The Neuroscience of Choice, Change and Connection
As director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Climate Communication Division, Annenberg School for Communication Professor Emily Falk spends a lot of time thinking about the neuroscience of decision making, behavior change and successful communication.
Her new book, “What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change,” weaves together brain science with personal anecdotes and captivating stories from public figures in areas ranging from journalism to entertainment to sports.“I hope that if people understand how their brains work, it could give them more agency in thinking about the choices and the possibilities that they have,” Falk says.
Q: You start the book by writing about the value system and the self-relevance system. What are they, and how do they shape the choices we make?
The value system and self-relevance system are two core networks in the brain that shape how we make choices, whether we realize it or not. The value system helps us assess what’s worth our time, attention and effort. It calculates the value of each option we consider, basically asking, ‘What’s the likely possibility for reward here?’ Our self-relevance system helps us identify things that are ‘me’ or ‘not me.’
One of the things I talk about in the book is how much overlap there is between self-relevance and value judgments. Things that are perceived as ‘me’ are often also thought of as more positive or good; things that are thought of as ‘not me’ are less positive and less good. That can be helpful for maintaining a positive sense of self, but it can also limit us in the possibilities that we see for ourselves.
Q: What can we learn from neuroscience research about how to change our behaviors and how our social relationships impact behavior change?
Neuroscience has shown that behavior change is not just about willpower; it’s about how our brains assign value to different choices and how that value can shift in different contexts and environments. In general, you might prefer coffee over tea, but you might change your mind if it’s midnight and you’re already feeling over-caffeinated, or if a friend raves to you about a new boba place. Change happens when new behaviors start to feel rewarding.
As we think about changing our own behaviors, one insight is that the value system tends to prioritize rewards that come as soon as possible. Knowing that, we can think about how to make things that are compatible with our bigger-picture goals more immediately rewarding. If I want to get more exercise, how can I make that more fun in the moment, like by listening to an exciting audiobook or watching a television show I wouldn’t otherwise watch, or doing it with a friend?
Thinking about the self-relevance system, one of the issues we run into is defensiveness. We can be reluctant to trade in behaviors or ideas that we think of as ours, and so one way to get around that is interventions that help us zoom out and connect with the bigger world. If you take a moment to reflect on your core values — such as family, creativity, loyalty, spirituality or compassion — your brain becomes more receptive to messages about behavior change. Studies using brain imaging show that this type of values affirmation makes neural circuits involved in valuation and self-related processing more responsive to messages, making health or prosocial messages ‘land’ more effectively.
A third brain system I describe in the book is the social relevance system, which helps us understand what other people think and feel. This opens all kinds of possibilities for influence that we often don’t notice. People who inspire us and share our goals influence us, and so do people whose actions and values we wouldn’t want to emulate. Neuroscience evidence suggests that when we learn about other people’s preferences or see their behaviors, it can change the response of reward circuits in our brains. Knowing this, we can be more mindful of the stories we share with our kids, the people we’re spending time with and the media we are consuming.
Q: Your book highlights colleagues across Penn, such as Katy Milkman, Joe Kable, and Dani Bassett. How has their work inspired you and shaped your own research and thinking?
When I first came to Penn, I ended up sharing a pod in Richards [Hall] with Joe Kable, one of the world’s leading expert on value-based decision-making and the brain’s value system. Joe has been an incredible pioneer in mapping that system and understanding how people make decisions with immediate versus more delayed rewards.
Katy, I’m just such a fan of her work. Her book “How to Change” was a stellar example of taking complicated behavioral science and distilling it in a quite usable way. She has so many different lines of work that are amazing. The Behavior Change for Good Initiative is also a pioneering example of how to bring scientists together to test what works and what doesn’t for changing people’s behavior and lives.
Dani Bassett was one of my closest collaborators for quite some time. Their work pushed the field to think about the brain in network terms. It was a real joy getting to collaborate with them on understanding the interplay between brain network dynamics and social network dynamics.
