Neuroscience of Social Change
Have you ever felt that knot in your stomach when faced with a new idea that challenges everything you’ve believed?
Social change is inevitable, but it often brings discomfort and resistance. And when you're fighting for a social movement, it can feel impossible to try to fight "against the grain" and change people's ways, thoughts, or beliefs. In this episode of Brain Blown, we’ll explore how emotions inevitably overpower rational thinking (contrary to popular belief) and the implications it causes. We’ll delve into the neuroscience behind our resistance to change and discuss the powerful 25%-claim from Centola.
Join us as we navigate these complex dynamics and uncover what it truly takes to inspire change in our society
Look out for more mini-episodes on this topic in the coming weeks!
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REFERENCES
The Behavioral Neuroscience of Motivation: An Overview of Concepts, Measures, and Translational Applications -- Eleanor H. Simpson and Peter D. Balsam
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Decision Making: A Review and Conceptual Framework -- Lesley K. Fellows Montreal Neurological Institute
The Role of Emotion in Decision Making: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective -- Nasir Naqvi, Baba Shiv and Antoine Bechara
Decision Neuroscience New Directions in Studies of Judgment and Decision Making Alan G. Sanfey
The Ecology of Human Fear: Survival Optimization and the Nervous System -- Dean Mobbs, Cindy C. Hagan, Tim Dalgleish , Brian Silston and Charlotte Prévost
Human Orbitofrontal Cortex Signals Decision Outcomes to Sensory Cortex During Behavioral Adaptations -- Bin A. Wang, Maike Veismann, Abhishek Banerjee & Burkhard Pleger
The Neuroscience of Happiness and Pleasure by Morten L Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge
Neuroscience of Affect: Brain mechanisms of pleasure and displeasure -- Kent C. Berridge and Morten L. Kringelbach
The Neuroscience of Pleasure and Happiness By Luciano Marinelli
A neuroscience perspective on pleasure and pain -- Dan-Mikael Ellingsen, Morten Kringlebach, and Siri Leknes
Introduction to the Journal of Marketing Research, Special Issue on Neuroscience and Marketing -- Colin Camerer and Carolyn Yoon
Persuasion, Influence, and Value: Perspectives from Communication and Social Neuroscience -- Emily Falk and Christin Scholz
What can neuroscience offer marketing research? -- Billy Sung and Nicholas J. Wilson
Neuroscience in Marketing: Assessment of Advertisement; Memory by Means of Facial Muscles; Movement Analysis -- Calga Pinar, Sanem Alkibay
"The Emerging Neuroscience of Social Media" Dar Meshi, Diana I. Tamir, and Hauke R. Heekeren
"Social Influence on Positive Youth Development: A Developmental Neuroscience Perspective" Eva H. Telzer, Jorien van Hoorn, Christina R. Rogers, Kathy T. Do
"The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning" Paul J. Eslinger, Silke Anders, Tommaso Ballarini, Sydney Boutros, Soren Krach, Annalina V. Mayer, Jorge Moll, Tamara L. Newton, Matthias L. Schroeter, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Jacob Raber, Gavin B. Sullivan, James E. Swain, Leroy Lowe, Roland Zahn
"Brain and Social Networks: Fundamental Building Blocks of Human Experience" Emily B. Falk and Danielle S. Bassett
"Mind the Gender Gap" Gina Rippon
"Change: How to Make Big Things Happen" Damon Centola
General Outline of Episode
This entire season was built up to this final full episode. Every topic we’ve discussed, from how we make decisions, how what we like or want play into those decisions, pleasure and how it drives our decisions, how we influence others’ decisions and their power over us… come down to this crucial topic.
How to use it all on a much bigger scale – the impact of social change that changes the world.
This is the Neuroscience of Social Change
The University of Minnesota states that social change refers to the transformation of culture, behavior, social institutions, and social structures over time. It can be looked at as how human interactions, values, and norms shift. This can happen by accident or by deliberate action, but change is a guarantee, it will happen. So how do we look at the neuroscience of it? By looking at what creates a social movement and how social change happens.
In Damon Centola’s book Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, he looks at how things change on a larger scale in terms of everything from how Twitter became popular to why you use a qwerty keyboard to the change in the Black Lives Matter movement. So how do things change? Centola stresses the idea that “our need for social coordination is more powerful than our love of tradition - and that need was key to social change”. Why do things change? Because we change as people. We see things differently, our world and needs change, and when they change enough and start to impact people, we start to shift.
However, change does not occur in a comfort space and comfort does not occur in a change space. Change by its nature is uncomfortable to the human mind. So we cling to what we know for a long time. Until we don’t anymore.
So what creates social change? A lot of it comes down to what we have covered in this season on the podcast. Some, however, come from the heart of what we continue to cover here - this all comes back to relationships and belonging. At the heart of all of this - is we do this to belong, to have a sense of belonging. To feel we belong. As we covered, Eslinger, Anders, et all state “A "feeling" is a fundamental construct in the behavioral, neurobiological and social psychological sciences encompassing a range of subjective experiences.” They state this is connected to survival and life. We, as humans, have an inherent drive to belong. Rubin states belonging is about a “conscious or unconscious assessment” specifically looking at the “perceived opportunity for ingroup membership or inter-personal attachments”. And Eslinger, Anders et all also state that humans have a unique ability not only to attach to humans, but also attach to nonhumans, cultural symbols, ideas, beliefs, etc which they say “may contribute to the remarkable human inclination to cooperate beyond kinship boundaries, due to intrinsic reward, even when no evident reputation gains are at stake”. If we remember from just what we recently covered - this is a cornerstone. We connect to ideas and beliefs the way we connect to humans because we know the more people who have our back the more safe we are.
And when we don’t feel safe, we switch. If we remember from Season 1, we are wired for safety or connection - but never both at the same time. Social movements are at the heart of ideas, beliefs, and values. They are things we find just and fair. And remember social disgust is as strong as physical disgust. Your brain will respond as hard to the behavior you find repugnant the same way it will to vomit or feces. We feel a need to belong. And it elicits some very strong reactions.
This connects us to Marketing, because once we have decided we feel connected to a belief, value, or idea – we market it. Not just in the traditional sense of marketing, but in how we convince others that this new way is the right way.
When we covered marketing, we reviewed from season 2 how the human brain remembers. Human brains work by coding. We take in information through a sense of coding - allowing us to store and retrieve information, however, we rarely have the ability to do this with a neutral lens. On the contrary, we code via impact of emotions, as stated by Pinar, Bozoklu, and Alkibay who argue that studying neuromarketing helps us understand how humans make decisions. How we identify what drives our behavior and how to change it. And once we have a sense of how we decide things, we know how to market it, because we know how to play along your coding of emotions. Marketing, in its sense, is how we convince humans to change a behavior- buy something they wouldn’t have otherwise, engage in healthier lives, vote a certain way, donate to a cause. In this season we first focused on just how much we think we make decisions rationally, but the truth is we don’t code rationally so we don’t make decisions rationally. As stated at the start of this season “Human beings do not know themselves”, we act and then we make sense of it but we tell ourselves the opposite. We often run a cost-benefit analysis but Simpson and Balsam state this is physical effort, mental effort, time, loss of other opportunities, discomfort, danger, etc vs. fulfilling psychological or psychological needs, escaping harm/avoiding a cost, so depending on need and resource we don’t often do this the same every time. We think we make decisions rationally and logically, but we won’t even decide something the same way twice sometimes if we are hungry.
So how does this impact social change?
Let’s say I want to start a social change movement to convert golf courses to housing for the homeless. My feeling of belonging might be connected to the tribalism of poverty, perhaps that’s because I see myself closer to being homeless than rich, but it might also be because I feel connected to a tribe that wants to improve the lives of others. I have a belief that I have connected to that all people have a basic right to shelter. I want to do marketing on this matter, so I need to engage with everything from basic conversation to social media to perhaps even an ad campaign. I might come against people who are going to feel othered by this. Golfers for one. They might see this as a threat, whereas I may feel my insula is activated by those who would want their recreational sport to matter more than people’s basic level of security. That threat implies we are not going to connect on this issue. To market this, and make it work, I do need to connect to people with money, as it takes a lot of money to build housing that would be free. So now I need to market to the tribe with wealth, but not golfers. I need to market also playing on their emotions because emotions have a greater value than logic when it comes to human decision-making. Here lies a lot of problems. How would I do it?
Centola states to create any major change, the heart of it is that you don’t have to convince everyone. On the contrary, you need to convince about 25% of your people. He talks about stronger ties and weaker ties. If you can convince 25% of your people, and they convince 25% of theirs, it will start to grow more and more. Over time we can take an idea we originally found possibly even repugnant, and start to convince people that social change is necessary. How? Because humans are social creatures, we need each other, and it takes additional brain energy to go against someone else.
That is also part of the risk of the social movement never taking off – because you tried to stretch yourself too thin and rely on weaker ties. Centola says that before we hit the 25% we need, the idea is often too new. We don’t want to go against others – we don’t want to take the risk and try something that people are against, and when we start to, we will get uncomfortable and back off. This is why movements can be so hard to start, or get traction. Because even when we feel passionate about something, we struggle to risk going against someone. To do so you are the ‘other’ and that activates our safety response - remember the more people who have our back, so othered is unsafe.
And taken from a University of Minnesota class – whenever we have a social movement – we actually have two. We have one running in one direction which is usually change-oriented and another moving in the other direction which is often staying oriented – tradition-oriented. So they run at the same time and often what we see is ebbs and flows of change – one movement will peak while the other one bottoms and then vice versa – and that is how we move forward – its slower but that is how humans move. We have culture, we have counter-culture, we have progress we have tradition. It makes for a continuous movement forward but it’s slow in nature.
What is the brain’s role?
What we are talking about is a few things. We learn something new through social connections. So that is our relationship network. We have to base that on our ability to tolerate new ideas, new suggestions, and new ways of being. We then work to make a decision based on the information we have. We have a pleasure to connect and we have to have pleasure or we don’t motivate. Then we choose to act, or not.
So we start a little all over what we covered this season.
Let’s start with the most recent. We do things because of social connection – we are social creatures. This comes down to connecting us to the greater whole, but also connections to our tribe. That means we are back to mentalizing because we have to do this to understand the mental states and motivations of others. If you remember Meshi, Tamir, and Heekeren AND Telzer, van Hoorn, Roger both state When we mentalize we use our “dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ), anterior temporal lobes (ATL), inferior frontal gyri (IFG), and posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC)”. So dorsomedial prefrontal cortex - is that area near the bottom of the prefrontal cortex - hence dorsal, as dorsal means back, and it's kinda your brain’s middle manager. It's supposed to keep our amygdala in check - though it doesn’t always - it has working memory, planning, abstract reasoning, theory of mind, sense of self, empathy, decision-making, and morality. So you know – major things that come into play when we are talking about social change.
By its nature, when we learn something new we are connecting to our anterior temporal lobes because we use that for semantic memory (people, words, facts, etc) whereas the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus is used for episodic/autobiographical memory - which means we also use it to imagine the future and make sense of space and scene – all neighbors in the brain. And we use these when we share information and when others share information with us. When we connect with each other to share ideas and beliefs – we share similar areas of the brain that fire and this can cause us to actually change our own “beliefs, preferences, and actions to align with those of the communicators” according to Falk and Bassett.
If you remember, Falk and Bassett will also remind us that areas of the brain we use for communicating ideas, beliefs, etc don’t “operate in isolation. We have the hotspot areas we have seen before, but there is a greater web activation with “myelinated neuronal axons”. As Eslinger, Anders, et all state this is connected to the social behavior neural network (SBNN). And because it’s social of course we see those hormones interacting. Specifically of course the old friend oxytocin is a huge component here (as well as vasopressin - because we get those with social recognition, social attachment, and social behavior.
And if we remember Meshi, Tamir, and Heekeren AND Telzer, van Hoorn, Roger AND Falk and Bassett AND Eslinger, Anders, et all all gave us a heads up about the fact that “Social rewards activate a network of brain regions including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), ventral striatum, and ventral tegmental area”. When we get positive feedback, when it seems like people understand us, agree with us, think like us, think highly of us, connect with us, see us, etc., this gives us rewards
i.And the big one - feeling like we belong: As we covered - Eslinger, Anders, et all state that we need to feel like we belong and we bond at a group level. We have individual pride and group pride and they are very similar - this is connected to belonging to a bigger whole.
But that means we need to make sense of what our tribe, our connection, this person, this group is saying to us. So that means we are using our
a. VMPFC and VS -
As we covered, Falk and Scholz state that activity in these areas shows that the brain is integrating a lot of different inputs and trying to make sense of it all. Specifically to get it into “a common value signal” They state that this common value signal helps the brain compare and contrast different choices.
ii. Sung and Wilson taught us this can help predict choices.
iii. But Falk and Scholz were quick to remind us about the importance of these brain areas in social connection. Specifically that they are involved in tracking if I’m with the crowd or am I against the crowd. “one set of studies points to the involvement of the brain’s value system in tracking divergence versus consensus with group opinion; some evidence suggests that, rather than tracking the value of the stimulus in isolation, the brain initially tracks convergence and divergence with group opinion as an end in itself”. We never ever stop being a social species and this is so big in social change. Because social change is conflict.
iv. And conflict is important. when we are in agreement the VMPFC comes into play. But conflict is harder. Your ventral striatum is really impacted if it feels like it's in disagreement and will increase activity in the brain’s valuation system. “Nonconformity to peer opinions has been associated with increased activity in brain regions implicated in salience, arousal, and conflict monitoring”. In other words - it's hard to go against the grain. And social movement is all about the fact that the grain is no longer working for us.
b. Falk and Scholz explore that further specifically looking at social learning theory and theories of embodied social cognition. When we feel in sync with someone we are more likely to be able to influence them and vice versa. Because we are so much a social species, our brain struggles more when we don’t conform to group norms - not that you can’t but it is taxed more.
c. (Bandura's study shows we have a desire to conform to group norms which is pretty central and Cialdine and Goldstine will show we want to promote “positive social outcomes and avoid negative social sanctions”.
d. Berger states that having a shared motivation is influenced by 5 key factors “impression management, emotion regulation, information acquisition, social bonding, and persuasion of others.” Stating that these are not only valuable but impact our ability to have “a positive image of the self and maintain positive social relationships” Which boils down to the fact that we are not logical creatures - much as we would like to believe otherwise. We like to think we decide by facts and logic. But we have so much evidence to show we are “persuaded less by facts and more by subjective value”
e. And the further the conflict the more taxing on the brain, specifically Falk and Scholz specifically in the posterior medial frontal cortex which activates for conflict detection”
f. Dopamine Falk and Scholz also state that dopamine is impacted here specifically in “modulating neurochemicals, such as dopamine, involved in reinforcement learning within the brain’s value system can alter people’s tendency to conform” the more dopamine - the more we want to conform and the more we will agree with others when we might not otherwise
g. Since we are talking about dopamine - that brings us to pleasure. Touhami, Benlafkih, Jiddaene, Cheetah, Malki, and Benomar taught us to look at pleasure and the reward centers of the brain because it's at the heart of motivation which drives action and behavior. So we are looking back at that Ventral Tegmental Area, Nucleus Accumbens.
h. And this is going to impact our decision making which always impacts our memory because we use memory to help guide us
i. So to make decisions using memory we are looking at the Orbital Frontal Cortex again. Wang, Veismann, Banerjee, and Pleger taught us “The ability to respond flexibly to an ever-changing environment relies on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).” Because the Orbital Frontal Cortex takes the sensory information and combines it with “predicted outcomes to enable flexible sensory learning in humans. We adjust to constant changes in our environment through our Orbital Frontal Cortex taking in that coding that all of our senses can do, and how we code (positive, negative, neutral, other) helps us determine if the outcome is possibly good, or bad for us. We make sense of the world through coding – is this good, bad, scary, what is going to happen? What’s the best choice we can make? We go from there. (COULD PAIR THIS DOWN)
j. We covered that in episode one of this season. And how Wang et all state that we have to adapt to survive and we do this based on prediction and evaluation. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)connects to our sensory information, memory, learning, and attention. The medial orbitofrontal cortex encodes the reward value, and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex helps assign credit. Thus our Orbital frontal cortex is impacted when we are trying to use recall to assess if this could go good or bad. Specifically, it is “encoding the prediction error (PE)” when there is change and trying to adapt accordingly.
k. And then we have to choose. Baron, Hernnstein, and Prelack as well as Lipshiz stated an oversimplification of decision making is that there are three interrelated processes. Essentially we identify options, we evaluate and we make a choice. One of the big things in this is how we evaluate, however. Naqvi, Shiv, and Bechara state “It does seem clear that the ventral and medial prefrontal cortex mediate some or many aspects of reinforcement processing” If we remember from the beginning of this season it was believed that clearly, humans would make decisions based on a cost-benefit analysis using a “rational Bayesian maximization of expected utility” (ie mathematical probability.) However, this could only be true if humans “were equipped with unlimited knowledge, time, and information-processing power.”. This is not the case. Thus the assumption that we do things based on a logical equation of cost-benefit analysis is not actually possible.
l. Instead, Naqvi, Shiv, and Bechara found that most decision-making is impacted by emotions and biases. We don’t make logical choices because we don’t have infinite knowledge and time. And unlike what humans would like to think - which is clearly the more important the decision, the more logic we have, the reverse is actually found to be true. The higher the risk, the more the uncertainty, the more we lean on gut and emotion. This gets impacted and navigated by our ventromedial prefrontal cortex and if this area is not working as well as we would like it to, we often make choices that are detrimental to our well-being. And too much damage, and we do not learn from our mistakes. However, what have we learned in this podcast? An important thing about this study is that participants who had clear damage to this area made very poor choices, specifically when emotion was involved, and could not learn from their mistakes but “their intellect and problem-solving abilities were largely normal” specifically this showed that decision making was not impacted in knowledge, comprehension. attention, or memory. However, their emotions were impacted, appearing to be flat, and struggled to read emotional cues. This shows us that the vmPFC helps us “use emotions to aid in decision making, particularly decision making in the personal, financial, and moral realms”. This also helps us show that no matter what, “emotions play a role in guiding decisions, especially in situations in which the outcome of one's choices, in terms of reward and punishment, are uncertain”
m. Naqvi, Shiv, and Bechar also found that damage to the amygdala impacted decision-making in that it becomes more difficult to understand rewards and punishments, specifically to predict the future
n. And of course, this is going to connect with “Am I afraid, is there pain, or am I disgusted” which means we impact the:
ii. Amygdala – I think this goes without saying but let’s get into the details of it. You have fear. Change is hard and scary. Change not happening and limiting your life is scary. Taking new risks is scary. We have amygdala action all over the place. Belonging has a flip side of not belonging.
This so impacts social change because we are talking about how our values impact our social connection – do our beliefs connect with our tribe?
Dameon Centola will talk about how we have this belief that the influencers of today are what drive social change – but he says this is not the case. They are just getting credit for it. Because they have too much to lose to take that risk before it’s supported by their social connections. As supported by Falk and Basset who hypothesized that more popular people in social media are perceived differently- case, we have data to show that increased social networks can cause you to have a larger amygdala (meshi, tamir, heekeren) because you have more to lose.
And because it’s coial we can feel pain. Ripon will state the bilateral insula and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)are areas that fire because those are areas connected to processing physical pain or social pain. If we remember Ripon stated that “ACC is sometimes dubbed the GoNoGo or the “error-evaluation” area, as it is consistently activated in tasks requiring inhibition, either to withhold a response or to change a response following an error”. This and our insula are activated due to concern with loss of self-esteem when we have negative experiences online and that fear of social rejection causes us to withdraw.
And Sanfey and colleagues (Sanfey, Rilling, Aronson, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2003) found that the insular cortex is activated when subjects evaluate the fairness”, which is emotional but is also judgment -specifically if it feels unfair. Fairness is not a logical area - because your insula, like your amygdala, is not logical
All of this comes on board when we are talking about something as big as making decisions to impact society and social change.
It’s no wonder that it’s taxing.
Final Thoughts
What can we do about the information we just learned?
The big question I think many people are trying to answer is can we make social change possible and how? Centola would argue yes, but be aware that there will always be others trying to stop social change from happening. Remember, change doesn’t happen in a comfort space. We all survived a shared trauma four years ago - trauma makes a change, makes uncomfortablility hard. Becuase as we have learned a lot on this podcast, the brain moves into survival mode, instead of thrive. When we are trying to survive we are just trying to keep things going. We are not as creative, connected, intelligent, and caring as we are when we are not hurting. So we don’t have the spoons, the ability to do as much - we are just trying to put one foot in front of the other.
But we are healing. And the more we heal the more we can start to expand both individually and collectively. But it’s important to know that different people are at different spaces in the healing journey. So some will always try to stop change. Some will try to stop change because it’s scary and not enough people agree with you yet.
Centola would say - don’t try to convince everyone. That is your downfall. A) you can’t B) You don’t have to. You just need to connect with the “strong ties” in your life. Working in social movements we used to train people to stop arguing with the opposite side. Stop it. We get a moment of fired up from it, but it burns through time, resources, and energy. We both just end up more mad at each other. We say hurtful things, we are not at our best. It is ok to say “Have a good day” and move on. Some people you will never convince, and that is ok. A vote of 99 to one is not a tie. Think about what you can make a change on. Think about expanding instead of changing. As we learned here in season 1 it is more possible to change a negative to a neutral than to a positive. That’s too much for the brain. We can change a neutral to a positive - but the neutral has to come first. Think in terms of that. If someone is undecided or neutral on something, can I make you positive about it? That is a win. Additionally, if you’re negative about something, and you are important to me and this is important to me - can I help connect to you to make you more neutral on it? Because that is also a win!
So how do we do that - not the way we have been! Not through facts and figures and logic. Why are you using logic? We don’t make decisions logically?? Know instead what they are going through - what emotions are impacting them, what they fear, what are they disgusted by. Be in sync with their emotions and be in sync with their thoughts - you need to empathize with the person you are connecting to. You need to hear them if you want them to hear you.
We talked in season 1 in the neuroscience of politics - the conservative side needs black and white - interactive complexity (or the ability to see shades of gray) is so hard, especially if you are hurting or fearful or not in a safer space. And the liberal side only thinks in shades of gray. They are unable to go simple. So - to connect together as humans, we need to connect on an emotional level. We need to be curious and hear people out. That is what makes a difference.
And then over time, things will shift. Because humans continue to change and grow. We don’t go backward. We can never return to the past, because we are different people. We will only move forward but not quickly. Centola says 25%. If I change 25% of people and you do, and other people too - we start to change each other, and we start to change the world.
