Emily Falk: The Neuroscience Behind Every Decision You Make

Guy Kawasaki:
Hello, it's Guy Kawasaki, and guess what? It's the Remarkable People podcast. We're trying to help you become remarkable. And today's guest is the remarkable Emily Falk. She's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and that's a nice way of me saying that she's part of this mafia from Pennsylvania. That's Katie Milkman and Angela Duckworth and Emily Falk. They're like the next Bob Cialdini, the father of influence.
If I could do my career all over again, if I could go back to school instead of majoring in psychology, I would major in the kind of stuff that they study. So she holds appointments in communication, wait, get a load of this list; appointments in communication, psychology, marketing, operations, information, and decisions.
That's all she's an expert in. And she directs the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Climate Communication Division at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Man, that's a mouthful. Emily, you sure do a lot.

Emily Falk:
I'm really excited to be here today. Thank you for having me.

Guy Kawasaki:
Listen, I've been on both sides of this kind of interview where you have a new book, and this is Emily's new book. Emily's new book is called What We Value. So we're going to talk about how people make decisions about what they value today.
As I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, there are three components to our decision making and those components are the value system, the self-relevant system, and the social relevant system. So first of all, if I have those three things right, could you explain what each of them are and the interplay between the three?

Emily Falk:
Sure. So there are lots of different systems in our brain that work together, and in the book I chose to focus on those three. The value system, which offers this final common pathway for decision-making and takes inputs from lots of other brain systems, including our self-relevant system that helps us figure out whether things are me or not me, our social relevant system that helps us understand what other people might be thinking or feeling.
And actually lots of other brain systems as well, like our sensory systems that help us take in information about the world and our deliberative processing systems that help us think through things and regulate our feelings, our emotional processing systems. So there are a lot of different brain systems that are all contributing to our value calculations.
And the reason that I focused on the self-relevant and social relevant systems in particular as inputs to that value calculation are because they're such powerful inputs and because they constrain and also open up possibilities for how we think about ourselves and other people in our relationships, which are some of the most fundamental things we do as people. So it's three of many systems that are really important for our decision making.

Guy Kawasaki:
And just walk us through a simple kind of decision and how those things would interact with each other as we come to our final conclusion, our final action.

Emily Falk:
Sure. So when you started out by saying three parts, one of the things that I thought we might talk about is that there are these different phases that unfold in our decision making when we're making a conscious choice between two options, let's say between whether you want to eat an apple or an orange.
The first thing is that we decide what we're choosing between. So we identify what the possibilities are, and then our value system assigns a subjective value to each one of those possibilities. We choose the one that we think is going to produce the most reward or that our brain implicitly has decided would be most likely to produce reward for the person who's right here, right now, me.
And then we keep track of how it went. So when things go better than we thought that they would, that's called a positive prediction error. Let's say I choose the orange and it's one of those really juicy, delicious oranges, and that was even better than I thought it was going to be.
Then our brain store that information and inform the choice for next time. When things go worse than we thought it would be, let's say that the orange is a little bit mealy, maybe really sour, and we get a negative prediction error and then we're less likely to do that in the future.
So it's an iterative cycle where we are making these decisions and then learning from them. But sometimes we're so focused on the outcome of what happened that we fail to notice all the stuff about the process that we could have control over.
Like which things did we imagine were our possibilities in the first place where our self-relevant and social relevant systems shape and constrain those things. And then what parts of the decision are we paying attention to? What parts of the choice are we focusing on because that's going to change the subjective value that we assign to each option. And then finally, that outcome.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now in this rather simplistic decision that we're making between an apple and an orange, the second step you stated was placing a valuation on these options.
Now are you saying that as we choose between these two fruits, I'm thinking to myself, "If I pick the orange and my hand is dirty, I got to stick my fingernail in there and peel the orange, but apple I can just eat, but then I want to get more vitamin C because it's cold season. So maybe I should eat the orange, but maybe I should eat the apple because apple has higher fiber."
Are all those things happening in my brain. And finally I say, "I'll pick the orange because it looks more delicious." What's really going on there?

Emily Falk:
So I think the things that you listed are a good example of the fact that this is a subjective context dependent calculation. And so some people might do what you're doing, which is say I'm in a situation where my hands are particularly dirty and so that's a factor. In some other situations, let's say you're at a restaurant and you've just washed your hands and there's a buffet and the fruit's all peeled and prepared for you, and that wouldn't be a factor.
And so in the early days of this research, which is actually pretty recent the past few decades, it wasn't obvious whether there would be this final common pathway that would be able to integrate all of these disparate kinds of information or whether there would be different brain systems that would compute how much fiber is there in this food, how much sugar is there in this food, all of the different things.
What's the color, the attributes that you just listed for an apple and an orange. One possibility from an evolutionary standpoint is that there are certain kinds of objective features of a food that your brain might want to keep track of and therefore that we would consistently prioritize.
But in fact, what scientists found in monkeys and also in humans is that's not what happens. That on a Tuesday we might make a different choice from the one that we make on a Friday. And that depends on the parts of the decision that we're paying attention to.
And our recent experiences. Are you totally satiated? Did you just chug a gallon of orange juice? Maybe you never want to see an orange again. And so even with this very simple example, you can see all of the different kinds of things that might go into it.
And then what was really amazing is that it's not just apples and oranges, it's not just choosing between different kinds of foods, which are in some ways more easily comparable, but also would you rather have an orange, or would you rather go for a walk with me?
Those are not even both food choices. It's an experience of one kind, a social experience, and experience of a different kind, getting a primary reward of eating the food. And likewise, we can abstract away even more and think about inputs like our moral values or how much the different things cost.
And all of those different things get integrated relatively seamlessly for many of our choices in these value calculations. And so when we understand how those are unfolding, I think it can be useful because there are systematic biases in the kinds of things that our brains prioritize. For example, rewards that happen immediately are easier to vividly imagine and get weighted more than rewards that we have to wait for, let's say.

Guy Kawasaki:
A lot of these we are on the borderline of ridiculousness about the factors we're considering between an apple and an orange. Are you saying that these things are going on subconsciously and basically at one point we just pick an orange? Or are you saying that there are different kinds of people and some people like me are thinking about how dirty your hands are or how much fiber does it have? Do I need vitamin A or vitamin C? Or is it me or is it everybody? And it's just a background process.

Emily Falk:
So there's a couple of different parts of the question that you're asking. So one is of course there is variability across people, like people's brains work somewhat differently. Your experiences and my experiences might be somewhat different. And so the factors that are going go into our value calculations are a little bit different. Psychologists have studied things like need for cognition and how much people tend to maximize versus satisfy.
So there's going to be some differences in the way that we do this, but also importantly, and the thing that I like to focus on the most is how much variability there is within a given person depending on the situation that they're in, the context that they're in, what their recent experiences are, what their goals are, how much they have attention and motivation to pay attention to what's happening.
So for many of our decisions, we're not going through and deliberately weighing all of the different things that you're describing.
Of course, I look over at my counter and I'm very lucky that I have both apples and oranges in the house right now, and I'm not going to agonize over that decision. But if I wanted to shape the choice for myself, let's say between whether I choose an orange or whether I choose a bag of potato chips.
Maybe I'm thinking about my health, but thinking about something that's far in the future, whether I'm likely to get heart disease is working against that kind of priority that my value system puts on immediate rewards.
And so instead of thinking about I know the orange is better for my health in the long-term, that's not really salient or a big priority for the me that's right here, right now in terms of how my value system's going to respond.
And having the oranges out on the counter and the potato chips somewhere that's much more annoying to access, focusing on how juicy and delicious the orange is going to taste for me right now, and how sweet is something that is a feature that I really love. So I think it's not that every single decision, we're consciously going through all of those different attributes. Does that make sense?

Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, yes. I hope not because I'm getting tired just thinking about picking between an apple and an orange here. We use the word value, singular, right? The highest value option, but picking the highest value option, you have to kick in values, plural. So what happens if your values are, shall I say, skeptical or evil or bad? What if your values are bad, then what?

Emily Falk:
What do you mean by if your values are bad? Say more about that.

Guy Kawasaki:
Maybe not in apples or oranges, but I don't know. Pick something like sending people to El Salvador without due process. What if your values are bad? And so you value, I don't know, supporting your base, but the values that make you support your base in this way is kind of suspect. So then what happens between value and values?

Emily Falk:
Are you asking about how a person might make a decision that's really counter to what some of us might think of as humane?

Guy Kawasaki:
Yes. I mean what you value is influenced by your values, right?

Emily Falk:
Sure. So I think what you're getting at is if you think about moral values, what we think of as right and wrong, which might come from different sources like our spirituality or religion or upbringing or education. Those kinds of big V values of what's right and wrong contribute to this value calculation. And I think sometimes when people think about a value calculation, what might come to mind for them is like, what are your values, your core values, your moral values?
And it goes back to the same thing that we were just talking about that when that is what you're thinking about when you take a step back and you have a minute to think about how you align your day-to-day actions with those bigger picture values, that is something that often we can do. Of course, sometimes we have different values that are in conflict with one another and philosophers have thought about these kinds of questions for a very long time.
And what I would say is that we also end up in lots of situations because we are not necessarily taking a step back and thinking about what our bigger picture values and the big V sense are and instead choosing things because they're easier, because they're popular or because we're not giving it a lot of attention. And so it's not necessarily that moral values are going to be the most salient attribute in every single calculation for every single person.
I think that's a little bit different than the example that you're bringing up where you and I might have one set of moral values that are core for us and that seem self-evident for us, and that then give way to a bunch of different assumptions about what kinds of behaviors would be the right behaviors to choose, and those might be different from what somebody else would think of as their core moral values and how that relates to a particular situation.
You are mentioning questions about immigration policy in the US I think or alluding to that, when we think about how might we treat other humans who are here. And in brain scans, if you just indulge me for a second, I will come back to the political question. But in brain scans, scientists have looked at how people's brains come into sync with each other when they're watching media, when they're engaging with different kinds of ideas.
And early work in this space showed that when people watch the same movies that their brains came into sync with each other. So if you watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a Western where there's the director is really directing your attention and training your brain to go up and down in the same way as the rest of the audience. It's really captivating you and transporting you into this world.
We also see that when people have more sort of similar experiences or closer to each other when they're friends, when they live close together, then their brains tend to show more of that kind of synchrony going up and down in the same places at the same times. And then experiments have shown that when people are communicating, if I tell you a story and you are making the same meaning of the story that I'm making, our brains are going to be in sync with one another.
And finally, when scientists bring groups of people into the lab and some of the people are told one backstory and other people are told a different backstory, the people who share assumptions about what's happening in the story, their brains are in sync with one another, but out of sync with people who are told different information coming into it.
And so I think where that comes back to these questions about what we think of as incontrovertible positions, moral values and so on. Right now we're at a moment where there's a lot of polarization about how we should think about what is right and wrong and how we should be and what we owe each other.
And when liberals and conservatives in the US watch the same news stories, for example, news clips about immigration. Even though they're watching literally the same movies, the same sentences are being said, the same images are on the screen, people who share the same political ideology, brains are more in sync with their ingroup and not as much in sync with their outgroups.
And one possibility is that the assumptions that we're bringing to the table are really shaping so that we're having a different experience of what we're seeing. We're making totally different meaning of it.
And I think there's behavioral research that complements this about where that might come from. For example, when people swap out the news source that they're watching, when folks who are reliable Fox News viewers watch CNN for some period of time, it changes what issues they're paying attention to, what beliefs they have about some of those issues and so on.
So I think the media that we've already consumed are shaping the assumptions that we're bringing into these new experiences and then bringing us into sync with some people and out of sync with other people. So does that get part of what you're asking about?

Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, that's exactly what I'm asking about. So with this knowledge about, first of all, you figure out what options you have, then you pick the one with the highest value and then you track how it's rewarding. If you go with that model, how do we optimize our choice making process? If I know that's what's happening in my brain, how can I optimize my decision making?

Emily Falk:
Let's talk a little bit about what it might mean to optimize decision making, because I think for different people it might mean different things. So in the book, the starting assumption that I'm making is that different people have different preferences. They might have different hopes and dreams and goals, and that there's not necessarily always an objectively good decision or bad decision.
Going back to these very much more simple kinds of decisions, should I eat chocolate cake for breakfast? I don't know. If I do that every day for many years, it's probably not good for my health and it's probably not going to set me up to have an amazing feeling in my body.
But once in a while, let's say that something really amazing just happened and that feels like a really special way for me to celebrate or it's my birthday or something like that. There might be situations where that's a perfectly reasonable decision to make. So I think we have to get clear about what we mean by good decisions and bad decisions.
And part of what I hope people take away from the book is a little bit more compassion for themselves and others about why we might do the things that we're doing and then try to set up our decision making so that more of it makes sense to us. Sometimes we make decisions where in retrospect we're like, why did I do that thing?
And so how might we do that in a different way? And thinking about back to some of the political examples or how should we treat each other? I think that right now for me, I'm in a moment where it feels like it's hard to make good decisions. There are so much going on. Every day I'm at the University of Pennsylvania where the Trump administration has frozen 170 million dollars in research investments to Penn.
I know the people whose clinical trials are getting paused. I know the people whose jobs are at stake. There's a lot going on right now and still even just thinking about what are the options that we're choosing between what might we do in this situation?
What is a good decision about how to spend my day? Is the good decision to focus on my kids, I've got twin ten-year-olds. Is it really to lean into those immediate connections? Is it to try to do everything that I can to help people understand the value of science and what's at stake for the future of our democracy and our health and our innovation, infrastructure?
There are so many possibilities, and so getting more concretely back to how understanding what's happening in our brains might then help shape the way that I think about that kind of problem.
One thing is that noticing that having such a wide array can be paralyzing. I can think about, what are a few concrete things that I might choose between right now? What are the things that are possible for me to do right now?
And then let's say calling my representatives is something that is likely to be effective in the sense that it's an individual action that I can take right here, right now. It takes two minutes, three minutes, and I believe that the congressional aides tally at the end of the day how many people called and talked about a particular issue.
So it's something where when I think about my bigger picture self-relevance system, that's something that's an identity that's important to me. Being a person who participates in our community and tries to make things better. When I think about then the social implications of that, doing stuff in collaboration with other people is another thing that directly impacts our value calculations and can produce a sense of reward.
When I'm feeling alone, when I'm feeling like I don't know if there's anything I can do, remembering that there are these sources that can make something distant and abstract and not vivid, like participating in a political process feel more immediate, more concrete, more compatible with who I am and what I value, and then also more enjoyable by doing it with other people. That's one thing that's been on my mind a lot recently for sure.

Guy Kawasaki:
And plus your two kids, right? You've got a lot on your mind right now. So do you think that in step one, which is considering the options, let's posit that there is this theoretical wise decision. Do you think that the danger to making a wise decision is the consideration of too many options or too few options? Which way is the better way to go?

Emily Falk:
I don't think there's one right answer to that because we know that this is not necessarily even from the neuroscience literature, this is from behavioral economics and psychology. We know that having too many decisions that we're considering can make people throw their hands up and just say, "I don't even want to do this." There is a famous set of studies where having too many different jam flavors to choose from goofed people's decision making up.
On the other hand, going back to this question of is there anything that I can do in this situation or that we imagine that our possibilities are constrained because we automatically take things off the table because people like me don't tend to do this?
That's where I think taking a step back and thinking about why are these the assumptions that I'm making, why are these the possibilities that I'm choosing? So in the book, I talk a little bit about a decision about whether to go and visit my grandmother who lives in Philadelphia.
She's a hundred years old right now. She's amazing. And so she's one of my very favorite people. But knowing that she's a hundred, I know that I am not going to be able to go for walks with her forever. And yet sometimes it feels so hard to even consider that as a possibility with all the other things that are demanding my time and attention.
My job that's very important to me, my kids that are very important to me. And so one of the things that I realized actually listening to a podcast that I really loved called How to Save a Planet.
That one of the things that was getting in the way was I wasn't even considering going to visit Bev because the traffic is really bad, and the transit time just felt like too much of a barrier, and I'd totally taken it off the table.
And on this episode of How to Save a Planet, there was an episode about bikes where people were just having such a delightful time giggling on their bikes and enjoying their bike rides. And that possibility of getting to my grandmother's house in a way that felt more easeful, more joyful, more like me time, getting to move my body, be outside a little bit, that really unlocked something for me.
Being able to figure out how to get across town in a way that the time felt good in and of itself. Made it possible for me to say, "Actually, this is something I want to consider doing multiple times a week. It's not something that I want to just do once in a while when all the stars align to make it possible."
And doing it one time, going back to that process of seeing how straightforward it is to do that, and then remembering how enjoyable it is to spend time with this person that I care about made it easier to make that choice again.
And so sometimes just being able to take that first step to see that something that we hadn't really considered as an option could be an option if we figure out how to remove the friction and how to instead tip the value calculation in favor through something like biking instead of driving. That's a place where I think we sometimes want to put possibilities back on the table.

Guy Kawasaki:
So this is the Katie Milkman theory of bundling something you enjoy, but something that maybe you still enjoy seeing your aunt, but it's putting these two things together like Katie.

Emily Falk:
You're thinking about this in terms of “temptation bundling.” That's interesting.

Guy Kawasaki:
Exercising and listening to her podcasts.

Emily Falk:
So Katie Milkman coined the term “temptation bundling” to say that when we're making choices, and this maps on to the idea that our value systems prioritize immediate rewards. So she talked about this a lot in terms of getting exercise.
So if you don't want to go to the gym and it feels really effortful for you to go to the gym, then as you mentioned, Guy, she gave people the opportunity to listen to really exciting audiobooks. And so if you're only able to listen to The Hunger Games when you're at the gym, then all of a sudden that process of being at the gym can feel much more enjoyable.
And I think extending that logic and knowing that our brain's value systems really prioritize those immediate rewards, we have a lot of different options. So one is “temptation bundling,” like Katie's research highlights. Another is figuring out how to make the thing that we're doing inherently enjoyable.
For example, choosing an exercise that is more fun for you, maybe going dancing is actively fun for you, whereas running on a treadmill isn't. And so in the same kind of way, I think it's a little bit nuanced, but “temptation bundling” says, "Let's bring in an external reward like the podcast," or "I'm going to eat a chocolate right afterwards because that makes it really fun for me to know that reward is going to come with this hard activity."
I think that's a little bit different than figuring out how we can make the thing itself enjoyable. And so I think you can imagine that the biking could be conceptualized as “temptation bundling.” I get to do this fun thing while I'm also doing another fun thing, visiting my grandmother.
I was thinking about it a little bit differently, which was the transit itself, the process of getting there went from being really unpleasant and a thing I didn't want to do and was essentially counterweighting a thing that I knew was something I wanted, going to visit my grandmother. Replacing that with an activity that's inherently enjoyable for me, biking.
And so I think the value of the neuroscience here in some ways is to say that although there are some theories about “temptation bundling,” and there are other theories about how vividly we imagine future events, bringing that psychologically closer in that way and some theories about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and those kinds of things.
And when we look at what's happening in our brains, I think it simplifies things in some ways because it says whatever the thing is that you need to do to figure out how to make this more rewarding now, there are so many possibilities for how you might do that.
Pick one of them. And then once your brain realizes that the reward is psychologically closer in time or in geographic distance or in social distance, which are all processed in similar ways in our brains, then we can be more successful in making that decision in a way that feels straightforward, if that makes sense.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yes. Since you opened the door here with Grandma Bev, let me ask you a question. So it seems to me that the seminal moment with Grandma Bev talking about how visiting with her you were on your phone in deep focus and all that. The seminal moment to me was that Grandma Bev brought it up to you and said, "You're here, but you're not really here." So how do we catalyze those kinds of moments which set the whole thing in motion?

Emily Falk:
So you're right. I didn't give her due credit when I was just talking about the transportation in the podcast. It is true that one night she was over at my house and she's fantastic. She's figured out how to use ride-sharing apps and how to come over to my house and spend time with me.
And one night when we were out on the block, she said to me, "I come over to your house, but we're not really spending time together." And in the moment initially I felt really defensive about that. I was like, yes, we are. I make you dinner all the time. You come over, we're in the same room. You're hanging out with me in the kitchen.
We're spending time together. And of course, what she was saying was, I wasn't giving her my focus. When she comes over to my house, there's a lot going on. There's my kids who need attention, and there's often other family members, my mom, my brother's wife, his baby. There's a lot going on at my house when we're all together.
And so that's different than having time where we're just focused on each other. And so that was the initial catalyst. You're right for me saying, okay, how am I going to shift the way that I'm making this decision to be able to make it a frequent possibility rather than just something that I do once in a while when it occurs to me?
And I think there are a couple of different pieces to that. So one is I was saying I felt really defensive when she first brought that up. So how do we let go of some of that defensiveness to be able to connect with people that we care about?
Another piece of that is how do we think about what other people might already know or not know so that we can ask for those things? That was in some sense, really important that she told me what she was actually thinking instead of just continuing on feeling resentful or feeling frustrated or feeling disconnected.
And so in the later part of the book, I talk a little bit about some of the things that motivate us to share ideas or information with other people, which also go back to these value calculations. I imagine that if my grandma had thought that I was going to be fully dismissive or closed off, then it might not be worth her energy to try to engage me about that.
And likewise, she has a lot of wisdom being herself and her age. So sometimes when we're younger, we worry about things like, what's the other person going to think about me? So the social relevant system can both work in our favor, helping us understand other people's motivations and helping us connect with them. But it can also bring up these questions. What is this going to say about me if I say that?

Guy Kawasaki:
So what's your advice to the Bevs of the world? Is it let it rip, speak up? Or maybe part of what's going on with Bev is "I'm a hundred. Time is running out. I can't be dicking around. I got to tell Emily to get her act together."

Emily Falk:
And that in and of itself is a great example of how different context changes our value calculations. As we get older, maybe we're less concerned about whether we say it in exactly the right way or not and more concerned with the things that matter the most, like getting to have the time with the people that we love while we have that opportunity.
So I think I really appreciated that she did that. So I don't know that I'm well positioned to give advice to the Bevs of the world because she's doing great, but I think not being afraid of making those suggestions. But when we do it, doing it in a way that people can hear, because like I said, that defensiveness is such a powerful force also in shaping our openness to change.
So there's a lot of research that highlights the endowment effect, the idea that we value things that we think of as ours, and that includes things like people demand more money for an object when they're going to sell it, and they think of it as theirs compared to when some outside person says how much they would be willing to pay for it. But the same logic happens with our behaviors, things that we've done in the past and we think of as this is what I do, this is me.
We can then sometimes jump to the conclusion that if I admit that what I did in the past wasn't optimal, or maybe I did something that was even bad, that can very easily get conflated with I'm a bad person. And then we come up with all kinds of reasons why that isn't true. If somebody made a request, "You never come and spend time with me. Why don't you ever call me?"
Those kinds of framings. If Bev had come to me and said, "You never spend any time with me and you're a terrible granddaughter." Or something that I heard in that way, then it would be much harder for me to figure out how to shuffle things around to actually hear what she's saying and do the thing.
So I guess my advice is make those requests, but do it in a way that helps people connect with their bigger picture of goals and values that puts on the table. We both want to spend time together, we love each other. How can we figure out a way to do that in a way that is actually doing it, right?

Guy Kawasaki:
I have four kids that I'm always telling them, "I'm seventy-one years old, I ain't going to last," or "You better surf with me now." And it works most of the time but anyway.

Emily Falk:
You're making an offer of surfing. That sounds amazing. Who doesn't want to do that?

Guy Kawasaki:
So we've been talking about value formation. So could you shed some light upon the factors that influence our values? There's parenting, there's education, there's culture. So if I'm a parent, you're a parent, you have these two kids and you're thinking, how do I instill them a good value system? What is it? What do parents do? What do you want from education? What do you want from culture? What are the factors here?

Emily Falk:
There are so many fields that have thought about that more deeply than neuroscience, right? There's many, many, not only academic fields, but historical, traditions, and cultural traditions that have thought a lot about how we do that well. And so what I would say is that one of the things that we haven't talked as much about explicitly in this conversation yet is the role of the social relevant system in shaping our value calculations.
And so we have a social relevant system, which scientists sometimes call our theory of mind system or our mentalizing system, which helps us understand what other people think and feel and paralleling that social rewards are really powerful in shaping what we think is good and bad and by extension what we think of as me and not me.
And so when we think about how we instill those values in our kids, I think there's a good amount of evidence that role models matter quite a bit. So what we actually do is going to inform what other people think is appropriate, what other people think is likely to be rewarding and so on.
We serve as those role models for other people. Sometimes this gets phrased in terms of how powerfully social influence influences us. So when we see what faces other people think are attractive, or when we see what foods other people are eating, or when we see how other people are consuming energy in their homes or whether they're voting.
Those things influence our value calculations to make us more or less likely to make those same choices. And then when you flip that around the question that you're asking about how do we shape our kids choices?
How do we shape our neighbors choices? How do we shape the choices of people on our teams at work? The things that we do are visible. And so when we make choices that are aligned with our bigger picture goals and values, other people see that, and it makes those choices seem more rewarding in their value calculations as well through this social influence mechanism.
My grad student, Rui Pei, who's at Stanford now ran a study that I thought was really interesting when she was at Penn, that looked at how adolescents and young adults change over time. And one thing that some scientists had asserted was that over the course of adolescence into young adulthood that people become more and more independent, they become more resistant to peer pressure.
And it's certainly true that during adolescence, our reward and value systems and our social relevant systems develop very quickly, but it's also true that we're soaking up the culture that we're part of. And so what Rui's data suggested was that it's not just exclusively in all places around the world that teenagers become linearly more and more resistant to peer influence.
When we look at western cultures like the US that prize independence and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and becoming this solo unique individual, that pattern is true. But Rui collected a bunch of data in China where there's more of a cultural focus on interdependence, on our relationships to each other, and the relative ways that our communities are constructed and how we interface with each other.
And there what she found that as people developed over the course of adolescence, they showed a different pattern where it seemed more like they were soaking up the values of their culture. So by the time they're in their early twenties, they actually were becoming more interdependent. Again, they were susceptible to peer influence and thinking about what other people were thinking and feeling in a way that seemed reflective of that cultural value.
So what I would say is as individual parents, we don't have sole influence. Anybody who's been a parent knows, we are definitely not the only forces that are shaping our kids. But we do have some role, and what we do is going to shape their value calculations. The stories that we tell are going to shape their value calculations.
In another study that we ran, which was inspired by a parenting dilemma, we found that disrupting function in lateral prefrontal cortex and parts of the brain that typically help us reason. People whose brain function was temporarily downregulated, temporarily disrupted, were not as able to reason about information that was presented as didactic facts.
So things like if you smoke for thirty years, you'll develop lung cancer. But even disrupting that function in these parts of our brain that help us reason, stories allowed people to continue to be able to make use of the information.
To be able to generate ideas in response to reason about those facts when they were bundled as information about people like John smoked for thirty years and developed lung cancer. And they said that was inspired by parenting dilemma because there's a lot of accounts of successful use of stories in many cultures around the world.
So there was an article about how Inuit parents use stories to help their children manage their feelings. And how should we react when we feel angry? How should we react when we have big feelings and how they use stories in that situation.
Anecdotally, when my kids were little, they were not great at regulating their emotions or reasoning about the situation that was happening. Let's say they were fighting over some toy, and I'd be like, "What do you think our options are here?" And they'd just be losing it.
But if I told a story about two other children that were in a very similar dilemma, they'd be able to pause and think about what these two other people should do. Back to your question about how might we shape the values that folks have?
I think that what we see descriptively empirically and consistent with how we understand the brain to work is the things that we do matter, the stories that we tell matter, and those kinds of social roots are much more powerful than just a list of facts and figures. What do you think? How do you think we should do it? What's been successful for you with your four kids?

Guy Kawasaki:
Listen, I know what I don't know. At seventy-one, I've come to that conclusion and the concept that you can truly control your kids and make them into what you want to make them into is a delusion. Let's not get into that. But this story is not necessarily a logical follow on from what we were just talking about, but I have to include this story because it is my favorite story of your book. And the gist of the story is that when you were giving your kid a reward, I think it was even monetary reward.
And basically he said, "Mom, how about just writing me a note? Can you please tell that story? That's a great story."

Emily Falk:
I think that is actually related to what we were just talking about a little bit, that sometimes we get so focused on one way of thinking about things when the social rewards can be so much more powerful. So the story was my kid, I think it was spelling homework or something that he was supposed to be memorizing various things. And back to the “temptation bundling” thing.
I was trying to figure out a way to incentivize him to just do the thing and I offered him a quarter, which at the time he knew he could buy, there were these penny candies at the store near our house to lure kids in and get them to want to buy more stuff at the store.
And so I had offered him this bribe basically, and he was like, "I have another idea. If I do all of this, will you make me a certificate that says, 'Good job, Theo," and you can put today's date on it?" And basically like you said, he wanted me to make him a little piece of artwork that he could have because those kinds of social rewards are really powerful because I think that kind of identity motivator can be so powerful. This is a thing that I did, this is something that I can feel proud of.
It was important to him that it have his name on it and that it reflect that he had done this thing. So of course I said, "Great. I'm happy to do that." We've made a lot of those kinds of things for guitar homework, playing music. And at the end of the week, if we've had a really great week, sometimes I'll make a little piece of artwork to celebrate that.

Guy Kawasaki:
If we had this interview or I had read your book a few decades ago, it would've saved me a thousands of dollars. But do you think there's an upper limit on the age when certificates no longer matter because my youngest is nineteen. Is it too late?

Emily Falk:
There's different things that are like certificates, right? I don't think there's an upper limit on our wish to connect with other people and to get positive feedback. It's performance appraisal season right now at Penn, so that feels really salient to me. What kind of feedback are we giving each other and making sure that we're expressing the appreciation for the things that we do really truly appreciate?
That's what that is. A certificate of appreciation is something that's a tangible acknowledgement of something that somebody did that you thought was amazing. So yes and no. I think it gets so much more complicated as people get older. And like we talked about, there are so many other peers and sources of influences in a nineteen-year-old compared to say, a five-year-old.

Guy Kawasaki:
Really? So I cannot pass up on this opportunity to ask this question of the Pennsylvania mafia of Duckworth, Milkman, and now Falk. I love the work of Bob Cialdini, and I have to ask you from a neuroscientist perspective, what makes a person persuasive at influential?

Emily Falk:
Thanks. And I love Bob Cialdini too, and I was just so excited when he gave positive feedback about the book. There are so many fundamental principles that he described early on. I think many people have read Influence. Millions of people have read Cialdini's classic, Influence. And so you're asking me about what makes somebody persuasive. One of the things that we see is that people who tend to use their social relevance system more when they're considering information, that information gets shared more.
So that kind of ability to engage in perspective taking, I think is one piece of it. And that resonates with some of the principles that Cialdini initially described related to the social influence that we were talking about before, where we look around and we see what other people are doing and thinking, and that influences our preferences.
Of course, there are decades of psychology research and thousands of years going back to Aristotle as well about what makes somebody persuasive, thinking about rhetoric like logos, ethos, and pathos. But when we think about the modern neuroscience research about what makes people persuasive, I think there are a couple of different pieces to that puzzle.
So one is that activation of our own social relevant systems as we're considering the ideas can help us frame information in a way that then resonates with others, and they go on to share. And yet, as we gain more power and status in organizations, we do that less. Neuroscience research highlights that people who have more social status sometimes do less of that thinking about what other people are thinking and feeling spontaneously than other people.
In terms of what makes people want to share information, also when we can connect it to ourselves. So in a study where we looked at what made people want to share New York Times headlines and teasers about health and climate relevant topics. When we just asked people to describe the content itself, that was our control condition. But when we gave people the chance to say why this matters to you or say why this is relevant to you, that increased their motivation to share the information.
And when we said, "Talk about why this matters for people in your social network, talk about why this is relevant to people that you know and care about." That also to a similar degree increased their willingness to share the information. So giving people that opportunity to connect ideas and information with their own identity or with the social relevance of the information for people around them are two kind of straightforward extensions of what we've been talking about so far.

Guy Kawasaki:
In a sense, the fact that I wanted to highlight the story of making a certificate for your son and the fact that we brought up the story of a hundred-year-old grandma Bev. That's exactly what you said, right?

Emily Falk:
Exactly.

Guy Kawasaki:
There's no better example of social relevance than your son and your grandmother.

Emily Falk:
And you're an expert interviewer trying to make these ideas resonate not only with me as a conversation partner, but with other people who might have kids and grandmas as well.

Guy Kawasaki:
And I often buy jam and when I buy jam, if there's too many jams to buy, I just buy apricot. I used to live about a mile from Draeger's, which is where that study occurred for Stanford. So I got to ask you about MRIs because in a sense, I'm reinforcing what you did because in your book you had a section about MRIs way upfront. And so my understanding of MRIs is that it measures the blood flow and oxygen to particular places in a person's brain.
And first of all, are we talking about the kind of MRI that, I've had MRIs to check my hearing, and they put you in this big thing, and the thing is right in front of your face and it's going “Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba.” And it is the most disturbing pain-free experience I've ever gone through. So is that the kind of MRI that neuroscientists use?

Emily Falk:
It is. The setup that neuroscientists use is a little bit different in that you would have headphones like the ones that I'm wearing right now and ear protection, and there would be a screen or goggles that you would wear that would show you stuff like you could see on a laptop screen. So if you're going in to have your hearing checked, or if you're going in to let's say, have a structural image of your knee taken, then you're just going to be looking at the plastic tube that's around you.
And so that is a little bit even more bizarre than the experience for the neuroimaging version of it where you're in that same kind of machine and it is very noisy and it is a foreign environment. And so in some ways, it's amazing that anything that happens in that environment relates to the behaviors that people have in the real world outside of the scanner, which they do, which is incredible.
But we're setting people up with headphones, goggles, usually a button box or a mouse pad or some kind of way that they can communicate responses for certain kinds of tasks. If we're making judgments about whether something's me or not me, that's just a button click, right? I show you an image on the screen that says intelligent and then click this button for me.
Click that button for not me. But new technology also is allowing us to do much more naturalistic things like coming up with noise-canceling headphones and microphone technology so that we can have a conversation. Some of the work I'm most excited about right now is with a collaborative team of scientists at Princeton and other universities where we've been scanning two people having real time conversation in that very bizarre foreign environment.
And they do it. They have deep, wonderful connective conversations that they enjoy.

Guy Kawasaki:
Is the assumption that a region of the brain lighting up is actually causing behavior change? Is it correlation or causation?

Emily Falk:
It depends on the study. So for the MRI studies that we do, they're correlational in that we're looking at correlations. Well, taking a step back. If we're talking about research on behavior change, there are a bunch of different kinds of studies that have been run.
My early work in grad school, for example, was fully correlational. We looked at what happened within the self-relevance and value systems as people were exposed to coaching messages, encouraging them to do things like wear more sunscreen or reduce their smoking.
And what we saw was that activation in those brain regions was associated with people changing their behavior in the time periods that followed, say a week or a month afterwards. There are some studies that we've done where we push around the brain activity using interventions.
For example, in a study on defensiveness and values affirmation, we brought people into the lab who are relatively sedentary, and we randomly assigned one group of people to get to do a values' affirmation where they reflect on their core values like we talked about earlier.
Stepping back, zooming out, thinking about those things that really matter to us can make us less defensive and more open to new ideas and information. So in that study, we had an experimental group that's getting this intervention of getting to reflect on the values that matter most to them, and a control group that's reflecting on other values that don't matter as much to them.
And then everybody seeing the same coaching messages afterwards. Things like, "According to the American Heart Association, your level of physical inactivity puts you at increased risk for heart disease." And there what we see is that the intervention that we're doing causally changes how much their brains are receptive to this kind of information.
So we see more activation in self-relevance and value systems when people did the values affirmation before the coaching than when they had the control intervention before the coaching. And then we also can link that level of activation to the behavior change that follows using accelerometers. Like a Fitbit basically, that doesn't give you feedback.
So there are different kinds of studies, different kinds of experimental designs where we make different kinds of claims about the relationship between the task that people are doing, the brain activation that they're experiencing, and then the behaviors that they do later.

Guy Kawasaki:
So my last MRI question is this, is there any concern that we are drawing so many conclusions about neuroscience based on what I think is a population of experimental subjects that undergraduate students trying to get credit or make a few bucks by being a subject? Are we taking that limited slice of the population, sticking them in an MRI, and drawing generalized conclusions?

Emily Falk:
For sure. And at the beginning of the book, on the note on the research, especially the older MRI research and social neuroscience is limited in the sense that it's about a very limited swath of the population. And there have been many large scale efforts, particularly more recent efforts, for example, the Human Connectome Project or ABCD is a developmental large scale collaborative endeavor to try to understand what happens in people's brains more broadly.
So colleagues and I have written about this question of what is a representative brain and how can we even find out when many of our early research studies were focused on these primarily western relatively well off, high education samples.
And so it's definitely an area that we have to continue to explore and expand what happens when we go outside of college student populations. And for some kinds of questions, we're doing a good job of digging deeper into that and for some kinds of questions, we need a lot more research. So that is definitely a caveat.

Guy Kawasaki:
So now my last question for you, unless you bring up something that makes me ask another question to follow up, is in social media and current marketing theory. So much is dependent on influencers influencing people. So what's the neuroscience take on can influencers truly influence us?

Emily Falk:
Sure. I think that that goes back to the same thing that we were talking about before. When people scanned the brains of college students learning about what faces peers thought were more attractive or less attractive, or what foods people thought were tasty, or what art people think is beautiful. Those are relatively anonymous peers and they exert influence on us by changing our underlying value calculations.
So when scientists randomly assign some faces or some foods or some pieces of art to get the feedback, "Your peers liked this more than you did." That doesn't just change what we say on the surface, that changes our underlying reward value calculations.
When people are relatively more famous and have a following, I would imagine that would amplify that effect. So I think they can influence us and so can other people online who are doing and saying all kinds of things that we may or may not want to be shaping who we are and what we value.

Guy Kawasaki:
So as soon as I hang up, I am going to create a certificate for my son about how happy I am with his first year in college, and I'll let you know if it works on a twenty-year-old kid and for your future reference.

Emily Falk:
Thank you.

Guy Kawasaki:
So again, the name of our guest is Emily Falk, and she has written this book, What We Value. And if you want to learn about how people come to value things, it's recommended reading. Thank you very much for being on our podcast.

Emily Falk:
Thank you so much for having me. It's been so great to meet you.

Guy Kawasaki:
As you're biking through Philadelphia and if you see Katie or Angela, please say hello for us.

Emily Falk:
I will.

Guy Kawasaki:
What kind of bike do you bike on?

Emily Falk:
These days I use the Indego bike share. It's so convenient. The bike share in Philadelphia has e-bikes, which makes it really pleasant to ride them. And you can ride from one place to another and then leave the bike there. And if you want to walk or have a drink at happy hour and then not have to bike home, take the subway, you can do that. So I am a big fan of the bike share.

Guy Kawasaki:
And are you taking different paths all the time, so you see different architecture like you mentioned?

Emily Falk:
I do try to do that.

Guy Kawasaki:
You see, Emily, I really did read your book. I'm not just working off a Wikipedia entry about you.

Emily Falk:
I appreciate you.

Guy Kawasaki:
So this is Guy Kawasaki. You've been listening to the Remarkable People Podcast and our remarkable guest today was Emily Falk and she's the author of this book, What We Value. So if you want to learn about what people value and how they came to value things, check that book out. And I want to thank the team of remarkable people, I really value them.
I value Madisun Nuismer, producer and co-author, Tessa Nuismer, our researcher, Jeff Seih and Shannon Hernandez, our sound design team. So that's the Remarkable People team, and I hope you value what we're doing for you. Until next time, mahalo and aloha.