you do?
Speaker 1 (17:36):
If you're like most people, you pull the lever, because
it's better to have one person killed than five. Now,
in the second scenario of the trolley dilemma, the same
trolley's barreling down the tracks. The same five workers are
in harm's way, But this time you are a bystander
on a footbridge that goes over the tracks, and you
(17:57):
notice that there's a large man standing on the footbridge,
and you realize that if you were to push him
off the bridge, his bulk would be sufficient to stop
the train and save the five workers.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Do you push him off? Now?
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Most people here just won't do it. Even now, the
math is exactly the same. You're trading one life for
five lives. The only difference is the issue of touching
the person with your bare hands or not. And as
I mentioned last time, when my colleagues did brain scanning.
They found that in the first case, the networks that
come online are just those involved with doing math problems essentially.
(18:40):
But in the second case, you've got these emotional networks
coming online too, these networks in the orbit of frontal cortex,
and that entirely changes your decision. So the networks involved
in emotion are very powerful drivers of decision making, and
this plays a bit role in how we select products,
(19:02):
how we make economic decisions. So when companies are interested
in plugging into these networks, they don't use terms like
we have an integrated approach or we give a comprehensive solution.
Those things don't talk to these orbital frontal networks at all. Instead,
companies say things like don't hate me because I'm beautiful,
(19:25):
or are you man enough to eat this burger? And
the idea is to plug right into the emotional networks
to steer your decision making. And it doesn't have to
be big and explicit, but also includes everything you've ever.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Seen in any ad.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Beautiful people loving the product being advertised, They smile beautifully
when they touch or look at the product. If it's cereal,
it's a family that's so happy and attractive and they
don't have any problems if it's for an adult audience.
The stars of the commercial are smiling at each other.
The camera lingers for just a moment longer to make
(20:05):
it clear that this is all a prelude to something
that's inevitably going to happen between them. In other words,
the appeal isn't to these networks that are concerned with valuation,
but instead the networks that drive primitive emotions.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
These have tremendous.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Power in the neural parliament that drives your decisions. So
now I've mentioned the brain networks involved in valuation and
those involved in emotion, and there's one more which brings
us to Act three. Traditionally, we study the brain by
(20:44):
looking at different regions and mapping what they're involved in,
like this is the region for vision, and over here
is where hearing takes place, and this area is involved
in touch and so on. But an enormous amount of
the circuitry of the brain has to do with other people,
understanding other people. We have an enormous amount of circuitry
(21:05):
devoted towards issues of trust or integrity, or the reputation
of other people in our tribe or in modern life,
it's others we meet all over the world, as well
as celebrities we've never even met. Bizarrely, so much of
our circuitry is devoted to social concerns. I can even
(21:26):
ask you, hey, does that person in your thousand contacts
that you know know this other person? And you'll pretty
much know immediately whether they know each other? And how
think about that? It's like a thousand by a thousand
matrix of data that's being stored there that you can
just call up in an instant And these sorts of
(21:47):
considerations about how much our brains care about other people
has led to a new subfield called social neuroscience. Now,
something quite amazing, it's surprising that I studied in my
lab with brain imaging, is that to the brain, companies
(22:07):
are just like people. We evolved in small groups and
developed this very rich social circuitry to understand each other
and to understand issues of trust and integrity and reputation
of every person in the group. But companies came along
just in the last second of our evolutionary history, and
obviously Mother Nature hasn't had time to rewrite the brain
(22:31):
to understand companies, so we use exactly the same circuitry,
as we do when we think about other people. So
we study this in my lab by having people read
a vignette about a person that does something something either
good or bad or suspicious, and we measure how different
brain regions respond to a person behaving this way. And
(22:54):
then we show these same vignettes to other people, but
we swapped out the name of the person with the
name of a company, and the brain regions that respond
are exactly the same. Evolutionarily, companies are something new and
we haven't evolved new circuitry to understand them. So we
(23:14):
understand a company exactly the same way with the same
circuitry that we use to understand other people. Is that
company trustworthy? Does the company have integrity? What is that
company's social reputation? And you see this on Facebook where
people are friends with people and they're friends with companies.
(23:39):
And by the way, in the legal system, there's a
legal fiction in which we treat corporations like individuals. So
the corporation can be guilty of a crime, can be
liable of a crime, and so on. In fact, the
word corporation means body. Now it might seem hard to
believe that companies and social reputation are tied so closely.
(24:04):
But let's take a typical example. Look at what happened
when one major company tied their reputation to a clean cut,
admirable young man and they got all the benefits from that.
I'm talking about Nike, who tied themselves to Tiger Woods.
He was in their advertising and his superstar power directly
(24:24):
lifted their economics because he was awesome, and so people
felt like cool, Nike is awesome and same way. But
then one day in two thousand and nine, the news
hit Twitter that he was cheating on his wife. Now
you can go back and look at a chart of
Nike stock that day. The news of his infidelity hit
Twitter at eleven forty am, and you can see the
(24:47):
immediate effect on the Nike stock price, which continued to
drop precipitously for the rest of the day and for
the next six months.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Even though Tiger.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Woods has nothing to do with the manufacturing or distribution
or the quality of the shoes, his infidelity soiled the
company's reputation in the social brain. If he didn't have
integrity at that moment, then something becomes wrong with the shoes. Now,
what I want to point out is this is not
just an economic phenomenon, it's a social phenomenon, and fundamentally,
(25:21):
it's a neuroscientific phenomenon. These social circuits evolved when we
operated in small tribes. They weren't really built to operate
at the level of multinational companies, and as a result,
companies get to ride on this circuitry for free. But
it also means that companies need to be aware that
(25:43):
they're operating with these basic friend or faux circuits. It
means that companies need to treat their customers like tribe members.
And I'm not saying this just as a friendly business philosophy.
I'm saying this because the same circuitry is being used
and because of social media, these sorts of social exchanges
have taken an unexpected evolutionary leap forward because they are
(26:09):
unerasable now. So here's an example. Some years ago, there
was a young man traveling on United Airlines and he
had to check his guitar through the baggage plane. So
he's sitting on the plane when they're on the runway
and he's watching the guys load the luggage in and
he sees the luggage handlers toss his guitar as they're
(26:29):
loading it. And when this guy gets to the destination,
he discovers his guitar is broken, so he complains to
United Airlines, but they tell him they can't take responsibility
for it and he has to pay for his own guitar.
So he gets mad and he writes a guitar song
and he puts it on YouTube and it's called United
breaks Guitars, and this goes viral and the Economist magazine
(26:53):
wrote an article into which they estimated that this guy
cost United Airlines one hundred and thirty million dollars. Why
because social reputation matters, and the Internet has made reputational
issues fast and instant and uneasable, and all this ties
into how companies use social media. So when Facebook first
(27:17):
got introduced as a concept many years ago, all companies
immediately started thinking about this as Okay, how do we
start a Facebook account and post on our feeds and
get people to buy our product? But this turned out
to be a fail because people weren't going to Facebook
with the intention of being sold to, So companies realize
(27:38):
pretty quickly it's not about selling directly. But the reason
I have a Facebook account was about branding. In other words,
how could they develop a social reputation? How could they
talk to these networks in the brain to make you
feel like they are your friend? So I just looked
this up. As of this morning, Burger King has over
(28:01):
eight point six million people following them. That's more than
Stephen Colbert. Now what sober adult clicks to be friends
with a fast food restaurant. The key is that they're
not selling on their feed. They're strengthening their connection with you,
like you're a friend. They say chatty things like you
(28:23):
like us, we love you. They're just like a living,
breathing person. And this is what companies do to plug
in to these networks. So I was in Texas recently
(28:47):
and I noticed a billboard that said the most quote
liked energy company in Texas. You can choose your own
energy provider there. So I wondered, what is there to
like about an energy In other words, why on social
media would you click to light them? So I went
and looked them up on Facebook. They had three hundred
thousand friends. So a month ago, I was on an
(29:10):
airplane and sitting next to a guy and we started
chatting about this, and he says, oh, yeah, I'm a
member of that company. So first I was struck that
he didn't say customer, he said member. So I thought,
I need to understand what exactly this company is doing
that makes them so light. So I went to their
web page, and on their site, they're hitting all three
(29:31):
of these neural networks that I talked about. So in
one part of their homepage, they're plugging right into the
valuation networks. They say they're the least expensive company and
they'll save you tons of money, and they have pictures
of dollar bills snowing down. Now next to that, they
have a picture that shows when you buy your energy
from them, they'll give you points that can be turned
(29:54):
into rewards, and they have pictures of airline tickets and
coffee and cash. And this section plugs right into the
orbit of frontal networks.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
They care about reward. And right below that.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
They have a section on the page that plugs into
social context. It says, when you earn, your friends earn.
And there's an attractive young woman holding a sign that
tells us her name is Stacy, and behind us are
a group of her attractive friends, and they're holding a
sign that says friends of Stacy what you can read
(30:28):
on their faces is that they're all so taken with
Stacy because she's earning money for them. She's earning and
everyone likes her, and they're happy and thriving and good
looking and have a tight relationship, and they're cheering.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
For Stacy with no hesitation. They really like her.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Possibly some of them are in love with her. And
this plugs right into the social networks that tell you
that your friends think this is cool. So this company
is doing a textbook job of hitting all the appaxis
to align these networks in your brain so you don't
have to feel like, yeah, they're inexpensive but they're boring,
(31:08):
or they're socially cool but they're too expensive or whatever.
They're firing on all cylinders and that's how they're able
to attract so many likes. Now, I'll mention something else.
When I went to their page, it told me that
two of my friends like this energy company. Now, who
spends their time liking an energy company? But I want
(31:30):
to point out that this has been one of the
most important tools of social media, not just the like button,
but the notification that your friends like this. Because brains
are so social, we really care about that situation. We
buy what our friends buy. We care about what our
friends care about. We are social animals, and things have
(31:53):
enormous sway. If our friends like it, that little message
plugs right into these networks telling us that it's cool.
And this is why social marketing is so effective. Think
about it this way. Would you pay one hundred and
twenty nine dollars for some weird new earbuds that were
green and hung halfway down your face? Maybe we could
(32:16):
be more likely to do it if your friends were
all doing it. If when you saw the ad for
those you saw that Bob and Tonica and Wag. We're
all doing it because we're social animals and we care
what our friends do. If they like it, we like it.
This is the basis of all trends, which are almost
(32:37):
always things that we look back on after a decade
and we can't.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Believe what we did or what we wore or what
we bought.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
But at the time we did it, everyone was doing it,
and that was the basis of the coolness. That was
what plugged into these networks in the midline of your brain.
Here economists talk about faith in the market, but the
reason this all has so much influence on our behin
behavior is because of faith in the social market. We
(33:04):
can't possibly have time to research everything, but we assume,
almost always erroneously, that if our friend has bought that thing,
it must be because he or sheet has invested the
time researching it and weighing all the options and selecting
the killer perfect brand or model. So that gives us
(33:27):
faith and we can save time because our friend, who
we like because they're smart, or simply good looking, or
simply because they like us back, if that person has
chosen this brand, then it must be awesome where they
wouldn't have done it, And that's why the social brain
is so critical to our decisions. So zooming out, we
(33:48):
make our purchasing decisions based on these three networks, price point,
the emotional feeling, and social context. And there are other
networks involved as well, but these are some of the biggies.
And the key is that these are all running as
a team of rivals. These systems are always battling it
(34:09):
out under the surface, and it's all unconscious, which means
you don't have access to the details.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
So when you choose to get.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
A burger at one fast food place over another, you
don't ask, am I buying this because of the price point,
because of the emotional salience of the salt and fat
and the colors used in the restaurant, or because their
ads feature beautiful young people in love and that reminds
me of my friends and my social life, or what
I wish it were. When you're at the store choosing
(34:39):
between ice cream brands, when you're scanning the ben and
Jerry's and Bluebell and Hoggin'daws, you don't have access to
the details of the battles going on under the wood.
You simply wait for a feeling to get served up
to your consciousness, and then you reach out and grab
one container off the shelf and not the others. So
keep this in mind the next time you're choosing between brands.
(35:02):
Why are you choosing this one? What are the elements
that are influencing your decision? Might you make a different
choice if you become aware of the parts that are
influencing you. You can't change the wiring of your brain,
but you can become more aware of what steers you. Okay,
(35:24):
So the previous episode was called how is the brain like?
A Team of Rivals? And in this episode we dove
into specific examples of different drives that pull our behavior
in different directions. So I hope you'll join me for
the next episode, Part three, where we will discuss how
we can take this knowledge and use it to navigate
(35:47):
our own behavior. Because you have systems in your brain
that deal not only with what is right in front
of you, but also that do you long term thinking.
So how do you get yourself to do the right
thing in the moment? How do you balance networks that
care about the now with networks that care about who
you are and who you want to be? How do
(36:09):
you forego temptation that's not aligned with your long term goals?
How is your decision about eating that cookie related to
the hero of the Trojan War. I'll see you there
in the next episode for the culmination of everything that
we've been talking about so far.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
That's all for this week.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
To find out more and to share your thoughts, head
over to Eagleman dot com, slash Podcasts, and you can
also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos on YouTube. Subscribe
to my channel so you can follow along each week
for new updates. I'd love to hear your questions, so
please send those to podcasts at eagleman dot com and
(36:52):
I will do a special episode where I answer questions
until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner
Cosmo
So what's happening in your brain When you stand at
the ice cream aisle at the store and you stare
at all the different options. It doesn't look like there's
a lot going on there, but inside there is a
war of brain networks.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
That are raging.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
So how does your brain make its decision about what
it's going to buy? And how is that influenced by price,
by your emotions, by your group of friends. How do
you decide whether you'd rather have a chocolate bar in
the shape of a computer keyboard or a nice candle?
Was an integrated match tickholder? And what does this have
(00:44):
to do with Starbucks or Tiger Woods or Burger King.
Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and in these
episodes we say fail deeply into our three pound universe
to understand why and how our lives look the way
(01:06):
they do. Today's episode is the second part of a
three part series.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
We're looking at how the.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Brain is a machine built of networks that live in conflict.
In the last episode, we saw that your brain is
a team of rivals. You have different networks with potentially
opposing opinions, and they all compete to steer the ship
of state. And today we're going to see how these
(01:41):
rivaling networks determine how we decide what to buy, like
which ice cream brand or which car brand, how much
should something cost? How do you get steered or manipulated
by emotions? And does it matter if your friends think
something is cool or lame. We're going to see how
an understanding of the brain exposes how we make our
(02:05):
daily decisions. As we found out in the last episode,
different networks in your brain care about different things, and
brain scientists all over the world have used imaging technologies
to see what the brain is up to when we
are faced with decisions like decisions about which fast food
(02:27):
restaurant you're going to choose on the block, or which
shirt to buy, or which internet service provider you're going
to sign up with. So let's start with the field
of economics. All of us who studied some economics in
college learned how humans make decisions, or that's what we
thought we were learning, But what we were actually learning
(02:49):
was an idealized version. We learned about Homo economicus, which
is a rational decision maker, and that decision maker always
works to maximize gain and minimize loss, and he's objective,
he's able to delay gratification. His decisions about what to
(03:11):
buy are unswayed by his emotions. And by the way,
if you put him in the same situation twice, he'll
behave consistently. But imagine I offer you two generic courts
of Rocky Road ice cream, and for one, I'm charging
you two dollars fifty cents. For the other one, I'm
charging you three dollars twenty five cents. As far as
(03:33):
you can tell, it's the same ice cream inside. So
if you're an economist, if you're homoeconomicist, the choice is easy.
It's straightforward. But now imagine that I rotate the courts
so you can see the labels, and one says Ben
and Jerry's and one says Hoggen Dawes. So which one
do you take?
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Now, Well, it's not so straightforward for real humans, because
suddenly there's branding and the emotions that you anticipate from
eating these and what your friends think of these brands,
and all your past experience with these brands, and all
this has led, in the last thirty years or so.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
To a new field called neuroeconomics. It's also known as
behavioral economics, and it comes down to the fact that
we have generally misunderstood how humans actually make decisions. So
psychologists and neuroscientists have been running experiments for decades now
to get a realistic understanding of the way people actually
(04:39):
behave rather than the way they're supposed to behave. And
what has emerged from this field is that real humans
are irrational. We care about immediate gratification, We ignore consequences.
Our decisions are massively swayed by our emotions.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
We behave and.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Consistently not making the same decision each time. We're easily
confused by calculations about risk. We're always influenced by branding.
So this is what we're going to talk about today.
How an understanding of the team of rivals in the
brain gives a clearer picture of how we behave. As
(05:21):
we talked about in the previous episode, you are not
an individual. In other words, you're not a single program
that's running. Instead, your brain is made of competing pieces
and parts, a society of mind, and these are always
battling to control your decisions. The outcome of the battle
(05:43):
determines what you do in the world. So, for example,
if I take some warm chocolate chip cookies out of
the oven and place them in front of you, part
of your brain says, great, that's a good source of energy.
Another part of your brain says, don't eat them, you'll
get fat. Another says, Okay, I'll eat them this time,
but I promise I'll go to the gym tonight. And
(06:04):
you can argue with yourself and eventually get mad at
yourself for your decision. You can curse at yourself, cajole yourself,
and as we'll see in the next episode, you can
even make contracts with yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
But who is talking with whom? Here? It's all you, right,
but it's different parts of you.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
And this is the sense in which humans can be conflicted. Now,
there are lots of drives that you have, but today
we're just going to concentrate on three of the main
networks that have come out of the last couple of
decades of brain scanning experiments. And these three networks are
among the biggest drivers of your decision making when you're
(06:45):
standing in the store. The first network that we're going
to talk about cares about the price of something. It's
made of a couple regions that sit on the side
of your brain in the northern part here above where
your ears are. The second network cares about the emotional experience,
or more specifically, the anticipated emotional experience. This is located
(07:10):
on the part of your brain just above your eyeballs.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
This is called the orbitofrontal cortex.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Because it's just above the orbits of the eye and
the frontal lobe. And this network cares about things like
what will these chips taste like compared to these Will
they be delicious or gross?
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Will this make me happy? Regretful? And the third network.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Responds to social context, as in do my friends think
this is cool or lame? And these regions right along
the midline of your brain between the two hemispheres near
the top. So I'm going to tell you this story
in three acts, one about each of these networks. So
(07:49):
let's start with the first, which is about how much
you think something is worth. A great book that summarizes
the psychology of this is predict to Be Irrational by
my colleague Dan Arieli, and I'll use some examples from that.
So let's say you're in the market for a pair
of Bluetooth headphones and you find it at a local
(08:12):
store and they're charging twenty nine dollars, so you think great.
So right when you're about to buy it, I ring
you up on your phone and I say, hey, I'm
two blocks away and I just found that headset you've
been looking for for nineteen dollars, so it's ten dollars cheaper.
The question is will you walk over to where I
am to buy the nineteen dollar headset instead of the
(08:35):
completely overpriced twenty nine dollars. Now, let's say you're in
the market for a new cell phone and you find
the one that you want at this store and it's
for five hundred and sixty seven dollars, and right when
you're about to purchase it, I call you and I say, hey,
I'm two blocks away and I found that phone you're
looking for for five hundred and fifty seven dollars, ten
(08:59):
dollars cheaper. The question is are you going to walk
all the way over two blocks to save ten dollars
five hundred sixty seven dollars versus five hundred and fifty
seven dollars. Now, the thing to notice is that these
two scenarios are exactly the same. I'm asking is ten
dollars worth the walk, or isn't it. It's the same
(09:20):
ten dollars either way. But in the first case, most
people will do it to pay nineteen instead of twenty nine.
And in the second case, almost nobody's gonna make that
walk two blocks just to pay five point fifty seven
instead of five to sixty seven. And this illustrates an
important point, which is that nothing is judged by itself.
Everything is judged in context. You are not homo economicus. Okay,
(09:47):
Now I'm gonna make you an offer. You can have
one of two things. I'm either gonna give you a
chocolate bar shaped like a computer keyboard or a candle
with a little drawer built into it that holds magticks.
So which one are you going to take? This is
a difficult decision, right because how do you translate these
(10:08):
into a common currency so you know which one has
more value to you. The reason this is a challenge
is because everything has to be converted into a common
currency to make a comparison, and this has to happen
at the level of neural activity, and that's tough when
you have such different items. This is the same if
(10:30):
I give you some other comparison like I'll give you
three apples, or a case for your sunglasses that shaped
like a hot dog? How do you convert that into
a common currency to make a direct comparison. So what
the brain is always looking for is context. It can't
make a decision about the value of something unless it
(10:53):
can do a direct head to head comparison. And this
ends up being an important clue for people who are
trying to sell you something because none of us know
how to price something, so we need to be told.
So here's an example. This happened with Williams Sonoma some
years ago. They introduced a home bread bakery. It's like
(11:16):
a large toast drub in that makes a loaf of
bread for you. And they put a price tag on
it around two hundred and seventy five dollars and it
was a perfectly good product, but sales wise, it failed completely.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
No one was buying it. Why.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
It's because people saw it on the shelf and they thought,
what is a home bread bakery anyway?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Is this a good one? Do I need it?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
So Williams Sonoma took on a research firm who advised
them to get a hold of a second homebread bakery
a slightly bigger one that was more expensive and put
it on the shelves next to.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
The first one. So they did that, and you know what,
the first bread bakery started selling. Why.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
It's because people did have to make a decision in
a vacuum. Now, now they could think, okay, well, I
don't know much about home breadmakers, but this one seems
to take up less counter space and it's less expensive,
so that seems like it's the right choice.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
So the customer's brains were given something that they.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Could compare and that allowed them to secure a decision.
And this trick of giving context, by the way, is
an old trick in real estate. So let's say you're
an agent and you're trying to sell someone a medium
sized traditional home.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
But the prospective buyers.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Are torn between that one and some modern home, and
they're stuck because these two homes are as different as
the chocolate keyboard and the candlestick. So what do you
do as the real estate agent to get them unstuck.
What you do is you show them another mid sized
traditional home, one that's a little bit worse. Maybe the
(12:55):
kitchen is outdated, or it's covered in wood paneling. So
This is known is the decoy effect, because you don't
expect them to buy this other home you've just shown them.
But what you're doing is you're giving their valuation systems
something it can understand. The brain can now compare the
slightly worse traditional home against the slightly better traditional home,
(13:17):
the one where the kitchen doesn't need an update.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
So they see this in context.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Now and it allows them to lock down a decision.
In general, everything in your brain is priced by comparison
to other things that are like it, and this is
because the brain stores its knowledge by association what is
related to what and how. So you're not going to
(13:44):
pay twenty five dollars for a bag of chips because
you have lots of experience with bags of chips and
they're not supposed to cost that much. But interestingly, there
is a way that companies can change where an item
sits in your network of associations. So, for example, some
of you may remember a time where you could drive
(14:05):
anywhere the na should and get a cup of coffee
for fifty cents. But when Starbucks launched, they didn't want
to sell their coffee for fifty cents, so they built
Starbucks to feel like a continental European coffee house, and
they had the place filled with the smell of roasted beans,
and they sold coffee presses and piscatti and croissants, and
(14:28):
they were creating a different experience, so different that we
wouldn't use the prices of the diners as an anchor
anymore for the price of coffee. So yeah, they even
changed the sizes they sold, so small, medium, and large
became tall, grande, and venti. And this made it so
(14:50):
that in your network of associations, you didn't link Starbucks
coffee with diner coffee, but instead with something different and fancier,
and therefore your valuation of the cup of coffee doesn't
feel off. So I was in Seattle a while ago,
and I saw a McDonald's billboard that was taking a
(15:12):
shot at Starbucks. The sign said four dollars for a
coffee is done. And what struck me as funny is
that homoeconomicists totally gets McDonald's message supply and demand and
so on, but real humans simply don't care. We get
something out of our experience with Starbucks, and therefore we're
willing to value a blonde vanilla latte differently. So now
(15:52):
I've told you how the brain thinks about value, how
much is something worth? But as I said at the beginning,
this is only part how the brain makes decisions. There
are other competing areas involved, and we turn to the
second act now, which is about emotions. Economists used to
think that all decision making in humans was a rational
(16:15):
process ua costs and benefits, and that tips your decision.
But recently the importance of emotions has come into the
spotlight because emotions are a critical part of the language
of the unconscious. It's not all about logic irrationality. We're
not just information processing devices. Our lives are richly painted
(16:38):
by emotion, and these influence decision making. So one basic
example is that you will make harsher moral judgments when
you're in a room that smells bad. This shows the
role of emotions like discuss in decision making about things
that you might think are higher level concepts. Okay, now
(17:00):
I'll give you another example, one that's been making the
rounds in philosophy for a little while. In part one
of this series, I mentioned the trolley dilemma.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Here's a quick reminder.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
A trolley is barreling down the train tracks out of control.
Five workers are making repairs way down the track, and you,
a bystander, quickly realize that they're all going to be
killed by the trolley. But you also notice there's a
lever nearby that you can throw, and that will divert
the trolley down a different track where only a single
(17:34):
worker will be killed.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
So what do you do?
Speaker 1 (17:36):
If you're like most people, you pull the lever, because
it's better to have one person killed than five. Now,
in the second scenario of the trolley dilemma, the same
trolley's barreling down the tracks. The same five workers are
in harm's way, But this time you are a bystander
on a footbridge that goes over the tracks, and you
(17:57):
notice that there's a large man standing on the footbridge,
and you realize that if you were to push him
off the bridge, his bulk would be sufficient to stop
the train and save the five workers.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Do you push him off? Now?
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Most people here just won't do it. Even now, the
math is exactly the same. You're trading one life for
five lives. The only difference is the issue of touching
the person with your bare hands or not. And as
I mentioned last time, when my colleagues did brain scanning.
They found that in the first case, the networks that
come online are just those involved with doing math problems essentially.
(18:40):
But in the second case, you've got these emotional networks
coming online too, these networks in the orbit of frontal cortex,
and that entirely changes your decision. So the networks involved
in emotion are very powerful drivers of decision making, and
this plays a bit role in how we select products,
(19:02):
how we make economic decisions. So when companies are interested
in plugging into these networks, they don't use terms like
we have an integrated approach or we give a comprehensive solution.
Those things don't talk to these orbital frontal networks at all. Instead,
companies say things like don't hate me because I'm beautiful,
(19:25):
or are you man enough to eat this burger? And
the idea is to plug right into the emotional networks
to steer your decision making. And it doesn't have to
be big and explicit, but also includes everything you've ever.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Seen in any ad.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Beautiful people loving the product being advertised, They smile beautifully
when they touch or look at the product. If it's cereal,
it's a family that's so happy and attractive and they
don't have any problems if it's for an adult audience.
The stars of the commercial are smiling at each other.
The camera lingers for just a moment longer to make
(20:05):
it clear that this is all a prelude to something
that's inevitably going to happen between them. In other words,
the appeal isn't to these networks that are concerned with valuation,
but instead the networks that drive primitive emotions.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
These have tremendous.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Power in the neural parliament that drives your decisions. So
now I've mentioned the brain networks involved in valuation and
those involved in emotion, and there's one more which brings
us to Act three. Traditionally, we study the brain by
(20:44):
looking at different regions and mapping what they're involved in,
like this is the region for vision, and over here
is where hearing takes place, and this area is involved
in touch and so on. But an enormous amount of
the circuitry of the brain has to do with other people,
understanding other people. We have an enormous amount of circuitry
(21:05):
devoted towards issues of trust or integrity, or the reputation
of other people in our tribe or in modern life,
it's others we meet all over the world, as well
as celebrities we've never even met. Bizarrely, so much of
our circuitry is devoted to social concerns. I can even
(21:26):
ask you, hey, does that person in your thousand contacts
that you know know this other person? And you'll pretty
much know immediately whether they know each other? And how
think about that? It's like a thousand by a thousand
matrix of data that's being stored there that you can
just call up in an instant And these sorts of
(21:47):
considerations about how much our brains care about other people
has led to a new subfield called social neuroscience. Now,
something quite amazing, it's surprising that I studied in my
lab with brain imaging, is that to the brain, companies
(22:07):
are just like people. We evolved in small groups and
developed this very rich social circuitry to understand each other
and to understand issues of trust and integrity and reputation
of every person in the group. But companies came along
just in the last second of our evolutionary history, and
obviously Mother Nature hasn't had time to rewrite the brain
(22:31):
to understand companies, so we use exactly the same circuitry,
as we do when we think about other people. So
we study this in my lab by having people read
a vignette about a person that does something something either
good or bad or suspicious, and we measure how different
brain regions respond to a person behaving this way. And
(22:54):
then we show these same vignettes to other people, but
we swapped out the name of the person with the
name of a company, and the brain regions that respond
are exactly the same. Evolutionarily, companies are something new and
we haven't evolved new circuitry to understand them. So we
(23:14):
understand a company exactly the same way with the same
circuitry that we use to understand other people. Is that
company trustworthy? Does the company have integrity? What is that
company's social reputation? And you see this on Facebook where
people are friends with people and they're friends with companies.
(23:39):
And by the way, in the legal system, there's a
legal fiction in which we treat corporations like individuals. So
the corporation can be guilty of a crime, can be
liable of a crime, and so on. In fact, the
word corporation means body. Now it might seem hard to
believe that companies and social reputation are tied so closely.
(24:04):
But let's take a typical example. Look at what happened
when one major company tied their reputation to a clean cut,
admirable young man and they got all the benefits from that.
I'm talking about Nike, who tied themselves to Tiger Woods.
He was in their advertising and his superstar power directly
(24:24):
lifted their economics because he was awesome, and so people
felt like cool, Nike is awesome and same way. But
then one day in two thousand and nine, the news
hit Twitter that he was cheating on his wife. Now
you can go back and look at a chart of
Nike stock that day. The news of his infidelity hit
Twitter at eleven forty am, and you can see the
(24:47):
immediate effect on the Nike stock price, which continued to
drop precipitously for the rest of the day and for
the next six months.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Even though Tiger.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Woods has nothing to do with the manufacturing or distribution
or the quality of the shoes, his infidelity soiled the
company's reputation in the social brain. If he didn't have
integrity at that moment, then something becomes wrong with the shoes. Now,
what I want to point out is this is not
just an economic phenomenon, it's a social phenomenon, and fundamentally,
(25:21):
it's a neuroscientific phenomenon. These social circuits evolved when we
operated in small tribes. They weren't really built to operate
at the level of multinational companies, and as a result,
companies get to ride on this circuitry for free. But
it also means that companies need to be aware that
(25:43):
they're operating with these basic friend or faux circuits. It
means that companies need to treat their customers like tribe members.
And I'm not saying this just as a friendly business philosophy.
I'm saying this because the same circuitry is being used
and because of social media, these sorts of social exchanges
have taken an unexpected evolutionary leap forward because they are
(26:09):
unerasable now. So here's an example. Some years ago, there
was a young man traveling on United Airlines and he
had to check his guitar through the baggage plane. So
he's sitting on the plane when they're on the runway
and he's watching the guys load the luggage in and
he sees the luggage handlers toss his guitar as they're
(26:29):
loading it. And when this guy gets to the destination,
he discovers his guitar is broken, so he complains to
United Airlines, but they tell him they can't take responsibility
for it and he has to pay for his own guitar.
So he gets mad and he writes a guitar song
and he puts it on YouTube and it's called United
breaks Guitars, and this goes viral and the Economist magazine
(26:53):
wrote an article into which they estimated that this guy
cost United Airlines one hundred and thirty million dollars. Why
because social reputation matters, and the Internet has made reputational
issues fast and instant and uneasable, and all this ties
into how companies use social media. So when Facebook first
(27:17):
got introduced as a concept many years ago, all companies
immediately started thinking about this as Okay, how do we
start a Facebook account and post on our feeds and
get people to buy our product? But this turned out
to be a fail because people weren't going to Facebook
with the intention of being sold to, So companies realize
(27:38):
pretty quickly it's not about selling directly. But the reason
I have a Facebook account was about branding. In other words,
how could they develop a social reputation? How could they
talk to these networks in the brain to make you
feel like they are your friend? So I just looked
this up. As of this morning, Burger King has over
(28:01):
eight point six million people following them. That's more than
Stephen Colbert. Now what sober adult clicks to be friends
with a fast food restaurant. The key is that they're
not selling on their feed. They're strengthening their connection with you,
like you're a friend. They say chatty things like you
(28:23):
like us, we love you. They're just like a living,
breathing person. And this is what companies do to plug
in to these networks. So I was in Texas recently
(28:47):
and I noticed a billboard that said the most quote
liked energy company in Texas. You can choose your own
energy provider there. So I wondered, what is there to
like about an energy In other words, why on social
media would you click to light them? So I went
and looked them up on Facebook. They had three hundred
thousand friends. So a month ago, I was on an
(29:10):
airplane and sitting next to a guy and we started
chatting about this, and he says, oh, yeah, I'm a
member of that company. So first I was struck that
he didn't say customer, he said member. So I thought,
I need to understand what exactly this company is doing
that makes them so light. So I went to their
web page, and on their site, they're hitting all three
(29:31):
of these neural networks that I talked about. So in
one part of their homepage, they're plugging right into the
valuation networks. They say they're the least expensive company and
they'll save you tons of money, and they have pictures
of dollar bills snowing down. Now next to that, they
have a picture that shows when you buy your energy
from them, they'll give you points that can be turned
(29:54):
into rewards, and they have pictures of airline tickets and
coffee and cash. And this section plugs right into the
orbit of frontal networks.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
They care about reward. And right below that.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
They have a section on the page that plugs into
social context. It says, when you earn, your friends earn.
And there's an attractive young woman holding a sign that
tells us her name is Stacy, and behind us are
a group of her attractive friends, and they're holding a
sign that says friends of Stacy what you can read
(30:28):
on their faces is that they're all so taken with
Stacy because she's earning money for them. She's earning and
everyone likes her, and they're happy and thriving and good
looking and have a tight relationship, and they're cheering.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
For Stacy with no hesitation. They really like her.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Possibly some of them are in love with her. And
this plugs right into the social networks that tell you
that your friends think this is cool. So this company
is doing a textbook job of hitting all the appaxis
to align these networks in your brain so you don't
have to feel like, yeah, they're inexpensive but they're boring,
(31:08):
or they're socially cool but they're too expensive or whatever.
They're firing on all cylinders and that's how they're able
to attract so many likes. Now, I'll mention something else.
When I went to their page, it told me that
two of my friends like this energy company. Now, who
spends their time liking an energy company? But I want
(31:30):
to point out that this has been one of the
most important tools of social media, not just the like button,
but the notification that your friends like this. Because brains
are so social, we really care about that situation. We
buy what our friends buy. We care about what our
friends care about. We are social animals, and things have
(31:53):
enormous sway. If our friends like it, that little message
plugs right into these networks telling us that it's cool.
And this is why social marketing is so effective. Think
about it this way. Would you pay one hundred and
twenty nine dollars for some weird new earbuds that were
green and hung halfway down your face? Maybe we could
(32:16):
be more likely to do it if your friends were
all doing it. If when you saw the ad for
those you saw that Bob and Tonica and Wag. We're
all doing it because we're social animals and we care
what our friends do. If they like it, we like it.
This is the basis of all trends, which are almost
(32:37):
always things that we look back on after a decade
and we can't.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Believe what we did or what we wore or what
we bought.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
But at the time we did it, everyone was doing it,
and that was the basis of the coolness. That was
what plugged into these networks in the midline of your brain.
Here economists talk about faith in the market, but the
reason this all has so much influence on our behin
behavior is because of faith in the social market. We
(33:04):
can't possibly have time to research everything, but we assume,
almost always erroneously, that if our friend has bought that thing,
it must be because he or sheet has invested the
time researching it and weighing all the options and selecting
the killer perfect brand or model. So that gives us
(33:27):
faith and we can save time because our friend, who
we like because they're smart, or simply good looking, or
simply because they like us back, if that person has
chosen this brand, then it must be awesome where they
wouldn't have done it, And that's why the social brain
is so critical to our decisions. So zooming out, we
(33:48):
make our purchasing decisions based on these three networks, price point,
the emotional feeling, and social context. And there are other
networks involved as well, but these are some of the biggies.
And the key is that these are all running as
a team of rivals. These systems are always battling it
(34:09):
out under the surface, and it's all unconscious, which means
you don't have access to the details.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
So when you choose to get.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
A burger at one fast food place over another, you
don't ask, am I buying this because of the price point,
because of the emotional salience of the salt and fat
and the colors used in the restaurant, or because their
ads feature beautiful young people in love and that reminds
me of my friends and my social life, or what
I wish it were. When you're at the store choosing
(34:39):
between ice cream brands, when you're scanning the ben and
Jerry's and Bluebell and Hoggin'daws, you don't have access to
the details of the battles going on under the wood.
You simply wait for a feeling to get served up
to your consciousness, and then you reach out and grab
one container off the shelf and not the others. So
keep this in mind the next time you're choosing between brands.
(35:02):
Why are you choosing this one? What are the elements
that are influencing your decision? Might you make a different
choice if you become aware of the parts that are
influencing you. You can't change the wiring of your brain,
but you can become more aware of what steers you. Okay,
(35:24):
So the previous episode was called how is the brain like?
A Team of Rivals? And in this episode we dove
into specific examples of different drives that pull our behavior
in different directions. So I hope you'll join me for
the next episode, Part three, where we will discuss how
we can take this knowledge and use it to navigate
(35:47):
our own behavior. Because you have systems in your brain
that deal not only with what is right in front
of you, but also that do you long term thinking.
So how do you get yourself to do the right
thing in the moment? How do you balance networks that
care about the now with networks that care about who
you are and who you want to be? How do
(36:09):
you forego temptation that's not aligned with your long term goals?
How is your decision about eating that cookie related to
the hero of the Trojan War. I'll see you there
in the next episode for the culmination of everything that
we've been talking about so far.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
That's all for this week.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
To find out more and to share your thoughts, head
over to Eagleman dot com, slash Podcasts, and you can
also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos on YouTube. Subscribe
to my channel so you can follow along each week
for new updates. I'd love to hear your questions, so
please send those to podcasts at eagleman dot com and
(36:52):
I will do a special episode where I answer questions
until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner
Cosmo
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