Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (40 page)

The question of whether we should be investing our limited educational dollars in making junior high students feel more socially connected to a community depends on our goals for school and our beliefs about the role of social connection in obtaining those goals.
Even tough-nosed cynics will likely agree that if we spend time and money creating a greater sense of community, our students will be happier.
Without pausing to breathe, they might rush to add that student happiness is not the main goal of our schools.
Although I care deeply about my own child’s happiness and well-being, I agree that a school’s main mission is to maximize learning and the capacity for self-guided learning later in life.
The big question, then, is whether creating a sense of belonging in students is merely an end in itself or whether it can improve learning and educational outcomes.

Being Bullied

There is no bigger threat to an adolescent’s sense of being accepted than being bullied while others stand by doing nothing.
Observers’ inaction is taken as a tacit endorsement
and thus can be experienced as a broad rejection by peers.
As might be expected,
bullying in school is associated with negative changes
in self-esteem,
depression, and anxiety.
Young adolescents experiencing more bullying
or rejection at the hands of their peers also show subsequent decreases in their GPA and school attendance.

Given that
as many as 40 percent of adolescents report
being the victims of some kind of bullying, this may already be producing broad-based reductions in student achievement.
Dewey Cornell examined how schools as a whole
were doing on the various NCLB tests as a function of the prevalence of bullying in each school.
Schools with higher bullying rates scored significantly lower on tests of algebra, geometry, earth science, biology, and world history.

Why would bullying, which typically takes place outside the classroom, affect performance in the classroom?
Recall that social pain activates the same neural circuitry as physical pain.
It is well established that
chronic physical pain is associated with
cognitive impairments like diminished working memory.
The entire purpose of pain is to draw attention to itself so that corrective or recuperative actions can be taken.
Thus, a person in pain is likely to be fixated on that pain, whether it’s physical or social, and this focus would leave fewer cognitive and attentional resources free to focus on the lesson of the day.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister examined the hypothesis that
social pain leads to decrements in intellectual performance
.
His team experimentally manipulated whether individuals were made to feel socially rejected or not.
Then in different experiments, the participants took either an IQ test or a GRE-style test.
In both cases the outcome was unequivocal.
Social pain led to dramatic reductions in test performance.
On the IQ test, the average score was 82 percent correct, but the scores of those who had been made to feel rejected fell to 69 percent.
More dramatically, on the GRE-style test, the rejected participants barely got half as many right as nonrejected individuals (39 versus 68 percent).
That is a stunning difference.
And all Baumeister had to do to produce it was tell participants that in the distant future they were more likely to be alone than other people.
Imagine the effect of being the victim of real bullying,
particularly when no one stands up to take your side.
This must be a profound distraction and a major strain on classroom learning.

Getting Connected

What about the flipside of the coin?
Does feeling more socially connected increase academic performance?
Do grades shoot up when we feel liked and respected?
Just as our intuitive theories tell us that the negative consequences of social pains are stronger than the positive consequences of social connection, it has been more difficult for researchers to establish that enhanced feelings of belonging increase academic achievement.
A number of studies have now shown
a modest impact on GPA of being accepted
by other students or feeling more connected to their school.
These studies tend to be correlational, making it difficult to rule out alternative explanations.

The most persuasive findings
come from experimental research done by Greg Walton and Geoff Cohen, two Stanford psychologists.
In a series of papers, they have demonstrated that a “belonging” manipulation can lead first-year college students who, prior to the manipulation, felt like they didn’t belong, to earn significantly higher grades throughout college.
Specifically,
they tested the effects on African-American
and European-American Yale students, who were represented by 6 and 58 percent of the student body, respectively.
Some students read a testimonial from an older student talking about how she had been worried about fitting in but that things had turned out really well.
Others read a testimonial from an older student talking about how his political views had gotten more sophisticated over time at college (but saying nothing about fitting in).
Whichever kind of testimonial the students read, they then had to deliver their own testimonial on video about the same thing.

Walton and Cohen obtained the students’ GPAs during each
semester of college.
For the African-American students, this single belonging manipulation led to an enduring improvement in GPA in nearly every semester of about 0.2 GPA units (for example, a GPA of 3.6 instead of 3.4).
The European-American students did not show this benefit.
They probably already felt like they belonged.
Given how well represented they were in the student body, the manipulation wouldn’t be expected to be as effective.
But if this effect isn’t about race per se, there might be tremendous use for it in the transition to junior high for all students, because at this juncture of their lives countless students of all races feel like they don’t belong.

This is a pretty crazy finding if you think about it for a minute.
Three years after spending an hour in a psychology experiment that momentarily amped up their sense of belonging, students were still benefiting from it in their academic performance.
Additionally, as seniors, the students were asked about having been in the study three years earlier.
Most could remember that they had been in the study, but almost none of them could remember what the study had been about.
This effect was carrying on long after folks could remember that the original event had happened.

Given that social rewards make us feel good and activate the brain’s reward system, these findings are consistent with past work on emotional experience and intellectual performance.
Social psychologist
Alice Isen repeatedly observed that feeling good
(“positive affect”) is associated with improved thinking and decision making.
In addition, positive affect has been associated with finding similarities and differences between ideas more effectively, and two separate studies have found that
positive affect enhances working memory ability
.

Why would feeling good, whether it’s the result of getting a surprise gift or finding out that others like you, have any impact on your ability to think well?
Neuroscientist Greg Ashby has suggested the reason is that
feeling good and thinking well both depend on dopamine
.
Whenever you do something that feels good or that is
rewarding, dopamine is released from the ventral tegmental area of the brainstem and is projected to the ventral striatum.
However, the ventral striatum is not the only brain region that is affected by dopamine released from the ventral tegmental area.
The lateral prefrontal cortex is also rich with dopamine
receptors, which means many of the cognitive functions associated with the lateral prefrontal cortex are modulated by the presence of dopamine.
Dopamine reductions in the prefrontal cortex
have been shown to impair working memory, and in at least some concentrations, increasing dopamine can improve working memory.
Putting this all together, it is plausible that the dopamine released during feelings of social reward promotes more effective prefrontal control during classroom activities, leading to higher grades.

Social motivations—the need to avoid social pain and the need to experience social connection—are basic needs that can impair learning when unmet.
Over the past two decades, some in education have seen the light about the need to address these motivations, but change is slow in coming, in part because to mentally equate social motivations with actual changes in academic performance is so hard.
Yet this is only a starting point.
The social brain offers other insights, which haven’t been considered at all, about how to change schools to improve academic outcomes.

Thou Didst Beat Me

If our schools are broken
, they have been broken in much the same way for a very long time.
The very first formal classroom was established in the first century AD for Jewish children to learn the Talmud, the book of Jewish laws and customs.
The classes were set up for all children above the age of six with no more than twenty-five students per class.
Five rows of five?
Sounds familiar.
Going back even further, an Egyptian child’s clay tablet from 3000 BC
was inscribed with the words
“Thou didst beat me
and knowledge entered my head.”
That sounds familiar too.
By junior high, education is a battle
between teachers trying to get English, history, math, and science into the heads of the students, while the students are preoccupied with the stuff that is actually important to them—the immediate social world of their peers.

After our journey through the latest research on the social brain, we know that it isn’t the students’ fault that they are distracted by the social world.
We are built to turn our attention to the social world because, in our evolutionary past, the better we understood the social environment, the better our lives became.
The mentalizing system that promotes this
understanding is particularly active and influential in early adolescence.

Although the brain is built for focusing on the social world, classrooms are built for focusing on nearly everything but.
We spend more than 20,000 hours in classrooms
before graduating from high school, and research suggests that of the things we learn in school, we retain little more than half of the knowledge just three months after initially learning it, and significantly less than half of that knowledge is accessible to us a few years later.
Why do we bother with this adversarial teaching process when so little of what is learned is actually retained?
Do we invest so much in our schools just so that we can say children were exposed to all of the important information?
Don’t we want them to actually learn and be able to use what they learn once they have finished with school?

If we want to improve our schools, we need to take a long hard look at what we are doing and be willing to toss a lot of it because it simply isn’t working.
If I had a printer that reproduced only 30 percent of the words I had typed on the page, I would throw it out.
We need to do the same with education.
I’m not one of those who think “teachers are the problem.”
Teachers work incredibly hard under difficult circumstances.
But we are sending them to war with butter knives instead of the ammunition they need to transform our children into the adults we want them to be.

The Mentalized Classroom

Teachers are losing the education war because our adolescents are distracted by the social world.
Naturally, the students don’t see it that way.
It wasn’t their choice to get endless instruction on topics that don’t seem relevant to them.
They desperately want to learn, but what they want to learn about is their social world—how it works and how they can secure a place in it that will maximize their social rewards and minimize the social pain they feel.
Their brains are built to feel these strong social motivations and to use the mentalizing system to help them along.
Evolutionarily, the social interest of adolescents is no distraction.
Rather, it is the most important thing they can learn well.

How do our schools respond to these powerful social motivations?
Schools typically take the position that our social urges ought to be left at the door, outside the classroom.
Talking, passing notes, or texting one’s classmates during class are punishable offenses.
Please turn off your social brain when you enter the classroom; we have learning to do!
It’s like telling someone who hasn’t eaten to turn off the desire to eat.
Our social hunger must also be satisfied, or it will continue to be a distraction precisely because our bodies know it is critical to our survival.

What then is the solution?
Giving students a five-minute break during class to socialize?
Letting them send text messages as they please?
I believe the real solution is to stop making the social brain the enemy during class time and figure out how to engage the social brain as part of the learning process.
We need the social brain to work for us,
not against us in the learning process.
Classroom learning as it typically occurs
depends on the lateral prefrontal and parietal regions involved in working memory (see
Figure 5.2
) and reasoning, along with the hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe, which are involved in laying down new memories.
As we have learned, the mentalizing system tends to operate in opposition
to the traditional learning network.
What we haven’t discussed is that the mentalizing system can operate as a memory system too, one that is potentially more powerful than the traditional learning network.