Winning the Battle Against Yourself

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the fall of 1999, a new film debuted in just 25 theaters across the United States. Its name was Being John Malkovich. The premise was outlandish. A down-on-his-luck puppeteer named Craig finds a small, hidden door at the office where he works. When he crawls inside, he goes through a strange portal and ends up inside the mind of the actor, John Malkovich. For 15 minutes or so, he gets to inhabit the actor's body before being spit out on the side of the New Jersey turnpike. Things only get more wacky from there. Craig and a co-worker start charging people to go through the portal, and soon, plenty of people have had the experience of being John Malkovich. When John Malkovich, the real John Malkovich, inevitably learns about this, he is determined to go through the portal himself. When he does so, he enters a world where everyone has his face and can only say one word. The movie is thought-provoking and has long been one of my favorites. That might be because it is a metaphor for a central idea that we explore on this show. We like to think that we are in charge of our own minds. We decide what we are going to think and what we are going to do. We decide what to cook for dinner, where to go on vacation, and whom to marry. But it turns out that there are a vast number of unconscious mental processes that direct much of how we think and act. Often we are unaware of these hidden puppeteers. They make us say and do things that we haven't consciously chosen ourselves. Sadly, there is no way to spit these puppeteers out on the side of the New Jersey turnpike. This week on Hidden Brain, why our minds often conspire against our best interests, and how we can regain some control over the puppet masters pulling at our strings.

Most of us have been raised to believe that if we want to get something done, we need only to set our minds to it. And yet something odd and discouraging often happens when we set out to lose weight or exercise more or save money. Somehow, we end up polishing off that pint of ice cream in the freezer or skipping our session at the gym or once again spending more than our budget allows. It's not what we set out to do, but it seems as if we are not the ones in charge. Emily Falk is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies how we make choices and how we can initiate change in our lives. Emily Falk, welcome to Hidden Brain.

EMILY FALK: Thank you so much for having me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Emily, I understand that you recently made a promise to yourself about what you would eat at a graduation ceremony that featured many desserts at the buffet. What was the promise you made to yourself?

EMILY FALK: Well, I was in the very exciting situation that there were many desserts that looked delicious and I was very curious, so I wanted to try all of them. But I knew, of course, that if I ate many different desserts, I would not feel amazing afterwards. So, I decided that I was going to get one of each of them, try each one, and then eat the full thing from the one I liked the best. I went and I sat down and I did try each of them, and it turned out that they were delicious. I was also in a ceremony that was about an hour long, and they were just there in front of me. And so, in the moment, it went well, in the sense that I had many desserts in front of me, and a lot of time, so I ate them. And that was really fun for a little while, until it wasn't. When Emily got home, she swore to her partner, Brett, that she was only going to eat healthy foods the rest of the day. Oh man, well, I went and I lay down on the couch, and I said, I am so sugared up, I am not going to eat any more sugar today.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And what happened?

EMILY FALK: I'm a little embarrassed to tell you what happened. What happened was that evening, we went out to dinner with my grandma Bev, and there's a diner in her building called Little Pete's. And we went there and had what my kids considered to be probably the ideal meal, including things like, you know, a griddled grilled cheese and waffles and things that you get at a diner. And at dessert time, the kids said they wanted a milkshake. And my kid Emmett asked the waiter, how big is the milkshake? And the waiter said, it's pretty big. And so I said, why don't you guys split the milkshake? So they agreed to that deal. And the waiter brought out two fairly sizable glasses full of milkshake, which I assumed was half in each glass. But no, he also had one of those large metal containers, like you get at a soda fountain, and he handed it to me. And that contained just as much milkshake. So he gave me this enormous milkshake, and basically, what was I going to do, right? Like, I didn't want to sugar my kids up anymore. Milkshakes are delicious. So despite the fact that directly before coming to this dinner, I had just said to Brett and my kids, I am not going to eat any more sugar today. I am just going to detox and eat all the green vegetables and feel amazing later. I proceeded to polish off the entire rest of that milkshake.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm reminded, Emily, of that perceptive scene from the sitcom Friends. Chandler and Rachel find themselves eating a cheesecake that was supposed to be delivered to a neighbor. When a second cheesecake arrives, they vow not to eat it and place the dessert outside the door of the rightful owner. But soon enough, they find the cheesecake has not yet been picked up.

CLIP: Do you see what I see? It's still there.

CLIP:Mrs. Braverman must be out. She could be out of town.

CLIP: Maybe she'll be gone for months. By then, the cheesecake may have gone bad.

CLIP: We don't want her to come back to bad cheesecake. No, that could kill her. Well, we don't want that. No, so we're protecting her. Well, we should take it. Yeah, but we should move quick. Why? Because I think I just heard her moving around in there.

CLIP: Go, go, go.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So I understand that part of your motivation in having that milkshake, Emily, was you wanted to shield your children from the dangers of too much sugar. That sounds a lot like what Chandler and Rachel were doing in the scene.

EMILY FALK: Yeah, I mean, that's certainly something that I said verbally at the table. I mean, Brett did remind me of the resolution that I had made earlier to be kind to my body and not totally poison myself with large amounts of sugar. And I had a milkshake in my hand and I said, well, I have a milkshake and it looks delicious. So that was a pretty good argument.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering, Emily, what you make of this, because I feel many people go through what you go through, which is that we want to do something, we aspire to do something, we plan to do something, and then somehow we don't.

EMILY FALK: Exactly. And this happens in all different parts of our lives. It happens with work projects that maybe we wish we had gotten to invest in a little bit more, or school projects if we're still in school. It happens with decisions where there's some kind of payoff that's far off in the future. Maybe we want to do something because we know that it'll make us healthier or happier later. It happens with the people that we care about and making time to spend time with them when they're available and when we still can. So that's just a small set of examples. There are so many times where we make these kinds of choices, and then later we wonder why we made them.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Have you heard this from your students, from your partner, from your children?

EMILY FALK: Yeah, I've heard this. Everybody that I know experiences this. One example that comes to mind is my grandma, Bev. Every time I see her, regrets that she hasn't been reading books. And I ask her, you know, why haven't you been reading books? She loves reading books. And she says, well, there's just so many things that I need to do. And I ask her about what those things are. And it's usually things that have to do with basic, you know, cleaning up her apartment or doing errands, things that take some time. And I say, well, why don't you just carve out some time and read some books? And she's like, I'll do it tomorrow. Or, you know, my kids are extremely interested in a wide range of things that they would like to be doing. And then sometimes on the weekend when they're allowed to have screen time, they end up playing a ton of Minecraft. And then later, they feel frustrated that they didn't do all those other things that they had in their plan for the weekend. Those are two small examples that come to mind. I mean, this also happens all the time with my team at work. Like when people are doing research and we meet and we discuss all of the ambitions that we have for the things that we're going to do and then we meet with each other a week later and only a very small number of the things that were actually on the list maybe have been accomplished. And it's not that anybody has been slacking off or anybody had bad intentions, but just that everything always takes longer than you think and then other things come up. And sometimes there's 20 things that didn't make it onto that original to do list, but that were really important in the moment.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So this phenomenon of failing to follow through is so common that it's become a trope in many films and TV shows. I want to play you a clip from the television series Parks and Recreation. The character Ron Swanson has had a really bad relationship with this woman, but keeps getting back with her. After one of their traumatic breakups, he records a message to his future self.

CLIP: Hello, Ron. It's Ron. If you're watching this, it means that once again, you have danced with the devil. Right now, you're probably thinking, Tammy's changed, we'll be happy together. But you're only thinking that because she's a monstrous parasite who entered through your privates and lodged herself in your brain. So you have two choices. One, get rid of Tammy. Or two, lobotomy and castration. Choose wisely. So, Emily, what do you hear when you hear that warning that Ron is giving to himself?

EMILY FALK: Yeah, I mean, what I hear is somebody who has tried to do something in the past, right? He set a goal and then other things that he hadn't accounted for come up. And so he gets back together with Tammy and clearly he's done this multiple times because he's made a video and tried to protect himself against it in the future, right? So we do this all the time. We try to talk to ourselves or make resolutions or write down ideas about how our future selves should behave.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering in some ways if this is like the story of, you know, Ulysses tying himself to the mast of his own ship. I mean, this is a problem that really goes back to mythology, to ancient times. I mean, the challenge that we often have in overcoming what seems to be, you know, almost a hijacker who lives inside our own heads. Yeah, I mean, it's an idea that goes back for centuries, millennia, and it's also an idea that's represented in all kinds of modern media.

EMILY FALK: And like the clips you played earlier, it's funny because we can relate to it, right? It's funny because it's so common that none of us is thinking, why are Chandler and Rachel interested in eating more of the cheesecake? Or, you know, well, Ron should just be able to stop himself because so many of us have been in that kind of situation.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So often, we sincerely want to make changes in our behavior, changes that we know would leave us better off. And almost as often, we end up not making those changes to our own frustration and bafflement. When we come back, the mysterious but powerful presence inside our heads, that works against our conscious goals to improve our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Emily Falk is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies why our resolutions often fail and what we can do about it. Emily, most of us imagine that if there's a choice we want to make or a change we want to initiate, we can simply decide to do it and then we will carry through. Your study of the brain suggests that there's more to this process. In particular, a network known as the value system gets involved whenever we face a decision. What is this value system?

EMILY FALK: The value system is a constellation of brain regions that handle our choices. The choices that we're making consciously between drinking a milkshake or not drinking a milkshake, between whether we're going to go out on a date with somebody or stay home and deal with our emails. And the value system calculates these choices in what neuroscientists call a value calculation. So, in some ways, it's doing a sort of cost-benefit analysis? Yeah, basically, for each of our choices, it's identifying what are the different things that we're choosing between. It's assigning a subjective value to each of those different choices that depends on our current context, our past experiences, our future goals. And then based on that subjective value, that subjective reward that it's anticipating from each of the choices, it chooses the one that it thinks is going to be the best for me right here, right now. And then it is connected to other brain systems that take action that's relevant to that choice.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you raised something really important here just now, which is that the value system is really focused on the here and now. So when Emily says, I don't want to eat too much dessert or too much sugar, because that's not gonna be good for me in the long run, but then Emily is confronting three delicious desserts that are sitting in front of her on the table, the value system has to make a judgment, and it has to prioritize either the short term or the long term.

EMILY FALK: Exactly, so when I'm trying to decide whether I'm gonna eat the delicious dessert that's sitting in front of me, the short term reward of how delicious it's gonna taste is more salient, that weighs more heavily in that value calculation than the long term consequence if I do that over and over again over the course of years, or even how I'm gonna feel tomorrow or later this evening.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And you can see how this works in all kinds of different ways. If I'm making a choice between buying some expensive gizmo or saving for my retirement, then the expensive gizmo gives me a joy and a pleasure in the here and now, and saving for retirement is a very far-off benefit.

EMILY FALK: Right. Not only is it far-off, but it's less vivid, right? I can totally imagine how much fun it's gonna be to play with that toy right here that's in front of me, whereas who knows what kind of toys are gonna be available during my retirement.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So very often the trade-offs we consider involve what you might call apples and oranges. They're very different choices that we often have to evaluate. And in the real world, we might establish committees to compare these very different choices, but somehow our brains reduce the complexity of these choices and turn messy real-world decisions into simple choices. You say it's useful to think of this value calculation as a hidden game of would you rather? What do you mean by that, Emily?

EMILY FALK: Well, you're probably familiar with the party game Would You Rather, where I might ask you different kinds of things that are usually not as simple as the option that you brought up. Like, would you rather eat an apple or an orange? Or would you rather eat a blueberry tart or a lemon cheesecake? Though, of course, the value system can handle those kinds of would you rather choices. But I also think it's pretty incredible that it can handle the more abstract kind of choices that we usually give it at a party that are not inherently comparable. Like, would you rather have a cat's tongue? Or would you rather have roller skates for hands? Right? Like, those are totally different things. And it's not like you can directly compare what the advantages and disadvantages would be. But you might have some intuition about which one you would choose.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You know, when I see some of these questions, would you rather be able to speak every language or have the most beautiful singing voice on Earth? Again, very difficult to actually compare and contrast these choices. But again, intuitively, when I think about it, I almost instantly have an answer in my mind about what I would choose.

EMILY FALK: Exactly. Likewise, we can do this with money. Like I could say to you, would you rather have $5 or would you rather snuggle with a puppy? And you could choose whether you'd be willing to pay $5 to snuggle with a puppy or not. And you can probably come up with an answer depending on how you feel about puppies and, you know, how flush you're feeling.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When the value system makes these quick, intuitive calculations, it tends to prioritize the here and now. Of course, most of our resolutions are about prioritizing long-term goals, not short-term gratifications. So what do most of us do when the value system nudges us toward that extra serving of dessert? We try to overcome it using willpower. We tell ourselves to think about the long-term benefits of not yielding to temptation. The problem is, those long-term goals tend to be abstract compared to the tangible pleasures of the here and now.

EMILY FALK: They're essentially far away from us in some way. We can't imagine them as vividly. And we can't imagine things as vividly when we think about things that are far off in the future, like for example, a long-term health benefit of what I choose to eat today or whether I choose to get exercise is offset by how nice it would feel to stay and watch another show or eat something delicious that is available to me right now. And likewise, those same kinds of abstract trade-offs come into play when we think about other kinds of shoulds, like I should care about what's happening globally to people who are suffering in other parts of the world. But when that's abstract and we know statistics about people that are, you know, dying, that's maybe less salient than we hear specific stories about the suffering of a particular individual. Or even better, when we get to know people whose lives are impacted by particular policies or decisions that are being made.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Another way, Emily, that we make ourselves vulnerable to losing control of our behavior is that we think of ourselves as independent, autonomous agents. But you say the brain is exquisitely sensitive to what other people think and do by what you call the social relevance system. What is this, Emily?

EMILY FALK: Yeah, the social relevance system is a set of brain regions that help us understand what other people think and feel. And so you might also hear scientists refer to a theory of mind system or a mentalizing system that helps us think about other people's thoughts and feelings. And this social relevance system can help us connect and coordinate with other people. And it also shapes the decisions that we make. Like it keeps us aligned with other people. It can help keep us on trends, but it can also do harmful things like maybe diluting us into resharing of false social media posts.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you yourself had an experience recently that gave you a sense of how powerfully influential the views of other people can be. And I understand it involved the actor Benedict Cumberbatch?

EMILY FALK: Yeah. So before the story I'm about to tell you, I had really never thought very much about Benedict Cumberbatch. I mean, I think if I saw him and I thought anything, it was like, there's a guy, like he's a pretty average looking guy. And then my friend, Rebecca, gave me a book called This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, in which an Australian author, Tabitha Carvan, spends a few hundred pages talking about how amazing Benedict Cumberbatch is. She thinks he's incredibly attractive. She just is completely enamored of Benedict Cumberbatch. And so after reading this book, which is really a book about joy and about what we value and about how we spend our time, I loved the book. It made me think, like, I wonder what all the, you know, excitement about Benedict Cumberbatch is. And I said to my partner, Brett, like, maybe we should watch Sherlock. And Brett was like, oh, I've already watched all of Sherlock. I love Sherlock. And I was like, what? Like, when did you watch Sherlock? And but he said he'd watch it again because he apparently also really likes Benedict Cumberbatch and he told me that he thought Sherlock was a really hot character. So apparently I was, you know, out of line. So so we watch a couple of episodes of Sherlock and with other people's voices in my head, I'm noticing like, yeah, he's pretty charming, like he's pretty smart. And then I started watching videos of him being interviewed online. And, you know, people asking these questions about like, how does it feel to be named the sexiest man alive? And he's like so charming, right? He says something like, oh, it makes me giggle. Or like, you know, he's totally delightful about it. And my friends, you know, we started talking about this, my friends, it turns out, thought Benedict Cumberbatch was really attractive. And all of this just made me like reconsider my entire position on Benedict Cumberbatch. You should watch the video of where he mispronounced penguins, and then a BBC reporter asked him about it. And he says, pengwings and penwins. Like he just keeps mispronouncing it. He can't seem to get it right in filming this documentary. And so then afterwards, they ask him about it, and he just totally fesses up. Like, yeah, I was having a hard time. And he's like, so like lovely and self-deprecating about the whole thing.

CLIP: Just try the word penguin again. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe they just gave up.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you got sucked into the Benedict Cumberbatch portal.

EMIY FALK: Yeah, I mean, like the people in the study, it's not like I would necessarily say that I think that he is the most attractive person on the face of the planet, but I went from thinking like, all right, here's an average guy, I don't really know what the fuss is all about, to appreciating the charming nature of at least how he comes across on the internet, right? And I think that that increased appreciation was motivated almost exclusively by this kind of social force of other people appreciating him.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We like to think that we're captains of our own ships, but the evidence of everyday life tells a different story. There is a co-captain at the helm, and this co-captain does not always share our goals. When we come back, how to make the changes we say we want? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist and neuroscientist Emily Falk is the author of What We Value, The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. She has spent many years studying why our brains seem to have minds of their own, and why our resolutions and plans often get hijacked and waylaid. If you have follow-up questions or thoughts for Emily after listening to today's conversation, and you're willing to share those thoughts with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line Mental Barriers. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Emily, you know it can be dispiriting to learn that the value system is in a sense making our judgments for us, and these judgments are often different from the ones we say that we want. You say that by understanding the operation of the value system, we can learn to work with the network in the brain rather than struggling against it. What do you mean by this?

EMILY FALK: Yeah, what I mean is that when we think about our bigger picture goals and values or even small goals that we might have, that the way that we frame those choices can make it easier to make choices that are congruent with what we would ultimately want if we were, let's say, operating as our best selves. So one example that I really like is a study that researchers at Stanford did where they looked at people's decisions in dining halls and they changed the labels of the foods to either focus on the long-term health benefits of things or the short-term taste. So for example, they might have vegetables that were labeled as healthy choice turnips or balsamic glazed turnips or nutritious green beans or sizzling szechuan green beans. And the dish itself is exactly the same, but when they foreground the tastiness of the option, people chose a lot more vegetables than when they foreground that sort of longer-term health benefit. And so what I mean when I say that we can work with our value system is like building on what we talked about before where people tend to prioritize the immediate or psychologically close or vivid consequences of our choices, we can focus on what is gratifying, what is rewarding, what is immediately useful about the thing that we want to do.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And in some ways, this is a very different model than trying to fight our value system, right? Because it's not the same thing as saying, my value system wants X, I'm going to exercise willpower to suppress it. It's basically saying, how do we actually work together?

EMILY FALK: Exactly, how do we collaborate with ourselves in order to make the choices that feel good now and feel good later? So if we think about an exercise example, you know, maybe we try to do something that we think is going to make us as fit as possible, and we choose something that isn't ultimately that fun or enjoyable and where we have to exercise a lot of willpower to make ourselves do it, and that's probably not sustainable. Whereas when we make choices that are really fun and joyful, like maybe I really love to dance, so going dancing for me doesn't feel like, you know, a workout specifically. It feels like something I would want to do, you know, for my mental well-being, even absent the physical benefits. Or going for a run with my neighbor is a great chance to catch up with her and hear about how her week is going. So focusing on those kinds of things can make it immediately rewarding, as opposed to just focusing on some longer-term goal about getting healthier, when in reality, it also has those benefits as well.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand that for a long time, you had an intention to visit your grandmother more often. You told me that you are close to her. But you kept failing to keep your resolution, because you dreaded the traffic you would encounter on the way to her house. So keeping in mind what we just talked about, the idea of working with the value system rather than against it. What did you do, Emily?

EMILY FALK: I was listening to a podcast called How to Save a Planet, where Kendra Pierre Lewis made this very delightful episode about biking. And it reminded me that biking doesn't have to be this, like, sweaty, stressful thing, where you're taking your life in your hands, weaving in and out of traffic. Like, the people that Kendra interviewed for the biking episode were just having fun. Like, they were out there joyfully teetering around on their bikes. And it made me think about the possibility that I could bike to her house instead of driving there. What did you do? Well, I got my bike out of the basement, and I biked down my street on a beautiful fall afternoon. And I biked up to the path that takes me to the route along the river, which is really beautiful. So pretty soon, I was on this jogging path, but I was just flying past the joggers, and the light was reflecting off of the Schuylkill River. And I just felt amazing. Like, I went all the way from where I live in West Philadelphia over to where she lives near the Art Museum, in this kind of state of feeling like this is exactly where I want to be right now. Like, I'm out on this beautiful fall afternoon, and having that time outside, having that me time, felt really good.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, in some ways, I think some of us shy away from doing this, because it almost feels like cheating, because in some ways now, you're visiting your grandmother in part now because you actually like biking, you like being outside, you like the look of the Skull Kilt River. And I think perhaps some of us have in our heads that for things to be good, they actually have to be hard, that for exercise to be meaningful, it has to involve suffering. And what you're saying is, no, it doesn't.

EMILY FALK: Exactly, I think that the more places in our life where we can find moments of joy, moments of connection, moments of happiness, I think we should take them where we can get them.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Emily and other researchers find that our resolutions are more likely to stick when we can link them with aspects of our identity, or what researchers call the self-relevance network in the brain.

EMILY FALK: I think one thing that we can do is think about how the goals that we have are the things that we want to do, but that we might not necessarily immediately connect with our sense of who we are could be connected to strengths we already have or things that we're already doing. So one thing that happened for me was, you know, I go for jogs mostly to de-stress, to blow off some steam, and I have two siblings who are much more serious runners. And one day, my brother was pitching me on the idea that if I did some targeted workouts, that I could get faster. And initially, I sort of wondered, like, why would I care about getting faster in the first place, like, growing up, I was, you know, thought of myself probably more like as a nerd than as a jock. And it wasn't immediately part of my identity to think of myself as a runner in that way. And my brother framed it a different way. He said, you know, academics often make really good runners because academics are good at planning, academics are good at working hard on things that, you know, have some payoff in the long term. And so that shifted it from something where, you know, doing these harder workouts to get faster would just be to do it to something that I already had the skills, the disposition to do. He also added another social reward, which was that if I got faster, I could run with my brother and sister and hear the gossip, which, of course, is very motivating for me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Was your brother, you think, aware of what he was doing? That was it, was he just sort of offering this as a helpful piece of guidance, or had he read some of your work and figured out that this was what was going to be effective?

EMILY FALK: Well, I don't know if he had read my work specifically, but I think it was a strategic way to frame things.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Because in some ways, I think what he got you to do was, instead of saying Emily is not a runner, he got you to say, well, running is the kind of thing that Emily should be doing. And in some ways, that's a very clever and important shift.

EMILY FALK: Exactly. And so, you know, I will admit I'm not like doing speed workouts all the time. But after learning a little bit about what I was capable of by doing that with my brother and with my sister, now at the end of my run, sometimes I will work in a little bit more, you know, I'll push myself for the last couple blocks to see how fast I can run or do those little things that over the long run, they promise me are going to make me a faster runner. And when I do that in my runs, then it gets incorporated into my identity. And there's this feed forward cycle of the more that I think of it as something that I do, the more I do it.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And of course, when we think about our self identities, there are some things that feel very core to us. So you might have previously thought, you know, I'm an academic, I'm primarily interested in the world of ideas, you know, running is not for me. But your brother found a way in some ways of connecting one aspect of what it means to be an academic with a very central aspect of what it means to be a runner. And that tells me that in many ways, as we're looking for things to do, there are probably ways to harness many of the goals we have with aspects of our identity that in some ways that we're not doing already. That if we're strategic about how we connect our resolutions to our identities, we can find things in our core identities that are better harnessed or connected to our resolutions.

EMILY FALK: That's right. So let's say that you have somebody that you work with who is really nervous about making a big presentation and they don't necessarily think of themselves as being a great presenter. But you've seen them at the office party and you know that they are an extrovert who is the life of the party. And so you might help them see the connection between that way that they are able to connect with other people in a crowd in one situation with that same kind of connection that they might have in other situations. And so as we think about, you know, what are the goals that we have and what are the things that are getting in the way, one of the things that might be getting in the way is if we think well, I'm not a person who does X and in reality, we can shift to think about like, well, what are the things that are true of me that could support being able to do that.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We talked earlier about the power of our social worlds in shaping the value system in the brain, Emily. You say that one way to enlist the power of social influence is to make use of what psychologists call social proof. Now, we've discussed this idea previously on the show, but what is social proof? How does it work and how can we take advantage of it?

EMILY FALK: Social proof is the idea that we are influenced by what the people around us are doing or thinking. And so when we see that other people are doing something, then that makes us think that it's a good idea. And social proof influences people often outside of their conscious awareness even. So for example, in California, researchers studied the energy use of different people, of different households. And what they found was that when they asked people what they thought was influencing their energy use behaviors, that people said that their costs and other factors were influencing it. But they didn't actually think that their neighbor's energy use was particularly impactful in their decisions. And yet, when the researchers looked at what was actually influencing their decisions, it turned out that other people's energy use behavior was pretty predictive of what those folks were doing. And so, based on that, what the research team did was they ran an experiment where they gave some people messages that were focused on social proof. Like, for example, 77% of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer. So that's a message that's highlighting that a lot of your neighbors are doing this thing. And other people got messages that were focused on, you know, just asking them to consider how they might conserve energy. Like, for example, by using fans instead of air conditioning. And other people got other kinds of appeals, so things like saving money. And they found, the researchers found that the households that were told about their neighbors' conservation efforts, that they ended up saving more energy than people in the other groups. And the thing that I think is really fascinating about this study is that those folks who are influenced by the messages still reported that what other people were doing was the least important reason for them making the energy decisions that they were making.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So I understand that you have a very interesting technique of deploying social influence with others in your lab. And it involves working on something that you call Wattied Watt-Watt.

EMILY FALK: Yeah, well, that term, the credit goes to Elliott Berkman, who's also a neuroscientist who studies goal pursuit. The idea of Wattie Watt-Watt is an acronym for work on that thing you don't want to work on time. There are a lot of things that we don't necessarily want to do, things that we don't feel like doing, but that we know we need to do. And what we do in our lab is we try to make those things that we know we don't really want to work on more rewarding by doing them together. So somebody might post on our messaging platform. Does anybody want to have a work on that thing session? And then a bunch of other people will get together. And the idea is that there's a set amount of time. You don't have to do a thing that you don't want to do forever. But we give each other support and encouragement and hold each other accountable for the thing. And so, having somebody else there kind of helps rebalance the value calculation because it's fun to get to catch up with somebody else. And committing to doing it together with somebody else taps into that idea of social rewards as well and makes it more likely that we'll get it done.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you've had your own experience with different approaches to working on a goal. At one point, you were trying to learn to play the guitar, and you've had different teachers who've emphasized different aspects of the guitar. Tell me about your experience with these different teachers and what's proven to be most effective.

EMILY FALK: Yeah. In 2019, my dad died. And my dad, when I was growing up, would always play the guitar and fill our house with music. He would come over and play with my kids. And when I was younger, we would sing and he would play rock and roll music or folk music, other kinds of things. And after he died, I really felt that absence very strongly. And so much that I decided that I was going to learn how to play the guitar. And I started trying to figure out how to do that. I watched videos online and I was trying to motivate myself. And I learned that I'm really lucky that at Penn, there's a program where they will connect you with a music teacher. And so, I got connected with a music teacher who was great. He was really enthusiastic. He was a classical guitarist. But he was also really focused on classical music. And I had this goal to learn how to play the guitar for really personal reasons. And when I asked him about the kinds of music that my dad liked or that my dad and I would play together, it was sort of something that he was like, yeah, you'll figure that out. But it wasn't central to the practice that we were doing together. And so I would kind of bribe myself through practice sessions. Like, all right, if you practice for 10 minutes, then you can eat a chocolate truffle at the end or something. And, you know, again, trying to like bring the reward as close as possible. But it was hard. And the pandemic struck and I paused the lessons for lots of reasons. But then, you know, as the pandemic eased and my kids went back to school face to face, I had a little bit more bandwidth again and I decided I was going to try again. And I got a recommendation for a guitar teacher who mostly teaches kids. And I think that's key because, you know, a guitar teacher who really teaches kids tells you something about what they're willing to engage with. And I met Gabriel, who's my guitar teacher now and also my son Theo's guitar teacher. And Gabriel took a totally different approach. So he was very focused on why I wanted to play and he would take little like audio clips that I had of my dad playing and transcribe them for me. And asked me for a list of songs that I was interested in. And then he would write them out at a level that was appropriate for where I was. And so when I was practicing, all of a sudden now it didn't feel like work. It didn't feel like, okay, now I'm doing my etudes and I'm doing the hard thing that's gonna get me to this goal later. I was already there, right? I was already doing the thing that was the future goal, just at a level that was appropriate for me. And that's worked really well for my kids too, that they get to choose the music that they start with. And he has them do exercises sometimes as well, but he connects it to their goal, their motivation of the particular song that they wanna work on. And then it doesn't make it feel like there's a separation between the repetitions and the practice that we're doing right now and some future abstract time when we're gonna be able to play music.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, I'm so struck that Gabriel did so many of the things that we've talked about in this conversation, Emily. He basically asked you what's relevant to your life. How do we make the fun start now as opposed to start later on? How do we make this as accessible and as self-relevant as possible so you are directing your own course of learning? I mean, in some ways, he is a student of yours as much as you are a student of his.

EMILY FALK: Well, yeah, I mean, I really appreciate the way that he has done that. And, you know, also just holding space for why I was there. Like, sometimes at the beginning, I would get really emotional, and that didn't seem to fluster him. He would just kind of wait or maybe sit there and play himself for a little bit. And I think that kind of holistic understanding of, like, sometimes we kind of segment off, like, okay, we're here because I'm going to try to get Emily to learn how to play the guitar rather than, like, we're here to have this experience together. And so, like, I try to channel some of that when I'm trying to get my kids to practice. Theo plays the guitar and Emma plays the piano with Gabriel. And, you know, if I'm sitting there practicing with Theo and he starts, you know, playing some other song that's not technically his homework for the week, when I'm being my best self, I can take a step back and think about, like, well, actually, the goal of this whole thing is for us to be able to connect and do this fun thing together. And so, rather than being like, hey, you're supposed to spend 10 minutes focusing on Bach. Like, you know, I can remind myself that, like, actually, this is the thing that we're trying to do. We're doing it right now. Rather than, like, you know, he's probably never going to be a concert musician. And so, this is why we're here.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, in some ways, this speaks to a really important idea, Emily, which is that I think we often have this very compartmentalized view of our own selves. So we have the sense of the person who says, I want to be, you know, whatever, pick the resolution, I want to be healthier, I want to be, you know, eat less dessert, I want to practice the piano, I want to call my grandmother, and we have this very compartmentalized view of saying, how do I make the rest of me fall in line with this vision that I have to do this particular thing? And it's a very top-down, almost hierarchical vision of how we imagine ourselves behaving and being. And I think what you're describing here with Gabriel is actually something that's much more integrated, where in some ways, you are one Emily. You are the daughter of someone who you loved and who you miss, and you're the musician, and you're the student, and you're the academic, and it's all one person. It's not five different people at war with each other.

EMILY FALK: Yeah. I mean, it makes me feel emotional even just thinking about it. But one thing that comes to mind is there is this warm up that my dad used to play. And... Um, I remember when I gave that MP3 to Gabriel, and he came back, and he was playing it, and I was in the living room. And it turned out that it was actually like really simple, and it was something that I did have access to be able to do, and that kind of like feeling connected to somebody who's not physically there, but where we've had the experience of doing something really special with them, like just felt so good. And, you know, now, playing with my kids, like when they play music, sometimes we choose songs that my dad wrote, and they learn how to play those songs, or songs that I used to sing with my dad. And when I'm sitting there, like with a kid snuggled in my lap, and a big guitar on his lap, and I get to sing there, it feels like a really full circle kind of feeling, like it feels like... I did not expect for you to make me cry. It feels, it feels amazing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Next week, we bring you part two of our conversation with Emily. We look at one particular obstacle to change, defensiveness. Have you ever noticed when you offer a friend or a colleague or a partner a suggestion for improvement? They often experience an urge to dig in their heels rather than listening to how they might change or do something better. They try to preserve the status quo. Like generals fighting a war, they try to protect every square inch of the person they are instead of embracing the person they might become. We will talk with Emily about how we can break through the barrier of defensiveness and help the people in our lives make valuable changes. If you have follow up questions or thoughts for Emily that you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line mental barriers. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Emily Falk is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of What We Value, The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. Emily, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

EMILY FALK: Thank you so much for having me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung heroes this week are a group of super fans who joined me recently for a meal after our Hidden Brain live show in the Boston area. Laura Sabia, Matthew Fleming and Dina Ben-David, it was wonderful to have the opportunity to connect with you. Thanks for your interest and support of our work at Hidden Brain. We are truly grateful. If you'd like to support our work and have access to conversations you won't hear anywhere else, please consider joining our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. Listeners who join in the month of September on Apple podcasts will have access to an extended 30-day free trial. To subscribe, find Hidden Brain on Apple podcasts and try the Try Free button, or go to apple.co/Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.