Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do | John Bargh | Talks at Google

So I am very pleased to introduce you to Dr. John Barge, he is a professor of psychology at Yale University. He has been researching in this field for over 25 years and much more than that, including focusing on the

unconscious

, he has distilled key findings from his research in the field in general in the book that is Here to talk about today before you

know

it, the

unconscious

reasons

why we do

what

we do, join me and give a warm welcome. Thank you David, thank you all for coming. I

know

you've been selected during your lunch hour and I don't have to be here, so I appreciate it, the book is not about the Freudian unconscious, but about the last 30 or 40 years of real systematic scientific research on average normal people assigned to the chance to conditions, not case studies of mentally ill people from whom Freud's generation generated its entire theory.

You'll also see it talked about and structured this way, but it's only thirty minutes, and in fact, if you want, I'll try to speed it up and make it shorter. Also

what

we found is that logically you would probably realize that it's not a separate unconscious mind, it's not some sort of separate part of the brain with its own rules and with its own operating system and it's locked away and you can. If you don't see it, you probably remember that movie backwards with little emotions running a control room that animated movie one of the little emotions did something wrong was thrown into this cave unconscious and the door was locked you never saw them again ever again you heard about them and that's not what we're talking about, it's a very different type of thing, it's a brain.

Research showing the effects of increasing or decreasing incentives during tasks, this is from University College London, shows that the same brain regions used become active. In any case, when a motivational state is conscious or unconscious, it is the same region of the brain and that is more or less true for everything, whatever the type of then, when you look at emotion, motivation, language, behavior , it's the same part of the brain that functioning and whether in conscious or unconscious mode, but it's a single unified brain, basically I hope that unconscious influences are generally useful, they survive natural selection, they survived evolution, they are not a species of evil, destructive twin lurking inside your skull, so that's the difference between what a lot of people hear and the word unconscious and that's what they think, of course, well, there's a disconnect, and that's why I'm organizing the book, but I also organize this talk today in terms of the future of the past president.

Because we are almost always focused on the present, we are focused on what is around us, what is happening in front of us, what we are aware of, what else could we be aware of except what we are aware of and therefore understand? the

reasons

for how we feel and our decisions etc. based on what is available to us right now in front of us, the mind is in all three time zones at the same time, you get influences from the evolutionary past, very strong influences from those who received your early childhood you no longer have memories of your first three or four years of life that carry over to the rest of your life influences from your recent past that have just happened that carry over, as in my case for a long time, my work life simply Continue directly with my home life and transfer to my understanding of what was happening at home, what was wrong, but also your future, your motivations, your goals, your aspirations, the things you are trying to achieve, whether that is a long-term life goal, having a family. a successful career be happy those kinds of things or even just have to do something tomorrow your mind is often in the future and your goals and motives influence how you view the present in other words what is good for your goal is what It's good for you and you like and don't like things based on whether they're good for your current goal, which can be a disconnect from your long-term values ​​and beliefs and I'll show you some examples of that, that's right. as it is organized and we will jump directly to the distant past, evolutionary past and there are these basic needs of these very important needs that we have in motivations that we have so basic to be safe to survive to not die to avoid diseases to avoid germs to protect ourselves against diseases and, of course, reproduction, mating and cooperation, these are the basic ones, but they are the basic physical motivations that we have and yet, as you will see, they influence much more than that.

So, for example, this is topical because it's October. It seems like every October they tell us to go out, you know, go out and get your flu shot. There is a horrible new strain of the flu virus that is deadly and very dangerous. Read this very carefully, I will tell you about the study, although a metaforce is being used in our country and it is actually a metaphor that has been used in the past by arch-conservative leaders who are taking advantage of this very strong motivation that we have. We have without realizing that immigrants in a country are like viruses in a body, like germs in a physical body or bacteria in a body, we need to protect ourselves and be safe from these germs and bacteria, we have to expel them and get rid of them if they are already in our body, we have to build walls or structures to keep them out, protect ourselves from the invasion of these germs and bacteria into our body, and if you think about immigration that way, you can see a strong connection. between the metaphor or analogy of immigration to a country and germs, bacteria or viruses in a body is not explicitly said, although people from arch-conservative leaders in the past have said that explicitly about despised minority groups in their society and it was an excuse or justification. for the eradication of those groups, well, what do we do at this time of year?

A few years ago, in our study, we reminded people in our study about the flu virus and the threat of flu and then we asked them to complete a survey about immigrants' attitudes toward immigration after that we asked them and then that they had already completed that survey whether they had gotten the flu vaccine or not, the people that we posed this threat to but who already knew they had the flu vaccine felt safe because here's the threat, but they've already taken measures to protect against it, they should feel safe against the flu virus. It turns out that they had more positive attitudes than average toward immigration because the threat of the flu is raised, but for people to whom we raised the threat of the flu but hadn't. when they got the flu vaccine their attitudes towards immigration became significantly more negative, they were more against immigration compared to a control group, so we are changing their attitudes towards immigration by increasing and reducing the threat of the virus of the flu, which is that connection I'm talking about.

And there's more, there's a lot of long-standing research showing that conservative people with conservative ideologies or conservative attitudes are generally more concerned about physical threats and physical safety than other people. There is a lot of research on that, for example, the size of the human being. The amygdala, which is the part of the brain that reacts to fear and strong emotions, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals. Brain imaging studies have shown that four-year-olds who are more fearful tend to have more conservative attitudes at age 23, which is a I studied at Berkeley, so there are a lot of studies on this and, in general, given this , there has been an easy trick that political psychologists have used in the past: you can turn a liberal into a conservative by basically threatening them and making them afraid to have more conservative attitudes and remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt saying that we have nothing to fear except fear itself and former President Obama

talks

a lot these days about the politics of fear because fear makes people more conservative; well, people have always become and have been very successful in becoming liberals and conservatives, but no one had ever turned a conservative into a liberal until we did it, as you can probably imagine how, feeling physically safe, we made them imagine that a genius gave them a superpower and they have a rich exercise of imagination. and they're really trying to imagine this happening in the control condition, the superpower they were given was being able to fly, that's actually the most popular superpower that people want out of all the possible ones, that's a control condition that the others were given the superpower is vulnerable from physical to physical harm like Superman's bullets would ricochet off you if nothing would happen, nothing would cut you that kind of thing and they imagine that and then we analyze their attitudes on standard social issues that classically define and divide. conservatives and liberals like same sex marriage, marijuana legalization, etc., of which are the standard ones where you get the difference and you see on the left the flight condition, you get the standard difference conservatives or liberal conservatives, but not the fly thing.

It doesn't matter at all as a superpower, but people who are made to feel invulnerable to harm from conservatives become much closer to liberal attitudes as a result of temporarily feeling physically safe. Another study into the real defining quality of being conservative, which is resilience. to social change that is what FDR was talking about in that speech about fear and fear himself he was talking about the New Deal that was not about World War II that was in 1933 his first speech on the State of the Union during the Depression on that topic. Actually, you make conservatives and liberals identical, if anything, so you take conservatives and turn them into liberals, at least temporarily, making them feel totally safe physically, just like you can take liberals, make them more conservative in their attitudes, making them feel afraid.

So these deep underlying evolved needs bubble up to influence, you know, abstract social attitudes and political attitudes that you think are just a product of reasoning and some rational position, but you can increase or decrease those liberal conservative attitudes on the surface of boiling water. because of the underlying flame underneath feeling physically safe or feeling physically afraid another there has been a lot of research on this physical heat and coldness over the last 10 years or so, we did a study 10 years ago in science published in science where we essentially gave everyone the same at Yale, in other places, the same description of a person to read and they formed an impression of whether they liked the person or not, we gave them all the same one, but some of them as they entered the experiment, actually in the inside.

In the elevator going up to the laboratory we had a lot of papers like the questionnaire that you were supposed to fill out and we had in our hand, oh, here we even have one, a cup of iced coffee or iced coffee or hot coffee, this is the iced coffee. condition we said, could you, you know, hold that for me for a second, you know, so I can get your papers and they held it and opened it. Here are the papers and they took them back, so it was a matter of two or three seconds. They may have retained the hot coffee or the heat of the iced coffee.

If they held the coffee hot, they form a significantly more positive impression of the person you read about. If they had held the iced coffee, a significantly more negative impression of the person they read about. Remember. everyone reads about the same person, so feeling physically warmer and colder actually changed the feeling that a person is socially warm or socially cold and since then, the last ten years there has been a lot of work in neuroscience on this, mainly at UCLA, where they show the same small part of the human insula, which is a walnut-shaped part of the brain in the middle of the brain, the same small part is activated when you hold something hot and when you text your family and friends and when you think about the people close to you and also the same small part is activated when you keep something cold and when you think about people who betrayed you or who are your enemies, they are connected, they are connected, there is a channel between feeling physical warmth and feel confident and positive. things towards other people and the same kind of reverse channel with feeling physically cold, let's get back to that in a second, a lot more research that has shown that a person's actual body temperature rises and falls along with their feelings of how close so people in the hospital have their oral temperature taken every six hours for six hours and also ask them how close they feel to the loved ones in their life and track the rises and falls of their body temperature when people are rejected in some In alittle game, when people no longer throw the ball to you and in some computer game, the avatars are throwing the ball but they stop throwing it, you feel a little rejected and your body temperature actually drops by about 0.4 o Fahrenheit from to some extent you feel physical your body is actually physically colder after a socially cold experience there is another type of past perhaps even more opaque to us because the things that happened to us in the first three four years we do not have much memory Because we A lot of things happen when we were babies.

This is my daughter, who is now 11 years old, but when she was 1, 2 and 3 years old, she was a big fan of movie cars, she loved Lightning McQueen and drove around the house. a little lightning car sitting in a lightning chair had a lightning blanket and we watched that movie together 50 or 60 times at least 50 or 60 times she was obsessed with lightning McQueen she thought lightning McQueen lived nearby and in Durham Connecticut because she saw a Corvette red and he was, you know, in that town next door he lived well, then he turned five and one night he wanted to watch a movie and I told him: "okay, when we see cars, we haven't seen it in a while, several years , you know, and that was you, you loved that movie, it was your favorite movie and she looked at me like I was crazy, like I wasn't, I'd never heard of that movie, I'd never seen it before and she didn't really remember seeing it. seen before telling me this sitting in the same chair as Lightning McQueen, that she had never heard of this movie and we watched it and she was really like she was seeing it for the first time.

I was like, uh, you know, I was surprised. all the plot twists, laughs in all the right places, but like you've never seen the movie. movie before and she thought she was crazy because I said she doesn't have any memories of all those years of her life, well why is that important? Because there are many things that happen early in our lives that do matter for the rest of our lives. life and we have no idea that they are influencing us and to begin with, an investigation in Minnesota has tracked down these people who are now 20 years old, but when they were one year old they came to the laboratory with their mother and took what is called the strange test the strange test is a way of measuring how attached the child is to his father and usually in the past it was always the mother but now it is both the parents and their children who are attached, the mother leaves the room They don't like it, it doesn't bother them because they know that if there is a problem, Mom, we'll be back.

They can count on Mom to support them, but others don't know and that's why Mom leaves. They are shy or disorderly. They cry, they are hysterical because they know that it is possible that the mother mother doesn't come back too soon or don't come in if they are screaming and crying for them, so they can't trust that, so as a matter of bonding and trust, it's there whether they're a year old or not, so look at these 67-year-olds in elementary school, high school, than at 20, if they are securely attached, they have more friends in elementary school, they are happier and have better grades in high school, and they have relationships. who don't break up very often in their 20s, the opposite is true for people who have insecure relationships at one year old with their mother, so something is happening early in your life and it's affecting your relationships with people.

Can you trust people? Do you break up? with them easily or not the rest of your life and they are tracking these people now will continue to track them as they go through their life, but that is totally opaque to you because you have no memories of anything that happens in the present also that goes beyond what really exists, for example, we really believe that we know people by their face, we really believe that their face is diagnostic in some way, we really know that person, you know the grumpy cat, right, it's a cat, It's a cat, look, that's really grumpy. right, I mean, he's not in a bad mood, he seems in a bad mood, you think he's in a bad mood now, like a cat, suck that really grumpy boy, he seems in a bad mood, right, and that's old Marley, just At home, you probably know this ahead of time, but this is a '90s movie, right, old Marley.

He was like an ax murderer and the bass, you know his body is in the basement next door, according to the neighborhood kids, but he turned out to be the sweet old man. There's that scene at the end of Christmas and he reunites with his granddaughter and everything. wonderful but he's a sweet guy it sounds like you know an ax murderer but we really feel so sure of ourselves when we see a person's face like we really know their personality turns out that's not a diagnosis people People with the most trustworthy faces rate those faces without knowing who they are and it turns out that the one that was rated the most stressed was where incompetents tend to win these elections seventy percent of the time, so certainly the people who vote think that they know that this person is competent or trustworthy and the face alone is not a diagnosis what is diagnostic is if you see the person in action if you see a person even for a while 15 seconds 30 seconds interacting with other people that predicts your results very well they are good therapists they are good teachers they are good, whatever, but not photographs and not just seeing a person for the first time without any type of interaction or seeing them in action.

Here's another way to go further, we have Hertz of schools of antelope fish, Fox, a bird, all doing the same thing. At the same time, you know that Fred Bird is not looking around watching Susie Bird go in one direction, saying "I think I'll do the same thing", it's not a matter of making decisions here, it's just a kind of automatic response to do the same as the peers around you and the cats, I'm not so sure, I mean this needs to be replicated, but we people, people definitely do this, young children really imitate, especially between the ages of three and three years old, they are learning what is the right thing to do.

I don't know, so they're really watching everyone to see and they'll do what you're doing and they'll do it over and over again, so we've studied this and demonstrated that effect in the lab with college students. physical behaviors like covering your ear, protecting your ear or shaking your foot, those kinds of things you are more likely to do when you are with a person doing the same thing and you have changed people and you do what is like a chameleon changing places to that match the environment the social environment they are in is fine, but this has consequences this is a dutch field study that shows that antisocial behavior littering mild graffiti carrying a shopping cart three blocks to your car instead of not knowing how to leave it there in the parking lot, that type of mild and social behavior is contagious since in an area that does not have graffiti, these pamphlets that are placed on the handlebars of the bicycle with rubber bands are not as far away as they put these on the right and yes there was graffiti and that kind of thing, there is a lot more garbage thrown on the ground instead of in the trash and the various scientific demonstrations in this article about ten years ago there is a social network analysis that Nick Christakis and Jim Fowler look at social networks like the Alumni Association or work groups members of credit unions, these types of things and in that network who knows who, things like obesity, depression, cooperation, happiness and other things are spread so that if there is one person, two or three people are far from you. but and you don't You don't even know them, but they know someone that you know and that kind of thing you're much more likely to have the same characteristics as them, so things like that, the propagated behavior, the mood, types of behavior such as cooperation, spread their contagion, but they.

You've probably heard of this 2014 Facebook study, in which 700,000 users deliberately manipulate their newsfeed as an experiment to make it 20% more positive or 20% more negative than usual and then check that the users have publications. 3 until 3 or 4 days later to see if they were also more positive or more negative and they were. By manipulating the news, it actually caused the person to have a more positive or more negative mood in their posts, that's another type of evidence. on social media we receive this type of dissemination what you see is what you do unfortunately it is used by advertisers this is an epidemiological study from Northeastern University just published last year around 1,000 underage drinkers ages 13 to 19 the more ads of alcohol they saw on On television, the more they drank, you see them a lot.

Parents often watch NFL football games or other sporting events. You see beer ads. You see Captain Morgan. You see a lot of alcohol ads. The more these ads, the more children who are exposed to them drink. this ranges from an average of 10 drinks per month to 30 drinks per month for those who saw many ads. It is a direct effect of the content of the ad. We've done studies by just watching five-minute comedy clips from the show Oliv whose line is Anyway, with Drew Carey we have a food ad there during the break or a non-food ad there during the break we have a plate of cookies from goldfish next to him and the people who saw the food ad was not.

Even on that type of food, eight forty-five percent more of the goldfish cookies that food ads try to get you to eat at home when you watch TV so that you eat more and have to buy more the next day in the store. store they are trying to get you to drink more here they are trying to get you to drink more or at least that is the result whether they are trying to do it deliberately or not and the effect happens that students, teenage drinkers, are a nice thing. about this mimicry is that it actually causes bonds, taste and feeling in the interaction was more fluid, you know, we have these things where people do the same thing at the same time and our culture, religious rituals where you get You stand, you kneel, you sing hymns, everyone does it. at the same time military you brand say things together in unison this actually produces greater bonding and liking for the group and the group effort these are field studies this is a Dutch restaurant and the waitress although the waitress or the waiter did it in this study was to repeat the customers order is right after, so I like a burger shake and some fries please, and then the waitress was saying like a burger shake and fries, just repeat the order or not, If you repeat it, the tips are right, in the end there are many more tips than otherwise, this is an electronics department of a French department store, a part of a French department store, a large French department store and the players of mp3 listen to the same thing, they repeated what the customer said when as a look at an mp3 player for my grandson, he will turn 13 next week, probably as an mp3 player for his grandson, he will turn 13 next week or not okay or just okay, here is the mp3 player with sales of 63 to 87% in mimic condition and the customers satisfaction with the store and the employee was noticeably higher, they went to the parking lot and asked those types of questions afterwards , so real life consequences now are the other thing about the present, if the context changes you, you could be a different person at home.

Since you're at work, my sister was at the talk I gave in San Francisco the other day and we're watching a show like this, she's not our mother, right? Oh yeah, so you can be a different person in different places, good, Ernst. Fair, who is a professor of economics at the University of Zurich, in fact, is expected to win the Nobel Prize in Economics someday soon; he may hear his name called again. He has done research on investment bankers, which is very important in Zurich, so investment bankers could be different people. at work than at home, what he did was he took them home one weekend and had them play a coin toss game where every head they tossed would get twenty Swiss francs, so I think it was 20 coin tosses.

So you can win up to 400 if you magically get a total of twenty heads. You were the one who reported what you got so no one knows you're home. You can say you have 20 if you know that no one would know the difference is correct, but you know that on average you will get 10 out of 20 heads. What he did in this study was take it home, but he asked some of them to describe his workplace, what his office was like. We had them think about their office right before this game or the other condition that they didn't do, which are the same people randomly assigned to be the office or the home condition and you probably can't see this, but on the left, these They are home.

People were not asked to think about their office and you pretty much get the binomial distribution, meaning this is what you would expect. By chance, there are some people at the endlower end, some people at the higher end, but most people are right. there you know, four, five or six in the middle or whatever, the average, the people on the right are the people who thought in their workplace, it's shifted significantly to the right, you even get this guy saying oh yeah, you know, I have something like that. all heads or you know you have a lot of heads there and you know they're greedier, they're less moral, they're less honest, the same randomly assigned people if they would just think about their office in this mundane way before the task and it's talking about situated identities , that you might be a different person at home, with different values ​​and behaviors than at your workplace, and unfortunately, this trick actually affects children.

This is a study that was shocking at the time and came out of Harvard. about two thousand four or five Asian American girls and had them color a cartoon color with crayons that emphasized their Asian identity or their female identity with Asian themes or with girls playing with dolls. Now the stereotype of the culture is Asian Americans are better at math and science than everyone else than the average person, but girls are no worse at math and science than everyone else, so if they colored the Asian- American of Asian subjects, then they took a math test. their math test was significantly higher than the group average if they had just colored the girls' ones, their average was significantly lower than the group average now remember they were randomly assigned to these same boys randomly assigned to be on Asia or The girl has already conditioned the culture's stereotypes about the qualities or abilities of the groups.

It got into their heads at the age of five and influences their actual performance on a mathematics exam. You are a different person depending on what aspect of your identity has been highlighted in the present, so the future concludes in the future, your goals change what you believe is good. or bad things, the health risk you are willing to take, who you consider your best friends, etc., etc., there are many things. I mean, for me, you know the feeling of the goal and the motive is strong when I'm. I play these dumb gaming apps on my phone and my Candy Crush and I'm trying to beat this level for weeks and I can't.

I'm almost there and you know, the in-app purchase, these games are free, but in-app purchase correctly, you already know that at the beginning. Oh, you know, five dollars, you can get five extra moves, yeah, so you beat this level, yeah, you move on and then of course you get the bill. You know, it's polite to what you know. $5.99 oh my god, it's like it's a stupid game for my enemy, who cares, no one will know, there's no trophy or recognition given for winning Candy Crush, I mean what am I, but at that moment the goal is so close and you're almost there and the feeling is very strong if you really like this game and you're trying to beat all the levels, that kind of thing, so your goal changes what you think is good or bad to do in one most important way.

These are again a Dutch grocery store. The store reminded at first with a recipe booklet with words related to healthy eating or diet and these are obese buyers and abhi buyers, so non-obese buyers benefit from these Prime and the recipe booklets do not make any difference in their shopping, but people. who are presumably more likely to have a diet goal and a healthy eating goal these words and the recipe leaflets actually change the amount of unhealthy snacks they buy from four and twenty euros to one and eighty euros and they don't remember the leaflet of recipes that were in and I have any idea that that influenced them at all, what they did, it activated the goal that they had of diet and healthy eating and they actually changed their purchases when they looked at the receipts at the end.

Same thing, this is a study from the University of Minnesota. with college women saying they don't think diet pills and tanning salons are a good idea, there are health risks and they are dangerous, but if they just looked at Tinder and other types of dating sites and were asked to rate the attractiveness of both men and women on the site activate what we want to call the mating goal or the idea of ​​finding a partner and partner or sex whatever you want to call it now they make these ratings and suddenly they are fine with tanning salons and diet. pills and they don't think they're risky at all if they don't think they would hurt them at all and that's why the same people change for the fact that they have this goal, being attractive is good for that goal.

It may not be good for you and it may not reflect your chronic or long-term values, but you temporarily think it's a good idea. So what has changed for you? Like I said, these things operate in the background, they can work on problems that you have and maybe you even forgot what it was, you're trying to remember something that you know, you know it but you can't remember it and you try, try, try to remember it. and then you're doing something completely different three or four hours later and the answer pops into your head out of nowhere, but it was because subconsciously we're still trying to solve that problem deep down, you have a goal to solve it, you really want to solve it and you're trying to figure out that answer and get to it later when you're thinking about something else.

Sherlock Holmes did this all the time. I have read all the Knoebels and therefore completed short stories over and over again when Sherlock Holmes reaches a dead end and cannot move forward. some crime or something you are trying to solve you take a break you play the violin you take cocaine you do something else and you come back to your fresh pines and you have ideas and breakthroughs right, you think while you refresh your mind what is really happening is that while your conscious mind has been elsewhere, unconscious about the processes, continues to work on that problem and sometimes can do a better job than we can do consciously for the reasons explained in the book, but the reasons why the types of unconscious processes They improve by processing information in parallel. and better for complex decisions and complex problems sometimes and then more limited focused conscious thought sometimes comes to you and when you're doing something more like Eureka in the bathtub burning naked this is a G rated version but I was actually naked According to the historians at that time ran naked through the streets of Syracuse after discovering the principle he was working on in the public baths and Deborah has had dreams about the benzene ring theory, she laughed and came up with a benzene ring theory in a dream of snakes. eating each other's tails in a kind of circle of fire.

I had my own dream about an alligator that's described in the book, but it's the same kind of experience where you know the answer, you've been working on something for five or ten years and it comes along. for you in this kind of dream work, which is actually another way of solving this problem, when you are not actually consciously thinking about it, if it is a very important problem as it was for both calculating and for me, so people have been worried. about these things in terms of mind control and whether you can use these kinds of influences on people to get them to do things that maybe they didn't want to do on their own, so you know we have to think. and talk about it because it's something that's legitimate to worry about, but only briefly, and that's where I'm going to conclude, you know.

The Economist magazine is concerned with mind control and has topics that in the past there were books like hypnotism about communism and the Beatles, this is actually a book that came out in about 1970, in which the Beatles tried to hypnotize us to make us communists through their evil rhythm. You can get them on eBay. Tin foil deflector caps that stop aliens from outer space from sending rays that influence their minds and of course sex in ice cubes, there are still books on subliminal seduction that had this kind of concern that that This is what happens in these types of ads and this is actually a subliminal ad that was widely played during the Bush Gore campaign in 2000.

This is an actual campaign ad that was found to actually have the word rats in it. right before the word Democrats in September 2000, trying to emphasize the rat part of the Democrats and denying that they intended to do this. and this kind of stuff and George W. Bush 43 kept denying it for weeks afterwards saying that they don't engage in this subliminal advertising over and over again, but they did it so you know those things you don't really have to worry about. The left ones are really true, they are really influencing us outside of our consciousness and they are influences that if we know about them, we can do something about them and, in fact, we can use them to our advantage, we can turn them around and make them help us. do what we want and help us do the right thing that we want to do and that kind of thing once we know everything about them, but you know, some people insist that they are the captain of their soul and the captain of their ship and neither of those things you know everything that influences me I am aware and I have the intention and nothing else really influences me but the really good boat captains are the ones who take into account the current and the wind, they don't just point their boat at the port and say that's it all that matters, the current and the winds don't matter at all because if they do that, this happens, you will crash into the rocks or they will take you out to sea, you can play golf that way, you can aim.

Right in the hole and fat forever, winning doesn't matter and whatever you are and this is what happens to you then, so you know it's your choice, everyone has the ability to make that decision on their own, but in Actually the point is that you do have it. We all have control over these things because they're not really secrets anymore and once you know them, you know it's up to you what you want to do with them, but I want to thank you all for coming and listening today, but how? Could we apply some of these techniques if I am trying to lose weight?

How might we apply some of these techniques to that, for example? This is something really recent, the last five or six years, it's not my area, but I read the research and every The researcher is now five six seven of the leading researchers and in the area of ​​self-control and self-regulation, the right is saying that the people who are effective self-regulators who score high on those scales, who can, who are the people who have good self-control, the people who self-regulate, earn more. money than anyone the rest of us are happier they have better relationships they are healthier all those good things come with these people who have a high capacity for self-regulation in self-control how do they do it well?

The old model is by acts of will they have such a strong will and the rest of us are weak, little weaklings and we can't do the things that they can do with them this strong will is actually the opposite of that they don't use willpower , willpower is It's hard to do and it's always a struggle. What they do is set up their world to make it easier for them to do the things they want to do. They set up their environment so that they don't have the tempting things they want. they can eat or drink at home they don't buy those things first they establish the good things they want to do they turn them into good habits and turn them into routines they start by saying I want to exercise I want to go for a run, they return home, they take off their clothes work and they immediately put on their shorts and running shoes, because what else are you going to do after putting on your running shoes and your running stuff but go for a run and they do it like this?

They do it without even thinking that they come home, they change, they put that on and without having to use any willpower at all, so effective self-control and self-regulation people are making use of unconscious types of habit influences. and routine and establishing their world if they want to be more kind and helpful they will put a photo of the people they want to be kind and help and their life like their grandmother's they are always kind and helpful to their grandmother if they could have a photo of her on her desk as a reminder without thinking that it will be that way or whatever, you know it is a great achievement, whatever it is, you make your world have those signals that come from the outside and trigger these tendencies that you want to support and build. you are your world so the outside world supports you instead of tearing down those things and that's what they do so that would apply to weight loss it would apply to exercise it would apply to pretty much anything you want to do thanks for the social chat either the end goal is to really entertain and decipher unconsciousness as much as we can so that we can cope better with unconsciousness or there is some level where having some level of unconsciousness is actually a healthy thing andYou should let him be Indian, yeah.

This is the most difficult chapter of this book for me to write. It was a chapter called When can you trust yourself? because in the past we've had books like Blink, who write bestsellers that say Trust Your Gut and other books like Think Fast and Slow, but they say no Don't Trust Your Gut and they're both sitting in paperbacks in stores, one side by side, you know they say the opposite, so it's a little more nuanced, it's a little bit more difficult question than you can trust. Your instinct and you can trust unconscious influences in certain situations and not in others.

One rule is whether it's your preference and the type of things you like or don't like. Your first kind of reactions are usually the best and you can overthink your feelings and get something out of it. different because of that and not be so happy with that choice if you think about it too much, you can trust your instinct about other people you are meeting as long as you see them in action if you see only the face or know their characteristics such as skin color or age, etc., and you can be very wrong, but if you see them in action, we are usually pretty good at it, so the only rule for our people is to always give people a chance, no.

Don't judge them just by their appearance or what you think because it is very powerful. Court studies, for example, have found that baby-faced people have a more baby-like face, receive lower sentences, and are less likely to be found guilty of the same thing. crimes like people who don't have baby faces and unfortunately people of color, the darker the color the longer the sentence they get for the same crime and this is happening right now, this is not something of the past so these things really matter real results and unfortunately people like judges and people in the legal system deny that this happens, they know that is not an influence.

I'm just telling my jury not to be influenced by those things in the glossy, in fact I will judge the people they point out. They brought out this kind of evidence, so they just said, you know, so when can you subconsciously trust? I'll tell you one thing I heard from someone, well, other people say the same kind of things anyway. I was on a Channel 5 morning show this morning and someone in the audience said the same thing and I want to say now that he would give me homework basically when he was done. I wrote this book basically last year in six months.

I didn't try to put it together for four years, but it finally clicked and I was finally able to gain surprisingly almost a chapter a week it was just coming out of me and what was happening after I finished a chapter, you think, oh well, I finished a chapter, you know, relax, have some fun and start the next tomorrow, but before I did that I always got the The next chapter in my head I always took the next day's stuff and started looking at it and uploaded it all here and then I had fun and then I relaxed, I was with my daughter, you know, she would go shopping, she would do housework, whatever she had to do, but I always had the next thing in my head first, so I would be working on it without you subconsciously knowing, basically, and wow , it was great that you came back the next day and had ideas on how to organize it and put it all together and start right away much better than if you leave it and start cold the next morning, so those are the things you use, something else, just This is my favorite little tip, like a life hack.

What comes out of this is this bonding and imitation thing that you can use, which is very easy because we naturally imitate, we end up and imitate each other without trying, you don't want to try, all you need to do is look at the other. person, so if you're meeting someone, a new colleague, a new job, someone, a new neighbor who just moved in with you, a new friend, you know something like that, just look at them while you're interacting for the first time, you'll do it naturally because you're just watching them imitate what they do, which will naturally make them bond and like it more than if you hadn't done that and they eat the technology, the trick is to just watch them and it turns out that on empathy scales.

People who have a personality are more empathetic than other people, they are also the people who look more and perceive the other person more while interacting and it's a really easy thing to do and it has all these potentially good benefits. You're just letting this kind of unconscious mechanism operate on its own naturally when you say that things like cooperation and obesity can have effects two or three degrees from your social network. How do you know what is causing the effect? Eric, how do you know that's not the case? They say that obese people tend to be more friends with each other than otherwise possible.

These are correlational studies. Social network analysis and sociology are correlational. The Facebook study was actually experimental because they manipulated the news feed and showed, but even the old Facebook. the studies that showed contagion were correlational, that's why Kramer did this second study, the first one showed contagion, but he said well, you know the objection was just what you said and then he says, okay, you manipulate it experimentally, it was very controversial. because you know you're playing. with people's moods, correct use and the final agreement is up to the user, what are those things called? It's like on page five thousand and four, that you're okay to do that and then when it's okay, then they said it's okay because people using Facebook agreed to this because it's in the agreement, but then they made the experimental version and they showed the same effect, so you are absolutely right on the sociological social network.

The reason I put that in there is because it's a new method that shows it's actually happening. can't give a conclusive answer about the cause, other studies like ours when we manipulate what people do and show the same effect, that's what helps you feel better about the causal nature, you have to do both, although you have to do it. Doing both types of studies mimicry tells why everyone likes parrots as a pet bird. I have a good couple of jokes. My real question is that at Google we have a lot of training programs to try to address unconscious bias, and in fact, in promotion committee processes, everyone is required to go through unconscious bias training before serving on a promotion committee.

I was wondering in the industry in general, in other corporations, in other organizational settings, have you looked? in research on unconscious bias training and trying to control the effects that these biases have, which is a cottage industry that is outside of academia, basically I remember that sometimes there would be a look at tumblr and a slightly silly image, since you know, from nature on tumblr with three followers and since I was there a few Fridays ago, maybe three or four Fridays ago, it was an open question and answer about unconscious bias and those people that were answering the questions, I don't know any of them. of them and I haven't heard of them, but They are all in the private sector and in industry, so I don't really know what the type of training is.

I know they do talk about the sort of Harvard implicit tests that you can do to detect the fact that you might have some unconscious bias, it's a little bit, it's a much simpler version of what I'm talking about in the book because bias unconscious that they measure is simply good or bad, it's just that you have a positive or negative association with these groups and that can be misattributed, so the idea of ​​this is that it would fall into the present section of the book: you have a negative feeling towards a member of a different social group and that negative feeling you don't know its true source because it says some kind of unconscious source and then you used to attribute it to something that makes plausible sense oh, they didn't have such good letters of recommendation or they didn't come from a very good school or you know that you somehow explain it in terms of something that may be plausible, so there's a real danger that even well-intentioned, well-intentioned people, a Galatric people, will fall victim to this misattribution effect because they have the negative feeling of not knowing what the source is and then applying it to something.

They might be able to say "Oh, I didn't like this or that" and it lets you know that it's not their skin color, it's not their gender, you know, but there's so many demonstrations, I mean, in the book it

talks

about this new Italian studio that is. horrible, it's 11 thousand job applications, real job ads in Italy and what they did was create an identical set of resumes, same qualifications, education, everything is identical, they made it a male or female applicant by name and put : an attractive or unattractive photograph along with the application and they sent the four to the eleven thousand jobs in Italy and these were real jobs they wanted to see who they called for an interview among the women. 57% of attractive women were called.

In one interview, seven percent of unattractive women were called for an interview. Now you can say, well, they're just intentionally trying to hire attractive women and you talk to people, and no, that's not what we're trying to do. that would be illegal, they don't want to do that, they say they don't do it and yet they have this prejudice called the beauty premium, which is huge, I mean, fifty-seven to seven for men, it's forty-seven to twenty-five , I mean, it's bad for men. too, but for women it's gigantic and these are people who don't receive the same economic opportunities because of this type of prejudice, so in real life right now, you don't know, in the past, these things are really a problem and they have to be resolved. with prejudices that people don't know about, but now we should know more about these prejudices and we should be able to take steps to stop them, you know, like not having photographs on applications for something, and I know that in orchestras the tests are behind. a curtain you don't know the age you don't know the gender you don't know the race the ethnicity whatever you want to call it of the person behind the curtain you can only hear the music if we could do that and that's easy for orchestras to do, right, it's not easy to do in other areas, but eliminating those kinds of signals that the culture gives us that say this group can do this, this group can't do that, you know, we get it from the culture and we soak it up. all of us, even if we are well-intentioned and egalitarian people, it's still in our heads if we got rid of those signs, we would be a lot better off, we could do a lot more now, I don't know if that's what you see, I don't know the training or what is about, but that would be my answer or my solution, but I would suggest, based on the research, that what we do here depends on whether you are taking the exam online. version of the training or if you're doing in-person training sessions, but the in-person training sessions try to really focus on trying to incite these biases, trigger these biases that someone might not realize they have and say then they can reflect on have been unrealizable, say you didn't do it because I'm very serious, that's why I went into my field in part and I teach this to Yale undergraduates and all that, and I got some students to leave the room talking about this kind of stuff about privilege and things like that, but this is what I would say because I have you right now and I'm going to say this is the last chapter of the book and I'll give it to you for free right now.

What I'm saying is It's not my own research, but it's a way to combat these things. It really works. They are called implementation intentions. And that's not from my colleague Peter Gollwitzer at New York University. The idea is that when I see a person of color I will be fair and whatever you do. What you are doing is specifying the trigger that will make the idea of ​​justice happen immediately. You link your intention with the future state of things. When I see a person of color, what's going to happen, I'm going to be fair. and you really have to commit to it, it's not a magic trick, if you don't, I don't really care, but I'll say: Oh, magic, magic, it's not, it's not a magic spell that you have to really be into. engaged. first of all, but you want to do that, you can say that and it actually works and it works for a lot of things, you know when This kind of thing helps the elderly to take medicine when I took five different types of pills at different times of the day with or without food, all this kind of complicated stuff helps them to do that helps health psychology to use these people Politics has used this to increase voter turnout in the primary elections because they say at 10 o'clock on Tuesday morning I will take a break from work, drive to the polling place and specify the victory, where and how if you are going to take carry out your intention, so I'm just going to vote, make a concrete plan, when, where and how I'm going to do itdo, and that really helps, so if there can be a when, if I see an encounter with a person of color, I will be fair, simple as that. kind of thing and they've actually done studies that show that it actually makes people fairer in their treatment so maybe that works so I was told I have the honor to ask the last question and you mentioned the experiment earlier . where if people were exposed to a warm environment, they were more prone to social warmth and if they were exposed to cold, the opposite.

Do you know if that's a function of people using the exact same word warm to refer to these two very different things? or worse, as social warmth into actual physical warmth rather than a thank you for asking, well, it's the reason we use the word warmth for both and there's a lot of things like George Lakoff, at Berkeley, has written about metaphors with which we live and all these different metaphors we tend to appropriate physical language terms to talk about our relationship with people, it is almost as if there is no psychology, a separate language, everything is physical, so we talk about a distant father or a close relationship or a high status, these are all physical directions, you know, types of terms a warm friend a cold friend a cold boss you know something like that so why do we use all these physical terms because it turns out that these are researchers who analyze the development of child language?

It turns out that these are the first Furion says that children have their direct experiences there, the first concept, babies, children, toddlers, are these, warm, cold, high, low, you know, near and far, types of terms, rough, soft, and they are also, then we develop an understanding of people, we tend to use that vocabulary, that's why we talk about a tough negotiator. or soft on crime, which means that when we give in, you know, it's a physical term all the time and we all know what each one means to us, we can communicate using these terms, the warm thing, I just want to say, you know.

How many of you are parents and are going to be parents, but this channel of warmth, the physical warmth that tells the baby that he can trust whoever is with him, is gigantic, it has been there since time immemorial and it is a way you know, my wife used to work in a hospital, they say, she says now the father opened the shirt and put the baby on the father, but not just the mother breastfeeding because I want the father to bond with the child too , they say this is skin to skin contact, yes it may not be so much skin to skin as heat because to the baby who doesn't know anything, the feeling of heat is an ancient sign that you can be trusted and this is it . channel that works throughout our entire life, it is still there when we are adults, but it is very important for the baby who does not know who to trust, is totally helpless, depends on everyone around him to keep him fed, warm and have something to do. drink and shelter protected from predators and it's that channel, so I knew it going in with my daughter.

I hugged and hugged and hugged and hugged and hugged to make sure she was as safe as possible at least at one year old. I was basically a single mother raising this girl and knowing that it would affect her the rest of her life it would affect her friendships in grade school how long her relationships lasted when she was 20 and if she could invest even though it's so exhausting you know little girl Toddlers and toddlers spend as much as my time doing that for her from the start, it would make it up to her forever and we can all do it, but that channel is there and can be used.

It seems irrational. It seems silly. Why would she warm up? You know, but I didn't know a little bit about anything baby, it matters, everything matters, thank you very much, thank you for the question.