Emily Falk

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, it was a typical night in my house.

And what that looks like is one of my kids was jumping up and down on the couch.

He was playing his guitar.

The other kid was trying to show my grandmother something.

something that he had built, probably a Lego creation, like kind of really, really close up in her face.

I was trying to get dinner on the table.

So you can imagine sort of dishes clanging and my phone is probably pinging with emails and text messages from people that I work with who would really like a response very quickly.

And when I was in that situation, I sort of had this sense of like, oh, my gosh, there's so many different things that I'm trying to juggle right now.

And in that particular moment, I decided that I was going to prioritize a little bit of time with my grandmother.

And my grandmother, Bev, is now 100 years old and she's one of my very favorite people.

So she's over at my house for dinner and I went over to her.

I left, you know, the pasta going and handed that over to my partner to handle.

And I took her hand and I walked her outside and sort of in the dusk, I was feeling like a little bit of a sense of relief.

Like I was feeling like, okay, we're getting outside, we're getting a little quality time together.

And I felt like I had made the right decision until she turned to me and she said that even though she really liked coming to my house and seeing my kids, who are some of her very favorite people, she said, we aren't really spending time together.

And, you know, it really struck me when she said that because, like, I really didn't want her to be right about that.

Like, of course we're spending time together.

What do you mean?

Like, you're over here making dinner for all of us and, you know, we're outside together now.

So what do you mean we're not spending time together?

I definitely initially was like, no, you're wrong.

Like, we do spend time together.

Look, what are we doing right now?

It's the same kind of defensiveness that I feel when, you know, somebody calls me up and says, like, why haven't you called me?

And it's like, well, we're talking right now.

What do you want from me?

So, I mean, yeah, I definitely felt some defensiveness in that moment.

Yeah, I think this is an incredibly common experience where, you know, we point out something that somebody could be doing better.

Like, for example, you know, maybe your partner could be taking out the trash or your kid could be doing their homework or somebody on your team at work could be responding to your collaborator a little bit more quickly.

And when we point out these things that we wish other people were doing differently, the things that are most salient for them are all the things that they're already juggling, just like you said.

You know, with my grandmother, I was juggling a lot of different things having to do with my work and my kids and getting dinner on the table.

And those things were front of mind for me.

And so when we point out the ways that other people could be improving their health behaviors, you know, choosing healthier activities, quitting smoking, drinking less, drinking

getting more exercise or studying harder or, you know, making choices that are different than the choices that they're making, that really can feel threatening.

It can threaten our self-image.

It can threaten our sense that we're making good choices.

I mean that our brain has these systems that help us think about what's good and bad, our value system, and brain systems that help us think about what's me and not me, which I call our self-relevance system.

And the self-relevance and value systems are really intertwined with one another.

So when we make decisions about what's good and bad, it's tapping into the value system, but that's overlapping with our self-relevance system.

And so...

Those kinds of decisions are conflated with one another to the degree that we tend to have these biases where we think of things that are me typically on average as being good and things that are not me as being on average bad.

We also have optimism biases where we think of ourselves as being above average, like more than 50% of people think that they're an above average driver.

And so when you say, well, you know, you might not be an above average driver.

You're actually like pretty risky driver, pretty dangerous driver.

People don't say, oh, thank you.

Like, I'm so glad that you pointed that out.

Now I'll go and like get some lessons so that I can be less of a danger to myself and other people on the road.

There's the old comedy bit about how people who are driving faster than you are maniacs and people who are driving slower than you are are, you know, super stodgy.

And of course, you're driving at exactly the right speed.

Exactly.

So I think that one of the things that can happen is that when, like, for example, when my grandma told me that she wished that we could spend more time together and I barely got it together to let her finish her sentence before explaining why she was wrong, that it's not just that, you know, I'm thinking about that specific situation of like, are we actually spending quality time together right now or not?

But also, like I said to you earlier, like, am I being a good granddaughter, which is an identity that's important to me?

Like, am I being somebody who shows up for her family in a way that feels good for them?

And so this idea that, like, we...

cling to the idea that we're doing things right is extremely common.

Like there's a New Yorker cartoon, I think, where there's a bunch of guys sitting around a boardroom table and the caption is, my last comment appeared to be inviting feedback.

Do not be fooled.

Right.

And that's funny because like the guy is, you know, maybe he said something like he's interested in feedback, but everybody sitting around the table knows that what he actually wants to hear is that he's doing a great job.

In that study, what we had people do was we had college students who told us on a day-to-day basis about how much they were drinking alcohol.

And we randomized people into different conditions.

Some of them just reacted naturally to alcohol the whole time.

Some of them were given a technique where they took the perspective of another person who was part of their social group who drank less than they did.

And so those people on a day-to-day basis were given reminders.

Like, let's imagine that you and I are friends and that you drink less than I do.

I would get text messages that say, you know, today if you encounter alcohol, you should approach it the way that Shankar would.

And other people were given messages that told them to essentially take a step back and just react in a more mindful way.

So basically to have whatever feelings they were having, but to do it from a more distanced perspective.

And both of those kinds of tools for creating psychological distance, taking the perspective of another person who drinks less than you do or reacting in that non-reactive way that characterizes mindfulness, both resulted in people drinking less than on weeks when they reacted naturally or compared to people who were reacting naturally.

Yeah, so there's this really wonderful research that I like that comes out of Brent Hughes's lab.

And what he's done is look at these networks of different kinds of traits and the way that people think of them as relating to each other.

And so there are some that are more central, like for example, our kindness or our compassion might be traits that we think of as core traits that are at the center of this network.

And the traits that kind of depend on those but aren't necessarily our most central traits, like maybe being witty, that those things are a little bit more open to feedback.

And so this team of researchers led by Jacob Elder in Brent's lab said,

found that it can be easier for us to incorporate feedback about traits that are more peripheral than our core ones.

Like we really don't want to change the things that we think of as being like really, really core to us.

So what the team found was that after receiving feedback, people were more willing to update their self-views about peripheral traits.

Like one example they gave is well-spoken.

People generally don't think of like well-spoken as something that's really core to their identity.

But if the committee gave feedback that was like, this person doesn't seem like they're that friendly,

then we might come up with reasons why like, well, I know that I'm friendly and maybe I was nervous and that didn't really come across in this video.

But like, I know that that's true about myself.

Well, it's interesting because I think that, you know, as the receiver of the feedback, we can kind of toggle between those different kinds of states.

I think it's really hard to control how other people receive those messages.

And we have much more control over how we do because there's a world where, you know, she says.

I'd really like to spend some more quality time with you.

And I take that as evidence that she thinks I'm not a good granddaughter and that's threatening to my core sense of self and my identity that maybe I'm not like as generous or kind or whatever as I could be.

But there's also a world where I can do the translation that you're describing and just say like, oh, let's figure out how we can make this work logistically, right?

If I can let go of some of that defensiveness and recognize that this is a goal that I have also to spend time together, then we're both much better off.

One of the things that I think we really do have control over is our ability to decide whether we want to be the kind of person who responds to loving critique, constructive critique openly, or whether we want to let defensiveness get the better of us.

And obviously there are situations where people are just mean or rude or whatever, and I'm not saying we should put up with that.

but that often there is useful information in the feedback that other people are trying to give us.

And that when we can see that as evidence that they care, when we can see that as evidence that they're trying to work towards some better outcome with us,

Or even just connect with the part of ourself that wants to be continuously improving.

That can be more productive than this automatic reaction that I think probably stems from the conflation of self and value.

Yeah, so one of the things that meditation helps people do is let go of that more bounded notion of self, right?

The idea that there's a fixed sense of who I am and that that can't change or that it has a particular and rigid structure.

So when you look at the brains of people who have practiced meditation for a long time,

Their self-relevant systems behave differently than the rest of us who aren't long-term meditation practitioners.

And so that also really suggests this other possibility that just kind of letting go of that bounded notion of self can make us open to all kinds of other possibilities.

Values affirmation is a technique where we reflect on values that matter a lot to us, so things that bring us a lot of meaning or purpose in our lives, which for some of us might be things like our friends and family or our spirituality or maybe our creativity.

And the idea is that when we reflect on those core values, it can allow us to zoom out and see that...

just because we made a mistake, it doesn't have to mean we're a bad person.

Or just because somebody is asking us to change one thing doesn't mean that like everything about us has to change.

And so this is a way that we can hold on to a core sense of self while making ourselves more open to potentially changing things that aren't working or to kind of shift preconceived notions about who we are.

So yeah,

As one example, our team has done research looking at folks who are relatively sedentary, people who don't move around a lot.

And what we found is that when we randomized people to either get to do a values affirmation exercise, reflecting on these kinds of sources of meaning and purpose in their life, things that really matter to them first,

compared to a control group who reflect on values, but the ones that aren't necessarily their most important values.

That what shifts is how their brains respond to the thing that comes next.

So when we give those folks coaching about why and how they might want to get more physically active, everybody in the whole study is seeing the same coaching messages.

So things like the more you sit, the more damage it does to your body, or according to the American Heart Association, people at your level of physical inactivity are at risk for cancer and heart disease.

And

Even though everybody's seeing objectively the same messages, the people who were first given this chance to engage in values affirmation show more activation within the brain's value system, more activation within the self-relevant system, suggesting that maybe they're open to those messages in a different way than people who weren't given that opportunity to first zoom out and reflect on their core values.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it also depends how you think about what difficult means.

Like right now we're in performance review season at Penn.

And something that we do in my lab is we do a bi-directional feedback meeting.

Like we fill out the HR forms where it's very top down.

Like as a manager, I need to give feedback to all the people who report to me.

But in that HR system, there's actually no place where they give feedback about what I'm doing well and what I'm not doing well.

And so we have these meetings that I know are on my calendar.

I know it's about to be the time when I'm going to be giving feedback to somebody else, but also they're going to be telling me what did I do as their boss over the past semester, over the past year that was helpful for them and helped them grow, but also what did I do as their boss that they wished I had done differently.

And there are a couple different things.

One is when I have the luxury of a little bit of time in my schedule, I do try to do a little bit of that kind of mini values affirmation, like reflecting on things that actually really matter a lot to me.

So I might look at photos of my kids or journal a little bit about things that I feel grateful for and things that are most important in my life.

But I also try to reconnect with why we're doing what we're doing in the first place.

And then the way that we set up these bi-directional feedback meetings is we usually start out with the things that are going well, right?

The things where they really genuinely do feel supported, the places that we're really connected, the places that we're on the same page.

And I will say that when people do this genuinely and authentically, it feels really good, like to feel seen and to feel recognized for the things that we're doing that are meaningful.

it feels different than the way that we engage when we're busy in our day-to-day lives, right?

And so having that foundation, then it feels possible to hear the constructive criticism or the constructive critique.

Like I'm thinking about one of the senior folks on my team last year told me that it felt really demotivating when it took me a long time to

get papers back to her like she would work really hard to put a paper in my writing queue and then because of whatever else I had going on in my life like sometimes it would take me weeks to give her feedback and she said you know when I do that I lose steam it makes me feel like unmotivated to keep the process going and you know there's kind of like with the situation with Bev there's an interpretation of that which is like oh like look at my calendar like I have meetings all day long and

You are one of many people who wants my feedback, right?

And so I think there's a way that it feels very easy to respond defensively there.

But there's also something that's really valuable about the feedback that she's giving me, which is like we both have a goal to share the research that we're doing with other people.

And I certainly don't want to be the bottleneck in that process, and especially if it's going to feel demotivating for her.

So, you know, over the past year, I've tried to think with her together about how we might plan and schedule so that I know when these things are going to be coming into my writing queue and that I can turn them around more quickly.

Right.

If I know that that's something that's really important to her, I can prioritize it.

And that's been really good.

Another senior person on my team, you know, told me that she felt like it was sometimes hard to get meeting time with me.

And that she felt like it was, you know, she didn't want to impose basically.

And that that felt really hard that like since I was clearly, you know, running around and doing so many different things and juggling them and sharing that with her, that it felt like maybe she shouldn't take time in our meetings to like,

catch up about our weekends or maybe she shouldn't take time to you know get into the weeds of little things that weren't the most pressing things and so this year I've worked on trying to protect more time to meet with that person and you know it's bi-directional performance feedback time again and she's like

It's a little bit better, but I still feel that way sometimes.

And so, you know, I guess I just don't want to like paint this picture like we do this one thing and then everything's fixed.

But I think that my goal is to go into those meetings thinking about how we can work together to make things a little bit better each time.

Well, so purpose has all kinds of benefits.

Purpose, there's a lot of research that highlights how purpose can make us more open to constructive feedback like we're talking about here.

It can also make us more likely to engage in conversations.

behaviors that are good for our body like there's a reciprocal relationship between things like getting a good night's sleep or going for a walk or connecting with people that we love and a sense of purpose so when we do those things that are good for our bodies we can feel more purposeful later and then when we feel more purposeful

it makes it more likely that we'll do those things.

And I think that an important thing to highlight there is that sometimes I think we think of some people as being more purposeful, like Mother Teresa, super purposeful, right?

But in reality, most of us fluctuate on a day-to-day basis around some set point.

Like we have our average, but some days we feel more purposeful.

Some days we feel less purposeful.

And on those days where...

we feel more purposeful maybe because we reflected on the things that really matter to us or maybe we took the time to go for a walk around the block or to call our best friend on the phone, that that has all these other benefits as well.

So when we had people do a values affirmation exercise where they ranked different values that might be important to them, as you said, some people choose values that are these self-transcendent values that connect them to a bigger whole, to people or a world that's bigger than myself.

And when people tend to endorse these self-transcendent values more as composed of more self-focused values, that they show lower reactivity in brain regions that track threat.

So it seems like getting those kinds of health coaching messages when they have this other psychological resource of self-transcendent values to rely on, that that incoming information might be less threatening.

Yeah, so this is research that I really love.

The idea is that there are certain kinds of experiences that we have that can be relatively transformative experiences that often involve kind of letting go, again, of that bounded sense of self and seeing the way that we're connected to something much bigger than ourselves.

So something that connects us to other people, to the rest of humanity.

And so this can happen through meditation.

It can happen when people take psychedelic drugs.

It can happen through rituals where people come together and do things.

So like you mentioned Burning Man and my friend and fellow neuroscientist Molly Crockett has explored how these kinds of transformative experiences are characterized really by an expansion, an expanded sense of self.

And so going to festivals like Burning Man and studying how people think and feel and behave in those kinds of contexts, Molly's team has found that those kinds of transformative experiences often involve having more of a sense of connection to other people, more of a sense of not having a bounded sense of me and not me that our brains are typically and sort of more automatically able

So when people do these kinds of things where they're connected to their community or experiencing community in a really different way, then that can help them let go of that like sense of ego that sometimes I think is characteristic of the defensiveness that we feel.

Well, one of the things that's really fascinating is the way that stories seem to get around our defensiveness.

We see this in all kinds of situations where people are able to reason about facts and information in a different way when it comes from a story than when it's just presented as a list of facts.

And I noticed this a lot as a parent.

When my kids were little, I read an article summarizing some research about the way that Inuit parents sometimes use stories to help teach children how to control their anger.

And

That work highlighted all of the different ways that stories can be used to shape our understanding of morality, our understanding of how we should behave.

And I also saw it on a day-to-day basis in my household.

So I have twins, and the twins often would get into very hyped-up states with each other where

They'd be fighting over a toy or they'd be fighting over who got to wear the blue pajamas or they would be fighting over, you know, who got to go first to get into the bathtub.

And any of these things seemed like just very dire, stakesy situations.

And

You know, when I would ask them, like, guys, like, can you please just calm down or what's going on?

Like, why are you behaving this way?

Like that didn't have any effect at all.

But when I would ask them, would you like to hear a story?

Then sometimes they would pause and listen.

And we had two characters in our house, Charlie and Charles Adams, named after the cartoonist who we all like.

And when we'd tell stories about Charlie and Charles Adams, then we'd get a completely different reaction.

The kids would be able to suggest ways that Charlie and Charles Adams could very generously share the toy or take turns wearing the special pajamas or take turns getting into the bath first.

And then after they had stopped and reasoned about it for those other people, then we were able to say, well, do you think that you guys could do any of those things?

And sometimes it would work.

And, you know, this came up the other day with my neighbor.

I was over at my neighbor's house and two of their kids were having a little bit of a tussle.

And I said, hey, guys, you know what happens when Emmett and Theo are in this situation?

And just, you know, tell a situation that's very similar to the one that's playing out there.

And then these little humans whose prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed can still reason in a completely reasonable way.

Yeah, and researchers who study narrative persuasion call that experience transportation, being transported into a story we can identify with the characters in a different way than when we're experiencing things ourselves.

And research in the brain that our team has done shows that there's fundamentally different pathways that are unfolding when we're reasoning about stories and other kinds of facts.

So we had smokers who came into the lab

And we used this brain stimulation technique called transcranial direct current stimulation, which temporarily disrupts the function of certain brain regions.

And so we used it to temporarily disrupt regions that typically are involved in that kind of effortful thinking.

And when people were getting their brain stimulated using this technology and they were given didactic facts, things like, you know, if you smoke for 30 years, it increases your risk of lung cancer by X percent.

Then when we disrupted the function of these brain regions, it made it so that they were less able to reason about those facts themselves.

compared to when we use sham stimulation where they're hooked up to the machine but not actually having those brain regions disrupted.

On the other hand, for people, for the smokers who came into the lab and did the same procedure, but they were given stories, even when we disrupted the function of these brain regions that we typically think of as being key for our ability to reason, they could still generate just as many arguments and think about what was happening.

So being told John smoked for 30 years and he developed lung cancer, they were able to reason about it in a different way.

And I think part of what's happening there is

is that other brain systems are being called into use.

So we know from other research that social relevance brain systems that help us understand what other people think and feel are engaged when we hear stories and when we tell stories.

And that that kind of thinking might be fundamentally different from the other kinds of reasoning that we're talking about.

Exactly.

And research by folks like Ethan Cross, some of the research that's been done here at Penn in the Behavior Change for Good initiative,

shows exactly that, that when people are put in the position of either, you know, taking the perspective of a distanced other person, like the perspective of a fly on the wall or the perspective of somebody else or their perspective of someone giving advice to another person, that that makes it easier for us to actually think about the situation in a more wise way ourself.

And so we can come up with better solutions.

We can come up with wiser solutions.

And, um,

I'll say personally, the number of studies that I've run where I have tried to convince somebody else to do something, to get more physically active or use sunscreen or floss or whatever it is, and then I just end up convincing myself.

I'm just this constellation of all the studies that I've ever run because for so many years I've been doing these studies trying to convince other people to do stuff.

Yeah, we ran a study where we had college students get messages on a day-to-day basis.

We sent them text messages and some of the students got messages where they were just told to respond to alcohol however they normally would.

And others were told to take the perspective of somebody who we knew from prior surveys that we had done with them was somebody that they were friends with and drank less than they did.

So it's somebody where they're familiar with that behavior and taking the perspective of a friend who drank less than they did also reduced their own drinking.

Well, in the hour or so after my kids go to bed, it's a really nice time where Brett and I usually hang out with each other.

And usually we hang out in the kitchen and we clean up from the day.

And by we clean up from the day, I mean Brett cleans up from the day and I hang out with him while that happens, which is really a lovely characteristic to have in a partner, somebody who's just as happy doing dishes as sitting around.

Yeah.

And so in this particular evening, Brett was doing his wonderful typical thing of doing the dishes.

And I was sitting in a very comfortable chair checking my email.

And there was a student who needed something from me in order to be able to move ahead with a project.

And I was trying to get back to them quickly because that's something that I like to do.

I don't want to be the bottleneck.

And as I was on my phone doing this task, Brett said to me that it was really frustrating for him when he felt like, you know, this is time when we're supposed to be hanging out together and I'm on my phone.

And...

You know, I definitely felt defensive in that moment.

Like, there are all kinds of good reasons why I'm on my phone, right?

One of the things that you love about me is that I'm a good boss and I'm a good collaborator and I'm a good scientist.

And, like, this is just going to take a second and it's not really disrupting the conversation.

And I can still hear what you're saying.

And do you want me to just recite back to you exactly what you just said?

Yeah.

Of course, like that did not interest Brett.

Like there's research that highlights that when other people are on their phones, it's annoying, right?

Like it's super annoying.

And in the moment, I was defensive.

I was not prepared to concede that, of course, he was right.

But as I thought about it over the next couple of days, because Brett is also not really one to complain that much.

It's rare that he says to me, like, I really don't like what you're doing.

I need you to change something.

And so even that sort of subtle, like, it feels really bad for me when you're on your phone when we're hanging out, that was noticeable.

And so over the next couple of days, I started thinking about

you know, who do I actually want to be in this situation?

And I started thinking about the people in our lives where you go over to their house and you don't even know if they have a cell phone, right?

Like they are definitely not checking their email or their texts and how different that feels from, you know, the person who every time you bring something up, they're like, let me just fact check that.

And they like go on their phone, beep, boop, beep.

And, like, you know, give you whatever stats or show you a YouTube video or something like that rarely adds to the conversation, right?

And so thinking about those people in my life who are so present in those interactions felt really motivating for me.

And I thought, like, that's actually how I want to be when I'm with Brett.

And so I tried to make some environmental shifts, like leaving my phone in the other room when we're hanging out.

And that works for the most part.

I'll say I'm not perfect.

I felt a little caught out the other night.

It was that hour after the kids went to bed and I was texting with a friend and she had just finished reading my book where I tell this story.

And she was like, aren't you supposed to be hanging out with Brett right now?

Why are you texting with me?

And I was like, oh, my gosh.

So then I was like double defensive.

Like, I know that I'm supposed to be hanging out with Brett.

Brett's probably like a little bit annoyed about the situation.

And now my friend is probably judging me that like, of course, I just told everybody that I want to be doing this.

And yet that is the person I want to be.

So I was like, you're totally right.

Took the phone, put it somewhere else.

And so I really appreciated that she called me out on that.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Shankar.

It's such a pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I was in the very exciting situation that there were many desserts that looked delicious.

And I was very curious, so I wanted to try all of them.

But I knew, of course, that if I ate many different desserts, I would not feel amazing afterwards.

So I decided that I was going to get one of each of them, try each one, and then eat the full thing from the one I liked the best.

I went and I sat down and I did try each of them and it turned out that they were delicious.

I was also in a ceremony that was about an hour long and they were just there in front of me.

And so in the moment, it went well in the sense that I had many desserts in front of me and a lot of time.

So I ate them and that was really fun for a little while until it wasn't.

Oh, man.

Well, I went and I lay down on the couch and I said, I am so sugared up.

I am not going to eat any more sugar today.

A little embarrassed to tell you what happened.

What happened was that evening we went out to dinner with my grandma Bev and there's a diner in her building called Little Pete's.

And we went there and had what my kids considered to be probably the ideal meal, including things like, you know, a griddled grilled cheese and waffles and things that you get at a diner.

And at dessert time, the kids said they wanted a milkshake.

And my kid Emmett asked the waiter, how big is the milkshake?

And the waiter said, it's pretty big.

And so I said, why don't you guys split the milkshake?

So they agreed to that deal.

And the waiter brought out two fairly sizable glasses full of milkshake.

which I assumed was half in each glass.

But no, he also had one of those large metal containers like you get at a soda fountain, and he handed it to me, and that contained just as much milkshake.

So he gave me this enormous milkshake, and basically, what was I going to do, right?

Like, I didn't want to sugar my kids up anymore.

milkshakes are delicious so despite the fact that directly before coming to this dinner I had just said to Brett and my kids I am not going to eat any more sugar today I am just going to detox and eat all the green vegetables and feel amazing later I proceeded to polish off the entire rest of that milkshake

Yeah, I mean, that's certainly something that I said verbally at the table.

I mean, Brett did remind me of the resolution that I had made earlier to be kind to my body and not totally poison myself with large amounts of sugar.

And I had a milkshake in my hand, and I said, well, I have a milkshake, and it looks delicious.

So that was a pretty good argument.

Exactly.

And this happens in all different parts of our lives.

It happens with work projects that maybe we wish we had gotten to invest in a little bit more or school projects if we're still in school.

It happens with decisions where there's some kind of payoff that's far off in the future.

Maybe we want to do something because we know that it'll make us healthier, happier later.

It happens with the people that we care about and making time to spend time with them when they're available and when we still can.

So that's just a small set of examples.

There are so many times where we make these kinds of choices, and then later we wonder why we made them.

Yeah, I've heard this.

Everybody that I know experiences this.

One example that comes to mind is my grandma, Bev, every time I see her regrets that she hasn't been reading books.

And I ask her, you know, why haven't you been reading books?

She loves reading books.

And she says, well, there's just so many things that I need to do.

And I ask her about what those things are.

And it's usually things that have to do with basic, you know, cleaning up her apartment or doing errands, things that that take some time.

And I say, well, why don't you just carve out some time and read some books?

And she's like, I'll do it tomorrow.

Or, you know, my kids are extremely interested in a wide range of things that they would like to be doing.

And then sometimes on the weekend when they're allowed to have screen time, they end up playing a ton of Minecraft.

And then later they feel frustrated that they didn't do all those other things that they had in their plan for the weekend.

Those are two small examples that come to mind.

I mean, this also happens all the time with my team at work, like when people are doing research and we meet and we discuss all of the ambitions that we have for the things that we're going to do.

And then we meet with each other a week later.

And only a very small number of the things that were actually on the list maybe have been accomplished.

And it's not that anybody has been slacking off or anybody had bad intentions, but just that everything always takes longer than you think.

And then other things come up.

And sometimes there's 20 things that didn't make it onto that original to-do list, but that were really important in the moment.

Yeah, I mean, what I hear is somebody who has tried to do something in the past, right?

He set a goal and then other things that he hadn't accounted for come up.

And so he gets back together with Tammy.

And clearly he's done this multiple times because he's made a video and tried to protect himself against it in the future, right?

So we do this all the time.

We try to talk to ourselves or make resolutions or write down ideas about how our future selves should behave.

Yeah, I mean, it's an idea that goes back for centuries, millennia, and it's also an idea that's represented in all kinds of modern media.

And like the clips you played earlier, it's funny because we can relate to it, right?

It's funny because it's so common that none of us is thinking, why are Chandler and Rachel interested in eating more of the cheesecake?

Or, you know, well, Ron should just be able to stop himself because so many of us have been in that kind of situation before.

The value system is a constellation of brain regions that handle our choices, the choices that we're making consciously between drinking a milkshake or not drinking a milkshake, between whether we're going to go out on a date with somebody or stay home and deal with our emails.

And the value system calculates these choices in what neuroscientists call a value calculation.

Yeah, basically, for each of our choices, it's identifying what are the different things that we're choosing between.

It's assigning a subjective value to each of those different choices that depends on our current context, our past experiences, our future goals.

And then based on that subjective value, that subjective reward that it's anticipating from each of the choices—

It chooses the one that it thinks is going to be the best for me right here, right now.

And then it is connected to other brain systems that take action that's relevant to that choice.

Exactly.

So when I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to eat the delicious dessert that's sitting in front of me, the short-term reward of how delicious it's going to taste is more salient.

That weighs more heavily in that value calculation than the long-term consequence if I do that over and over again over the course of years or even how I'm going to feel tomorrow or later this evening.

Right.

Not only is it far-off, but it's less vivid, right?

I can totally imagine how much fun it's going to be to play with that toy right here that's in front of me, whereas who knows what kind of toys are going to be available during my retirement.

Well, you're probably familiar with the party game, would you rather, where I might ask you different kinds of things that are usually not as simple as the option that you brought up.

Like, would you rather eat an apple or an orange?

Or would you rather eat a blueberry tart or a lemon cheesecake?

Though, of course, the value system can handle those kinds of would you rather choices.

But I also think it's pretty incredible that it can handle the more abstract kind of choices that we usually give it at a party that are not inherently comparable.

Like, would you rather have a cat's tongue or would you rather have roller skates for hands?

Right.

Like those are totally different things.

And it's not like you can directly compare what the advantages and disadvantages would be.

But you might have some intuition about which one you would choose.

Exactly.

Likewise, we can do this with money.

Like I could say to you, would you rather have $5 or would you rather snuggle with a puppy?

And you could choose whether you'd be willing to pay $5 to snuggle with a puppy or not.

And you can probably come up with an answer depending on how you feel about puppies and, you know, how flush you're feeling.

they're essentially far away from us in some way.

We can't imagine them as vividly.

And we can't imagine things as vividly when we think about things that are far off in the future, like, for example, a long-term health benefit of what I choose to eat today or whether I choose to get exercise is offset by how nice it would feel to stay and watch another show or eat something delicious that is available to me right now.

And likewise, those same kinds of abstract tradeoffs come into play when we think about other kinds of shoulds, like I should care about what's happening globally to people who are suffering in other parts of the world.

But when that's abstract and, you know, we know statistics about people that are, you

That's maybe less salient than we hear specific stories about the suffering of a particular individual or even better when we get to know people whose lives are impacted by particular policies or decisions that are being made.

Yeah, the social relevance system is a set of brain regions that help us understand what other people think and feel.

And so you might also hear scientists refer to a theory of mind system or a mentalizing system that helps us think about other people's thoughts and feelings.

And this social relevance system can help us connect and coordinate with other people.

And it also shapes the decisions that we make, like it keeps us aligned with other people.

It can help keep us on trends, but it can also do harmful things like maybe diluting us into resharing a false social media post.

Yeah.

So before the story I'm about to tell you, I had really never thought very much about Benedict Cumberbatch.

I mean, I think if I saw him and I thought anything, it was like,

There's a guy like he's a pretty average looking guy.

And then my friend Rebecca gave me a book called This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, in which an Australian author, Tabitha Carvan, spends a few hundred pages talking about how amazing Benedict Cumberbatch is.

She thinks he's incredibly attractive.

She just, you know, is completely enamored of Benedict Cumberbatch.

And so after reading this book, which is really a book about joy and about what we value and about how we spend our time, I loved the book.

It made me think, like, I wonder what all the, you know, excitement about Benedict Cumberbatch is.

And I said to my partner, Brett, like, maybe we should watch Sherlock.

And Brett was like, oh, I've already watched all of Sherlock.

I love Sherlock.

And I was like, what?

When did you watch Sherlock?

And but he said he'd watch it again because he apparently also really likes Benedict Cumberbatch.

And he told me that he thought Sherlock was a really hot character.

So apparently I was, you know, out of line.

So.

So we watch a couple episodes of Sherlock.

And with other people's voices in my head, I'm noticing, like, yeah, he's pretty charming.

Like, he's pretty smart.

And then I started watching videos of him being interviewed online.

And, you know, people asking these questions about, like, how does it feel to be named the sexiest man alive?

And he's, like, so charming, right?

He says...

Something like, oh, it makes me giggle or like, you know, he's totally delightful about it.

And my friends, you know, we started talking about this.

My friends, it turns out, thought Benedict Cumberbatch was really attractive.

And all of this just made me like reconsider my entire position on Benedict Cumberbatch.

You should watch the video of.

where he mispronounced penguins, and then a BBC reporter asked him about it, and he says peng-wings and pen-wins.

Like, he just, he keeps mispronouncing it.

He can't seem to get it right in filming this documentary.

And so then afterwards, I ask him about it, and he just totally fesses up.

Like, yeah, I was having a hard time.

And he's, like, so, like, lovely and self-deprecating about the whole thing.

Yeah.

I mean, like the people in the study, it's not like I would necessarily say that I think that he is the most attractive person on the face of the planet.

But I went from thinking like, all right, here's an average guy.

I don't really know what the fuss is all about to appreciating the charming nature of at least how he comes across on the Internet.

Right.

And I think that that increased appreciation was motivated almost exclusively by this kind of social force of other people appreciating him.

Yeah, what I mean is that when we think about our bigger picture goals and values or even small goals that we might have, that the way that we frame those choices can make it easier to make choices that are congruent with what we would ultimately want if we were, let's say, operating as our best selves.

So one example that I really like is a study that researchers at Stanford did where they looked at people's decisions in dining halls.

And they changed the labels of the foods to either focus on the long-term health benefits of things or the kind of short-term taste.

So, for example, they might have –

Vegetables that were labeled as healthy choice turnips or balsamic glazed turnips or nutritious green beans or sizzling Szechuan green beans.

And the dish itself is exactly the same.

But when they foreground the tastiness of the option, people chose a lot more vegetables than when they foreground that sort of longer term health benefit.

And so what I mean when I say that we can work with our value system is like building on what we talked about before, where people tend to prioritize the immediate or psychologically close or vivid consequences of our choices.

We can focus on what is gratifying, what is rewarding, what is immediately useful about the thing that we want to do.

Exactly.

How do we how do we collaborate with ourselves in order to make the choices that feel good now and feel good later?

So if we think about an exercise example, you know, maybe we try to do something that we think is going to make us as fit as possible.

And we choose something that isn't ultimately that fun or enjoyable and where we have to exercise a lot of willpower to make ourselves do it.

And that's probably not sustainable.

Whereas when we make choices that are really fun and joyful, like maybe I really love to dance.

So going dancing for me doesn't feel like a workout specifically.

It feels like something I would want to do for my mental well-being, even absent the physical benefits.

Or going for a run with my neighbor is a great chance to catch up with her and hear about how her week is going.

So focusing on those kinds of things can make it immediately rewarding as opposed to just focusing on some longer term goal about getting healthier, when in reality, it also has those benefits as well.

I was listening to a podcast called How to Save a Planet where Kendra Pierre-Lewis made this very delightful episode about biking.

And it reminded me that biking doesn't have to be this like sweaty, stressful thing where you're taking your life in your hands, weaving in and out of traffic.

Like the people that Kendra...

What did you do?

Well, I got my bike out of the basement and I biked down my street on a beautiful fall afternoon.

And I biked up to the path that takes me to the route along the river, which is really beautiful.

So pretty soon I was on this jogging path, but I was just flying past the joggers and the light was reflecting off of the Schuylkill River.

And I just felt amazing.

Like I went...

All the way from where I live in West Philadelphia over to where she lives near the art museum in this kind of state of feeling like this is exactly where I want to be right now.

Like I'm out on this beautiful fall afternoon and having that time outside, having that me time felt really good.

Exactly.

I think that, you know, the more places in our life where we can find moments of joy, moments of connection, moments of happiness, like I think we should take them where we can get them.

I think one thing that we can do is think about how the goals that we have or the things that we want to do, but that we might not necessarily immediately connect with our sense of who we are, could be connected to strengths we already have or things that we're already doing.

So one thing that happened for me was, you know, I go for jogs mostly to de-stress, to blow off some steam.

And I have two siblings who are much more serious runners.

And one day my brother was pitching me on the idea that if I did some targeted workouts that I could get faster.

And initially I sort of wondered, like, why would I care about getting faster in the first place?

Like growing up, I was, you know, thought of myself probably more like as a nerd than as a jock.

And it wasn't immediately part of my identity to think of myself as a runner in that way.

And my brother framed it a different way.

He said, you know, academics often make really good runners because academics are good at planning.

Academics are good at working hard on things that, you know, have some payoff in the long term.

And so that shifted it from something where, you know, doing these harder workouts to get faster would just be to do it to something that I already had the skills, the disposition to do.

He also added another social reward, which was that if I got faster, I could run with my brother and sister and hear the gossip, which of course is very motivating for me.

Well, I don't know if he had read my work specifically, but I think it was a strategic way to frame things.

Exactly.

And so, you know, I will admit I'm not like doing speed workouts all the time.

But after learning a little bit about what I was capable of by doing that with my brother and with my sister, now at the end of my run, sometimes I will work in a little bit more, you know, I'll push myself for the last couple blocks to see how fast I can run or do those little things that over the long run, they promise me are going to make me a faster runner.

And when I do that in my runs, then it gets incorporated into my identity.

And there's this feed forward cycle of the more that I think of it as something that I do, the more I do it.

That's right.

So let's say that you have somebody that you work with who is really nervous about making a big presentation and they don't necessarily think of themselves as being a great presenter.

But you've seen them at the office party and you know that they are an extrovert who is the life of the party.

And so you might help them see the connection between that way that they are able to connect with other people in a crowd in one situation with that same kind of connection that they might have in other situations.

Um,

And so as we think about, you know, what are the goals that we have and what are the things that are getting in the way, one of the things that might be getting in the way is if we think, well, I'm not a person who does X. And in reality, we can shift to think about, like, well, what are the things that are true of me that could support being able to do that thing?

Social proof is the idea that we are influenced by what the people around us are doing or thinking.

And so when we see that other people are doing something, then that makes us think that it's a good idea.

And social proof influences people often outside of their conscious awareness even.

So, for example, in California, researchers studied the energy use of different people, of different households.

And what they found was that when they asked people what they thought was influencing their energy use behaviors, that people said that, you know, their costs and other factors were influencing it.

But they didn't actually think that their neighbor's energy use was particularly impactful in their decisions.

And yet, when the researchers looked at what was actually influencing their decisions, it turned out that other people's energy use behavior was pretty predictive of what those folks were doing.

And so based on that, what the research team did was

They ran an experiment where they gave some people messages that were focused on social proof.

Like, for example, 77% of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer.

So that's a message that's highlighting that a lot of your neighbors are doing this thing.

And other people got messages that were focused on, you know, just asking them to consider how they might conserve energy, like, for example, by using fans instead of air conditioning.

And other people got other kinds of appeals.

So things like saving money.

And they found, the researchers found that the households that were told about their neighbors' conservation efforts, that they ended up saving more energy than people in the other groups.

And the thing that I think is really fascinating about this study is that those folks who are influenced by the messages still reported that what other people were doing was the least important reason for them making the energy decisions that they were making.

Yeah, well, that term, the credit goes to Elliot Berkman, who's also a neuroscientist who studies goal pursuit.

The idea of whatty-what-what is an acronym for work on that thing you don't want to work on time.

There are a lot of things that we don't necessarily want to do, you know, things that we don't feel like doing, but that we know we need to do.

And what we do in our lab is we try to make those things that we know we don't really want to work on more rewarding by doing them together.

So somebody might post on our messaging platform.

Does anybody want to have a work on that thing session?

And then a bunch of other people will get together.

And the idea is that there's a set amount of time.

You don't have to do a thing that you don't want to do forever.

But we give each other support and encouragement and hold each other accountable for the thing.

And so having somebody else there kind of helps rebalance the value calculation because it's fun to get to catch up with somebody else and committing to doing it together with somebody else taps into that idea of social rewards as well and makes it more likely that we'll get it done.

Yeah.

In 2019, my dad died and, um, my dad, when I was growing up would always play the guitar and fill our house with music.

He would come over and play with my kids.

And when I was younger, we would, you know, sing and he would play rock and roll music or folk music, other kinds of things.

And after he died, I really felt that absence very strongly.

And so much that I decided that I was going to learn how to play the guitar.

And I started trying to figure out how to do that.

I watched videos online and I was trying to motivate myself.

And I learned that I'm really lucky that at Penn there's a program where they will connect you with a music teacher.

And so I got connected with a music teacher who was great.

He was really enthusiastic.

He was a classical guitarist, but he was also really focused on classical music.

And I had this goal to learn how to play the guitar for really personal reasons.

And when I asked him about, you know, the kinds of music that my dad liked or that my dad and I would play together...

It was sort of something that he was like, yeah, you'll figure that out.

But it wasn't central to the practice that we were doing together.

And so I would kind of bribe myself through practice sessions.

Like, all right, if you practice for 10 minutes, then you can eat a chocolate truffle at the end or something.

And, you know, again, trying to like bring the reward as close as possible.

But it was hard.

And the pandemic struck and I paused the lessons for lots of reasons.

But then, you know, as the pandemic eased and my kids went back to school face to face, I had a little bit more bandwidth again and I decided I was going to try again.

And I got a recommendation for a guitar teacher who mostly teaches kids.

And I think that's key because, you know, a guitar teacher who really teaches kids tells you something about what they're willing to engage with.

And I met Gabriel, who's my guitar teacher now and also my son Theo's guitar teacher.

And Gabriel took a totally different approach.

So he was very focused on why I wanted to play.

And he would take little like audio clips that I had of my dad playing and transcribe them for me and asked me for a list of songs that I was interested in.

And then he would write them out.

at a level that was appropriate for where I was and so when I was practicing all of a sudden now it didn't feel like work it didn't feel like okay now I'm doing my etudes and I'm doing the hard thing that's going to get me to this goal later I was already there right I was already doing the thing that was the future goal just at a level that was appropriate for me

And, you know, that's worked really well for my kids, too, that they get to choose the music that they start with.

And, you know, he has them do exercises sometimes as well, but he connects it to their goal, their motivation of the particular song that they want to work on.

And then it doesn't make it feel like there's a separation between them.

the repetitions and the practice that we're doing right now and some future abstract time when we're going to be able to play music.

Well, yeah, I mean, I really appreciate the way that he has done that.

And, you know, also just holding space for why I was there.

Like sometimes at the beginning I would get really emotional and that didn't seem to fluster him.

He would just kind of wait or maybe sit there and play himself for a little bit.

And I think that kind of holistic understanding of like sometimes we kind of

segment off like okay we're here because I'm going to try to get Emily to learn how to play the guitar rather than like we're here to have this experience together and so like I try to channel some of that when I'm trying to get my kids to practice Theo plays the guitar and Emma plays the piano with Gabriel and you know if if I'm sitting there practicing with Theo and he starts you

you know, playing some other song that's not technically his homework for the week, when I'm being my best self, I can take a step back and think about, like, well, actually the goal of this whole thing is for us to be able to connect and do this fun thing together.

And so rather than being like, hey, you're supposed to spend 10 minutes focusing on...

Bach like you know I I can remind myself that like actually this is the thing that we're trying to do we're doing it right now um rather than like you know he's probably never going to be a concert musician and so so this is why we're here

Yeah, I mean, it makes me feel emotional even just thinking about it.

But one thing that comes to mind is there's this, like, warm-up that my dad used to play.

And...

I remember when I gave that MP3 to Gabriel and he came back and he was playing and I was in the living room.

And it turned out that it was actually like really simple.

And it was something that I did have access to be able to do.

And that kind of like feeling connected to somebody who's not physically there, but where we've had the experience of doing something really special with them, like just felt so good.

And, you know, now playing with my kids, like when they play music,

Sometimes we choose songs that my dad wrote and they learn how to play those songs or songs that I used to sing with my dad.

And when I'm sitting there like with a kid snuggled in my lap and a big guitar on his lap and I get to sing there, it feels like a really full circle kind of feeling like it feels like.

I did not expect for you to make me cry.

It feels amazing.

Thank you so much for having me.