216. Wired for Words: A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Influence

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Relevance is critical to communication, relevance to yourself, and relevance to others. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I'm excited to speak with Emily Falk. Emily is a professor of communication, psychology and marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and the Vice Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, where she directs the Communication Neuroscience Lab. Her latest book is entitled What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. Welcome, Emily. I'm really excited for our conversation. I know we missed each other once when you were out at Stanford, and I'm excited that we're getting to talk in this way. Shall we get started? 

[00:00:48] Emily Falk: Let's do it. 

[00:00:49] Matt Abrahams: So in your lab and your research, you use neuroscience to explore communication. And a topic I, and many of our listeners, are fascinated by is persuasion and influence. And I know you've done a lot of work in this area and I'm curious if you can share with us how do our neuro responses to persuasive messages help predict real world behaviors? Can you share some of your findings and, and what we can do based on those?

[00:01:13] Emily Falk: Yeah, in our early research, a lot of my work was focused on persuasive messages that were designed to change people's behaviors, like to help people quit smoking or get more physically active or wear sunscreen. And as I've continued to do that work and found that neural activity and response to persuasive messages can help us understand behavior change, and also what people decide not only to change themselves, but also what they want to share with others. I've also gotten really interested in like, well, how do we choose what those behaviors are in the first place? So whereas in the early work, a lot of it was aimed at convincing people of stuff, in my more recent research program, I'm more interested in how do we help people develop a sense of agency and autonomy, and how do they successfully pursue goals that they want to achieve.

[00:02:02] Matt Abrahams: In some ways it's self persuasion you're talking about. How do we motivate ourselves? 

[00:02:06] Emily Falk: Exactly. 

[00:02:07] Matt Abrahams: So what have you found both in your prior research and in the new research that we can all take to heart when we try to persuade others and ourselves? 

[00:02:15] Emily Falk: There are three core brain systems that our work has focused on. One, is the brain's valuation system that helps us calculate how valuable we anticipate any number of different choice options to be, and then to select the one that our brain anticipates is gonna be the most rewarding to us, and then to enact that choice. And that value system integrates lots of different inputs from many other brain systems, and two that really interest me are the brain self relevance system that helps us think about whether something is me or not me. It helps us think about our past experiences and make meaning of them and think about our own traits and what we're thinking.

[00:02:54] Then the social relevance system, which sometimes scientists talk about in terms of a theory of mind or mentalizing system. And I use social relevance as this kind of catchall for these thoughts about what other people are thinking and feeling, which also helps us predict what they're gonna do and how we might communicate successfully with them, or negotiate or win a game of chess. By extension, thinking about what are the ways that we can tap into those processes and think about making behaviors that we want to do or that are compatible with our long-term goals, feel identity congruent and socially valuable now. 

[00:03:30] Matt Abrahams: So if we were to craft messages to try to motivate somebody to do something, that's in line with what we're asking, we have to factor in both the impact, or the recipient's identity, how they see themselves, but also the social value that that brings as well. Did I get that right? 

[00:03:47] Emily Falk: Well, I don't know that you always have to do both, but those are two potential inroads to doing it. So for example, in research that we've done, looking at what motivates people to share information, when we gave them messages that were about things like health or climate change, headlines and teasers, and we just ask them to talk to other people about what this article's about. So they write a little social media post about what the article's about, and that's our control group. So that's kind of the baseline of like, how much are people motivated to share when they're just asked to share the information.

[00:04:19] And we compare that to when we give them the chance to make it relevant to themselves. So really simple prompts like, write about how this relates to you and things that you care about, or write about how this might be relevant to people in your social network. And in both of those conditions where we ask people to focus on the self relevance or the social relevance, it significantly increases people's interest in sharing that information.

[00:04:42] Matt Abrahams: So you were able to persuade them to be more motivated by asking them to focus on the relevance to themselves or the relevance to those they know. 

[00:04:50] Emily Falk: Exactly. And there's a lot of other kinds of techniques as well that tap into those kinds of processes. So if message tailoring is an idea that's been around for a long time, where scientists have found that when they tailor persuasive messages to the recipients goals, values, things that they know about that person's history. For example, in research on tailoring smoking messages, if a smoker wants to quit because they're sick of spending all their money on cigarettes, then giving them messages that really focus on those cost issues can be more effective than focusing on, you know, maybe the long-term health effects if that's not the thing that they really care about.

[00:05:27] For a different person, let's say that they really are motivated to quit because they wanna protect the people in their family. They're worried about secondhand smoke in their kids, and so for that person focusing on cost may be less of a persuasive argument and focusing on keeping their kids safe might be the way to do it. So that's an example where a different route to tapping into self relevance is also then compatible with more successful influence. And one of the things that I really like about having a neuroscience perspective on all of this is that I think it can help boil it down to what kinds of systems many of these different interventions are tapping into, and then give us a way of just organizing that information.

[00:06:08] Matt Abrahams: I find it so fascinating that looking at how the brain functions in communication can really give insight into why and how things work. I find how you study communication to be really fascinating. What I'm hearing is that you really have to think about your audience and what might be motivational to them. So many of us in our communication just focus on broadcasting the information out, but if you can actually find the value and motivation and tailor the message, especially if it can be around what's relevant to the individual or to their social network or social environment. It can really make a difference. So we have to take the time to think about it, and in many cases, those of us who have the opportunity, we could test different messages it sounds like, to see which is our most relevant for which people. And I think that's so useful to being effective in the communication. Did I miss anything in that? 

[00:06:57] Emily Falk: Yeah, so when we think about the way that these brain systems are working, one of the things that I find fascinating is that our value system tends to prioritize rewards that are psychologically close. And what does psychologically close mean? When we think about the way that the medial prefrontal cortex functions, there have been these beautiful papers led by people like Diana Tamir and Carolyn Parkinson that have shown something that wasn't at all obvious to me, which is that different kinds of psychological distance are encoded in similar ways. So something that happens far off in the future or geographically, the other side of the world, or to somebody who's socially really different than I am, those things all function in kind of similar ways. And so when we say that we want to make it relevant to the person, it's not only just like relevant to Matt, or relevant to Emily, but it's relevant to the person that's right here, right now.

[00:07:53] Like if we want to change some kind of behavior because it's gonna have a payoff that's several decades in the future, you might as well be talking about a different person who's gonna get that benefit from the brain's perspective. Or when we think about, you know, asking people to lend a helping hand or to make donations for folks that are all the way on the other side of the world, in other communities, without doing extra work to make that concrete and vivid and help you really imagine like, what are the rewards for somebody that I can connect with? Then it can be less motivating. And so I think that this way of thinking about psychological distance is another key ingredient that's relevant to the brain's value system has been really helpful for me in thinking about shaping these kinds of messages. 

[00:08:36] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. So relevance is not just in general, it's proximal or distal. I remember when I was in graduate school, I did some work with Phil Zimbardo on time perspective, and we looked at persuasive messaging that had long-term consequences versus short-term. So we looked at brushing your teeth, and we talked about how the distant goal was you'll have healthy teeth and you won't need to have dentures when you get older, which was nowhere near as successful in terms of messaging as when we talked about how you'll have fresh breath and your teeth will look white and clean. So this notion of thinking about relevance, not just generically, but in terms of how close it is to the real time, is fascinating to me. Beyond tailoring for relevance, what is the value of story in framing messages? 

[00:09:19] Emily Falk: There are a lot of different ways that we can frame messages that increase their effectiveness, and so there's a large literature in communication and psychology, which shows that when we use stories to communicate, it can reduce people's defensiveness, make them more open to new ideas. Often people identify with characters in the story. And in our work we found that when people are given information in the form of stories, it also makes it easier for them to reason about the information. So for example, in a study that Jason Coronel led, when he was in my lab, he brought people who smoke into the lab and he presented them with information about a wide range of topics, including smoking.

[00:10:03] And sometimes that information was presented in the form of didactic facts. You know, if you smoke for several decades, it significantly increases your risk of lung cancer. And then for other folks, they got the information in the form of stories. So for example, John is a smoker who smoked for several decades. He developed lung cancer. And the twist in this study, that's different from some of the other behavioral science studies, is that people came in for two different sessions, and in one of those sessions we used a kind of brain stimulation technique called transcranial direct current stimulation, which changes the activation in particular regions of people's brains.

[00:10:43] So during one session they had this brain stimulation that like literally decreased activation in regions that help us reason. And during the other session they got a sham stimulation, where we hook them up to the equipment, and everything's happening in a similar way, but they're not actually having any alteration happening in their brains. And the finding there was that for people who got the information delivered in the typical didactic facts kind of way, when they were under brain stimulation that was decreasing activation within parts of lateral prefrontal cortex that help us reason, they were less able to reason, which is exactly what you would predict.

[00:11:20] On the other hand, when people were told that information in the form of a story, reasoning about an exemplar is something that we do from the time that we're really little kids, and it taps into different kinds of brain systems. So other research has shown that stories tap into these social brain systems. And even when we essentially reduced people's ability to use these parts of their brain, they were still able to reason about the stories just as well. So stories are one effective way of improving our communications. 

[00:11:50] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for sharing the value of story and how even when you purposely impact, in a negative way, people's ability to reason stories still have great power. I find in my own life I learn best when people tell stories. One of the things I enjoyed so much about your book is that you have lots of stories that reinforce and support what you say. I want to turn to your new book, What We Value, and you dedicated a whole chapter of that book to brain synchrony that happens between people when we communicate, when we tell stories. Can you define what that synchrony means? 

[00:12:22] Emily Falk: Neural synchrony happens when people's brain activation follows similar patterns. And so one of the kind of simplest ways of thinking about synchrony is that if activation in a given region in my brain and your brain are going up and down at the same times, that's something we call synchrony. Some of the early research on neural synchrony looked at how neural synchrony relates to shared understanding. And there have been a number of studies that have shown that when people's brains are more in sync, especially in the social relevance system and other brain systems, that is associated with making similar meaning.

[00:13:00] And what I mean by that is, for example, when one person tells a story and another person gets the main point or extracts the same facts from the story, then that's associated with their brains being more in sync. When we watch movies together, like if we watch a movie that's a powerful movie, then that external stimulus is gonna drive our brains to be in sync. So often audiences watching, you know, a really amazing Western or listening to a powerful political speech, their brain activation is gonna be driven up and down in similar ways at similar times. 

[00:13:35] Matt Abrahams: Are there ways to bring about synchrony so that you can have that shared meaning, which can help accomplish many goals? I can imagine empathy is a critical component of shared meaning. It sounds to me like storytelling is one way. Are there other ways to bring about this kind of synchrony so you can get the benefit of shared reality, shared empathy? 

[00:13:56] Emily Falk: Well, I think what you're saying sort of highlights one of the ways, when you're talking about shared reality. There's other research that has shown that when people have similar assumptions going into a communication that their brains are more in sync. So for example, a research study at Princeton showed that when people were given different back stories, before their brains were scanned, the people who are given the first back stories brains are in sync with one another, but out of sync with people who are given a different backstory. So making sure that we're on the same page about what kinds of assumptions we have is one thing. There have also been a handful of studies looking at what happens in the brains of partisans.

[00:14:38] So people in the US, for example, who tend to be more liberal or more conservative. And what that research has shown is that when people watch the same media clips, people who share ideological perspectives also tend to be more in sync with each other than with people who are part of the other group. And I think that that is also a function of the kinds of assumptions that people are bringing to the table. And behavioral research shows that the media play a large part in that. And you know, as Vice Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and a communication scholar, like that's a piece of this puzzle that I think is so important for us to recognize is that the media that we consume fundamentally shapes so much about how we see the world, what we think and feel.

[00:15:22] There's this incredible study where political scientists randomized people to change their news viewing habits, and after changing their news viewing for a relatively short period of just a few weeks, the things that they thought were important, like what issues to focus on shifted. Their beliefs about those things shifted. And so of course, in day-to-day life, we don't usually make these major pivots, but if we want to understand where other people are coming from or checking our assumptions can be really helpful. And we can think about it in the workplace too. Like for example, if you come in and you're gonna make a big presentation and your boss is in the audience and they look kind of bored, maybe a little bit annoyed.

[00:16:05] Like one very reasonable assumption you might make is that they didn't like the presentation, but if you don't have access to the fact that like they slept badly, they hit every red light, they didn't get to have their coffee first, all of those things might be at play in their mind. And they thought your presentation was great, but you might be out of sync then when you have a conversation afterwards about what just happened, if you come into that conversation feeling a little bit defensive or a little bit like, oh, like what didn't they like about this, right? And they don't know that you're thinking that 'cause they weren't paying attention to what was happening on their face.

[00:16:39] Matt Abrahams: So much richness in what you just said. I just wanna put an exclamation point to the, the impact media can have on all of our communication and the way we interact. When I asked you the question, what are things we can do to bring about synchrony beyond storytelling, what I heard you say is that expectation setting that we can do in advance can prime people to be more in sync. So it could be what we call the meeting or what we put in the meeting invite, and all of that could help people get to synchrony more quickly because you're setting those expectations. But I also heard you say that we have to check our own self expectations, the assumptions that we have going in. This happens all the time where I see a student who looks disengaged in my class, and it turns out they're actually very engaged. It has to do with the bad day they had or, or some other situation. And once I learned that, it allows us to get back in sync. So very helpful that there are things we can do in advance to prime others, but also things we have to do to ourselves to set ourselves up. I appreciate that.

[00:17:39] Well, Emily, before we end, I'd like to ask three questions of all my guests. One I create just for you, and the other two are similar for everyone I interview. Uh, are you up for this? 

[00:17:47] Emily Falk: I'm ready. 

[00:17:48] Matt Abrahams: So in all of the fascinating research that you've done, I'm curious, is there one finding that stands out as something that's just really impacted how you do things, affected your communication or, or where you are in the world?

[00:18:00] Emily Falk: I'll tell you a little bit about some of the work that we're doing right now that is most exciting and on my mind. I'm doing this work with Diana Tamir and Shannon Burns, and a team of amazing postdocs that's about conversation, and we talked a little bit in our conversation here about neural synchrony. But one of the things that's been fascinating to me is that neural synchrony in and of itself seems like it's a starting point, not the end point you want to strive for in a conversation. And what I mean by that is in research that Lily Tsoi and Sebastian Speer led, when people have conversations where they're either talking with a friend or with a stranger, the friends quickly get in sync, and then they use the rest of the conversation to explore all different kinds of topics and ideas.

[00:18:47] Whereas the strangers often spend a lot of the time in that kind of small talk space where they're trying to establish common ground and getting in sync. And then maybe not surprisingly, the friends end up enjoying their conversations more, on average, than the strangers. But the good thing is that when the strangers do that pattern that the friends did of relatively quickly getting in sync, maybe do a little bit of small talk, but then they explore lots of different topics and lots of different mental space, they end up enjoying the conversations more too. That's something that's really intriguing me now and kind of pushing me in conversations with particularly people that aren't my best friends, try to be a little bit more adventurous, right? Not like inappropriate, but just like try to be more curious. 

[00:19:27] Matt Abrahams: That's really interesting. And this notion of getting in sync quickly can free you up to do other things, and it speaks to the power of icebreakers and other things that can help people really get there. Thank you for sharing that and how it's impacting what you do. Question number two, who's a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:19:45] Emily Falk: Tonya Mosley, who I talk about in the book because she has this amazing capacity to connect different people and ideas. She is a radio journalist. She hosts Fresh Air. She has an amazing podcast called Truth Be Told, and she's done just incredible work, bringing together different kinds of expertise and providing context for what's happening in the moment. Like when we look around and we're baffled by the political moment or by, you know, just how we function as humans, she's somebody who I think is incredible. 

[00:20:20] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for sharing that. Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:20:27] Emily Falk: I love this question and there are so many ways to answer it. I'm gonna focus on sort of the three ingredients that the book centers on, which have to do with our brain's value system, our brain social relevant system, and our brain's self relevant system. And so when we think about a successful communication recipe, I think about all of the myriad possible ways that we can tap into those systems. So I think the recipe sort of starts with understanding how our brains work. An analogy that I've been really liking is that many of us can cook a basic meal, but if you understand something about how chemistry works, then that can help you swap out ingredients if you don't have all the right ingredients. Or it can help you diagnose where something went wrong in a baking project. And likewise, if we understand how our brains are working, I'm hoping that that also helps people, A, make sense of like why we do the things that we do and have a little bit more compassion for ourselves, and for other people whose behavior does not make sense to us. And then also that maybe it can help us sort of diagnose places that we can intervene. 

[00:21:31] Matt Abrahams: You have done a great job of that today, helping us understand how our brains work and how that informs the choices we can make as communicators and perhaps the habits that we have. I really appreciate your insights and your time, and I wish you well with your new book. Thank you for your time. 

[00:21:46] Emily Falk: Thank you so much, Matt. It's such a pleasure to talk with you. 

[00:21:51] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about neuroscience and communication, please listen to episode 39 with David Eagleman and episode 101 with Matt Lieberman. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at FasterSmarter.io/premium.