Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (19 page)

Solomon Asch didn’t just mastermind classic social psychology experiments such as the one on conformity described in chapter 4. Asch was responsible for influencing the career path of Stanley Milgram, another iconoclast of social psychology. A few years after Asch’s conformity experiment, Milgram arrived at Harvard as a naive graduate student. He was assigned to be Asch’s research assistant. Although Milgram was thrilled to be working with someone as famous as Asch, the relationship was not entirely a pleasant one. Ideally, the mentor takes the young graduate student protégé under his wing and molds him into an independent investigator through both nurturance and tough love. Asch, however, was preoccupied with his conformity research. And Milgram, temperamentally predisposed to moodiness and sarcasm, tended to chafe at what he perceived as menial tasks dictated by Asch and the Harvard bureaucracy.
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When Asch invited Milgram to help edit his book on conformity, Milgram accepted, in part, to finance his graduate education while being afforded time to work on his dissertation. It didn’t work out as expected. Milgram spent more time on Asch’s book than he had planned, and not only that, Milgram never received the acknowledgment in the book that he had hoped for.

Although Milgram was intensely unhappy during this period, it was, nevertheless, his formative moment. It was a period of time that ultimately would determine his career direction toward creating a science of social networking. As Milgram wrote in a letter in 1959, “I’m listless,
uneasy, dissatisfied, bored and fed up. I’m the little man looking around for some totalitarian movement I can join.”
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Since he was looking out at the world from a vantage point of anonymity, it is no wonder that Milgram sought to figure out how he came to be in such a position.

With the Nuremburg trials still fresh in his mind, Milgram hit upon the idea of adapting Asch’s experiment to a life-or-death situation, to see whether not only group pressure but also authority figures could induce conformity. Milgram came up with the most famous social psychology experiment ever performed: the shock-obedience experiment. The premise was simple. Subjects were recruited in pairs, one of whom was designated the “teacher” and the other the “learner.” Whenever he gave an incorrect answer, the teacher applied an electric shock to “facilitate the learning process.” It was all a ruse. The learner was Milgram’s confederate, and the shock machine was a fake. The only real subject was the teacher. The true purpose of the experiment was to see how far people would go in shocking strangers under the inducement of an authority figure like Milgram. And they went far indeed, with 65 percent of the subjects maxing out the voltage into the lethal zone of the machine, despite screams and eventual silence from the learner.

Milgram became famous for this experiment, or perhaps infamous. The magnitude of the deception imparted to the subjects caused an outcry among the public and other psychologists. In the end, Milgram had achieved what he longed for as a graduate student—a killer experiment, brilliant in its conception and undeniable in its conclusions—but he still found himself on the fringe of academia. He became an iconoclast after the fact. Perhaps for this reason, he embarked on a somewhat tamer series of investigations on the nature of social networks.

To study the fabric of societal connectedness, Milgram devised an experiment to answer what he called the
small-world problem
. One way to phrase the problem is, what is the probability that any two people know each other? But this misses the more interesting aspect of
how
people are connected to each other. To approach this aspect,
Milgram formulated the question as, how many mutual acquaintances separate two randomly selected people? Although he didn’t coin the phrase, it is popularly known as
six degrees of separation
.
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First, Milgram identified a “target person,” who was a stockbroker living in Boston. Next, Milgram selected three groups of individuals to be “starting persons.” One group was randomly picked from the Boston area by soliciting participants through a Boston newspaper ad. The other two groups were selected to be geographically distant from the target—in this case, people who lived in Nebraska. One of the Nebraskan groups was selected like the Bostonians, and the others were chosen from a pool of Nebraskans who owned blue-chip stocks. Each of the groups represented a different clique of people, some connected through geography, and others through a common interest in stocks. Each of the starting persons received a folder with instructions to get the letter to the target in Boston. If they personally knew the target, then they should send the packet to him. But if the recipient did not know the target personally, then they were to send the packet on to someone who they thought would be more likely to know him.
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Most of the packets never reached their target, but of the 29 percent that did, each passed through four to six people (average of five). What is even more interesting than the number of people each packet passed through is Milgram’s observation that as the packets approached Boston, they tended to fall into common channels. Almost half of the letters reached their target through one of two people, whom Milgram called
common channels
.
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Who were these common channels? The first was a clothing merchant in the target’s hometown of Sharon, Massachusetts. So even though the target was a stockbroker in Boston, a big chunk of the letters reached him through the geographic proximity of a local business owner where he lived, as opposed to where he worked. The clothing merchant, while having nothing to do with the stock market, played the role of a connector. By virtue of his business, the clothes merchant
knew people from many different social circles. It makes sense that as the packets reached the vicinity of Boston, they should funnel to people who are viewed by the local community as well connected. These people are not iconoclasts. They couldn’t be. As well-respected, upstanding citizens, connectors form the glue of local society. Iconoclasts, by their very nature, upset this delicate web of connectedness. But iconoclasts need connectors. Without them, the iconoclast stands no chance of achieving success. Sometimes iconoclasts have to create the connectors themselves.

Ray Kroc: The Iconoclast Who Sold Hamburgers to Children

Ray Kroc, the iconoclastic salesman who took McDonald’s from a sleepy burger joint in southern California to a multinational corporation with more than $20 billion in annual revenues, knew the value of connectors. Born in 1902 in a suburb of Chicago, Kroc learned early on the power of social connectedness. While working at his uncle’s soda shop, “I learned you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm.”
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He later sold coffee beans and paper products, and in 1954, when he met the McDonald brothers, he was selling milk-shake mixers. Kroc bought the right to franchise the restaurant nationwide, but it was Kroc’s connection to another great iconoclast, Walt Disney, that was the source of Kroc’s brilliance. Kroc and Disney had reportedly met briefly as fellow ambulance drivers in World War I. After Kroc acquired the franchise rights to McDonald’s, he sent a letter to Disney, inquiring about the opportunity to open a restaurant in his Disneyland development. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out right away. In fact, McDonald’s and Disney didn’t work out a deal until 1996, long after both Walt Disney and Ray Kroc were dead.

Kroc, however, didn’t give up. He knew the value of connecting to potential customers. And if it wasn’t Disney, then he would create his
own “connector.” Kroc realized that his customers weren’t just adults. He wanted families in his restaurants, and that meant children. Taking a cue from Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Kroc created Ronald McDonald to connect to children.
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It seemed crazy at the time. Children didn’t have the wherewithal to go to a McDonald’s by themselves, and so conventional wisdom said that advertising to children was a waste of money. But Kroc persisted, and that is why he is an iconoclast. And he was right. Eventually, Happy Meals and movie tie-ins followed. More than anything else, Kroc was an iconoclast for single-handedly creating the concept of marketing to children through the creation of kid-friendly connectors.

The Road to Familiarity: Face and Name Recognition in the Brain

Apart from creating connectors to children, vis-à-vis Ronald McDonald, Kroc also perfected the art of ubiquity. Although Kroc was an iconoclast himself, he built McDonald’s on the notion of familiarity to the consumer and had no tolerance for nonconformity within his organization. Everything about the McDonald’s experience was geared toward uniformity and familiarity. Kroc wrapped his brand in a cloak of familiarity that appealed to deep-seated needs for predictability in most people’s brains.

Early work in network science focused on the egalitarian nature of social connections. In the real world, however, connections between people are rarely equal. Everyone knows the president. At least it can seem like that. Public figures, in particular, benefit from the lopsidedness of their social network. Many more people know them than they, themselves, know. The successful iconoclast cultivates this type of asymmetry in his social network.

One way to cultivate a surfeit of incoming connections is to create an aura of familiarity. Iconoclasts such as Chihuly, Picasso, and Kroc excelled at this. The type of familiarity that the iconoclast wants to
cultivate comes down to face and name recognition. It is easy to see why facial recognition evolved to a level of such importance. The face is the most variable aspect of human appearance, containing more bones and muscles per square inch than any other part of the body. We use a person’s face to gauge her beauty, and we value symmetry above all else.
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The face is also a window into our emotional states. Even without language, our faces say something about what type of person we are and how we feel.

Once humans acquired language, they no longer needed to rely solely on visual cues to identify a person. Now, in addition to their face, we mentally tag the identity of an individual with their name. In online communities, identities may be flagged in other ways, such as computer-generated avatars. Although faces and names are two very different ways to categorize an individual, both are necessary to trigger a feeling of familiarity. Recognizing a face, such as that of an actor in a movie, does no good unless you can link the face with its name. The inability to make this link leads to a tip-of-the-tongue feeling of frustration, which is not a mental state the iconoclast wants to foster when they are tying to sell their ideas. Solid familiarity imparts a visual image to a person’s name and nearly instantaneous recall of a person’s name when seeing his face.

For many years, psychologists thought that these two aspects of familiarity, visual and mnemonic recognition, were mediated by separate processes in the brain. But recent fMRI experiments suggest that the emotional response to an individual also colors our judgments of familiarity. All primates have evolved brains that contain specialized regions devoted to the processing of faces. The most prominent of these face-responsive areas is in a fold of brain, just off the midline toward the back of the head, called the
fusiform gyrus
. Neurons in this region fire most strongly when we see a human face. The more familiar the face, the stronger these neurons fire. The psychologists Ida Gobbini and James Haxby pointed out that the relationship between fusiform activity and
familiarity is influenced by several factors.
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For example, the faces of strangers elicit more activity than famous familiar faces, but the faces of friends and family members evoke as much activity as strangers’ faces. These results suggest that fusiform activity reflects the depth of facial processing. Both strangers and friends trigger more processing than famous people, but for different reasons. Whereas a stranger’s face might represent a potential threat, a friend’s face evokes deeper processing because it triggers a wealth of memories.

Although the fusiform area is critical for the initial processing of faces, Gobbini and Haxby found that a different set of brain regions tracked familiarity. This network implemented cognitive functions more general than just face processing. These areas included the
cingulate cortex
and a region on the side of the brain just above the ear, called the
superior temporal sulcus
(STS). The cingulate cortex is thought to represent personal traits and even the mental states of others, while the STS seems to play a critical role in the evaluation of their intentions.
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The STS neurons are exquisitely sensitive to physical configurations of the face, aspects such as in which direction the face was pointed, what the rest of the body was doing, and, most strongly, where the eyes were looking. The Scottish psychologist David Perrett, who has studied monkey STS neurons for decades, provided one of the most concise explanations for the function of these neurons: they signal the direction of another person’s attention.
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And from attention, we extract intention. Looking to the side, for example, may signal deception, and STS neurons pick this up.

The STS neurons provide a biological bookmark for a person’s character. A key element of Gobbini and Haxby’s theory of familiarity depends on the emotional response that we associate with a person’s face. In the simplest sense, one has either a positive or a negative emotional response to a person. Both types of emotions foster familiarity, but for opposite reasons. Positive feelings generate a desire to approach the person, while negative feelings make you want to run away. Obviously,
the successful iconoclast should be in the former category. An individual who doesn’t look straight into someone’s eyes runs the risk of the viewer’s STS neurons tagging him as a person of suspect intentions.