Idiot Brain

by Dean Burnett

:-( surprise :-O and many more. These are just simple lines and dots. They’re not even upright. And yet we still perceive specific types of expression.

  Facial expressions may seem a limited form of communication, but they’re extremely useful. If everyone around you has a fearful expression, your brain instantly concludes there is something nearby that everyone considers a threat, and primes itself for fight or flight. If we had to rely on someone saying, “I don’t want to alarm you, but there appears to be a pack of rabid hyenas heading right for us,” they’d probably be on us before the end of the sentence. Facial expressions also aid social interactions; if we’re doing something and everyone has a happy expression, we know we should keep doing it to gain approval. If everyone looks at us and appears shocked, angry, disgusted or all three, then we should stop what we’re doing rather quickly. This feedback helps guide our own behaviors.

  Studies have revealed that the amygdala is highly active when we’re reading facial expressions.6 The amygdala, responsible for processing our own emotions, is seemingly necessary for recognizing emotions in others. Other regions deep in the limbic system responsible for processing specific emotions (for instance, the putamen for disgust) are also implicated.

  The link between emotions and facial expressions is strong but not insurmountable. Some people suppress or control their facial expressions so that they differ from their emotional state. The obvious example is the “poker face.” Professional poker players maintain neutral expressions (or inaccurate ones) in order to hide how the cards dealt impact on their chances of winning. However, there is only a limited range of possibilities when being dealt cards from a deck of 52, and poker players can brace themselves for all of them, even an unbeatable straight flush. Knowing something is coming allows the more conscious controls of facial expressions to retain dominance. However, if during the game a meteorite crashes through the roof and onto the table, it’s doubtful that any of the players could stop themselves from adopting a shocked expression.

  This is indicative of yet another conflict between the advanced and primitive areas of the brain. Facial expressions can be voluntary (controlled by the motor cortex in the cerebrum) or involuntary (controlled by the deeper regions in the limbic system). Voluntary facial expressions we adopt by choice—for example, looking enthusiastic when viewing someone’s tedious vacation photos. Involuntary expressions are produced by actual emotions. The advanced human neocortex may be capable of conveying inaccurate information (lying), but the older limbic control system is unfailingly honest, so they come into conflict quite often, because the norms of society often dictate that we don’t give our honest opinion; if a person’s new haircut repulses us, it’s not good to say so.

  Unfortunately, our brains being so sensitive to reading faces means we can often tell when someone is undergoing this internal conflict between honesty and manners (smiling through gritted teeth). Luckily, society has also deemed it impolite to point it out when someone is doing this, so a tense balance is achieved.

  Carrots and sticks

  (How the brain allows us to control others, and be controlled in turn)

  I hate car shopping. Trudging across vast showrooms, checking endless details, looking at so many vehicles you lose all interest and start wondering if you have space in your yard for a horse. Feigning awareness of cars so you do things like kick the tires. Why? Can the tip of your shoe analyze vulcanized rubber?

  But for me, the worst part is car salesmen (I’ve yet to meet a female one). I just can’t deal with them. The machismo, the exaggerated chumminess, the “I’ll have to ask the manager” tactic, the implication that they’re losing money by my even being there. All these techniques confuse and unsettle me, and I find the whole process distressing.

  That’s why I always take my dad car shopping. He revels in this sort of thing. The first time he helped me buy a car I was braced for confident negotiating, but his tactic was largely swearing at the salesmen and calling them criminals until they agreed to lower the price. Unsubtle but definitely effective.

  However, that car salesmen the world over have such established and recognizable methods suggests they do actually work. This is odd. All customers will have wildly different personalities, preferences and attention spans, so the idea that simple and familiar approaches will increase the odds of someone agreeing to hand over hard-earned cash should be ludicrous. However, there are specific behaviors that increase compliance, meaning customers agree with someone and “submit to their will.”

  We’ve covered how fear of social judgement causes anxiety; provocation triggers the anger system; and seeking approval can be a powerful motivator. Indeed, many emotions can be said to exist only in the context of other people: you can be angry at inanimate objects, but shame and pride require people’s judgement, and love is something that exists between two people (“self-love” is something else entirely). So it’s no great stretch to find that people can make others do what they want by exploiting the brain’s tendencies. Anyone whose livelihood depends on convincing other people to give them money has familiar methods for increasing customer compliance and, once again, the way the brain works is largely responsible.

  This doesn’t mean there are techniques that give you total control over someone. People are far too complex, no matter what pick-up artists would have you believe. Nonetheless, there are some scientifically recognized means for getting people to comply with your wishes.

  There’s the “foot-in-the-door” technique. A friend asks to borrow money for the bus. You agree. Then they ask if they can borrow more for a sandwich. You agree again. Then they say why not go to the bar, catch up over a few drinks? As long as you’re OK to pay, they don’t have any money, remember? You think, “Sure, it’s only a few drinks.” Then it’s a few more and suddenly they’re asking to borrow money for a taxi as they’ve missed the bus, and you sigh and agree because you’ve said yes to everything else.

  If this so-called friend had said, “Buy me dinner and drinks and pay for me to get home in a convenient manner,” you’d have said no, because it’s a ridiculous request. But that’s exactly what you’ve done. This is the foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique, where agreeing with a small request will make you more amenable to a larger request. The requester has his “foot in the door.”

  FITD has several limitations, thankfully. There has to be a delay between the first and second request; if someone agrees to loan you $5, you can’t ask for $50 ten seconds later. Studies have shown FITD can work days or weeks after the initial request, but eventually the association between the first and second requests is lost.

  FITD also works better if requests are “prosocial,” something perceived as helpful, or doing good. Buying someone food is helpful, then loaning them money to get home is also helpful, so more likely to be a request that’s complied with. Keeping lookout while someone scrawls obscenities on their ex’s car is not good, so driving them to their ex’s house to throw a brick through their window afterwards would be refused. Deep down, people are often quite nice.

  FITD also needs consistency, for instance, loaning money, then loaning more money. Driving someone home doesn’t mean you’ll look after their pet python for a month. How are these things related? Most people don’t equate “give a ride in my car” with “have a giant snake in my house.”

  Despite limitations, FITD is still potent. You’ve probably experienced the family member who gets you to set up a computer and ends up using you as 24/7 tech support, for instance. That’s FITD.

  A 2002 study by N. Guéguen shows it even works online.7 Students who agreed with an emailed request to open a specific file were more likely to take part in a more demanding online survey when asked. Persuasion often relies on tone, presence, body language, eye contact and so on but this study shows these aren’t necessary. The brain seems worryingly eager to agree with requests from people.

  Another approach actually exploits a request that’s been denied. Say someone asks you if they can s
tore all their possessions in your house because they’re moving out. This is inconvenient, so you decline. Then they ask if they can instead borrow your car for the weekend to move to their stuff elsewhere. This is much easier, so you agree. But letting someone use your car for a weekend is inconvenient, just less so than the original request. Now you’ve got someone using your car, and you’d never usually agree to that.

  This is the door-in-the-face technique (DITF). It sounds aggressive, but it’s the person being manipulated who is “slamming the door” in the face of those making demands. But slamming a door in someone’s face (metaphorically or literally) makes you feel bad, so there’s a desire to “make it up” to them, hence agreeing with smaller requests.

  DITF requests can be much closer together than FITD ones; the first request is denied, so the person hasn’t actually agreed to do anything yet. There is also evidence suggesting DITF is more potent. A 2011 study by Chan and her colleagues used FITD or DITF to compel groups of students to complete an arithmetic test.8 FITD had a 60 percent success rate, while DITF was closer to 90 percent! The conclusion of this study was that if you want schoolchildren to do something, use a door-in-the-face approach, which is definitely something you should phrase differently when announcing it to the general public.

  The potency and reliability of DITF may explain why it’s so often used in financial transactions. Scientists have even assessed this directly: a 2008 study by Ebster and Neumayr 9 showed the DITF to be very effective when selling cheese from an Alpine hut to passers-by. (NB: Most experiments don’t take place in Alpine huts.)

  Then there’s the low-ball technique, similar to FITD in that it results from someone initially agreeing to something, but which plays out differently.

  Low-ball is where someone agrees to something (a specific price to pay, a certain amount of time to do a job, a specific word count for a document), then the other person suddenly increases the initial demand. Surprisingly, despite frustration and annoyance, most people will still agree with the increased demand. Technically, they have ample reason to refuse: it’s someone breaking an agreement for personal gain. But people invariably comply with the suddenly increased demand, as long as it’s not too excessive: if you agree to $70 for a used DVD-player, you won’t still agree if it suddenly costs your life savings and firstborn child.

  Low-ball can be used to make people work for free! Sort of. A 2003 study by Burger and Cornelius of Santa Clara University had people agreeing to complete a survey in return for a free coffee mug.10 They were then told there were no mugs available. Most still did the survey, despite not getting the promised reward. Another study by Cialdini and his colleagues in 1978 reported university students were far more likely to show up for a 7 a.m. experiment if they’d already agreed to show up at 9 a.m., than if they were initially asked to show up at 7 a.m.11 Clearly, reward or cost aren’t the only factors; many studies of the low-ball technique have shown that actively agreeing to a deal, willingly, before it’s changed is integral to sticking to it regardless.

  These are the more familiar of many approaches for manipulating people into complying with your wishes (another example is reverse psychology, which you definitely shouldn’t look up yourself). Does this make much evolutionary sense? It’s supposed to be “survival of the fittest,” but how is being easily manipulated a useful advantage? We’ll look at this more in a later section, but the compliance techniques described here can all be explained by certain tendencies of the brain.†

  A lot of these are linked to our self-image. Chapter 4 showed the brain (via the frontal lobes) is capable of self-analysis and awareness. So it’s not so far-fetched that we’d use this information and “adjust” for any personal failing. You’ve heard of people “biting their tongue,” but why do that? They may think someone’s baby is actually quite ugly, but stop themselves from saying this and instead say, “Oh, how cute.” This makes people think better of them, whereas the truth wouldn’t. This is something called “impression management,” which is where we try to control the impression people get of us via social behaviors. We care what other people think of us at a neurological level, and will go to great lengths to make them like us.

  A 2014 study by Tom Farrow and his colleagues of the University of Sheffield suggested that impression management shows activation in the medial prefrontal cortex and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, along with other regions including the midbrain and cerebellum.12 However, these areas were noticeably active only when subjects tried to make themselves look bad, when choosing behaviors to make people dislike them. If they were choosing behaviors that made them look good, there was no detectable difference from normal brain activity.

  Coupled with the fact that subjects were much faster at processing behaviors that made them look good as opposed to bad, they concluded that making us look good to others is what the brain is doing all the time! Trying to scan for it is like trying to find a specific tree in a dense forest; there’s nothing to make it stand out. The study in question was small, only 20 subjects, so it’s possible specific processes for this behavior might be found eventually, but the fact that there was still such a disparity between looking-good people and looking-bad people is striking.

  But what does this have to do with manipulating people? Well, the brain seems to be geared towards making other people like it/you. All the compliance techniques arguably take advantage of a person’s desire to be seen positively by others. This is such an ingrained drive that it can be exploited.

  If you’ve agreed to a request, rejecting a similar request would probably cause disappointment and damage someone’s opinion of you, so foot in the door works. If you’ve turned down a big request, you’re aware that the person won’t like you for this, so are primed to agree to a smaller request as a “consolation,” so door in the face works. If you’ve agreed to do or pay something and then the demand suddenly increases, backing out would again cause disappointment and make you look bad, so low-ball works. All because we want people to think well of us, to the point where it overrides our better judgement or logic.

  It’s undoubtedly more complex than this. Our self-image requires consistency, so once the brain has made a decision it can be surprisingly hard to alter it, as anyone who’s tried explaining to an elderly relative that not all foreigners are filthy thieves will know. We saw earlier how thinking one thing and doing something that contradicts it creates dissonance, a distressing state where thinking and behavior don’t match. In response, the brain will often alter its thinking to match the behavior, restoring harmony.

  Your friend wants money, you don’t want to give it. But you just gave them a slightly smaller amount. Why would you do this if you didn’t think it was acceptable? You want to be consistent, and liked, so your brain decides you do want to give them more money, and there we get the FITD. This also explains why making an active choice is important for low-ball: the brain has made a decision, so will stick to it to be consistent, even if the reason for the decision no longer applies; you’re committed, people are counting on you.

  There’s also the principle of reciprocity, a uniquely human phenomenon (as far as we know) where people will respond in kind to people being nice to them, more so than self-interest would suggest.13 If you reject someone’s request and they make a smaller one, you perceive this as them doing something nice for you, and agree to be disproportionately nice in turn. DITF is believed to exploit this tendency, because the brain interprets “making a smaller request than the previous one” as someone doing you a favor, because it’s an idiot.

  As well as this, there’s social dominance and control. Some (most?) people, in Western cultures at least, want to be seen as dominant and/or in control, because the brain sees this as a safer, more rewarding state. This can often manifest in questionable ways. If someone is asking you for things, they are subservient to you, and you stay dominant (and likeable) by helping them out. FITD fits nicely with this.

  If you reject someone’s re
quest, you assert dominance, and if they make a smaller request they have established they’re submissive, so agreeing with it means you can still be dominant and liked. A double whammy of good feelings. DITF can arise from this. And say you’ve decided to do something, then someone changes the parameters. If you then back out, this means they have control over you. To hell with that. You’ll go through with the original decision anyway, because you’re nice, damn it: low-ball.

  To summarize, our brains make us want to be liked, to be superior, and to be consistent. As a result of all this, our brains make us vulnerable to any unscrupulous person who wants our money and has a basic awareness of haggling. It takes an incredibly complex organ to do something this stupid.

  Achy Breaky Brain

  (Why a relationship break-up is so devastating)

  Have you ever found yourself in the fetal position on the sofa for days on end, curtains drawn, phone unanswered, moving only to haphazardly wipe the snot and tears from your face, wondering why the very universe itself has cruelly decided to torment you so? Heartbreak can be all-consuming and totally debilitating. It is one of the most unpleasant things a modern human can expect to experience. It inspires great art and music as well as some terrible poetry. Technically, nothing has physically happened to you. You haven’t been injured. You haven’t contracted a vicious virus. All that’s happened is you’ve been made aware that you won’t be seeing a person you had a lot of interaction with much any more. That’s it. So why does it leave you reeling for weeks, months, even for the rest of your life in some cases?

  It’s because other people have a major influence over our brain’s (and therefore our) well-being, and seldom is this more true than in romantic relationships.