Brains On Purpose™

Become a wizard? Become a vampire? Become a collaborative disputant?

This research had me smiling about both real and fantasy-realm possibilities. How about you? What do you think? Could the narrative collective-assimilation hypothesis be used in mediation?

Abstract of "Becoming a Vampire Without Being Bitten: The Narrative Collective-Assimilation Hypothesis" (Psychological Science):

We propose the narrative collective-assimilation hypothesis—that experiencing a narrative leads one to psychologically become a part of the collective described within the narrative. In a test of this hypothesis, participants read passages from either a book about wizards (from the Harry Potter series) or a book about vampires (from the Twilight series). Both implicit and explicit measures revealed that participants who read about wizards psychologically became wizards, whereas those who read about vampires psychologically became vampires. The results also suggested that narrative collective assimilation is psychologically meaningful and relates to the basic human need for connection. Specifically, the tendency to fulfill belongingness needs through group affiliation moderated the extent to which narrative collective assimilation occurred, and narrative collective assimilation led to increases in life satisfaction and positive mood, two primary outcomes of belonging. The implications for the importance of narratives, the need to belong to groups, and social surrogacy are discussed.

Excerpt:

Two resources for you: One on attention and the other on cultural neuroscience

I have blogged several times about attention and culture here at BonP because I think understanding both is important for conflict professionals. Here are two additional sources of information.

First, click to listen to neuroscientist Amishi Jha give a very short talk at Pop!Tech on how to improve attention. From YouTube:

Amishi Jha is a brain scientist who is working on ways to train brains to pay better attention. How can mindfulness training help people in high-stress situations -- from medical staff to soldiers -- better navigate their challenging environments?

Second, click to read a blog post by neuroanthropologist Daniel Lende (Neuroanthropology at PLoS Blogs Network) about your brain and culture. From that post:

Your Brain on Culture is a November article in the Monitor on Psychology. Written by Beth Azar, this piece provides good coverage of the boom in cultural neuroscience, covering current research and prominent researchers.

Cultural neuroscience looks at how culture can shape cognition, how brains work in different settings, and the culture-dependent connections between cognition and brain function. Cultural neuroscience has emerged at the intersection of the incredible rise of neuroimaging research and decades of work in cultural psychology.

I will provide an overview of the article below, complete with reactions to its main sections. At the end, I will also provide links to the main researchers and article abstracts covered by Beth Azar.

On this day after Thanksgiving in the US, I continue to be grateful for all that the Internet provides, such as the ability to watch and read the above.

Image credit: Neuroanthropology.

Another clue about what can trigger in-group/out-group bias: Accents?

Do we have a bias against people who do not speak as we do? Some research reported at this year's meeting of the Society for Neuroscience suggests that we may. From "Unfamiliar Accents Turn Off Humans And Songbirds" (NPR):

New research suggests that our brains have a built-in bias against people whose accents don't sound like our own.

That's the conclusion of Scottish researchers who presented their work [great overview of the research at this link] at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.

The team ... used a functional MRI scanner to study the brains of 20 native Scots as they listened to native English speakers with Scottish, American and southern English accents. They focused on the brain's temporal voice area, which seems to specialize in processing characteristics of particular voices.

What is one hypothesis drawn by the researchers as a result of their observations? From "Listeners' Brains Respond More to Native Accent Speakers; Imaging Study Suggests Accents Are Subtle 'Insider' or 'Outsider' Signal to the Brain" (Science Daily):

"The pattern of neural activity differed strikingly in response to their own specific accent compared with other English accents," [Patricia] Bestelmeyer said. "The initial results suggest that such vocal samples somehow reflect group membership or social identity, so that 'in-group' voices are processed differently from the 'out-group.'"

This research has gotten a fair amount of attention in the media and blogosphere, including from The Dana Foundation blog. From We prefer people who sound like us:

... Dr. Bestelmeyer noted that people attribute more positive traits to their native accent, indicating that we are more likely to hire someone or buy from someone who sounds like us.

Anyone with the goal of persuading others may want to to follow this line of research as it unfolds. If you are interested in that and other voice research, you may want to check in periodically at University of Glasgow's Voice Neurorecognition Lab.

Excerpt from ARE WE BORN RACIST? leaves out one key to lessening in-group/out-group response

It is not news that our reactive brains respond in predictable ways to those we see as different from us. Those ways are not the same as how we respond to members of our in-groups. You can read about some of that research in this excerpt (AlterNet) from Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology.

Unfortunately the role that self-awareness, attention, mindfulness, can play in facilitating a person's being more reflective, less reactive, when interacting with those different from him or her is not mentioned. With training in self-awareness, attention, mindfulness, we do not need to be slaves to our brains.

As we have often pointed out here, there are those in the science community who do think we are clueless, helpless, hapless slaves. From "Missing Persons" (The Catholic Thing):

Many scientists have for some time denied the old view of what really distinguishes human beings: that we have the ability to know the truth and the freedom to choose right and wrong. It’s odd that modern science – which has given us so much knowledge about the world and useful technologies in medicine and other fields – should deny our ability to know and will. But no small segment of modern scientists regard the human capacity for knowing not, as in the past, as a kind of miracle, something of a different order than everything else we observe in the universe. For them, human knowledge is merely a kind of higher evolutionary reaction to stimuli. Indeed, if you look at the statements of some neuroscientists, they have started to call it a “folk view” that we know things and can act freely. For them, it’s determinism all the way down. We dummies – the non-neuroscientists – just don’t know it yet.

What we each think about determinism and reductionism, whether or not we think we can override our brain to be in alignment with our values, is important. It affects how we see the rights and responsibilties of our clients, and more important, what, in our own behavior, we believe we can and cannot change. Even if we are born racist, I believe we have the power to overcome reactive responses. Do you?

Sure, our brains may react and act up in ways that our reflective mind may find upsetting, even horrifying. Through self-awarensss and attention training, by increasing mindfulness skills, our reflective minds can steer. Remember: "The brain puts out the call, the mind decides whether to listen."

Want to know a brain? Don't take it out of context

Brains are changing all the time (when I think of neuroplasticity—brain changing—I sometimes imagine the brain as a verb instead of a noun), and that changing is not in isolation.  Brain changes are facilitated by social interactions such as a dispute, as well as by interactions with the non-people environment and the culture. To highlight the fact that the brain is not a lone ranger, I included "Ensemble" ("all the parts of a thing considered together") in my CARVE Disputes Model™. To think of the brain by itself can lead to some conclusions that are not useful.

If you are interested in how the brain dances with its surroundings, you might want to follow the field of cultural neuroscience. I have for you an article that gives an overview of that discipline. From "The cultural neuroscience of person perception" (Progress in Brain Research) [pdf]:

It seems unassailable at this point that the adult human brain is a place where plasticity is the norm, not the exception. This is a point that has startled some neuroscientists and psychologists, who have generally privileged anatomical and functional fixity. As one neuroscientist said, writing in Science: ‘‘If the neural systems used for a given task can change with 15 min of practice ... how can we any longer separate organic structures from their experience in the organism’s history?’’ The field of cultural neuroscience should answer with a resounding: we cannot! [footnotes removed]

The authors go on to mention the lone-ranger versus dancing-with-environment approach to the brain.

The epistemological stripping of the brain from its environment, social context, culture, and ecology — a notion that pervades the fields of psychology and neuroscience — has provided major challenges for the emergence of a research field dedicated to the study of the interactions between brain and culture, between the neural and the ecological. We hope that by studying how the brain and culture interact, the burgeoning field of cultural neuroscience can move beyond these dichotomies and provide novel insights into psychological processes. This is especially true for the cultural neuroscience of social perception, given the dynamic and interactive nature of perceiving and interacting with others.

Certainly cultural neuroscience will give us good information about minds and brains in conflict with other minds and brains. I will be watching.

Bonus: Here's research by the authors of the above article about what happens in our brains when we interact with someone from our outgroup versus our ingroup. This second article "The Neural Origins of Superficial and Individuated Judgments About Ingroup and Outgroup Members" (Human Brain Mapping) [pdf] cites and is consistent with Jason Mitchell's research I posted about in Brains of a feather: What brains do when thinking about someone in the ingroup versus someone in the outgroup.

Brains of a feather: What brains do when thinking about someone in the ingroup versus someone in the outgroup

Following up on the last post in which we looked at homophily or the "birds of a feather" phenomenon, let's consider a Harvard study about what a brain does when it thinks about people believed to be different, perhaps people of a different ethnic, cultural, or political group. Researchers looked at what happened in the brains of liberal college students when they thought about Christian conservatives.

From "Brain Scans Get at Roots of Prejudice" (an article covering the study) . . .

As they did so, a brain region strongly linked to the self and to empathy with others nearly shut down, while another center -- perhaps linked to stereotypic thoughts -- swung into high gear.

"It's as if you think that 'they' don't think like you do -- it's like you believe they are governed by a different set of rules when they think," explained study author Dr. Jason Mitchell, . . . .

According to Mitchell, social psychologists have long known that people engage different mental criteria when thinking about the possible thoughts and actions of people within their own ethnic, cultural or political group, vs. those outside that group.

Knowledge of cognitive biases such as ingroup bias is certainly not new but learning about the neurological mechanisms is. There is still much research to be done to achieve fuller understanding  of how we think about others but this study is a step.

One focus area of Mitchell's research is something very important for anyone wanting to understand interpersonal communication and conflict: "other-ness."

"Our work is about 'other-ness,' " Mitchell said. "There's this question of 'How do I figure out what's going on inside your head? How do I make inferences about what you are feeling?' "

How do we figure it out?

Birds and feathers: The role of homophily in conflict

Homophily makes it much more likely that we will communicate and associate with others we know to be similar. Many, many studies have been done on the theory of homophily showing that most communication occurs between people who are homophilous. Homophily is the degree to which people share certain attributes such as level of education, class, values, philosophy, and organizational role — the degree to which they are alike. Another name for homophily is the "birds of a feather" phenomenon.

Homophily occurs partly because communication is usually more effective when between two people who are similar. They share the same language meanings, beliefs, assumptions, and nuances. And interacting with someone similar typically is more comfortable and takes less effort.

In addition to taking more effort, communication between dissimilar individuals can lead to misunderstandings because of what is not held in common: e.g., beliefs, values, status, demographic variables. It can also lead to uncomfortable cognitive dissonance if you hold certain beliefs about those who are dissimilar and those beliefs are not confirmed, or when you are exposed to beliefs that are not your own.

Heterophily can lead to conflict. I bet you already know that one way among several to lessen that conflict can be to find some area of homophily. This search for similarity is nothing new to dispute professionals but understanding it by looking at the homophily tendency may remind us of the value of finding some commonality. Often a small commonality can create large strides towards resolution.

What does this have to do with neuroscience? Later this week, we will look at what happens in the brain when we think about someone we view as part of our flock as opposed to when we consider someone who is not a bird of the same feather.