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