Synopsis of talk at TIE Entrepreneurial Summit 2011

Part 1 covered the power of incentives, neuroeconomics and how Gallup developed method to measure emotional connect between customers and organizations. There was explanation on how a feeling of unfairness can trigger strong reactions with a variety of examples. Then the ultimatum game was used to show how people respond to situations emotionally rather than rationally. The effect of framing and how it can affect responses was explained. How loss aversion affects important decisions was explained with some examples.

Click here to read part 1

Part 2 starts explaining that human beings without exceptions are highly biased. First optimism bias was explained followed by reference or anchoring effect and relative positioning bias. The tendency of linking price to quality was explained and comparison between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations was made. Finally there is explanation on how brain research supports the need for leaders to set examples for others to follow.

Click here to read part 2

We are mostly driven by our subconscious mind

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Let us first examine what we mean by subconscious mind.

Subconscious mind is nothing but the neural pathways that have been established in our brains as a result of our past beliefs and conditioning.

Research has established that while brain size has increased by about 350% over human evolution, blood flow to the brain increased by an amazing 600%. The increase in the supply of blood to the brain appears to be closely linked to the evolution of human intelligence where the human brain has evolved to become not only larger, but more energetically costly and blood thirsty than previously believed.

The brain therefore has developed two important mechanisms to conserve energy by way of ‘Latent Inhibition’ and ‘Cognitive Biases’.

Latent Inhibition is the unconscious capacity of the brain to ignore stimuli that experience has shown to be irrelevant to our needs. This is critical, as scientists estimate that we are exposed to several million pieces of information at any one time, but our brains can deal with only about forty. On the flip side, Latent Inhibition makes us miss out many important things that happen around us.

The other type of optimization occurs by way of cognitive biases which are a result of our brain’s attempt to drastically simplify information processing by using rules of thumb, heuristics or mental shortcuts. The downside here is that these cognitive biases, which operate without our explicit awareness, often tend to make us take very irrational decisions.

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In fact, Dan Ariely, well known behavioral economist, in his ground-breaking book ‘Predictably Irrational’, explores this phenomenon and demonstrates that people make the same mistakes time and again in predictable ways.

It is clear from research that even though we are aware of our consciousness, it is the unconscious mind operating quietly in the background that is really running our lives.

All of us who are more than five years old operate from unconscious levels of our mind approximately 95% of the time and not surprisingly children under six years rarely use conscious processes at all. The subconscious mind of children continually acquires behavioral programs by observing people who influence them like mother, father, family or community. These programs, which are subconsciously registered and strengthened by repeated observations, run the show for the rest of their lives unless they are consciously changed with a lot of effort.

It should therefore come as no surprise that many of our childhood experiences really drive our behavior without our explicit awareness.

The early sensory-motor and emotional memories of infants and toddlers are created and nurtured by the Amygdala, Thalamus, Cerebellum and Orbital Medial Prefrontal structures of the brain. This system organizes and retains the primitive vestibular-sensory-emotional memories of early caretaking. What makes this very significant is that these memories become the foundation of our belief systems when we grow up.

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In his book “The Neuroscience of Human Relationships”, Louis Cozolino says “ Because the first few years of life are a period of exuberant brain development, early experience has a disproportionate impact on the development of neural systems. In this way, early negative interpersonal experiences become a primary source of the symptoms for which people seek relief in psychotherapy.”.

Although most of our important social and emotional lessons occur during our early years, we have little or no conscious memory of learning them.

This phenomenon, referred to as Infantile Amnesia, is due to the immaturity or lack of full development of hippocampal-cortical networks, whose functioning is required and critical for the conscious recollection of the learning process. Despite our lack of explicit memory for these experiences, we are nevertheless driven by these early lessons of life.

It must be highlighted that the subconscious mind does handle many onerous responsibilities. It keeps our body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It keeps our heart beating at a certain rate and it also keeps us breathing regularly. It effectively uses our autonomic nervous system, to maintain the right balance among the hundreds of chemicals that reside in our billions of cells so that our entire physical machine functions in complete harmony. It is also the source and storehouse of our emotions.

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Subconscious is a storehouse of all your learnings. Once you learn how to do a certain task, then it becomes a habit stored away in your subconscious memory and you don’t need to learn it again. If there was no subconscious mind, then on a daily basis you would have to relearn every function.

Thus we learn how to walk with our conscious mind, but once the behavior is fully learned, we no longer need to think about it. The subconscious now controls the act of walking unless we decide to consciously control our steps. Again, when we stop thinking about it, the subconscious mind resumes control.

Subconscious mind is many times more powerful and responds faster than the conscious mind. The conscious mind processes information at an approximate rate of 40 bits of information per second, while the subconscious mind processes approximately 40 million bits of information per second. It is worth noting that when we drive a car we use around thirty different skills without being aware of it.

Cozolino says “ Research has found that, although it takes our brain 400-500 milliseconds to bring sensations to conscious awareness, it takes only 14 milliseconds to implicitly react to, and categorize, visual information.”

We need to note that the subconscious mind does not think or make any moral judgments. It only knows what it has been taught and holds them as true beliefs. Accordingly, it directs our thoughts and actions in tune with the entrenched programming.

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In his book “Strangers to Ourselves”, Timothy Wilson presents a superb view of the reasons why the unconscious mind is inaccessible to self-analysis: “The bad news is that it is difficult to know ourselves because there is no direct access to the adaptive unconscious, no matter how hard we try. This is mainly because our minds have evolved to operate largely outside of our consciousness.”

Wilson suggests that we are better off by combining introspection with observing how others react to us, and deducting the otherwise inaccessible nature of our minds from their responses. If others see us differently than we see ourselves, we need to incorporate this alternative view of ourselves into our personal narrative.

This is the reason why I have been emphasizing for many years now, that we need honest feedback from people who love us enough to tell us the truth which, if we take in the right spirit, will help us change our behavior to build better relationships.

We now know that all our habits of thinking and acting are stored in our subconscious mind. But more significantly, our subconscious mind clearly demarcates our comfort zones and works really hard to keep us as much as possible in these comfort zones.

“WHATEVER WE PLANT IN OUR SUBCONCIOUS MIND AND NOURISH EVERYDAY WITH REPITITION AND EMOTION WILL ONE DAY BECOME A REALITY.”
– EARL NIGHTINGALE

Whenever we try to change any of our established patterns of behavior, our subconscious mind makes us feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable. At that time, we can feel our subconscious pulling us back towards our comfort zone. Even thinking about doing something different from what we are accustomed to, will automatically trigger a tense feeling and unease.

McKinsey studies done in the years 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010 have repeatedly confirmed that 70% of corporate change initiatives have failed to meet their stated objectives. Many Behavioral Scientists believe that resistance of people to move away from their comfort zones may be a big contributing factor for these failures.

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Research has established that less than one percent of all the information that the mind takes in, actually reaches our awareness. Likewise, most of how we react to that information remains outside our awareness. Let us examine what we miss out in the process.

A psychologist made a one-minute videotape of three students passing a basket ball back and forth. At one point in the video a woman wearing a white victorian gown and carrying a white parasol strolled through the game and her passage took about four seconds.

Before playing the video, the psychologist asked the participants to watch the video and report how many times the ball was tossed back and forth. At the end of the video, participants came out with numbers like 23, 24 or 25 as the number of ball tosses. Then the psychologist asked them if they saw anything unusual. The participants were perplexed with the question, as they did not notice any thing unusual. However when the video was replayed, most people were flabbergasted to see, for the first time, the woman walking through the game.

Thus, while the selectivity of our attention or focus usually helps us, it also means that we do not notice many things – and more importantly, we do not realize that we have not noticed.

To summarize, we cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. Similarly, when we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind prompting us to greet. Thus our acts are essentially end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a complex structure of habits and learned skills. We need to understand and appreciate that most of our life is enacted without our conscious awareness.

 

Understanding False Memories

Our memories are wrong at least as often as they are right. At best, they are incomplete, though we might swear otherwise. This affects countless aspects of our lives, and in many cases the decisions that we take purely depending on our memories can have far reaching consequences to the lives of others.

Thus False Memories, which are the erroneous recollection of events that did not actually occur become important to understand because they have the potential to derail relationships simply because the parties simply relied too much on their memories. Even worse, it can send innocent people to prison.

Among the most surprising discoveries about human memory is the realization that remembering a past event is not like picking a DVD off the shelf and playing it back. Remembering involves an elaborate process of reconstruction from information stored in various parts of the brain.

We store assorted features of an event as representations that are distributed around the brain. In simple terms, visual features are represented near the back of the brain in the areas specialized for visual processing, sounds are stored in auditory processing regions close to the ears and smells are stored in the olfactory system that lies behind the nose.

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To experience the rich, vivid “re-living” of a past event, the brain gathers all these features and puts it together into a representation of what took place.

LET US TRY TO UNDERSTAND MEMORIES A LITTLE BETTER

Loss of memory, and creation of new memory, is central to a relatively efficient system of information processing that never sleeps. The selective movement of information into long-term memory is an adaptive marvel of efficiency that allows our brains to store crucial pieces of information that we will rely on in the future, and at the same time shed information not worth holding onto. The process is not neat and tidy, and memory selectivity often works against us like in cases where we would rather like to forget a hurtful event. But when you view the process through the lens of species survival, it makes abundant sense. It is important to remember that during the human evolution, it was crucial to remember where the best sources of food were located, where the best hunting grounds were located, which areas needed to be avoided lest you became something else’s dinner and clarity on how to return safely back home. For our ancestors, reliance on memory of particular details was a matter of life and death.

There are two types of memories ‘verbatim’ and ‘gist’.

Verbatim traces are memories of what actually happened. Gist traces, on the other hand, are based on a person’s understanding of what happened, or what the particular event meant to him or her. Over a period of time the Verbatim traces fade away unless the event itself was emotionally charged. Ultimately what gets retained is only Gist traces.

Information retrieved from memory is simultaneously processed in two specific regions of the brain, each of which focuses on different aspect of a past event. The medial temporal lobe (MTL), located at the base of the brain, focuses on specific facts about the event, the verbatim part. The frontal parietal network (FPN), located at the top of the brain, on the other hand processes the global gist of the event.

The specific brain area accessed when one tries to remember something can ultimately determine whether the the memory is true or false.

THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF MEMORY ‘VERBATIM’ AND ‘GIST’. OVER A PERIOD OF TIME VERBATIM TRACES FADE AWAY. ULTIMATELY WHAT GETS RETAINED IS ONLY GIST TRACES

During the brain scans, Roberto Cabeza, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University found that volunteers who were highly confident in memories that were indeed true showed increased activity in the fact-oriented MTL region.

“This would make sense, because the MTL, with its wealth of specific details, would make the memory seem more vivid,” Cabeza said. “For example, thinking about your breakfast this morning, you remember what you had, the taste of the food, the people you were with. The added richness of these details makes one more confident about the memory’s truth.”

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On the other hand, volunteers who showed high confidence in memories that turned out to be false exhibited increased activity in the impressionistic FPN. The people drawing from this area of the brain recalled the gist or general idea of the event, and while they felt confident about their memories, they were often mistaken, since they could not recall the details of the memory.

“Specific memories don’t last forever, but what ends up lasting are not specific details, but more general or global impressions,” Cabeza said.

What we do not realize is that other events that occur after the original event can change the memory of the original event. Think of the scenario where at the time original event occurred, you and your cousin were close friends. But later on you have an argument and a falling-out that lasts for years. Your memory of the first event might now include your cousin being aloof and cold, even if that was not true. The later experience has changed your memory.

You will also start to fill in your memory gaps with “made up” sequences of events, but these will seem as real to you as the original event. You can’t remember who else was at the family dinner, but Aunt Jolene is usually present at these events, and so over time your memory of the event will include Aunt Jolene.

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“SPECIFIC MEMORIES DON’T LAST FOREVER, BUT WHAT ENDS UP LASTING ARE NOT SPECIFIC DETAILS, BUT MORE GENERAL OR GLOBAL IMPRESSIONS,” CABEZA SAID.

Have you ever embellished a story—or just made something up—and re-told the not-entirely-true version enough times that you could no longer distinguish between fact and fiction?

It is also not that difficult to implant false memories. In an interesting experiment, Daniel Schacter, Psychology Professor at Harvard University, was able to implant a “false memory” in more than half of the audience. He recited a list of 15 words, including candy, sugar, and taste. A minute or two later, he asked the audience whether certain words were on the original list. Taste, most everyone agreed, was. Nail was not. In both instances, the audience was correct. Lastly, Schacter asked if sweet was on the list. Nearly every hand went up. “Are you absolutely certain it was on the list?” Schacter asked. Some hands went down, but a majority was confident it was on the list. It was not. Most of the words were related to sweet; that association helped contribute to the false memory.

Similarly, It is easy to mix up memories so that things that happened at two separate events become fused into one.

Australian eyewitness expert Donald Thomson appeared on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. He was later arrested, placed in a lineup and identified by a victim as the man who had raped her. The police charged Thomson although the rape had occurred at the time he was on TV. They dismissed his alibi that he was in plain view of a TV audience and in the company of the other discussants, including an assistant commissioner of police. The policeman taking his statement sneered, “Yes, I suppose you’ve got Jesus Christ, and the Queen of England, too.” Eventually, the investigators discovered that the real rapist had attacked the woman as she was watching TV – the very program on which Thompson had appeared. Authorities eventually cleared Thomson. The woman had confused the rapist’s face with the face that she had seen on TV.

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Witness testimony has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system, revered in courtrooms and crime dramas as the evidence that clinches a case.

If memory flaws only affected our personal past, that would be bad enough. But the problems created by our mistaken recollections affect all of society. More than 75,000 prosecutions every year are based entirely on the recollections of others. While perjury is a felony, the overwhelming majority of eyewitness errors aren’t conscious or intentional. Rather, they’re the inevitable side effects of the remembering process.

Forensic technology has now led to many such convictions being overturned. The Innocence Project in the US campaigns to overturn eyewitness misidentification and lists all the people who have subsequently been acquitted.

The project reports that there have been 311 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the US, which includes 18 people who were sentenced to death before DNA evidence was able to prove their innocence. Unfortunately, many of them had already served dozens of years in prison.

We need to appreciate that human memory has not evolved so that an observer may accurately report previously seen events. The actual, physical events are merely grist for the mill of interpretation. We need to appreciate that each witness extracts an interpretation of the event that is meaningful in terms of his own beliefs, experiences and needs. Once the interpretation is done and the interpreted information is stored away, the event itself becomes relatively unimportant. Moreover, since each person interprets the event in terms of his own world view, different eyewitnesses observing the same event may have different interpretations and therefore different memories.

TO PUT IT SUCCINCTLY

We do not see what we sense but what we think we sense. What our consciousness is actually presented with, is an interpretation of the event and not the raw data.

The whole process starts with a quick interpretation of the event.  Once the interpretation is done, then the raw sensory data is mostly discarded. What is important to note is that the transformation from raw data to interpretation occurs automatically and outside our awareness.

One mystery that is somewhat alarming emerged from case reports of Innocence Project. Despite being innocent having not committed the crime, nevertheless around a quarter of the accused who were later exonerated had, in fact, confessed or pleaded guilty to the offences.

It seems hard to imagine that anyone of sound mind would take the blame for something he did not do. But several researchers have found that it was surprisingly easy to make people confess to invented misdemeanors.

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Admittedly these confessions are taking place in a laboratory rather than an interrogation room, so the stakes might not appear that high to the confessor. On the other hand, the pressures that can be brought to bear in a police station are much stronger than those in a lab. The upshot is that it seems worryingly simple to extract a false confession from someone—which he might find hard subsequently to retract.

Elizabeth Loftus has dedicated most of her life’s work and energy to creating a vivid and brilliant model and theory showing that the memory is amazingly inventive and fragile. In one of her experiments, Loftus gave a group of volunteers the rudimentary outlines of a childhood experience: getting lost in a mall and being rescued by a kindly adult. She told the subjects, falsely, that the scenario was real and had taken place when they were young. (For verisimilitude, Loftus asked their parents for biographical details that she could plant in each story.) Then she debriefed the subjects twice, with the interviews separated by one or two weeks. By the second interview, six of the twenty-four test subjects had internalized the story, weaving in sensory and emotional details of their own. Loftus and other researchers have since used similar techniques to create false memories of near-drownings, animal attacks, and encounters with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.

It’s important to point out that a false memory is different from a lie. Liars know what really happened, but claim something different. People with false memories honestly believe what they’re saying—there is no intent to deceive. They’re just wrong about what actually happened, for predictable reasons.

The main difference between false memories and lies is awareness: people are unaware that a memory is false, but are fully cognizant of the truth when lying or concealing incriminating information.

The British False Memory Society (BFMS) is a registered charity formed in 1993 to deal with issues relating to false memory.

False memory is creating severe problems in the field of alleged sexual abuse.  The Society acknowledges and abhors the fact that there are many genuine cases of child abuse that may require the application of the criminal law. However, what is happening is that a number of people, usually during psychotherapy or counselling, are recovering ‘memories’ of having been sexually abused in childhood, even though those accused – usually, but not always, their parents – strongly deny such abuse and there is no real corroborating evidence to support such abuse.  A worrying feature of these cases is that the accusers did not remember being abused prior to receiving therapy. Thus these could be cases of planted memory.

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Not surprisingly, such memories, if false, have severe consequences both for the person concerned and for his or her family. It is not uncommon for a whole network of family relationships to be destroyed as a result.

The phenomenon of false memories is common to 
everybody. You may recall, for example, the party you were certain that you attended many year ago in high school, say, when, in fact, you were home down with the flu. The false memory is created because so many people told you about the party over the years that the details made their way into your own memory cache.

False memories can be dismissed sometimes as a mere curiosity, but quite often they have real implications. For instance, innocent people have gone to jail when well-intentioned eyewitnesses testified to events that actually unfolded in an entirely different way.

We tend to develop overconfidence in our memories as in our daily experience we recall events, especially the important ones, easily and often. Unfortunately, we rarely find our memories contradicted by evidence and we also do not take any initiative to check if they are right.

 

Critical need to understand Tribalism in the current volatile environment

The idea that humans have a need to belong to social groups is very fundamental in psychology. Belonging does not just feel good but is often essential for our very survival, even in modern times.

As Jane Howard, biographer of anthropologist Margaret Mead, puts it “Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”

We now have strong evidence that human evolution has produced natural tendencies in people to favor members of their own group and to distrust and disadvantage outsiders. Insider-outsider distinctions seem to be innate and well entrenched. This favoritism is the result of substantial benefits derived from group solidarity in early human evolution, and we still live with this grouping tendency even today.

As social animals we depend on our groups, our tribes, literally for our survival. And it would be consistent with that interpretation that the more threatened we feel, by economic uncertainty, or threats of terrorism, or environmental doom and gloom, the more we circle the wagons of our opinions to keep the tribe together and keep ourselves safe.

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IN-GROUP AND OUT-GROUP:
It’s a well-known principle in social psychology that people define themselves in terms of social groupings and are quick to denigrate others who don’t fit into their groups. People who share our particular qualities are our “in-group,” and those who do not are our “out-group.”

Let us take a look at Social Identity theory. Psychologists Tajfel, Billig and Turner have shown that part of our social identity comes from those groups with whom we associate. Interestingly, we show this strong bias in favor of ‘in-group’ members, even when the groups are arbitrarily formed. Tajfel demonstrated this in an experiment where he assigned people randomly into groups but, although everyone had seen and noted that the assignment was random, they still showed a preference for members of their group over other people, even going to the extent of giving rational arguments about how unpleasant and immoral the ‘out-group’ people were.

The term group here is rather a loose expression as it refers to any type of grouping starting from your classmates, office colleagues, same club members, working mothers or social activists, depending on your individual sense of belonging to a particular cluster.

The in-group may also consist of a tribe, a religious group, speakers of a common language, or, within nations, interest groups such as workers, gun owners, or farmers. Each person is typically a member of several groups, each of which can potentially command this sort of loyalty.

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Perhaps there is some survival mechanism at work in formulating in-group-out-group distinctions. In our desire to feel safe, we bond together with those whom we see as most like us so that we can protect ourselves from those who might do us harm. The virtual fences we build to keep the outsiders away allows us to lead our daily lives with a feeling of being protected and secure. However, it is precisely these fences that keep us from bonding with our fellow human beings which in fact, may compromise our true security.

Many a times tribal loyalties tend to override objectivity and rational decision making. One such manifestation of group loyalty was reported in The New York Times, where the Orthodox Jews of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn shunned a neighbor after learning that he told police about a man – a fellow Jew – who was sexually abusing his son. As an objective person you would think that a father protecting his son would be the sort of behavior that would be honored, appreciated and supported. Unfortunately, such objectivity is thrown to the winds if it is disloyal to the tribe.

We have also read reports that show this dangerous tribe-centered attitude by Catholic Church authorities abandoning their morals and severely compromising the safety of vulnerable children by covering up, ignoring, or denying extensive evidence of child abuse by a small number of priests.

The severest form of tribalism that is tearing the world apart is religious fanaticism.

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Scott Atran, Hammad Sheikh and Angel Gomezc gave very interesting insights in their interviews with United States officials familiar with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed “Caliph” of the Islamic State, and his close circle, including General Douglas Stone, who commanded Camp Bucca where they were held.

They suggest that these jihadists were absolutely committed “purists,” completely devoted to their idea of Sharia and the Caliphate, and willing to do anything for it and were willing to use violence to instill blood lust among their followers and terror among enemies. They also believe that the unconditional commitment to comrades, in conjunction with their sacred cause, may be what allows low-power groups to endure and often prevail against materially stronger foes.

Let there be no doubts that tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior, readily overriding reason. Think of the inhuman things we do in the name of tribal unity. Wars are essentially, and often quite specifically, tribalism. Genocides are tribalism – wipe out the other group to keep our group safe – taken to madness. Racism that lets us feel that our tribe is better than theirs, parents who end contact with their own children when they dare marry someone of a different faith or color – are all examples of tribalism trumping common sense and objectivity.

Something that goes almost unquestioned in many circles is nationalism which is another strong form of tribalism. Nationalists are concerned with their fellow citizens, regardless of the effect on outsiders. Nationalists are willing to sacrifice their own self-interest in order to harm outsiders, e.g., in war, for the benefit of co-nationals.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor was very honest when she said “Let me let you in on a little secret. There is no such thing as an international community. There are only self-maximizing, self-interested states that will push their interests as far as possible.”

CULTURAL COGNITION IS THE THEORY THAT WE SHAPE OUR OPINIONS TO CONFORM TO THE VIEWS OF THE GROUP WITH WHICH WE MOST STRONGLY IDENTIFY.

The reason for this is that it creates solidarity in the group, which increases the chances that our group’s views, influence and power will prevail in society which, incidentally, is how political parties work.

It is clear to any observer that people are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion.

This is because they trust them more, relax with them better in business and social events, and prefer them more often than not as marriage partners. They are quicker to anger at evidence that an out-group is behaving unfairly or receiving undeserved rewards. And they grow hostile to any out-group encroaching upon the territory or resources of their in-group.

When in experiments black and white Americans were flashed pictures of the other race, their amygdalas, the brain’s center of fear and anger, were activated so quickly and subtly that the conscious centers of the brain were unaware of the response. The subject, in effect, could not help himself.

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When, on the other hand, appropriate context like the approaching black being a doctor of the white American observer was added, then the situation changed as the two higher learning centers viz. the cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral preferential cortex of the brain got activated, silencing threat response from the amygdala.

Eva Telzer of UCLA and three other researchers report that when they extended these amygdala studies on children they found something very interesting. The racial sensitivity of the amygdala is not noticeable until around the age fourteen and even once it kicks in, its effect is not uniform across people. For instance, children exposed to more racially diverse peer group exhibited less strong amygdala effect. In fact, at really high levels of diversity, the effect disappeared altogether. The authors of the study suggest that neural biases to race therefore are not innate and that race is actually a social construction, learned over time.

It is worthwhile pointing out that shifting strong tribal conflicts from the very real battlefield of war and mutual human destruction to sports arenas and video games can be looked at as a civilizational progress. Victories in team sports can provide the satisfaction of showing the superiority of their own group over the other groups without the damaging consequences of real conflicts.

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IIM Indore Foundation speech

Synopsis:

I had the privilege of delivering the 13th Foundation Day speech at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore and took the opportunity to highlight amazing insights that brain research has been throwing up in the last two decades which have great relevance to business as well as other leaders especially in the current challenging environment.

In the first half, I talked about behavioral economics findings showing how our unconscious biases make us behave irrationally and how tribalism or strong in-group vs out-group distinctions drive people to take extreme positions leading to conflicts.

I talked about optimism bias affects our decisions and how feelings of un-fairness and status anxiety can trigger disproportionately strong reactions.

I touched upon belief systems, Cognitive Dissonance, framing and loss aversion.

In the second half of the talk I emphasized how intrinsic motivation is lot more effective than extrinsic motivation. I then explained how anchoring bias is exploited by retailers and most critically stressed the need for leaders to walk the talk, I showed how people are vulnerable to priming and the contagious nature of human behavior. I touched upon neuro-marketing and ended with the need to understand false memories.

Will be happy to hear your comments.

Part 1

Part 2

 

 

Insights from Neuroscience and Brain Research.

UNDERSTANDING BELIEFS

I have always been fascinated by various facets of human behavior. Neuroscience and Brain Research have started providing great insights into the rationale behind some arguably perplexing aspects of human behaviour and we are now able to explain “why people behave the way they do? “

The subject of Neuroscience, of course, is very vast and is incredibly interesting which is the reason why it has attracted more than ten thousand researchers in the US alone.

My desire is to discuss these fascinating findings, especially related to human behaviour, through this NeuroInsights blog.

I welcome your comments as well as other perspectives.

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Let me take up the subject of beliefs first because we see the world through our belief filters, which is the reason why different people see the world differently. We need to appreciate that irrespective of how various beliefs come to take root in us, we nevertheless live our lives as if all our beliefs are real facts, even though many of them are not.

More importantly, we also lack the requisite ability to change our beliefs even when we are confronted with plenty of evidence that questions the very foundations of our beliefs. This is simply because our beliefs are amazingly resilient, since they get neurologically connected and become part of our memory and emotional infrastructure. Further, as these beliefs get practiced repeatedly over a long period of time, they become our entrenched behaviors at which point of time, they become very difficult, if not impossible to change.

Let us first examine what we mean by beliefs. Belief is some-thing that one accepts with a strong conviction as true and real. It could also be a feeling of being sure that someone or something exists or even a conviction that something is either good or bad, is right or wrong or is valuable or useless.

BELIEFS ARE MAINLY ACQUIRED THROUGH A COLLECTION OF INTERPRETATIONS AND FEELINGS BASED ON OUR PAINFUL OR PLEASURABLE EXPERIENCES OF THE PAST.

As a simple example, we know that fire can hurt because we have had experience that touching fire is painful. The more complex example is our belief that it pays to adjust and toe the line of powerful people rather than confront them. This belief may be the result of childhood experiences in dealing with powerful members in our family.

There is a widespread acknowledgement that the coping behaviors learned in childhood have great strength and persistence and can be changed only with considerable effort. What is stored in this firmware is the sub-conscious cataloging of strategies that did or did not work while we tried to cope with our environment during our childhood. These beliefs are so strongly embedded in us that they become our subconscious behavior-controlling programming.

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What is surprising is that we are not-at-all conscious of how and when we acquired at least some of our beliefs. One reason given for this is that although most of our important social and emotional lessons occur during our early years, we have little or no conscious memory of learning them. This phenomenon, referred to as “Infantile Amnesia”, is due to the immaturity, during childhood, of hippocampal cortical networks, whose functioning is required and essential for the conscious recollection of the learning process. Despite our lack of explicit memory for these experiences, they nevertheless come to form the infrastructure of our lives. We unconsciously interpret these early lessons as the ‘givens’ of life, rarely noticing that they are powerfully influencing and guiding our moment-to-moment experiences.

Beliefs could also be the result of Cultural Cognition, which is the theory that posits that we shape our opinions and form our beliefs in order to conform to the views of the groups with which we most strongly identify. In our desire to feel safe, we bond together with all those who are more like us so that we can protect ourselves from those who might do us harm.

Michael Shermer, a well-known science writer, postulated the concept of Belief-Dependent-Realism.

He says, that we form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, emotional and psychological reasons due to the influence of family, friends, colleagues, culture and society at large. Once we form our beliefs, we then defend, justify and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments and rational explanations. Beliefs come first and explanations for such beliefs then follow. In his book “The Believing Brain”, he calls this process, wherein our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about them, as belief-dependent realism.

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We need to appreciate that reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of that reality depends on the beliefs that we hold at any given time.

It may sound strange if I claim, that the brain is not that much interested in truth or reality. The brain is fundamentally focused on self-preservation and is constantly trying to create its own sense of reality through beliefs. The brain then goes on to seek out and incorporate external information that further strengthens its beliefs.

Shankar Vedantam, author of ‘Hidden Brain’, says that facts do not matter as much as people generally believe. Telling people facts that go against their strongly held beliefs can be counter-productive. In-fact, it makes them dig-in their heels even deeper.

Stanford University Psychologist Leon Festinger beautifully sums it up.

“A MAN WITH A CONVICTION IS A HARD MAN TO CHANGE. TELL HIM YOU DISAGREE AND HE TURNS AWAY. SHOW HIM FACTS AND FIGURES AND HE QUESTIONS YOUR SOURCES. APPEAL TO LOGIC AND HE FAILS TO SEE YOUR POINT.”

It is worth repeating that most of our beliefs originate from the time we were children. They are not necessarily based on facts, but are based more on our perception of events as they were unfolding. We try to model ourselves around people who played significant roles in our lives – parents, teachers, religious leaders, older siblings etc.

One reason why placebos show similar impact like the drug, is because of our belief system. A placebo, as you know, is a pretend drug, a “sugar pill,” that is prescribed for a patient with the expectation that the patient’s belief in the efficacy of the drug will actually cause it to have an effect. And not surprisingly it does. The effect is real and is not imaginary. There was a report, sometime back, of a man who tried to kill himself by taking an overdose of pills that turned out to be placebos. However, the man’s blood pressure dropped precipitously, as it might have done if the drug had inherent physiological effects.

It should be noted that everyone is subject to the placebo effects and it is not something that occurs only in weak-minded subjects. However, the effectiveness of placebo effect depends on a number of factors like the seriousness of the condition for which the drug is being given, the emotional state of the patient, and the stature of the physician prescribing the drug.

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“Though the placebo effect remains largely shrouded in mystery, researchers attribute some aspects of the placebo response to active mechanisms in the brain that can influence bodily processes such as the immune response and release of hormones” says Amanda Enayati in a CNN article.

Incidentally, Neuroimaging studies have shown that, at the level of the brain, belief in Ganesha with the head of an elephant or the belief that a black cat crossing your path will bring you bad luck are no different than belief that two plus two equals four or Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India. Since beliefs are a result of learning, we can’t remove or eliminate superstitious beliefs easily just as we can’t eliminate learning itself.

This is the reason why it is so difficult to eliminate prejudices against one section of society or the other including the gender bias against women.

On the positive side, belief systems are not necessarily bad since we use our beliefs to give structure to the enormous, chaotic world in which we live. They help us to have a clear sense of who we are and what groups we belong to. And beliefs often help us, as human beings, to cope with and manage a variety of things that are too large in scope for our brains to comprehend.

I look forward to your comments.

nsraghavan