Translator: Yury Rogoza Reviewer: Aliaksandr Autayeu
(Applause)
I would like to start our talk,
our discussion,
with the film based on Alberto Moravia's novel
“Il conformista” 1951 / “Conformist”.
Bernardo Bertolucci created a wonderful, touching,
interesting story of the conflict, personal conflict
between the main character Marcello Clerici and the state.
As a result of this conflict, the main character
lost his loved one.
Many of us in this room
are ready to confront the state, the opinion of others or the crowd.
Actually, in our laboratory, we are trying
to understand why we are strongly inclined to be conformists,
how much we can understand the hidden the cerebral mechanisms of conformism.
While preparing our talk,
I tried to find out where my interest in this subject stemmed from.
I remembered a few interesting facts.
I have made my dissertation
under the supervision of Natalia Behtereva --
granddaughter of the great Russian physiologist and psychiatrist
Vladimir Bekhterev.
Vladimir Bekhterev’s interest was in social influence.
If you look at this book
“Suggestion and its role in public life”,
you will find a number of very interesting chapters.
For example, the chapter on clonic effects,
epidemics of witchcraft and demonomania.
Incredibly interesting stories
about how epidemics of religious ecstasies and convulsions
spread with incredible speed in groups of people.
Actually, Behterev’s curiosity,
went on to his granddaughter, and then to me as her student.
At that time I was studying brain
and we absolutely did not understand how we can study
“Neurobiology of social influence”.
Many of you are familiar
with the excellent research in social psychology.
As a post-graduate student, I became increasingly interested
in social psychology.
With excitement, I read books by social psychologists,
the books of Cialdini, Zimbardo, Arnsen.
I read all these fantastic experiments which show
how people are influencing us.
I read and, frankly, realized that
as a neuroscientist, I will never learn it, never...
Many of you might remember wonderful experiments of Solomon Asch.
He asked his subjects to do a very simple task.
They saw on a screen
three lines “А”, “В” and “С”.
And the question was very simple:
which of these lines has the same length as line “X”?
The answer is obvious:
line “B” is equal to line “X”.
But imagine for a minute that in a room,
there are 6 decoy subjects besides you
and all of them are giving a wrong answer.
Solomon Asch showed that in this situation,
less than a third of people give the correct answer,
the rest will show conformism,
they'll give the wrong answer, just not to be different from others.
Social psychology through hundreds of great experiments showed
the power of the people around you, the power of the crowd.
We are afraid to be different,
we change our opinion to follow the crowd.
For example, social psychology revealed that
it is the behavior of others, not our own opinion,
that determines the amount of adultery, crime,
amount of dishonest taxpayers.
Social influence and the behavior of others determine our behavior.
But I was a neurophysiologist, I knew that
I would never explore all these interesting processes.
In my academic career, along my academic path,
the change happened very unexpectedly.
I understood that I would have no chance to study
all the processes of social influence,
when we realize with horror
how our opinion differs from the opinion of the majority.
But one day,
when I was on an internship in Helsinki,
in a university, I parked my car
near this building.
The building was created
by a magnificent Scandinavian architect
Alvar Aalto.
I stopped my car and leaned towards the radio receiver.
Somebody was talking about a new science,
about neuroeconomics.
The new discipline appeared at that very moment
as economists and neuroscientists discovered each other.
It turned out that for hundreds of years,
economists and neuroscientists had been studying the same thing.
They studied decision-making process.
The economists were interested in exploring complex solutions:
why we pay this amount of money for these goods and not a different one,
why we invest money or do not invest money,
why we save money
for pensions, or not.
Biologists were interested in simpler questions:
why we pursue the fat rabbit, or not
or why we run away from a scary lion, or not.
In fact, for hundreds of years the two disciplines had been studying
the same thing, the same question:
how do we make decisions?
And here the new discipline appeared: neuroeconomics.
This discipline tries to find out
how our brain is programming our decisions
in various complex economic and social contexts.
For me it was a turning point!
We were able to formalize the hypothesis,
the hypothesis of brain mechanisms of conformism.
For us, conformism -- or social influence --
is a phenomenon of people nearby
manipulating our brain,
manipulating the activity of certain brain areas
involved in the decision-making process.
Which areas of the brain and which processes
are exploited by people around us,
forcing us to change our opinion?
To answer this question,
we can put our subjects in the scanner,
try to influence their opinion
and register that activity of the brain,
which is connected to social influence.
But we need a hypothesis.
In fact, we are interested
in the following situation.
This is a famous German photo,
you see a man with crossed hands
amidst the crowd giving the Nazi salute.
Probably this person
has a different opinion.
What is going on in this man's head?
We hypothesized
that our biology, our evolution
designed the brain in such a way
that the brain at this point tells him:
“You're wrong!
You should not be different from others!”
Indeed, it is dangerous to differ from the people around.
Let’s imagine an FC “Spartak” Moscow t-shirt
at the fan sector of Petrovsky stadium [home stadium of a rival team]
in St. Petersburg.
It can be very dangerous to differ from others!
Therefore we hypothesized
that the brain signals us danger:
“You are different, it is dangerous,
change your opinion to agree with the majority!”
How to identify this signal of danger?
Here we can refer
to a formal representation of this mechanism,
formulated by a remarkable neuroeconomist, mathematician Read Montague.
He expressed this hypothesis quite abstractly.
Imagine that the brain perceives the behavior of others --
this is a green line, green curve,
this is how our brain perceives the norm.
The red line indicates
how our brain perceives our own behavior.
This is an abstract curve.
The difference between them is a mathematical error.
This mathematical error
forces us to change our opinion
to agree with the opinions of people nearby.
Many will say: “What a strange
simplified mechanism,
which is not clear enough.”
Why do they say that about this mathematical error?
It is because we then translate
the whole problem of social influence
into the language of neuroeconomics.
For neuroeconomics, for biology,
error is the key point.
For neurobiology
error -- or the awareness of error --
is the moment when we change.
If we do not realize it,
and make a mistake, we learn almost nothing,
we stick to the same opinion, the same behavior.
If we are wrong and notice the mistake,
we change, we learn.
Therefore, we hypothesized that at the moment
when our opinion differs from the opinion of others,
our brain screams: “You're wrong!”
The brain signals us an error
and this signal forces us
to automatically change our opinion to agree with the opinion of others.
How to find this error signal in a human brain?
A huge body of neurobiological research
shows that there is
a distributed network in our brain
which monitors our mistakes.
It warns us about our mistakes and,
first of all, it is the cingulate cortex,
marked here by a yellow circle.
If you mentally cut our brain like apple, between the hemispheres,
then the cingulate cortex will be located
on the inner surface of the cerebral hemispheres.
This area signals us our mistakes,
this area triggers internal changes.
Therefore, if our hypothesis is correct,
if for our brain
differing from others is an error,
we should detect this activity,
when our opinion differs from the opinion of others.
We thought a lot about how to explore conformism,
how to trigger conformism many times, and at the same time
not stress our subjects too much.
At that time, I was working in the Netherlands.
My professor, Hyenas Fernandez suggested:
“Let’s study conformism
as a change of opinion about the attractiveness of faces.”
I like this
digital masterpiece,
you see beautiful faces of different races
and carefully crafted transient versions.
All these people are beautiful.
Indeed, there is something universal in beauty
and psychology says that beauty is universal.
But at the same time there is something special
in the faces of people of different cultures,
that we do not fully understand.
These faces are beautiful for a given culture,
but we cannot grasp this beauty.
We decided to study how our opinion
changes
under the influence of the opinion of others.
We created a very simple test.
We put our subjects into a scanner and asked them
to assess the attractiveness of people's faces.
They saw a face on the screen
and had to assess it
from not attractive -- 1,
to very attractive -- 8
The subject evaluates the face,
see their assessment on the screen,
but every time they did so,
every time they assessed the face,
we presented them the opinion
of more than one hundred students from the same university.
Sometimes this opinion differed from the subject's opinion,
sometimes it matched.
We were interested in what is happening at the moment,
when our opinion differs
from the opinion of others.
Whether the cingulate cortex activates,
whether it tells us about the error...
Our research has shown that indeed,
you see it in yellow, the cingulate cortex activates,
as soon as our opinion differs from the opinion of others.
For our brain, the difference
from others in our behavior, in our opinion --
is an error!
How quickly does the brain tell us about this error?
To investigate this,
we used a different method --
magnetic encephalography.
With this method, we can surround your head
with lots of hypersensitive sensors
which are able to catch a small signal
produced by the cingulate cortex.
And by using this method,
we saw this peak of activity 240 milliseconds later,
a quarter of a second later
our brain tells us: “You differ from others!
Change your opinion!”
If such a signal really exists in the brain,
can we suppress it by modern methods?
Yes, we can!
We can use transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Using a focused magnetic field,
we can temporarily suppress,
reduce the activity of the cingulate cortex,
which tells us about this error.
We can expose our subject
to a transcranial magnetic stimulation.
For 20-30 minutes, their cingulate cortex
will produce much fewer signals.
We did this with our subjects,
asked them to do the same task.
The results show that our subjects
change their opinion only half as much
after their cingulate cortex
was temporarily blocked
with magnetic field.
That is, the brain automatically informs us:
“We differ from others.”
This signal appears in a quarter of a second.
Modern methods allow us
to suppress this signal
and make people less conformists.
My colleagues in various laboratories
studied how the cingulate cortex responds
to the opinion of the group of people that we love,
and to the opinion of the group that we hate,
how it reacts when our opinion differs from the opinion of experts.
My colleagues in Denmark
used chemical substances
that change a certain amount
of neurotransmitters in the cingulate cortex
and temporarily made people more conformists.
That is, we are increasingly aware
of what happens in the brain of a conformist.
We all seem to be prone
to automatically change our opinion
to agree with the opinion of others.
All this research has shown that for our brain,
our difference from others is an error
and it showed that the brain tends
to automatically change our opinion to agree with the opinion of others.
Why did we become such conformists?
Why are we inclined to conformism?
We can cite here a few theories.
One theory -- “wisdom of the crowds” -- says that the crowd
is a more accurate device to evaluate the reality.
There are many opinions in the crowd.
It leads to the crowd more accurately
assessing the situation, evaluating information,
so you should follow the crowd.
Another theory is -- evolutionary theory --
tells us about evolutionarily stable strategies of behavior.
It says that for millions of years
evolution has been testing us.
All wrong decisions, suboptimal solutions,
are immediately punished by natural selection.
We become somebody's food, we do not leave posterity,
we die from hunger.
Therefore, if a group, a flock,
learns the same behavior, the same opinion...
It can happen only
if this opinion, this behavior, is better than the alternative.
Because the alternative was punished for millions of years.
From the point of view of evolution, we must follow the flock.
Their opinion is checked by natural selection.
But we are living in a rapidly changing world,
where the opinion of the majority
may slow down progress, for example.
The majority can suppress the creative minority opinion,
it can suppress changes.
Therefore we have to remember
about this internal tendency to conformism,
we tend to change our opinion to agree with the opinion of others.
We should remember this when we see the number of likes on the Internet,
when we read surveys,
when we listen to TED talks.
If we go back to the main question of our conversation:
what was going on in the head of Marcello Clerici
during his conflict with the state?
Probably his brain signaled him
about, possibly, the most important mistake:
his opinion differs from the opinion of the state,
his opinion differs from the opinion of others.
And we should remember that.
Perhaps not everyone in this room will be able to overcome...
Because when we go
against the state, against others, against the opinion of the crowd,
we go, in some sense, against our own brain.
Perhaps at this point, I should conclude my presentation.
And finally, I want to thank all my colleagues,
who helped me carry out
all these quite difficult experiments
and you for your patience and attention.
Thank You! (Applause)