The single system of deliberation and intuition
Filed under: Social Brain, emotional cognition, motivation, neuroscience, social organisation
A while ago Matthew Taylor posted on some research suggesting that crude financial incentives can make you stupid – they make you think in narrow linear terms instead of creatively and holistically. He was commenting on an experiment involving the ‘candle problem’ popularised by Dan Park:
In this exercise subjects are shown a picture of a table next to a wall. On the table is a candle, a book of matches and some drawing pins in a box. The task is to attach the candle to the wall over the table, light it, but not let it drip wax on the table.
On average it takes people about ten minutes to identify the solution. This is to take the drawing pins out of the box, pin the box to the wall, then stand the candle on the box so the wax drips on to it rather than the table. This requires the subjects to make the lateral leap of seeing that the box holding the pins is not just a receptacle for another object but an object in itself.
In this test those who are offered a cash prize for completion perform less well than those who are simply asked to solve it as quickly as they can. Fascinatingly, if the test is made easier – by taking the pins out of the box so it can be seen from the start as an object in play – then those offered incentives perform better than those not.
What has puzzled me about this is the neurology. What part of the brain is dominant when people are motivated by the cash incentive and are consequently worse at solving the complex problem (and better at solving the simple problem)?
The brain is a very, very complicated thing. But it can be understood in terms of roughly two systems. The first is the conscious system of deliberation, thought and decision-making. This bit is centred around the pre-frontal cortex, an area where information can be ‘restructured’ creatively when one is solving a problem. In the candle problem one has to see the box in a different way than it first appears, one cannot necessarily just follow one’s past experience (doing this commonly results in trying to fix the candle to the box by heating its standing end). So it seems the pre-frontal cortex has to be engaged to solve this problem.
The unconscious brain has many functions but one of them is to predict future events based on past ones through learning and memory. This can happen automatically, as Antonio Damasio’s famous gambling experiment showed: our behaviour can start changing on orders from our unconscious brains before we are consciously aware of a reason. This occurs because the unconscious brain can run cognitive processes in parallel – it can process millions of bits of data at once, so is much faster than the conscious brain which can only hold a small number of pieces of information in mind (between five and seven seems to be the limit). Much of our behaviour is driven unconsciously even when it appears conscious – Benjamin Libet’s famous experiment showed that when we press a button our unconscious brain has started the action before we are aware.
When someone solves the candle problem what seems likely is that the conscious brain ‘takes over’ cognitive work and the pre-frontal cortex ‘restructures’ the problem. In a comment on Matthew Taylor’s blog post a member of the Social Brain steering group, Ben Seymour, noted that in an experiment he had run, in responding to crude incentives the parts of subjects’ unconscious brains concerned with basic reward-responding were highly active, crowding out the higher cognitive functions of the pre-frontal cortex. The inference to draw seems to be that the ‘emotional’ unconscious brain needs to be offline so the conscious brain can do its thing.
That would seem right at first blush. The candle problem is quite simple even in its complexity – it only involves a few elements. So the pre-frontal cortex is capable of the requisite ‘restructuring’ work that crude reward circuits would interfere with. But is this right? A couple of experiments have shown that insight into complex problems that require lateral thinking (such as solving word puzzles) actually results from unconscious cognition. This can be shown by distracting someone solving a problem so that their conscious brain is out of action. They then get struck by a ‘feeling’ of insight that must come from their unconscious brains (and which fMRI scans confirm does).
It seems more likely to me that the pre-frontal cortex and the unconscious brain work together, rather like an airline pilot works with an autopilot. The pilot directs the autopilot to make certain computations when he is required to solve a problem. It then does these computations and the pilot checks if they are right or not. Or, think of making a move in chess: a good player doesn’t hold all the possible patterns in his/her head (he/she couldn’t, there are far too many), rather she or he directs the unconscious brain to whir through thousands of possibilities with certain general instructions in mind (like ‘trap his queen but don’t leave my bishop exposed’). Various possible moves shoot up into consciousness with that ‘oh yeah’ feeling, and are checked by the rational brain (which often results in an ‘oh no’ feeling because the move isn’t right).
That co-operation between conscious and unconscious brain processes seems likely to be how complex problem solving works. We are trapped into talking dichotomously about conscious processes operating at the exclusion of unconscious ones (and vice a versa) by a residual dualism. But from Damasio’s work on emotion we know that the brain is not dualistic – conscious and unconscious systems are not separate, they are in fact beautifully woven together.
On this non-dualist understanding, what happens with simple incentives is that crude reward systems kick in and the cooperation between pre-frontal cortex and unconscious brain is momentarily backgrounded.
Why is this important? Because if you thought that only the conscious brain worked on complex problems you would think that what is required is practice at deliberative sequential problem-solving (think of someone solving a problem and giving a running commentary on the sequence of steps – ‘first I do this, then that, and then…’). But what is required is that plus the intuitive thinking of the unconscious brain. In other words, sequential thinking integrated with rumination. And that is important to know if you are involved in organising how people learn and work. After all, if practice makes perfect, we want to practice the right things.
Social Brain media coverage and where we go from here
The Social Brain project is starting to gain some traction it seems. First of all it got a mention in a Guardian leader, then Madelaine Bunting wrote a really interesting article laying out pretty much its remit. I have a number of presentations coming up this autumn to various audiences. So it’s nice to see the brave gamble the RSA took on this project paying off.
But what is really exciting is the deliberative research we are about to start in October. For the last few months a ‘wiki’ has been created laying out the most important insights of the neuro- and behavioural sciences, and weaving them into an accessible and (hopefully) clear series of metaphors and examples. This document is an achievement in itself, as it has been created with the help of a steering group of experts from various fields and will hopefully provide some thought leadership. But what we do next with it is in my opinion more exciting. Whereas Nudge rather paternalistically changes ‘choice architecture’ – of course, not too paternalistically, as free choice is not taken away just shaped by the way it is offered – our aim is to go though some learning and discussion sessions with a number of different cohorts of people and ask them to think creatively about how the new knowledge might inform what they do. So we want to empower people to change their own behaviour. Of course, this is risky: they might just turn round and say ‘I knew all this already’, or ‘interesting but so what?’ Well, we took a risk getting this far so there’s no point in playing it safe from here on in!
By the way, as mentioned in Madelaine Bunting’s article, a pamphlet detailing the findings of the first (desktop research) phase of the project is due out soon. I’ll keep you posted.
Baby P and social work: putting the human craft back in
I read at the weekend the Observer’s reportage on the background to the defendants in the Baby P case. The article was excellent – nice to see some proper in-depth journalism going on for once. But it made for grim reading. One thing is clear, this did not come from nowhere: the defendants were on the wrong end of generations of abusive, unhealthy, uneducated, and loveless living. That is not of course to excuse what they did. It is to try to understand what we have to do to stop this kind of thing happening more often. I say ‘more often’ because violence by family members towards children goes on all the time. It is only because Baby P’s case was particularly grotesque and the fact that it happened on the watch of Haringey social services that it got the headlines at all. What a depressing thought.
There are many things to say about the problems the article uncovers. Here is one.
The way social workers operate has become increasingly regulated, or regulated in the wrong kind of way. This regulation is the response to cases like Victoria Climbié – check boxes and cases like this won’t happen again is the thinking. But in a perverse and tragic irony the regulation that was a response to Climbié’s case has contributed to the occurrence of cases like Baby P’s. Too much of the wrong kind of regulation means social workers have lost touch with the vital human skills they need to call upon to do their difficult jobs.
What needs to be fostered is the craft of social work – people with the right ‘people skills’, so to speak. A large part of these skills are learned by simply following round a really good social worker and seeing how they do things; picking up all the subtle cues and intuitive judgements that make him or her adept. A child protection officer quoted in the Observer article makes the point thus:
‘… training needs to be improved, with much more emphasis on reality and practice-based learning, and lengthy placements in the sector.’
Another part of the change in working practices is adequate supervision – that is, the opportunity for social workers to run through the judgements they have made, think about why they made them, and constantly stay vigilant about the possibility of biases, blindspots and tunnel vision. This should be done in a supportive environment with a group of talented peers so that a culture of constant improvement and self-monitoring is established.
This combination of learning a craft and really good supervision will get the most out of social workers’ brains. It will allow them to deploy the mighty computational powers of their unconscious brains’ dopamine prediction-error systems (that is, to hone their intuitive judgement), whilst at the same time developing the ability to correct the tendency of those systems to get stuck in routines.
But also, getting really good at something very difficult in an environment of constant but supportive self-correction yields a culture of pride, self-respect and moral value (and hopefully, admiration from the general public). That has to be the ultimate aim.
Don’t walk, boogie
This post is for Louisa Wells.
Here is something amazing that your brain does. When you walk across a room, whistling dixie and daydreaming about the upcoming weekend, your brain is constantly interpreting the information your body sends, and sending back signals about what is going to happen next. And what is going to happen next is your foot is going to land on the floor and you are going to move forward.
This might seem so banal as to be absurd to spend anytime thinking about. But let’s think a little. I believe Wittgenstein said something along the lines of: ‘it is the things that are under your nose that are the most profound, yet the hardest to get a grip on.’
The feel of your foot landing on the floor when you walk is not the feel of a robot hobbling along – you do not get the signal ‘foot on floor, other foot behind, foot on floor, other foot behind, foot on floor, wall to the left!, other foot behind, wall to the left!, wall to the left!…’ That would drive you nuts.
What you get is a smooth flowing feeling with everything integrated together. Think about that for a minute. What a great thing walking is! But don’t think too much, otherwise you’ll walk self-consciously, and you won’t quite feel yourself.
That last phrase is interesting; ‘you won’t quite feel yourself.’ It gives us a clue to our natural everyday sense of self, the one that is right under our noses all the time and without which we’d, well, not be ourselves. How does the brain create this sense of self?
You take a trip on a ship. You throw-up for a couple of hours, then you feel kind of okay. You ‘feel yourself again’ (but a bit rough). Or, you spend a week at sea then walk on land: you feel a stomach-churning shaking in your legs, and you don’t feel yourself for quite a while. What’s happening here is the clue to understanding how the brain creates that sense of self that is under our noses everyday.
In our brains – in the unconscious ‘emotional’ parts of them we share with other animals – there are neurons that transmit dopamine. These neurons form systems that predict what is going to happen around you. There are millions and millions of them, and they can process millions of bits of data at the same time. When you have an experience, they record what happens, and then when you have similar experiences in the future, they predict what will happen then, based on what’s happened already. Even experiences as mundane as walking across a room.
These systems of dopamine neurons feed into the rest of the brain – the conscious parts concerned with decision-making, the unconscious parts concerned with multi-sensory processing, the whole damn caboodle. When your foot steps normally on the floor dopamine flows at a certain level into the rest of the brain as patterns are recognised and predicted (‘if a step forward is taken, the floor will be there, oh good the floor is there’). Of course you are not conscious of any of these signals (that is what would drive you nuts). What you are conscious of (I want to say ‘dimly conscious of’?), is that smooth feeling of integrated poise.
When you get sea-sick, or land-sick, what is happening is that your unconscious brain creates a change in the dopamine levels fed out into the rest of your brain. This alerts you to patterns that weren’t predicted (‘if I put my foot forward the floor will be there, I put my foot forward, woh – the floor is not there!). The consequent alert takes the form of feeling queasy.
Isn’t that amazing, all that computation and prediction just to walk across a room! What an absolute masterpiece of molecular engineering you are! It’s the simple things in life that give pleasure…
One final thought. I think the Pentagon should weaponise dopamine prediction systems. They should invent a bomb that affects soldiers’ ability to do everyday things like walk around with that smooth feeling of poise. The enemy would just stay at home and watch telly – ‘don’t quite feel myself today… a bit out of kilter – can’t quite put my finger on it, just feel a bit weird.’ On the scale of harms done by weaponry this has to be on ‘the not too bad’ side.
Between tension and contradiction – the wonderful complexity of people
Let’s celebrate something. People are polymorphous – they take many shapes, and I don’t just mean their bodies. I mean, people, on average, can hold a variety of evaluative moods and attitudes; produce a plethora of responses to the ways of the world. They can see that sometimes one has to be disciplined and unforgiving, at other times compassionate and fraternal. They can see the need to stand up to a bully, but also to put an arm around him and ask what’s wrong. On people incapable of this polymorphous social and ethical engagement, we are none too keen.
There seem to be two crucial ranges of polymorphousness. The first is ethics. Most of us hold a certain set of values that pull us in different directions: we can see that bullys should be reprimanded, but also that they are probably hurting too. The second range spans methods. We hold to a certain set of rules of thumb, conceptual frameworks, nuggets of practical know-how and principles of thinking and doing. Some examples: don’t change everything at once; if ain’t broke don’t fix it; don’t bite off more than you can chew; don’t just treat the symptoms treat the cause.
Our view of the world is a complex plot of points on the ranges of ethics and methods. One range is in the domain of values, the other that of facts. And of course, these domains influence one another: punish too hard out of moral conviction and you may well increase the bullying you seek to stop; be too caught up in the empirical causes of bullying and you lose sight of the moral clarity that it is wrong.
So within a single person there will be conflicts in ethics, conflicts in methods, and an almighty conflict between ethics and methods. In all their wonderful polymorphousness, people constantly negotiate these conflicts. And hooray to that.
In politicians, it seems to me, people want to see individuals who recognise the complexities of this delicate process of negotiation. They don’t take kindly to John Redwood style neo-liberals and they don’t much like dyed-in-the-wool socialists like Bob Crow. In short, they don’t like ideologues: their certainty across the terrains of ethics and methods is disconcertingly simplistic.
But although people will welcome ethics and methods that are in tension, what they can’t stand are outright contadictions. For example, take the slogan ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. This acknowledges a tension that most people feel in terms of both ethics and methods. In terms of the former, that committing a crime is wrong, but that so is the fact some criminals have grown-up in awful circumstances. In terms of the latter, that tackling a problem properly requires getting to its root causes.
But within time, the tensions captured in this slogan become too great. It becomes apparent that people haven’t been sold a workable blend of values and methods, but an unworkable contradiction. For example, as was reported on the Today programme this morning, we now incarcerate children between twelve and fourteen years-old that don’t complete their community-based sentences. The idea of the latter is that they rehabilitate youngsters – get them to understand the consequences of their actions and to take into account their responsibilities to themselves and others. But incarceration just turns them into criminals. So being tough on crime actually means being pathetic on the causes of crime.
The way out of a contradiction like this is to convert the blend of ethics and methods back into a workable tension. One option would be to take the view that because crime is wrong, we are justified in locking people up and throwing away the key, and that since most criminals will be off the street, we’ll be tough on the causes of crime too. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, it is the causes of crime that are considered the real moral wrong, so let’s put much more effort into rehabilitation – spend more money on it, make the process far more thorough and multi-faceted.
Either kind of rebalancing will have to take into account both facts and people’s cherished ethics and methods. Both will run aground on these sandbanks. But people do want to see their own polymorphousness shone back at them from politicians. This makes the challenge the development of policies that accept the requisite tensions, but which don’t push as far as contradictions.
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