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We are Social!

We are Social!

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The Social Brain

I urge you to read Matthew Lieberman’s excellent book ‘Social’. He adds to a body of work which wants us to recognise that despite how we may feel about our individual identity, we are principally wired to behave, think, and feel socially. (Perhaps our sense of individuality is an illusion).

Here’s some of his ideas, simplified.

Social by Default Think of yourself at rest, passive. No executive function going on in the brain. When you are in that state, there is a part of your brain, known as the Default Network that is active. Our Default Network is, according to Lieberman, (sub-consciously) rehearsing and priming us for social behaviour. He argues that if our default, or resting state is ‘social’… then being social must be the most significant part of what we are, and what we are here to be.

And more…this Default Network is highly correlated to the parts of our brain that are associated with the activity of Mentalizing – figuring out what is going on in other people’s minds.

Mind Reading Humans are set apart from other animals by their ability to figure out what is going on in other’s minds. Explaining how we are mind-readers, Lieberman introduces us to the incredible Mirror Neurons. When you are watching someone experiencing an emotion, the same part of your brain becomes active as theirs thanks to Mirror Neurons. You are (in a brain sense) being them.

Lieberman doesn’t think Mirror Neurons account fully for our ‘mind reading’ capacity. He sees them as the building blocks for Mentalizing – helping the brain to know what someone is experiencing. But to ‘feel them’, you need Empathy. And to want to help you need empathetic motivation – and that requires our Default Network and the chemical Oxytocin which Lieberman describes as ‘nature’s caregiver’. Oxytocin makes us feel good, about being good.

It’s Good to be Good Leiberman says that when we get rewards, or do good things for people or get treated fairly by other people, or when we are liked, it ‘feels’ like it does when we eat chocolate. Pleasurable. And we feel pain when we suffer social rejection, or unfairness, or sadness – so pain and pleasure, “the driving forces of our motivational life”, are social as much as they are physical experiences.

The Social Self Towards the end of his book Lieberman deals with the knotty issue of identity and personal motivation, by arguing that our sense of self is actually derived from what other people think of us. He argues we learn about ourselves through reflected appraisal (what I think you think of me). Interestingly the part of the brain linked to sense of self is also involved with suggestibility and persuasion. Lieberman demonstrates in his book how unaware we are of being persuaded and how poor we are at identifying what is persuasive to us. Lieberman concludes we are very susceptible to persuasion, precisely because we don’t know it’s happening to us!

So what are the implications of his thinking?

Lieberman is saying we are made to be many.

We are programmed to be (sub-consciously at least) thinking about ourselves in the context of others, and when we are accepted and acknowledged, noticed and valued, we feel joy and contentment, and when we are treated poorly, or ignored, we feel pain.

This is pretty fundamental stuff. Lieberman puts sociality at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – in other words it is our oxygen, our nourishment, what really matters, what we can’t do without.

What does this mean for business, marketing and research?

For business it means framing what you do so that you can connect individuals to others. Your business might need to focus on giving customers recognition so they feel connected to you, or it may be your business focus * is in bringing people together, or be about helping the group organise, or helping clarify someone’s place in the group (identifying status). Fundamentally a business needs to ask itself how it helps the individual belong.

For research it means observing, listening to and understanding the space where people connect and share. Researchers need to spend more time working out how people forge identity through their social behaviour.

If the researcher’s job is to understand how the individual becomes connected to the group, then we need to use methods that help expose this behaviour. Ethnography, and observation techniques, conversation analysis and exercises in group discussions that focus on seeing how the individual processes ideas in relation to their groups should be our start point.

Our questions need to be designed to reflect that our individual identity is developed in relation to others…

  • How is this useful for you in your family?
  • If you buy this and so do other people, what do you now have in common?
  • If you give this to someone, how does it help them?
  • What would bring you together here?
  • What is making your feel like an outsider?
  • What is worth sharing in this idea?
  • Why is this worth telling someone about?

We should heed too what Lieberman and others tells us, that the individual doesn’t always know what persuades them and where social influence comes from. We don’t know our own minds, and even more tricky, we don’t know, we don’t know! It’s so easy to ask people why they think what they do, and to hear a coherent answer. But beware the coherent answer.

Let’s hold onto what research can and should do, shine a light on how ideas, products, services help people relate to one another, socially.

kath-handonheart

Kath Rhodes, Qual Street Owner

I love love learning and so I invest time and resources with Ambreen and Claire into exploring social psychology, neuro science, creativity and new techniques in research. Read all about it and help yourself to the ideas that will deliver your business the insight it needs

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@Qualstreet on 17 March 2023