Category Archives: Neuroscanning

Does Social Media “Dumb Down” the Wisdom of Crowds?

We assume that democracy is the gold standard of sustainable political social contracts. And it’s hard to argue against that. As Winston Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

Democracy may not be perfect, but it works. Or, at least, it seems to work better than all the other options. Essentially, democracy depends on probability – on being right more often than we’re wrong.

At the very heart of democracy is the principle of majority rule. And that is based on something called Jury Theorem, put forward by the Marquis de Condorcet in his 1785 work, Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions. Essentially, it says that the probability of making the right decision increases when you average the decisions of as many people as possible. This was the basis of James Suroweicki’s 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds.

But here’s the thing about the wisdom of crowds – it only applies when those individual decisions are reached independently. Once we start influencing each other’s decision, that wisdom disappears. And that makes social psychologist Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments of 1951 a disturbingly significant fly in the ointment of democracy.

You’re probably all aware of the seminal study, but I’ll recap anyway. Asch gathered groups of people and showed them a card with three lines of obviously different lengths. Then he asked participants which line was the closest to the reference line. The answer was obvious – even a toddler can get this test right pretty much every time.

But unknown to the test subject, all the rest of the participants were “stooges” – actors paid to sometimes give an obviously incorrect answer. And when this happened, Asch was amazed to find that the test subjects often went against the evidence of their own eyes just to conform with the group. When wrong answers were given, a third of the subjects always conformed, 75% of the subjects conformed at least once, and only 25% stuck to the evidence in front of them and gave the right answer.

The results baffled Asch. The most interesting question to him was why this was happening. Were people making a decision to go against their better judgment – choosing to go with the crowd rather than what they were seeing with their own eyes? Or was something happening below the level of consciousness? This was something Solomon Asch wondered about right until his death in 1996. Unfortunately, he never had the means to explore the question further.

But, in 2005, a group of researchers at Emory University, led by Gregory Berns, did have a way. Here, Asch’s experiment was restaged, only this time participants were in a fMRI machine so Bern and his researchers could peak at what was actually happening in their brains. The results were staggering.

They found that conformity actually changes the way our brain works. It’s not that we change what we say to conform with what others are saying, despite what we see with our own eyes. What we see is changed by what others are saying.

If, Berns and his researchers reasoned, you were consciously making a decision to go against the evidence of your own eyes just to conform with the group, you should see activity in the frontal areas of our brain that are engaged in monitoring conflicts, planning and other higher-order mental activities.

But that isn’t what they found. In those participants that went along with obviously incorrect answers from the group, the parts of the brain that showed activity were only in the posterior parts of the brain – those that control spatial awareness and visual perception. There was no indication of an internal mental conflict. The brain was actually changing how it processed the information it was receiving from the eyes.

This is stunning. It means that conformity isn’t a conscious decision. Our desire to conform is wired so deeply in our brains, it actually changes how we perceive the world. We never have the chance to be objectively right, because we never realize we’re wrong.

But what about those that went resisted conformity and stuck to the evidence they were seeing with their own eyes? Here again, the results were fascinating. The researchers found that in these cases, they saw a spike of activity in the right amygdala and right caudate nucleus – areas involved in the processing of strong emotions, including fear, anger and anxiety. Those that stuck to the evidence of their own eyes had to overcome emotional hurdles to do so. In the published paper, the authors called this the “pain of independence.”

This study highlights a massively important limitation in the social contract of democracy. As technology increasingly imposes social conformity on our culture, we lose the ability to collectively make the right decision. Essentially, is shows that this effect not only erases the wisdom of crowds, but actively works against it by exacting an emotional price for being an independent thinker.

The Physical Foundations of Friendship

It’s no secret that I worry about what the unintended consequences might be for us as we increasingly substitute a digital world for a physical one. What might happen to our society as we spend less time face-to-face with people and more time face-to-face with a screen?

Take friendship, for example. I have written before about how Facebook friends and real friends are not the same thing. A lot of this has to do with the mental work required to maintain a true friendship. This cognitive requirement led British anthropologist Robin Dunbar to come up with something called Dunbar’s Number – a rough rule-of-thumb that says we can’t really maintain a network of more than 150 friends, give or take a few.

Before you say, “I have way more friends on Facebook than that,” realize that I don’t care what your Facebook Friend count is. Mine numbers at least 3 times more than Dunbar’s 150 limit. But they are not all true friends. Many are just the result of me clicking a link on my laptop. It’s quick, it’s easy, and there is absolutely no requirement to put any skin in the game. Once clicked, I don’t have to do anything to maintain these friendships. They are just part of a digital tally that persists until I might click again, “unfriending” them. Nowhere is the ongoing physical friction that demands the maintenance required to keep a true friendship from slipping into entropy.

So I was wondering – what is that magical physical and mental alchemy that causes us to become friends with someone in the first place? When we share physical space with another human, what is the spark that causes us to want to get to know them better? Or – on the flip side – what are the red flags that cause us to head for the other end of the room to avoid talking to them? Fortunately, there is some science that has addressed those questions.

We become friends because of something in sociology call homophily – being like each other. In today’s world, that leads to some unfortunate social consequences, but in our evolutionary environment, it made sense. It has to do with kinship ties and what ethologist Richard Dawkins called The Selfish Gene. We want family to survive to pass on our genes. The best way to motivate us to protect others is to have an emotional bond to them. And it just so happens that family members tend to look somewhat alike. So we like – or love – others who are like us.

If we tie in the impact of geography over our history, we start to understand why this is so. Geography that restricted travel and led to inbreeding generally dictated a certain degree of genetic “sameness” in our tribe. It was a quick way to sort in-groups from out-groups. And in a bloodier, less politically correct world, this was a matter of survival.

But this geographic connection works both ways. Geographic restrictions lead to homophily, but repeated exposure to the same people also increases the odds that you’ll like them. In psychology, this is called mere-exposure effect.

In these two ways, the limitations of a physical world has a deep, deep impact on the nature of friendship. But let’s focus on the first for a moment. 

It appears we have built-in “friend detectors” that can actually sense genetic similarities. In a rather fascinating study, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler found that friends are so alike genetically, they could actually be family. If you drill down to the individual building blocks of a gene at the nucleotide level, your friends are as alike genetically to you as your fourth cousin. As Christakis and Fowler say in their study, “friends may be a kind of ‘functional kin’.”

This shows how deeply friendships bonds are hardwired into us. Of course, this doesn’t happen equally across all genes. Evolution is nothing if not practical. For example, Christakis and Fowler found that specific systems do stay “heterophilic” (not alike) – such as our immune system. This makes sense. If you have a group of people who stay in close proximity to each other, it’s going to remain more resistant to epidemics if there is some variety in what they’re individually immune to. If everyone had exactly the same immunity profile, the group would be highly resistant to some bugs and completely vulnerable to others. It would be putting all your disease prevention eggs in one basket.

But in another example of extreme genetic practicality, how similar we smell to our friends can be determined genetically.  Think about it. Would you rather be close to people who generally smell the same, or those that smell different? It seems a little silly in today’s world of private homes and extreme hygiene, but when you’re sharing very close living quarters with others and there’s no such thing as showers and baths, how everyone smells becomes extremely important.

Christakis and Fowler found that our olfactory sensibilities tend to trend to the homophilic side between friends. In other words, the people we like smell alike. And this is important because of something called olfactory fatigue. We use smell as a difference detector. It warns us when something is not right. And our nose starts to ignore smells it gets used to, even offensive ones. It’s why you can’t smell your own typical body odor. Or, in another even less elegant example, it’s why your farts don’t stink as much as others. 

Given all this, it would make sense that if you had to spend time close to others, you would pick people who smelled like you. Your nose would automatically be less sensitive to their own smells. And that’s exactly what a new study from the Weizmann Institute of Science found. In the study, the scent signatures of complete strangers were sampled using an electronic sniffer called an eNose. Then the strangers were asked to engage in nonverbal social interactions in pairs. After, they were asked to rate each interaction based on how likely they would be to become friends with the person. The result? Based on their smells alone, the researchers were able to predict with 71% accuracy who would become friends.

The foundations of friendship run deep – down to the genetic building blocks that make us who we are. These foundations were built in a physical world over millions of years. They engage senses that evolved to help us experience that physical world. Those foundations are not going to disappear in the next decade or two, no matter how addictive Facebook or TikTok becomes. We can continue to layer technology over these foundations, but to deny them it to ignore human nature.

Using Science for Selling: Sometimes Yes, Sometimes No

A recent study out of Ohio State University seems like one of those that the world really didn’t need. The researchers were exploring whether introducing science into the marketing would help sell chocolate chip cookies.

And to us who make a living in marketing, this is one of those things that might make us say “Duh, you needed research to tell us that? Of course you don’t use science to sell chocolate chip cookies!”

But bear with me, because if we keep asking why enough, we can come up with some answers that might surprise us.

So, what did the researchers learn? I quote,

“Specifically, since hedonic attributes are associated with warmth, the coldness associated with science is conceptually disfluent with the anticipated warmth of hedonic products and attributes, reducing product valuation.”

Ohio State Study

In other words – much simpler and fewer in number – science doesn’t help sell cookies. And it’s because our brains think differently about some things than other.

For example, a study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior (Casado-Aranda, Sanchez-Fernandez and Garcia) found that when we’re exposed to “hedonic” ads – ads that appeal to pleasurable sensations – the parts of our brain that retrieve memories kicks in. This isn’t true when we see utilitarian ads. Predictably, we approach those ads as a problem to be solved and engage the parts of our brain that control working memory and the ability to focus our attention.

Essentially, these two advertising approaches take two different paths in our awareness, one takes the “thinking” path and one takes the “feeling” path. Or, as Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman would say, one takes the “thinking slow” path and one takes the “thinking fast” path.

Yet another study begins to show why this may be so. Let’s go back to chocolate chip cookies for a moment. When you smell a fresh baked cookie, it’s not just the sensory appeal “in the moment” that makes the cookie irresistible. It’s also the memories it brings back for you. We know that how things smell is a particularly effective way to trigger this connection with the past. Certain smells – like that of cookies just out of the oven – can be the shortest path between today and some childhood memory. These are called associative memories. And they’re a big part of “feeling” something rather than just “thinking” about it.

At the University of California – Irvine – Neuroscientists discovered a very specific type of neuron in our memory centers that oversee the creation of new associative memories. They’re called “fan cells” and it seems that these neurons are responsible for creating the link between new input and those emotion-inducing memories that we may have tucked away from our past. And – critically – it seems that dopamine is the key to linking the two. When our brains “smell” a potential reward, it kicks these fan cells into gear and our brain is bathed in the “warm fuzzies.” Lead research Kei Igarashi, said,

“We never expected that dopamine is involved in the memory circuit. However, when the evidence accumulated, it gradually became clear that dopamine is involved. These experiments were like a detective story for us, and we are excited about the results.”

Kei Igarashi – University of California – Irvine

Not surprisingly – as our first study found – introducing science into this whole process can be a bit of a buzz kill. It would be like inviting Bill Nye the Science Guy to teach you about quantum physics during your Saturday morning cuddle time.

All of this probably seems overwhelmingly academic to you. Selling something like chocolate chip cookies isn’t something that should take three different scientific studies and strapping several people inside a fMRI machine to explain. We should be able to rely on our guts, and our guts know that science has no place in a campaign built on an emotional appeal.

But there is a point to all this. Different marketing approaches are handled by different parts of the brain, and knowing that allows us to reinforce our marketing intuition with a better understanding of why we humans do the things we do.

Utilitarian appeals activate the parts of the brain that are front and center, the data crunching, evaluating and rational parts of our cognitive machinery.

Hedonic appeals probe the subterranean depths of our brains, unpacking memories and prodding emotions below the thresholds of us being conscious of the process. We respond viscerally – which literally means “from our guts”.

If we’re talking about selling chocolate chip cookies, we have moved about as far towards the hedonic end of the scale as we can. At the other end we would find something like motor oil – where scientific messaging such as “advanced formulation” or “proven engine protection” would be more persuasive. But almost all other products fall somewhere in between. They are a mix of hedonic and utilitarian factors. And we haven’t even factored in the most significant of all consumer considerations – risk and how to avoid it. Think how complex things would get in our brains if we were buying a new car!

Buying chocolate chip cookies might seem like a no brainer – because – well – it almost is. Beyond dosing our neural pathways with dopamine, our brains barely kick in when considering whether to grab a bag of Chips Ahoy on our next trip to the store. In fact, the last thing you want your brain to do when you’re craving chewy chocolate is to kick in. Then you would start considering things like caloric intake and how you should be cutting down on processed sugar. Chocolate chip cookies might be a no-brainer, but almost nothing else in the consumer world is that simple.

Marketing is relying more and more on data. But data is typically restricted to answering “who”, “what”, “when” and “where” questions. It’s studies like the ones I shared here that start to pick apart the “why” of marketing.

And when things get complex, asking “why” is exactly what we need to do.

Why Our Brains Struggle With The Threat Of Data Privacy

It seems contradictory. We don’t want to share our personal data but, according to a recent study reported on by MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan, we want the brands we trust to know us when we come shopping. It seems paradoxical.

But it’s not — really.  It ties in with the way we’ve always been thinking.

Again, we just have to understand that we really don’t understand how the data ecosystem works — at least, not on an instant and intuitive level. Our brains have no evolved mechanisms that deal with new concepts like data privacy. So we have borrowed other parts of the brain that do exist. Evolutionary biologists call this “exaption.”

For example, the way we deal with brands seems to be the same way we deal with people — and we have tons of experience doing that. Some people we trust. Most people we don’t. For the people we trust, we have no problem sharing something of our selves. In fact, it’s exactly that sharing that nurtures relationships and helps them grow.

It’s different with people we don’t trust. Not only do we not share with them, we work to avoid them, putting physical distance between us and them. We’d cross to the other side of the street to avoid bumping into them.

In a world that was ordered and regulated by proximity, this worked remarkably well. Keeping our enemies at arm’s length generally kept us safe from harm.

Now, of course, distance doesn’t mean the same thing it used to. We now maneuver in a world of data, where proximity and distance have little impact. But our brains don’t know that.

As I said, the brain doesn’t really know how digital data ecosystems work, so it does its best to substitute concepts it has evolved to handle those it doesn’t understand at an intuitive level.

The proxy for distance the brain seems to use is task focus. If we’re trying to do something, everything related to that thing is “near” and everything not relevant to it is “far. But this is an imperfect proxy at best and an outright misleading one at worst.

For example, we will allow our data to be collected in order to complete the task. The task is “near.” In most cases, the data we share has little to do with the task we’re trying to accomplish. It is labelled by the brain as “far” and therefore poses no immediate threat.

It’s a bait and switch tactic that data harvesters have perfected. Our trust-warning systems are not engaged because there are no proximate signs to trigger them. Any potential breaches of trust happen well after the fact – if they happen at all. Most times, we’re simply not aware of where our data goes or what happens to it. All we know is that allowing that data to be collected takes us one step closer to accomplishing our task.

That’s what sometimes happens when we borrow one evolved trait to deal with a new situation:  The fit is not always perfect. Some aspects work, others don’t.

And that is exactly what is happening when we try to deal with the continual erosion of online trust. In the moment, our brain is trying to apply the same mechanisms it uses to assess trust in a physical world. What we don’t realize is that we’re missing the warning signs our brains have evolved to intuitively look for.

We also drag this evolved luggage with us when we’re dealing with our favorite brands. One of the reasons you trust your closest friends is that they know you inside and out. This intimacy is a product of a physical world. It comes from sharing the same space with people.

In the virtual world, we expect the brands we know and love to have this same knowledge of us. It frustrates us when we are treated like a stranger. Think of how you would react if the people you love the most gave you the same treatment.

This jury-rigging of our personal relationship machinery to do double duty for the way we deal with brands may sound far-fetched, but marketing brands have only been around for a few hundred years. That is just not enough time for us to evolve new mechanisms to deal with them.

Yes, the rational, “slow loop” part of our brains can understand brands, but the “fast loop” has no “brand” or “data privacy” modules. It has no choice but to use the functional parts it does have.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are multiple studies that indicate that it’s these parts of our brain that fire instantly, setting the stage for all the rationalization that will follow. And, as our own neuro-imaging study showed, it seems that the brain treats brands the same way it treats people.

I’ve been watching this intersection between technology and human behaviour for a long time now. More often than not, I see this tendency of the brain to make split-section decisions in environments where it just doesn’t have the proper equipment to make those decisions. When we stop to think about these things, we believe we understand them. And we do, but we had to stop to think. In the vast majority of cases, that’s just not how the brain works.

Media: The Midpoint of the Stories that Connect Us

I’m in the mood for navel gazing: looking inward.

Take the concept of “media,” for instance. Based on the masthead above this post, it’s what this site — and this editorial section — is all about. I’m supposed to be on the “inside” when it comes to media.

But media is also “inside” — quite literally. The word means “middle layer,” so it’s something in between.

There is a nuance here that’s important. Based on the very definition of the word, it’s something equidistant from both ends. And that introduces a concept we in media must think about: We have to meet our audience halfway. We cannot take a unilateral view of our function.

When we talk about media, we have to understand what gets passed through this “middle layer.” Is it information? Well, then we have to decide what information is. Again, the etymology of the word “inform” shows us that informing someone is to “give form to their mind.” But that mind isn’t a blank slate or a lump of clay to be molded as we want. There is already “form” there. And if, through media, we are meeting them halfway, we have to know something about what that form may be.

We come back to this: Media is the midpoint between what we, the tellers,  believe, and what we want our audience to believe. We are looking for the shortest distance between those two points. And, as self-help author Patti Digh wrote, “The shortest distance between two people is a story.”

We understand the world through stories — so media has become the platform for the telling of stories. Stories assume a common bond between the teller and the listener. It puts media squarely in the middle ground that defines its purpose, the point halfway between us. When we are on the receiving end of a story, our medium of choice is the one closest to us, in terms of our beliefs and our world narrative. These media are built on common ideological ground.

And, if we look at a recent study that helps us understand how the brain builds models of the things around us, we begin to understand the complexity that lies within a story.

This study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences shows that our brains are constantly categorizing the world around us. And if we’re asked to recognize something, our brains have a hierarchy of concepts that it will activate, depending on the situation. The higher you go in the hierarchy, the more parts of your brain that are activated.

For example, if I asked you to imagine a phone ringing, the same auditory centers in your brain that activate when you actually hear the phone would kick into gear and give you a quick and dirty cognitive representation of the sound. But if I asked you to describe what your phone does for you in your life, many more parts of your brain would activate, and you would step up the hierarchy into increasingly abstract concepts that define your phone’s place in your own world. That is where we find the “story” of our phone.

As psychologist Robert Epstein  says in this essay, we do not process a story like a computer. It is not data that we crunch and analyze. Rather, it’s another type of pattern match, between new information and what we already believe to be true.

As I’ve said many times, we have to understand why there is such a wide gap in how we all interpret the world. And the reason can be found in how we process what we take in through our senses.

The immediate sensory interpretation is essentially a quick and dirty pattern match. There would be no evolutionary purpose to store more information than is necessary to quickly categorize something. And the fidelity of that match is just accurate enough to do the job — nothing more.

For example, if I asked you to draw a can of Coca-Cola from memory, how accurate do you think it would be? The answer, proven over and over again, is that it probably wouldn’t look much like the “real thing.”

That’s coming from one sense, but the rest of your senses are just as faulty. You think you know how Coke smells and tastes and feels as you drink it, but these are low fidelity tags that act in a split second to help us recognize the world around us. They don’t have to be exact representations because that would take too much processing power.

But what’s really important to us is our “story” of Coke. That was clearly shown in one of my favorite neuromarketing studies, done at Baylor University by Read Montague.

He and his team reenacted the famous Pepsi Challenge — a blind taste test pitting Coke against Pepsi. But this time, they scanned the participant’s brains while they were drinking. The researchers found that when Coke drinkers didn’t know what they were drinking, only certain areas of their brains activated, and it didn’t really matter if they were drinking Coke or Pepsi.

But when they knew they were drinking Coke, suddenly many more parts of the brain started lighting up, including the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is usually involved in creating our own personal narratives to help us understand our place in the world.

And while the actual can of Coke doesn’t change from person to person, our Story of Coke can be an individual to us as our own fingerprints.

We in the media are in the business of telling stories. This post is a story. Everything we do is a story. Sometimes they successfully connect with others, and sometimes they don’t. But in order to make effective use of the media we chose as a platform, we must remember we can only take a story halfway. On the other end there is our audience, each of whom has their own narratives that define them. Media is the middle ground where those two things connect.

The Split-Second Timing of Brand Trust

Two weeks ago, I talked about how brand trust can erode so quickly and cause so many issues. I intimated that advertising and branding have become decoupled — and advertising might even erode brand trust, leading to a lasting deficit.

Now I think that may be a little too simplistic. Brand trust is a holistic thing — the sum total of many moving parts. Taking advertising in isolation is misleading. Will one social media ad for a brand lead to broken trust? Probably not. But there may be a cumulative effect that we need to be aware of.

In looking at the Edelman Trust Barometer study closer, a very interesting picture emerges. Essentially, the study shows there is a trust crisis. Edelman calls it information bankruptcy.

The slide in trust is probably not surprising. It’s hard to be trusting when you’re afraid, and if there’s one thing the Edelman Barometer shows, it’s that we are globally fearful. Our collective hearts are in our mouths. And when this happens, we are hardwired to respond by lowering our trust and raising our defenses.

But our traditional sources for trusted information — government and media — have also abdicated their responsibilities to provide it. They have instead stoked our fears and leveraged our divides for their own gains. NGOs have suffered the same fate. So, if you can’t trust the news, your leaders or even your local charity, who can you trust?

Apparently, you can trust a corporation. Edelman shows that businesses are now the most trusted organizations in North America. Media, especially social media, is the least trusted institution. I find this profoundly troubling, but I’ll put that aside for a future post. For now, let’s just accept it at face value.

As I said in that previous column, we want to trust brands more than ever. But we don’t trust advertising. This creates a dilemma for the marketer.

This all brings to mind a study I was involved with a little over 10 years ago. Working with Simon Fraser University, we wanted to know how the brain responded to trusted brands. The initial results were fascinating — but unfortunately, we never got the chance to do the follow-up study we intended.

This was an ERP study (event-related potential), where we looked at how the brain responded when we showed brand images as a stimulus. ERP studies are useful to better understand the immediate response of the brain to something — the fast loop I talk so much about — before the slow loop has a chance to kick in and rationalize things.

We know now that what happens in this fast loop really sets the stage for what comes after. It essentially makes up the mind, and then the slow loop adds rational justification for what has already been decided.

What we found was interesting: The way we respond to our favorite brands is very similar to the way we respond to pictures of our favorite people. The first hint of this occurred in just 150 milliseconds, about one-sixth of a second. The next reinforcement was found at 400 milliseconds. In that time, less than half a second in total, our minds were made up. In fact, the mind was basically made up in about the same time it takes to blink an eye.  Everything that followed was just window dressing.

This is the power of trust. It takes a split second for our brains to recognize a situation where it can let its guard down. This sets in motion a chain of neurological events that primes the brain for cooperation and relationship-building. It primes the oxytocin pump and gets it flowing. And this all happens just that quickly.

On the other side, if a brand isn’t trusted, a very different chain of events occurs just as quickly. The brain starts arming itself for protection. Our amygdala starts gearing up. We become suspicious and anxious.

This platform of brand trust — or lack of it — is built up over time. It is part of our sense-making machinery. Our accumulating experience with the brand either adds to our trust or takes it away.

But we must also realize that if we have strong feelings about a brand, one way or the other, it then becomes a belief. And once this happens, the brain works hard to keep that belief in place. It becomes virtually impossible at that point to change minds. This is largely because of the split-second reactions our study uncovered.

This sets very high stakes for marketers today. More than ever, we want to trust brands. But we also search for evidence that this trust is warranted in a very different way. Brand building is the accumulation of experience over all touch points. Each of those touch points has its own trust profile. Personal experience and word of mouth from those we know is the highest. Advertising on social media is one of the lowest.

The marketer’s goal should be to leverage trust-building for the brand in the most effective way possible. Do it correctly, through the right channels, and you have built trust that’s triggered in an eye blink. Screw it up, and you may never get a second chance.

Social Media Reflects Rights Vs. Obligations Split

Last week MediaPost writer (and my own editor here on Media Insider) Phyllis Fine asked this question in a post: “Can Social Media Ease the Path to Herd Immunity?” The question is not only timely, but also indicative of the peculiar nature of social media that could be stated thus: for every point of view expressed, there is an equal — and opposite — point of view. Fine’s post quotes a study from the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Zurich, which reveals, “Anti-vaccination supporters find fertile ground in particular on Facebook and Twitter.”

Here’s the thing about social media. No matter what the message might be, there will be multiple interpretations of it. Often, the most extreme interpretations will be diametrically opposed to each other. It’s stunning how the very same content can illustrate the vast ideological divides that separate us.

I’ve realized that the only explanation for this is that our brains must work differently. We’re not even talking apples and oranges here. This is more like ostrich eggs and vacuum cleaners.

This is not my own revelation. There’s a lot of science behind it. An article in Scientific American catalogs some of the difference between conservative and liberal brains. Even the actual structure is different. According to the article: “The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives.”

We have to understand that a right-leaning brain operates very differently than a left-leaning brain. Recent neuro-imaging studies have shown that they can consider the very same piece of information and totally different sections of their respective brains light up. They process information differently.

In a previous post about this topic, I quoted biologist and author Robert Sapolsky as saying, “Liberals are more likely to process information systematically, recognize differences in argument quality, and to be persuaded explicitly by scientific evidence, whereas conservatives are more likely to process information heuristically, attend to message-irrelevant cues such as source similarity, and to be persuaded implicitly through evaluative conditioning. Conservatives are also more likely than liberals to rely on stereotypical cues and assume consensus with like-minded others.”

Or, to sum it up in plain language: “Conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head.”

This has never been clearer than in the past year. Typically, the information being processed by a conservative brain would have little overlap with the information being processed by a liberal brain. Each would care and think about different things.

But COVID-19 has forced the two circles of this particular Venn diagram together, creating a bigger overlap in the middle. We are all focused on information about the pandemic. And this has created a unique opportunity to more directly compare the cognitive habits of liberals versus conservatives.

Perhaps the biggest difference is in the way each group defines morality. At the risk of a vast oversimplification, the right tends to focus on individual rights, especially those they feel they’re personally are at risk of losing. The left thinks more in terms of societal obligations: What do we need to do — or not do — for the greater good of us all?  To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, conservatives ask what their country can do for them; liberals ask what they can do for their country.

This theory is part of Jonathon Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. What Haidt, working with others, has found is that both the right and left have morals, but they are defined differently. This “moral pluralism” means that two people can look at the same social media post but take two entirely different messages from it. And both will insist their interpretation is the correct one. Liberals can see a post about getting a vaccine as an appeal to their concern for the collective well being of their community. Conservatives see it as an attack on their personal rights.

So when we ask a question like “Can social media ease the path to herd immunity?” we run into the problem of message interpretation. For some, it will be preaching to the choir. For others, it will have the same effect as a red cape in front of a bull.

It’s interesting that the vaccine question is being road-blocked by this divide between rights and obligations. It shows just how far the two sides are apart. With a vaccine, at least both sides have skin in the game. Getting a vaccine can save your life, no matter how you vote. Wearing a face mask is a different matter.

In my lifetime, I have never seen a more overt signalling of ideological leanings than whether you choose to wear a face mask or not. When we talk about rights vs obligations, this is the ultimate acid test. If I insist on wearing a mask, as I do, I’m not wearing it for me, I’m wearing it for you. It’s part of my obligation to my community. But if you refuse to wear a mask, it’s pretty obvious who you’re focused on.

The thing that worries me the most about this moral dualism is that a moral fixation on individual rights is not sustainable. It’s assuming that our society is a zero-sum game. In order for me to win, you must lose. If we focus instead on our obligations, we approach society with an abundance mentality. As we contribute, we all benefit.

At least, that’s how my brain sees it.

To Be There – Or Not To Be There

According to Eventbrite, hybrid events are the hottest thing for 2021. So I started thinking, what would that possibly look like, as a planner or a participant?

The interesting thing about hybrid events is that they force us to really think about how we experience things. What process do we go through when we let the outside world in? What do we lose if we do that virtually? What do we gain, if anything? And, more importantly, how do we connect with other people during those experiences?

These are questions we didn’t think much about even a year ago. But today, in a reality that’s trying to straddle both the physical and virtual worlds, they are highly relevant to how we’ll live our lives in the future.

The Italian Cooking Lesson

First, let’s try a little thought experiment.

In our town, the local Italian Club — in which both my wife and I are involved — offered cooking lessons before we were all locked down. Groups of eight to 12 people would get together with an exuberant Italian chef in a large commercial kitchen, and together they would make an authentic dish like gnocchi or ravioli. There was a little vino, a little Italian culture and a lot of laughter. These classes were a tremendous hit.

That all ended last March. But we hope to we start thinking about offering them again late in 2021 or 2022. And, if we do, would it make sense to offer them as a “hybrid” event, where you can participate in person or pick up a box of preselected ingredients and follow along in your own kitchen?

As an event organizer, this would be tempting. You can still charge the full price for physical attendance where you’re restricted to 12 people, but you could create an additional revenue stream by introducing a virtual option that could involve as many people as possible. Even at a lower registration fee, it would still dramatically increase revenue at a relatively small incremental cost. It would be “molto” profitable.

But now consider this as an attendee.Would you sign up for a virtual event like that? If you had no other option to experience it, maybe. But what if you could actually be there in person? Then what? Would you feel relegated to a second-class experience by being isolated in your own kitchen, without many of the sensory benefits that go along with the physical experience?

The Psychology of Zoom Fatigue

When I thought about our cooking lesson example, I was feeling less than enthused. And I wondered why.

It turns out that there’s some actual brain science behind my digital ennui. In an article in the Psychiatric Times, Jena Lee, MD, takes us on a “Neuropsychological Exploration of Zoom Fatigue.”

A decade ago, I was writing a lot about how we balance risk and reward. I believe that a lot of our behaviors can be explained by how we calculate the dynamic tension between those two things. It turns out that it may also be at the root of how we feel about virtual events. Dr. Lee explains,

“A core psychological component of fatigue is a rewards-costs trade-off that happens in our minds unconsciously. Basically, at every level of behavior, a trade-off is made between the likely rewards versus costs of engaging in a certain activity.”

Let’s take our Italian cooking class again. Let’s imagine we’re there in person. For our brain, this would hit all the right “reward” buttons that come with being physically “in the moment.” Subconsciously, our brains would reward us by releasing oxytocin and dopamine along with other “pleasure” neurochemicals that would make the experience highly enjoyable for us. The cost/reward calculation would be heavily weighted toward “reward.”

But that’s not the case with the virtual event. Yes, it might still be considered “rewarding,” but at an entirely different — and lesser — scale of the same “in-person” experience. In addition, we would have the additional costs of figuring out the technology required, logging into the lesson and trying to follow along. Our risk/reward calculator just might decide the tradeoffs required weren’t worth it.

Without me even knowing it, this was the calculation that was going on in my head that left me less than enthused.

 But there is a flip side to this.

Reducing the Risk Virtually

Last fall, a new study from Oracle in the U.K. was published with the headline, “82% of People Believe Robots Can Support Their Mental Health Better than Humans.”

Something about that just didn’t seem right to me. How could this be? Again, we had the choice between virtual and physical connection, and this time the odds were overwhelmingly in favor of the virtual option.

But when I thought about it in terms of risk and reward, it suddenly made sense. Talking about our own mental health is a high-risk activity. It’s sad to say, but opening up to your manager about job-related stress could get you a sympathetic ear, or it could get you fired. We are taking baby steps towards destigmatizing mental health issues, but we’re at the beginning of a very long journey.

In this case, the risk/reward calculation is flipped completely around. Virtual connections, which rely on limited bandwidth — and therefore limited vulnerability on our part — seem like a much lower risk alternative than pouring our hearts out in person. This is especially true if we can remain anonymous.

It’s All About Human Hardware

The idea of virtual/physical hybrids with expanded revenue streams will be very attractive to marketers and event organizers. There will be many jumping on this bandwagon. But, like all the new opportunities that technology brings us, it has to interface with a system that has been around for hundreds of thousands of years — otherwise known as our brain.

Our Disappearing Attention Spans

Last week, Mediapost Editor in Chief Joe Mandese mused about our declining attention spans. He wrote, 

“while in the past, the most common addictive analogy might have been opiates — as in an insatiable desire to want more — these days [consumers] seem more like speed freaks looking for the next fix.”

Mandese cited a couple of recent studies, saying that more than half of mobile users tend to abandon any website that takes longer than three seconds to load. That

“has huge implications for the entire media ecosystem — even TV and video — because consumers increasingly are accessing all forms of content and commerce via their mobile devices.”

The question that begs to be asked here is, “Is a short attention span a bad thing?” The famous comparison is that we are now more easily distracted than a goldfish. But does a shorter attention span negatively impact us, or is it just our brain changing to be a better fit with our environment?

Academics have been debating the impact of technology on our ability to cognitively process things for some time. Journalist Nicholas Carr sounded the warning in his 2010 book, “The Shallows,” where he wrote, 

” (Our brains are) very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning … the more adept we become at that mode of thinking.”

Certainly, Carr is right about the plasticity of our brains. It’s one of the most advantageous features about them. But is our digital environment forever pushing our brains to the shallow end of the pool? Well, it depends. Context is important. One of the biggest factors in determining how we process the information we’re seeing is the device where we’re seeing it.

Back in 2010, Microsoft did a large-scale ethnographic study on how people searched for information on different devices. The researchers found those behaviors differed greatly depending on the platform being used and the intent of the searcher. They found three main categories of search behaviors:

  • Missions are looking for one specific answer (for example, an address or phone number) and often happen on a mobile device.
  • Excavations are widespread searches that need to combine different types of information (for example, researching an upcoming trip or major purchase). They are usually launched on a desktop.
  • Finally, there are Explorations: searching for novelty, often to pass the time. These can happen on all types of devices and can often progress through different devices as the exploration evolves. The initial search may be launched on a mobile device, but as the user gets deeper into the exploration, she may switch to a desktop.

The important thing about this research was that it showed our information-seeking behaviors are very tied to intent, which in turn determines the device used. So, at a surface level, we shouldn’t be too quick to extrapolate behaviors seen on mobile devices with certain intents to other platforms or other intents. We’re very good at matching a search strategy to the strengths and weaknesses of the device we’re using.

But at a deeper level, if Carr is right (and I believe he is) about our constant split-second scanning of information to find items of interest making permanent changes in our brains, what are the implications of this?

For such a fundamentally important question, there is a small but rapidly growing body of academic research that has tried to answer it. To add to the murkiness, many of the studies done contradict each other. The best summary I could find of academia’s quest to determine if “the Internet is making us stupid” was a 2015 article in academic journal The Neuroscientist.

The authors sum up by essentially saying both “yes” — and “no.” We are getting better at quickly filtering through reams of information. We are spending fewer cognitive resource memorizing things we know we can easily find online, which theoretically leaves those resources free for other purposes. Finally, for this post, I will steer away from commenting on multitasking, because the academic jury is still very much out on that one.

But the authors also say that 

“we are shifting towards a shallow mode of learning characterized by quick scanning, reduced contemplation and memory consolidation.”

The fact is, we are spending more and more of our time scanning and clicking. There are inherent benefits to us in learning how to do that faster and more efficiently. The human brain is built to adapt and become better at the things we do all the time. But there is a price to be paid. The brain will also become less capable of doing the things we don’t do as much anymore. As the authors said, this includes actually taking the time to think.

So, in answer to the question “Is the Internet making us stupid?,” I would say no. We are just becoming smart in a different way.

But I would also say the Internet is making us less thoughtful. And that brings up a rather worrying prospect.

As I’ve said many times before, the brain thinks both fast and slow. The fast loop is brutally efficient. It is built to get stuff done in a split second, without having to think about it. Because of this, the fast loop has to be driven by what we already know or think we know. Our “fast” behaviors are necessarily bounded by the beliefs we already hold. It’s this fast loop that’s in control when we’re scanning and clicking our way through our digital environments.

But it’s the slow loop that allows us to extend our thoughts beyond our beliefs. This is where we’ll find our “open minds,” if we have such a thing. Here, we can challenge our beliefs and, if presented with enough evidence to the contrary, willingly break them down and rebuild them to update our understanding of the world. In the sense-making loop, this is called reframing.

The more time we spend “thinking fast” at the expense of “thinking slow,” the more we will become prisoners to our existing beliefs. We will be less able to consolidate and consider information that lies beyond those boundaries. We will spend more time “parsing” and less time “pondering.” As we do so, our brains will shift and change accordingly.

Ironically, our minds will change in such a way to make it exceedingly difficult to change our minds.

The Potential Woes of Working from Home

Many of you have now had a few months under your belt working virtually from home rather than going to the office. At least some of you are probably considering continuing to do so even after COVID recedes and the all clear is given to return to normal. A virtual workplace makes all kinds of rational sense – both for employees and employers. But there are irrational reasons why you might want to think twice before you fully embrace going virtual.

About a decade ago, my company also went with a hybrid virtual/physical workplace. As the CEO, there was a lot I liked about it. It was a lot more economical than leasing more office space. It gave us the flexibility to recruit top talent in areas where we had no physical presence. And it seemed that technology was up to the task of providing the communication and work-flow tools we needed to support our virtual members.

On the whole, our virtual employees also seemed to like it. It gave them more flexibility in their workday. It also made it less formal. If you wanted to work in pajamas and bunny slippers, so be it. And with a customer base spread across many time zones, it also made it easier to shift client calls to times that were mutually acceptable.

It seemed to be a win-win. For awhile. Then we noticed that all was not wonderful in work-from-home land.

I can’t say productivity declined. We were always a results-based workplace so as long as the work got done, we were happy. But we started to feel a shift in our previously strong corporate culture. We found team-member complaints about seemingly minor things skyrocket. We found less cohesion across teams. Finally – and most critically – it started to impact our relationships with our customers.

Right about the time all this was happening, we were acquired by a much bigger company. One of the dictates that was handed down from the new owners was that we establish physical offices and bring our virtual employees back to the mothership for the majority of their work-week. At the time, I wasn’t fully aware of the negative consequences of going virtual so I initially fought the decision. But to be honest, I was secretly happy. I knew something wasn’t quite right. I just wasn’t sure what it was. I suspected it might have been our new virtual team members.

The move back to a physical workplace was a tough one. Our virtual team members were very vocal about how this was a loss of their personal freedom. New HR fires were erupting daily and I spent much of my time fighting them. This, combined with the inevitable cultural consequences of being acquired, often made me shake my head in bewilderment. Life in our company was turning into a shit-show.

I wish I could say that after we all returned to the same workplace, we joined hands and sang a rousing chorus of Kumbaya. We didn’t. The damage had been done. Many of the disgruntled former virtual team members ended up moving on. The cultural core of the company remained with our original team members who had worked in the same office location for several years. I eventually completed my contract and went my own way.

I never fully determined what the culprit was. Was it our virtual team members? Or was it the fact that we embraced a virtual workplace without considering unintended consequences. I suspected it was a little of both.

Like I said, that was a decade ago. From a rational perspective, all the benefits of a virtual workplace seem even more enticing than they did then. But in the last 10 years, there has been research done on those irrational factors that can lead to the cracks in a corporate culture that we experienced.

Mahdi Roghanizad is an organizational behavior specialist from Ryerson University in Toronto. He has long looked at the limitations of computerized communication. And his research provides a little more clarity into our failed experiment with a virtual workplace.

Roghanizad has found that without real-life contact, the parts of our brain that provide us with the connections needed to build trust never turn on. In order to build a true relationship with another person, we need something called the Theory of Mind. According to Wikipedia, “Theory of mind is necessary to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own.”

But unless we’re physically face-to-face with another person, our brain doesn’t engage in this critical activity. “Eye contact is required to activate that theory of mind and when the eye contact is not there, the whole other signal information is not processed by our brain,” said Roghanizad. Even wearing a pair of sunglasses is enough to short circuit the process. Relegating contact to a periodic Zoom call guarantees that this empathetic part of our brains will never kick in.

But it’s not just being eye-ball to eye-ball. There are other non-verbal cues we rely on to connect with other people and create a Theory of Mind. Other research has shown the importance of pheromones and physical gestures like crossing your arms and leaning forward or back. This is why we subconsciously start to physically imitate people we’re talking to. The stronger the connection with someone, the more we imitate them.

This all comes back to the importance of bandwidth in the real world. A digital connection cannot possibly incorporate all the nuance of a face-to-face connection. And whether we realize it or not, we rely on that bandwidth to understand other people. From that understanding comes the foundations of trusted relationships. And trusted relationships are the difference between a high-functioning work team and a dysfunctional one.

I wish I knew that ten years ago.