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				Hidden Motives Part 1 - The Quest for Cool Alan gets a brain scan that tells him how his brain responds to cool and uncool items. Why would our minds react to the social status of products?
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: What makes a product cool? What's going on in your brain right now as you see objects, both cool and uncool, floating by? Can your brain tell the difference? How is it deciding? What's the hidden motive behind the quest to be cool? Today in our culture, cool is a social norm, it's a social good. It's something that is desirable. We rate people in terms of how cool they are. We all have at least some kind of implicit understanding of the rules about being cool. For young people, it's a terribly important thing. There's nothing worse for a high-schooler than not feeling cool, to be banished by it. So it's really a very important social good for us to have. It defines ultimately our identity. ALDA: So, how cool am I? TECHNICIAN This is the emergency buzzer, if you need us. ALDA: To find out, I've agreed to have my head examined by lying in an MRI machine that will allow Steve Quartz to peer into my brain while I'm looking at pictures. Steve wants to see if my brain reacts differently to the images of things I think are cool as opposed to those I find uncool. One problem for me right away is that I have no clue whether many of the 140 things parading in front of my eyes are cool or not, or even whether I think they're cool or not, or even, in some cases, what they are. It doesn't matter. All I have to do consciously is look at them. It's what my unconscious is doing, what's going on in my brain that I'm not aware of, that Steve and his collaborators are interested in. Because while on the one hand what's cool right now in our culture can be viewed as trivial and passing-- after all, there's nothing more uncool than what was cool last week-- on the other hand, how we decide what's cool, Steve believes, requires the most highly evolved parts of our brains, the most uniquely human, and involves nothing less than our sense of self-- all that from looking at stuff like shoes. It took about 30 minutes in the scanner, my brain now reeling from consumer overload. So, now that we're done with the scan, we have a little survey for you. ALDA: Anette Asp is Steve Quartz's extremely cool collaborator. All the images that you saw in the experiment are represented here on this paper. It goes from zero to five, and you're going to rate each image from zero, meaning not cool, to five, meaning very cool. Very cool. Okay, so how do I translate that to me? If I think... do I like it? Do I think it's pleasant, nice...? Wha... how do I...? How you experience them. If you think it's cool... Different people mean different things by "cool." This is not me saying what I think other people think are cool. This is me saying how I respond to it. Yes, exactly. ALDA: By the way, all these objects were chosen for their coolness by a panel of design experts. But it's not what they think that matters, right? ALDA This looks uncool to me, but I like it. So I'm saying that's cool-- sort of cool. Oh, very uncool here, very not cool. I don't know what this is, I don't like it. Here! Now we got it-- very cool. Finally we got very cool. ALDA: The iPod even I can recognize as cool, but most of this stuff... You rated most of the objects as uncool, the majority of them as uncool. So we took the ones that you rated cool and the ones you rated as uncool and looked at the differences. And so here's you. Okay. This is you looking at the cool objects. At the cool ones. At the cool ones-- very little activation overall. ALDA: It seems that the cool stuff left me cold, my brain remaining stubbornly indifferent even to things like the iPod that I thought were cool. But here's the surprise. To objects I later labeled uncool, my brain lit up, most especially in an area that has long fascinated Steve Quartz right at the very front of the brain, where he believes our sense of self resides. About a third of everyone run through the scanner had this strong negative reaction to the uncool, including, to her astonishment, Anette. You had the same response? Yes, I said I just ignored all the images that are uncool. I'm just focusing on the cool images in the scanner. I looked at the results afterwards, and I responded exactly like you-- completely unanticipated. What about people like us? What, for example, did you react negatively to on that list? Well, there were some sunglasses, some cars, water bottles, shoes-- I mean, especially clothes for me is a big deal. And I think the people that are high negative responders are very consciously aware of what's cool, but their main focus is to stay away from everything that is uncool, and that's how our brains respond. It doesn't seem like it results in a gray life. I mean, you seem very cool. Your hair is cool, your outfit is cool, right? Look at your ring there. Thank you. Well, I think that just the fact that my brain responds so intensely to the negative stimuli, the uncool, makes me maybe sweat even harder to be cool. ALDA: But while Anette and I have brains that unconsciously recoil from the uncool, people in the next biggest group tested in the scanner have the opposite response. Their brains ignore the uncool but go wild-- especially in that part at the front where our sense of social status lies-- when confronted with cool. What's more, another part of the brain involved in planning movement also lights up, suggesting they're subconsciously reaching out to grab the product. Being one myself... ( all laugh ) ASP: Guess what he is. Are you highly positive in response to cool? I am, I am, I... It certainly tells me that I... it gives me clues when I walk into a store... of what to be aware of. So, his brain is biased by everything that is positive... like the cool stimuli is very attractive to his brain. And it might be that people in that category are more impulsive-- they're shopaholics or they're... it's important to them to be on top of trends and know about new products coming out on the market first. They tend to jump on the new stuff faster than the people who are more worried about being cool in terms of staying away from the uncool products. And, Steve, is that how you see yourself? Was it a surprise to you to scan yourself? No, it actually confirmed my wife's suspicions. ( all laugh ) Have you scanned your wife? No, she's afraid to know what she is. ( all laugh ) ALDA: Not surprisingly, this new ability to see inside our heads as we contemplate what's cool enough to covet-- what attracts us to eight-dollar bottles of water and $5,000 watches-- is also attracting the attention of marketers who'd like us to buy them. In fact, a whole new business called neuromarketing is already using brain imaging to seek out the hidden motives behind our consumer desires.

				Hidden Motives Part 2 - Hidden Prejudice A simple Implicit Association Test checks what Alan really thinks about women and careers. He's always thought of himself as a feminist, but does his mind hide a secret prejudice?
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: I've always thought of myself as a feminist, so I'm pretty sure I know how I'll do in this test of my reaction to women in the workplace. I am ready to begin. ALDA: Women, in fact, like Mahzarin Banaji, who's a professor here at Harvard University. The test is called the Implicit Association Test, and it begins simply enough. I have to pair the word in the center with one of the words above by pressing the "E" key with my left hand or the "I" key with my right. Mahzarin has told me to do this as fast as I can, because it's the time I take to make the associations that's critical to the test. Now the target words have changed, but the task remains the same: to quickly decide whether the new words belong to the left or the right. But things are about to get trickier. BANAJI: It's the same thing except now any one of these four will show up. When it's "career" or "male," press the left key; when it's "family" or "female," you'll press the right key. ALDA: Okay, "career" or "male." ALDA: So now the categories are described by two words, making it harder to decide where the new words belong. But since historically "male" and "career" have gone together... ALDA: This is like you're reinforcing the stereotype here. BANAJI: Yes, exactly. ALDA: The point of the test is to discover if, lurking beneath my feminist convictions, I actually harbor a hidden bias against women in the workplace based on all the associations between man and career and women and family that bathed the culture I grew up in. ALDA: "Family or male, career or female." Okay, now you're testing me. ALDA: The Implicit Association Test is designed to ferret out any bias by seeing if it takes me fractionally longer to figure out where a word belongs when the pairing of the target words-- in this case "family" and "male" together and "career" and "female"-- is slightly more difficult for my brain to accept. ALDA: "Corporation-- family... ( laughs ) career... Brother... management..." "You are done." BANAJI: Slight. I could tell he has a slight... this is very good. So, let's see, you're showing a slight automatic association between male and career, and only 12% of the sample population that takes this test shows this bias. What you're seeing is that you're showing a much smaller bias than what many other people show. I'm up here-- I make a strong association between male and career and female and family, even though that's not what I consciously express. Even though that's not what you live? That's not what I live, but in my world... I'd be interested to know... maybe many years of working in feminist causes made you show this less. ALDA: So, all those years of working in feminist causes didn't manage to totally eliminate my lingering association between female and family and male and career. What's astonishing, though, is that Mahzarin is far worse, and she's not only enjoying a very successful career; she designed the test. Another of its designers is Brian Nosek, who personally developed the test he's taking now, intended to reveal hidden racial prejudice. ALDA: These are the same faces you've seen many, many times. NOSEK: Many times. In fact, I helped create the faces. ALDA: The heart of this test is to see whether it's easier for Brian to match words or pictures to pairings of "African American" with "bad" and "European American" with "good" than when the pairings are reversed-- European Americans with "bad" and African Americans with "good." BANAJI: I can predict. NOSEK: Yeah? What do you think? Moderate. Moderate to strong. I say "moderate" as well. "Strong preference for white." You're taking this for the umpteenth time and you still haven't caught on to the fact that you're a little biased? ( all laugh ) I think part of that is the insistence that my conscious beliefs still matter. It isn't that the fact that I keep showing these implicit biases mean that I'm a biased person so I should just accept that and move on. It's that, no, I don't agree with those. I do have them, and I will admit to having those implicit biases, but I'm not going to let that rule what I would consciously want to have. ALDA: It really is remarkable that here I am in Cambridge, Massachusetts-- perhaps the liberal capital of the country-- with two academics who pride themselves on their enlightened attitudes, only to discover that they have latent within them biases they would fervently deny if their own test hadn't revealed them. But all may not be lost. NOSEK: We've found in research and also in testing of myself that if I put myself in a situation where I think about positive black exemplars-- I think about Michael Jordan and Colin Powell and people... Martin Luther King-- who have had a very positive impact and who are also African American, I show much less bias immediately after thinking about those exemplars than if I hadn't thought about them before. Even simple things like the presence of an African-American experimenter, reduces race bias, that the presence of a competent woman makes women's attitudes to math become more positive-- those kinds of studies sit, I think, in contradiction to ways in which people like I thought about these. We thought they were learned over long periods of time, that they were entrenched, they were rigid, inflexible, and that does not appear to be the case. And I think that that's where the room for optimism is. So, on the one hand I would like people to take these data seriously. When we can show the vast numbers of people who show the bias, I think we need to contend with that. On the other hand, what this work is showing is that it might be not that hard to shape environments that can change these even automatic kinds of attitudes. ALDA: You can find out if you harbor unconscious biases you would deny even to yourself by logging onto the Project Implicit Web site. There you'll find tests of attitudes toward such things as age and religion, as well as lighter fare like the Harry Potter movies versus The Lord of the Rings. Give it a try. You may be in for a shock.

				Hidden Motives Part 3 - Tough Choices Moral choices and judgments about what's fair each have emotional and rational components. Alan gets scanned again to see what his mind is doing.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: A harrowing true story used on MASH has been borrowed by researchers looking for the hidden struggles that go on when our brains are confronted with a moral dilemma. A bus full of people has to hide from enemy soldiers. Quiet! Now, nobody make a sound until they've passed us. ALDA: But a crying baby endangers everyone's life. Hawkeye urges the mother to keep the baby quiet, and she ends up smothering it. The question is, "Is it okay to sacrifice one life in a situation like this to save the lives of everyone else?" The question has been asked of subjects in a study at Princeton University, along with another version of the same dilemma involving a train, or in some accounts a trolley. ( train chugging ) You're standing next to a railroad switch as a train approaches. If you do nothing, the train will surely kill five foolish but innocent people standing on the track. You could save them by hitting the switch, diverting the train. The problem is there's another foolish innocent standing on the second track. So the moral question here is, "Is it okay to hit the switch so that you only run over one person instead of five?" What do you think off the top of your head? Yeah, off the top of my head it... it seems, uh... uh, you would... it would be regrettable to kill anybody, but if you could save the five people, then you would throw the switch. Well, that's what pretty much everyone we ask says. Okay, now here's a slightly different case: trolley headed towards five people. This time there's no other track. You're on a footbridge standing over the track, and you're standing next to this big person. And this time the only way you can save those five people is to push the big guy off of the bridge. He'll land on the tracks. He'll get squashed by the train. He'll die, but the five people will live. ALDA: Okay, so would I push the guy off the bridge? Yeah. Well, it's so hypothetical. I mean, I don't even understand... First of all I don't understand how he could... I'd have to be really convinced that it could stop the train. But I'd be, as I'm sure most people would be, less inclined to push the guy, but, um... uh, I don't know. It depends. It kind of depends. Do I have anything against this guy? I mean, would it matter to me if I... if I lost him? The fact that you're looking for all these sort of angles and ways out and things to question is very telling, because most people are made rather uncomfortable by that one. Right, by taking an active role. Structurally these are very similar cases. I mean, it's death by trolley to one person in order to save five people. Perhaps you can try to find a reason for why it's okay and why it's not, and this is what philosophers have been busy doing. We put the philosophical question about what's right and what's wrong aside for a second and say, "What's going on in the brain?" ALDA: What they found when people struggled with these problems in a scanner is that regions of the brain thought to be involved in emotion lit up when people thought about pushing the guy off the bridge. And just as I did, it took them longer to make that decision than the less personal one of throwing the switch. How emotion and rationality compete in decision making is also the subject of an experiment that I'm about to be suckered into, along, apparently, with some dozen Princeton students. Our subject today is going to be Alan Alda, whom I'm sure you all recognize, and slightly different from our run-of-the-mill Princeton undergraduate. And so the way it'll work is that each of you in turn will play one round of the game. You'll be brought into a room and sat in front of a computer terminal. You'll play the game with Alan, who's going to be downstairs in the scanner. ALDA: I'll be having my brain scanned while each of the other players offers to split ten dollars with me. I can either accept or reject the offer, but if I turn it down, we both get nothing. Well, if they give me a ridiculous offer, then I... I lose... I lose money because I don't accept their ridiculous offer? That's correct. If you reject the offer, neither of you get anything. This game is like life. ALDA: So it's into the MRI machine I go again. I'm given a button box to respond to the offers, which I can see projected on a mirror above my face. MAN: Alan, are you able to read the words "Welcome to the experiment" on the screen there? ALDA: Yes. ALDA: I hadn't expected a computeas a partner, but its offer seems what a reasonable machine would make, so, okay, I'll take it. Kelly seemed like a nice person, and she is. Fine. Kathleen-- let's see. What?! That's ridiculous! No way! I'm beginning to wonder if this is a setup and the people aren't actually playing, just lending their faces. ( scoffs ) Another selfish oaf. Take that! Claire... yeah, she... no, I didn't... oh, yes... no, no, no... oh, the heck with it. I'm now pretty sure I'm being manipulated by the experimenters and not by those nice, polite Princeton students. Oh, here's the computer again. Maybe I can teach this thing a lesson in manners, too. Zap. I was just one of some 20 people scanned in the study, which found that in most of us, blatantly unfair offers activated regions of our brains associated with feelings of anger and disgust. What's more, these responses were stronger when we thought the offer was coming from a person rather than from a computer. Was there somebody live at the other end? Well, no. Not... not... not exactly, no, no. I mean, at one point they were alive when you took their picture. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Well, that occurred to me somewhere in the middle of the first run, I think. Do you feel that affected the way you played the game? No, I played it as if they were real people. You actually rejected a couple of offers from the computer where it made, you know, avowedly unfair offers, but nevertheless there's... there's no, you know... presumably there's no... Well, the chances were better for me if I assumed I could move the computer around than if I just had an emotional reaction to it. Or a very dry response, which is just to assume "Hey, it's a computer. "I'll take the two bucks and run, "and then there's no consequences down the road for what I get." And anyway, it was only a couple of bucks. Well, we discussed that, too. And at first we thought that maybe this is an inconsequential part of your salary, but then we realized this is PBS, and so maybe this is more than you're getting. No, I did very well today. Well, they haven't paid you yet. This is part of the experiment. SANFEY: Will you take it right now? Yeah, I'll take it. I suppose you think I'm going to give it back to Princeton, huh? Forget it. One... two... three... What did I make? $48. $48. Not bad, huh? Now, of course, you know, it has nothing to do with... with the science of it, but how did I do compared to other people? I'll let these guys answer, because they're the ones... ALDA: Is that about average? SANFEY: That's actually low. Most people would be... would reject less offers. ALDA: They would? Yeah. What do they report when they talk to you? Why would they reject? Typically people around the seven-and-three mark, people have typically told us, "That's... It's a little bit unfair, but it's not too bad," so they'll tend to accept that. They'll also tend to accept everything a computer offers them. They don't really draw a distinction between fairness and unfairness for a computer. So they do... Most of our subjects will reject a nine-and-one offer, and about half will reject the eight-and-two, and most will accept the seven-and-three. ALDA: When the offers areseven and three, the rational regions of the brain become more active than the emotional centers, suggesting that reason is overcoming outrage. Since at least the days of Sigmund Freud, we've been aware that there are hidden motives behind much of what we decide and what we do. The tools of science are now revealing the clamor within our brains as these hidden motives compete, and they may one day help us better understand that clamor so that our decisions aren't quite so... well, dumb. ALDA: It would be interesting to know what you recorded when I was offered seven and three, because I thought, "Well, gee, that's being awfully particular. Why don't you take the three?" But I thought, "No, no."