Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (41 page)

In the 1980s,
a series of behavioral studies demonstrated
a curious phenomenon.
In the first of these studies, social psychologist David Hamilton asked people to read statements describing ordinary behaviors (for example, “reading the newspaper”).
Some of the participants were told to try to memorize all the information because there was going to be a memory test later.
Other participants were told to “form an overall impression of what the person who performed these various actions is like” and were explicitly told
not
to try to memorize the information.
These folks were not told about the upcoming memory test, and instead they were told they would later be asked some questions based on the impression they had formed.
These individuals thought they would be asked questions like “Would this person prefer watching a movie or going hiking?”
Regardless of what each participant was told to expect, everyone got a memory test.
Guess who did better on the memory test: the folks told to memorize for the test, or the folks trying to form an overall impression?
I wouldn’t be telling you about this study if it were the memorizers, would I?
As strange as it might seem, in study after study, the folks making sense of the information socially have done better on memory tests than the folks intentionally memorizing the material.

For years, this
social encoding advantage
was assumed to result from efficient use of the traditional learning system (that is, working memory regions plus the medial temporal lobe).
People thought that social encoding must be using this system better than memorization attempts do.
This was a parsimonious explanation, but with all due respect to William of Ockham, it was wrong.
Jason Mitchell, a social neuroscientist at Harvard University
, ran an fMRI version of the social encoding advantage study.
As in a dozen studies before his, he found that when people were asked to memorize the information, activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex and the medial
temporal lobe predicted successful remembering of that information later on.
According to the standard explanation of the social encoding advantage, the same pattern should have been present or even enhanced when people did the social encoding task, but that isn’t what happened.
The traditional learning network wasn’t sensitive to effective social encoding.
Instead, the central node of the mentalizing network, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, was associated with successful learning during social encoding.

The educational implications of these findings are vast.
These findings suggest that the mentalizing system is not just for social thinking—it is also a powerful memory system.
Under certain circumstances, it appears to be a more powerful memory system than the traditional one, as social encoding leads to better memory performance than actually trying to memorize.
This system has limitations with respect to classroom learning, but before getting to those, let’s roll out the big news here.

The brain has a fantastic learning system that has been largely untapped as an educational resource.
This could change everything.
Remember, when we use the traditional memory system it typically suppresses the mentalizing system.
That’s the seesaw.
Thus, the way we have learned how to learn in the classroom turns off this mentalizing-based learning system.
Moreover, the entire structure of classroom learning is meant to prevent this system from contributing; social thinking is penalized in the classroom.
So let’s consider some simple ways to make the social brain work for us, instead of against us, in the classroom.

History and English

I hated history class.
It didn’t matter whether it was U.S.
history or world history.
The way it was taught and described in our textbooks was largely the history of who had power, who fought whom in what year, which country was able to get or keep power, and
what the territorial boundaries looked like before and after each war.
The facts as currently taught are commonly devoid of the social content and implications that the mentalizing network seems to naturally crave, leading minds to wander to other distractions that impede learning.
Yet historical events, as they are occurring, are intensely social, nearly always infused with multiple mentalistic narratives that we use to understand the events while they are still in the headlines.

Consider the ongoing diplomatic standoff between the United States and Iran.
U.S.
leaders are constantly debating the true beliefs of Iranian leaders regarding their goals for uranium enrichment.
Do they want it as a power source as they claim or to create nuclear weapons?
Most U.S.
policy wonks assume Iranian leaders are not telling the truth, but what can be inferred about their true intentions from the things they do say?
Emotionally, U.S.
leaders are driven by their fears about the implications of a nuclear Iran and how that would affect Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East.
Strategically, Democrats and Republicans are jockeying for position on the rhetoric of our Iran policy in order to weaken or embarrass their opponents in the next election.
All of these events are rich with social and mentalistic drama, but by the time they become a paragraph in the history textbook, this social cognitive drama will all be stripped away and replaced with the actions that were ultimately taken.

It is understandable that historians would worry about sticking to the objective facts and shy away from the kinds of inferences needed to discuss the psychosocial drama of historical events.
But as someone who cares about education, I care far more about how to make this content interesting to students.
History has always been a giant soap opera as it unfolds, which is part of why current events are so interesting.
They appeal to our mentalizing system, which wants to understand the
why
behind all of the observable events.
News analysis provides us with this mentalistic drama, and
if history classes are to be more engaging, they should as well.
History class needs to move from limiting discussion to the
how
and
what
of history to the much richer
why
that students crave.
Presenting historical events in terms of possible social narratives that address the thinking, feeling, and motivations of historical figures may well improve retention of the agreed-upon key facts by invoking the mentalizing-based memory system.
It is like hiding medicine inside a piece of candy; the child enjoys the candy while the candy also serves as a vehicle for the medicine.

Social thinking is equally relevant to English class and yet is largely absent from the curriculum.
English classes devote enormous time to the rules of writing.
Lessons focus on spelling, grammar, syntax, topic sentences, and the five-paragraph paper.
These are commonly presented as a rigid set of facts and rules to be learned and implemented in one’s writing.
The true motivator behind all of these facts and rules lurks in the shadows, rarely discussed openly in the classroom: good writing is all about getting ideas from your mind into the minds of other people, so that they understand you and are persuaded, informed, or moved by you.
This is a straightforward mentalizing concept that should be students’ North Star, their guiding light.

Based on social brain research, I would argue that rather than English classes, students should be taking “communication classes” because this would place the focus on all the tools we have at our disposal to communicate effectively with others, if only we learn how to wield them.
Understanding the minds of one’s audience and how they are likely to interpret or misinterpret what has been written is the essential principle behind the rules of good writing.
Consider the use of the passive voice.
Everyone learns that using the passive voice is a major no-no (for example, “the bicycle was ridden by the boy” should be “the boy rode the bicycle”), but few learn the reason for this: the reader has to do more mental work to understand passive language.
The passive voice isn’t wrong because
it violates a sacred principle.
It is wrong, in most cases, because it is harder to follow.
The deeper principle is “Make yourself easy to understand.”
This is the litmus test for nearly all writing decisions.
While history class would be improved by focusing on
why
historical figures did
what
they did, English class would be equally improved by focusing on
why
each rule improves comprehension and
when
it does so, rather than exclusively focusing on
what
the rules are.
Our brains crave
why
stories, and in history and English, these are natural companions to what is already taught.

Math and Science

When policy makers sound the alarm about how U.S.
classrooms are falling behind those in other countries, they aren’t thinking about history class, and most of them aren’t focused on English either.
There is a huge federal initiative to improve education in the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) because these fields are seen as determining our ability to improve the quality of life through new inventions, techniques, and discoveries.
As much as I am trying to shed light on the overlooked significance of the social world and how our brain specifically evolved to interact with it, I am not making the case that mentalizing has a natural home in lectures on geometry or organic chemistry.
In these subjects, the social brain may not play a role in the content of the material.
However, it may still end up being central to the learning process.
If we can increase the social motivations present while learning math and science, students may absorb the content far better than they currently do on average.

Recall the social encoding advantage: when we encode information socially, the social brain handles the encoding and leads to better retention of the information than the traditional memory system.
Given that it makes no sense to ask people to think about
math from a social perspective, the trick is to get the mentalizing system to do the learning a different way—to get learners to think of themselves as teachers while they are learning.
Yale psychologist John Bargh
first performed this trick back in 1980.

In the first study of
learning-for-teaching
, Bargh compared people who were memorizing information for a test to people who had learned the same material in order to be able to teach it to someone else.
Those learning the material in order to teach it performed better on what to them was a surprise memory test, compared to those who knew the memory test was coming and had studied for it.
There are two other key facts of this study.
First, those learning in order to teach never actually got to teach.
The act of teaching no doubt enhances memory; however, in Bargh’s study, people were tested right after learning the material.
Thus, any advantage they showed had to be due to the social motivation present while learning the material.
The second critical fact is that the material to be learned was not social.
This means that the results of this study might generalize to learning a variety of nonsocial content—like science and math.

It is an open question as to whether the learning-for-teaching effect is like the social encoding advantage, in terms of using the mentalizing system rather than the traditional memory system.
My lab is currently investigating this, but we do already have some suggestive evidence that social motivation alone is sufficient to activate the mentalizing system’s memory abilities.

Recall that in
Chapter 5
on mentalizing, I described a study that Emily Falk and I ran looking at what happens in the brain when we see messages that we are destined to spread effectively to others—when we are acting like Information DJs.
One of the things we looked at in our analyses was how accurately the Interns (the people in the scanner who were the first to be exposed to the pilot television show descriptions) remembered the ideas when passing the information on to the Producers (the people who learn about the pilot
shows only from the Interns).
Memory accuracy was associated almost exclusively with mentalizing activity, not the traditional memory system, when the idea was first presented.
This suggests that the motivation to share the information may have been routing the content through the mentalizing system for later retrieval.

If we know that social motivations to learn can invoke the mentalizing system and enhance learning, how do we apply that knowledge in classes such as math and science?
Perhaps through peer tutoring—students teaching students.
Rather than trying to prevent student interactions during class, the view from the social brain is that such talking should be encouraged, but focused, to maximize the benefits.
Peer tutoring has been used in classrooms, but not broadly and not in ways that maximize its social motivational benefits for learning.

Consistent with the learning-for-teaching findings,
multiple studies have demonstrated that peer tutoring benefits
learning in both tutors and tutees, with tutors often benefiting more.
In some ways this has been seen as a limitation of peer tutoring because the intention has been to specifically enhance tutee learning and close the gap between low- and high-achieving individuals.
From the current perspective, a broad program focused more on
tutor
learning (through socially motivated teaching), with all students functioning as both tutors and tutees, might lead to the best educational outcomes.
We should figure out ways to make low achieving students the tutors, where the learning benefits are greatest, rather than always putting them in the role of the person being tutored.