Eyal Winter – Feeling Smart: Why our Emotions are More Rational Than We Think

Saïd Business School is delighted to welcome Eyal Winter as part of the Responsible Leadership Series.

http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/school/events…

0:32it’s about russia now but it’s much broader it’s about decision-making
0:35interdisciplinary center that accommodates people from different
0:40disciplines starting with economics and business but also mass psychology
0:44computer science biology law sociology and I might’ve over over
0:57philosophy and all these people are doing research in the wrong field but
1:05they have one common issue which is one common topic that they’re interested in
1:09inches decision-making
1:13and when i when I was when I served as the director of the center and lots of
1:19opportunity to talk with people and learn from people coming from different
1:25disciplines at some collaboration some joint papers with with these people and
1:31and at the end of my my term as the director I decided I want to put
1:36everything that I have in mind about decision-making and rationality in the
1:44way I was influenced by my colleague and decided to write this book and why while
1:50was thinking very very seriously about rationality member decision-making I
1:58realize that there is one one aspect in decision-making that is very much
2:03overlooked by much of these disciplines even psychology and this is the role of
2:12emotions in decision-making and and one of the purpose of writing these this
2:18book was to highlight based on my research research in the field in
2:23understanding emotions better and the way they affect their decision making
2:27and also reflecting on these other people who worked on it some of them in
2:34my center some of them outside the center in various places in the world
2:39that was the purpose of writing the book and many of you two courses in economics
2:51and I bet none of you have heard during I didn’t hear I was an economic students
2:58I didn’t hear the word emotions all through my students career in economics
3:07and I bet most of you haven’t heard this word because most of us think this this
3:12belong to different territory that’s maybe maybe not
3:17science maybe psychology it doesn’t belong to economics it doesn’t belong to
3:23business and this this perception is being changed now and I wrote the book
3:31of course I was I was a little concerned about the way my colleagues in Economics
3:36with think about it will treat it goes again this was the way I interpret it is
3:42this world was pretty much a taboo in the profession let me say tell you a
3:46little bit about the processor wrote it in in in hebrew first and then I
3:52translated in english publisher in Germany that I still publishing now it
4:07appears also in Germany then there to factory other publishers that they’re
4:12going to
4:13come up with the big publishers dark going to come up with the book one of
4:18them in China Japan and in Turkey I speak English I speak German site would
4:26give my inputs to these translation in fact one of the mighty myself of course
4:33I did I speak Hebrew but I don’t have anything to say about the wind
4:39translated in these other languages when when when I finished the book as I told
4:47you because it seemed to be emotions seem to be a rather I’m familiar or a
4:57topic that is not really discussed within economies was important to me to
5:02know what people in my profession is saying and I threw the the publisher I
5:12was very lucky to actually get endorsement that appear in the book by
5:17eight nobel areas George Akerlof can narrow Robert alman Bob Lucas Eric
5:26Maskin Roger Myers soon open drawers which only nears near Lowes personally
5:31also burning sneeze and also by people who wrote other popular books on
5:38decision-making to some extent not all of them actually gonna be hella
5:44perinatal both Syrian Assad who rolled beautiful mind and Larry Summers who was
5:50the former secretary of Finance in the USA and the president of Harvard
5:56University so if you are interested in economics and you worry that the motions
6:03really don’t belong there then I hope these names will change your mind about
6:08about reading it and when I started
6:17addressed to conventional wisdom about emotions and rationality
6:26very widespread in fact until a couple of decades several decades ago there
6:31were even widespread among scientists now now scientists realized that they
6:35they they are wrong
6:38the false but still most of the general public and by the way this book is meant
6:44for general public
6:45this is not fewer academic book it’s meant for general general readers the
6:54general public this is really still very much true conventional wisdom one of
6:59them is that what we have in the brain are two separate boxes one that is
7:05responsible for a rational decision making and the other one which is
7:09responsible for emotional decision making and they’re constantly fighting
7:14and eventually one of these boxes takes over the other one case eating and this
7:23is how we make the decision
7:25ok if it’s if it’s the right time parks that one then we make a rational
7:31decision if it’s left left-hand one then we make an emotional decision
7:38this is very wrong ok we don’t have two boxes in the brain and and we can’t
7:43really separate emotions from analyses or reasoning there are places in which
7:53are more typical to process emotions are not going to talk about it but it’s
7:59really very hard to to separate these areas that’s one thing and the other
8:03thing which is even more important is that a rational being an R
8:09emotional beings are constantly in discussion constantly exchanging
8:14information constantly deliberating working really really together in quite
8:22differently so if at all there is some interaction between these two boxes we
8:27want to keep this this description and then obviously they’re very much
8:35intermingled the reason is that basically even even the most material
8:43decision-making eventually involve an emotional reaction to the supermarket
8:51and face to product in front of us and we eventually what are handled one of
8:56them the final trigger is emotional
9:02the final trigger is is take place after process which we analyze think we ask
9:09questions we will look at numbers and we analyze it and we look back and think
9:16about consequences and things like that this is analytical but eventually the
9:22last trigger is a motion ok so this is one conventional wisdom the other
9:27conventional wisdom is about how emotions affect our decision-making and
9:34most of us would have us believe that we would have been able to do better
9:42decision without emotions especially when these decisions involve our
9:46financial or economic decision this is also wrong emotions not only it’s not
9:58only the case that they don’t generally
10:04destroy or or reduce the quality of our decision-making even the contrary almost
10:13in most cases the help of the facilitator decision-making ok we would
10:20have been in spite of craving to be like mister Spock if you remember the person
10:27who could simply turn off his his emotional being and make decisions
10:30solely by logic and reasoning we would’ve been a very very bad decision
10:36maker if we if we had this ability or if we turned off or promotion of being one
10:46startling evidence about it was or is is written in a wonderful book by Antonio
10:55Damasio who is normal signs who basically tell us a lot about my role eg
11:02of of emotions and he talks about the very famous incidence of a train worker
11:08in the states at the end of the 19th century who got injured while working on
11:14on the train tracks and he was actually was it was hit in the front lawn and an
11:24object came through his front front front and two craving a whole of that
11:32size
11:33nevertheless he survived it is survived twenty years afterwards the accident
11:43didn’t actually do anything to his to his
11:50reasoning ability to his analytic skills he could do calculation could do all
11:56sorts of complicated stuff that you used to do before but emotionally and
12:03socially his life were completely ruined ok 11 experiment once once he was
12:11discovered scientists started to implement all sorts of decision-making
12:17experiments of him and 11 of the one more startling phenomenon is the one you
12:21gave when you give this person an opportunity to make decisions they
12:27simply can’t make the decision if you if you put two fruits the same food if you
12:32put two apples in front of them they would randomly take one but if you took
12:36an apple and an orange he would stare at it for 15 minutes not being able to do
12:44to make a decision and and the way his life was ruined was was because of his
12:53inability to deal properly with his emotions for instance it couldn’t wake
12:59wake up in the morning and do the basics include all of us are doing preparing
13:07ourselves to go to work he understood that going to work is essential for his
13:12well-being could explain why it’s essential for his well-being but he
13:17didn’t have these treater emotional trader intrinsic trigger that made him
13:24do so they so he lost his job he lost his family it was a miserable people
13:30person in spite of the fact that nothing is is analytical skill was was was
13:37damaged so why why why isn’t it correct how do how do emotions facilitating help
13:49us in in in decision-making so let me first say that in my book I’m a
13:54distinction between two types of emotions once which I call social
14:00emotions these are emotions or
14:03interactive emotions these are motions that we experienced only when we
14:08interact with someone else
14:09Kaif we are angry we have to be angry at somebody ok if we will love somebody
14:17will feel empathy to somebody has to be somebody to whom we feel these emotions
14:22experienced this emotional reaction these are so you’re talking about
14:29empathy love embarrassment is is is an interactive emotion anger of course but
14:38also emotions which I call autonomous emotions that you don’t require any
14:43interaction at all like for instance fear can be an experience fear from
14:48somebody but it’s not necessary we can fear you can experience fear from
14:53diseases from from accidents from whatever right
14:57fear happiness so row these are motion that they call autonomous and most of
15:07the book is actually talking about the advantages so far
15:12interactive emotional let me give you one example section two examples about
15:18how anger on service and these are these are based on experiment that have been
15:22done several decades ago in the us- and one of these experiments subject was
15:28brought to the lab to negotiate division of sums of money they were divided into
15:35pairs were given some money would create some some sort of a cemetery was created
15:41so as not to get them focus on some focal point of dividing 85050 and there
15:50were they there were brought to the lab to to negotiate about how to divide his
15:54monies but before they were taken into the lab some of them were induced to be
16:00be slightly more angry than the rest how do you make people think tactically or
16:05any other two techniques that are used one of them is to let them wait in front
16:10of the lab an extra hour before you bring him here for the Windermere this
16:16will definitely make them pissed off but i dont like this technique there is
16:19another technique that technology is used very often and some of my
16:23colleagues at the University which is asking them to write down in a very
16:30detailed way an annoying experience that they have let’s say in the last two or
16:36three years while they write it down you can look at the face and see how how
16:43emotionally Rosal there how angry they become were writing this so some of them
16:51were where induced by this technique to be angry more than the others and what
16:58these researchers found which is startling thing but it says a lot about
17:02the role of emotions in
17:05in making us more rational what they found out is that those people went to
17:11the lab with a higher level of anger also left alive with a higher level of
17:16money
17:17ok so anger actually both money bought them something ok I’m gonna tell you
17:24later about how how comes that those people did better in negotiation
17:31another experiment was carried out around the same time they’ll not with
17:37negotiations but with debating debating is when people try to convince each
17:43other about some political issue or ideological issue and bring arguments ok
17:49it’s not about negotiations not by dividing anything it’s about convincing
17:53ok and they use the same technique to make some people more more angry than
18:01the other 12 found out and then they wrote down all the argument that people
18:08are making during their debate what they found out that those people who was
18:13slightly more angry and I stressed lightly because I don’t want to motivate
18:18you now to really go back home and ask yourself how do I make myself mad about
18:24other people right
18:25tuning is is is the is the main thing here but any of those people were
18:32slightly more angry than the rest were found to be able to distinguish better
18:36between relevant argument is irrelevant argument is to some extent this is less
18:42surprising that what I told you before because we know that anger raises the
18:48level of adrenaline in our body makes it makes us more alert it motivates us when
18:55we’re angry want to change the situation you motivated in doing stuff and
19:02eventually this comes out
19:05this boils down to something helpful for us so so much of the discussion in the
19:17book is is is going through different types of emotional reactions and asking
19:25myself what extent they help us and and how how these the ability for them to be
19:36helpful to us is is is actually consistent with what what what we know
19:40in economic theory ok all the time in the book is consistent is not something
19:46is not contradicting economics it’s actually confirming economic theory but
19:53reinterpreting some of the concept the notion that we have an economic theory
19:57so for instance one very important concept that can explain a lot why
20:04people are served well by being a little bit angry is the concept of commitment
20:12is an old concept to do to thomas showing that roughly says that sometimes
20:20in strategic interactions we haven’t we get an advantage by tying your hands
20:27behind their back
20:29reducing our opportunities is good good service and one of the examples I heard
20:41from a friend of mine with historians concerned the wrong on leaks legions
20:48that we’re chasing the German tribes Over the Rhine be used to burn the
20:55bridges over the run
20:57ok burning bridges is reducing your your opportunities is doing something that is
21:03irreversible to some extent but this is an action that the paint them
21:08better off because it could signal their enemies that there is only one way they
21:12can go now right there’s no way back for them which influence the forest the
21:17behavior of the other party so now let me let me go back to anger and described
21:27to you
21:28hypothetical scenario that might might give you a little bit of insight about
21:33why anger could service in relation to this idea of commitment I wanted to
21:39think about a situation which you come back from a conference on vacation and
21:45you’re not a fight at the airport that your flight was canceled happened to all
21:49of us I guess most of us many of us when I tell my kids they say to my students
21:56undergrad student Lisa a wonderful and another day in the hotel but for most of
22:02us these are bad news
22:03ok and what I wanted 1012 to do is to go through two different scenarios and
22:10tried to speculate about the emotional reaction that you’ll have in these two
22:15difference in arguing whether the you have the same emotional reaction in
22:19these two scenarios in scenario you look around yourself and you basically
22:24realize that people are very indifferent about these news they don’t seem to care
22:31much about the fact that they are asked to report a date later at the airport
22:36they are announcing the buses are waiting outside to take you to the hotel
22:40and you are rolling site is that it’s a done deal nothing would happen nothing
22:46could change ok I assume that in this situation in under this scenario you
22:53want be really anger would not be the correct aristide’s not be the the the
22:58right emotion to characterize your mental state maybe frustration may be
23:04sore about the fact that you missed your spouse birthday or girlfriend birthday
23:10but not anger now wanna take you through some are you be which is which starts
23:17very much the same but developed differently
23:21and in scenario to be you come across in a Quentin and he tells you I went to the
23:32airline desk and very determined way I explained them that I’m not going to
23:39take this treatment that you know that I’m expecting them to to serve me with
23:46some alternative and I told them again to raise the limit my boys would I told
23:55them that if they don’t do it I’m going to sue the company and believe it or not
24:02different flight and I’m going to be back on in a few hours in this scenario
24:08I bet you’d be much more angry than in Scenario way you are likely to go
24:18yourself to the desk of the airline and ask for similar treatment maybe raise
24:23your voice a little bit it’s not that you will imitate being angry you know if
24:28I had if I could measure I’ll tell you later about how we do it in the lab you
24:34measure your emotional reaction I would be able to see that for instance your
24:40level of adrenaline went up and the reason why you will
24:47emotional reaction would be so different between scenario and soon you’ll be
24:52pleased that in certain areas be you encounter an opportunity which was not
24:59there in scenario because you just heard that this guy who was hungry would be
25:07treated better and much of our emotional reaction and primarily potentially
25:15almost only in case of interactive emotion will talk about the interactive
25:21emotions are synthesized this way I’m calling it a bit of unfair way but but
25:29are are prone or
25:32affected by motivation this is actually an interesting phenomenon because if if
25:38if if you think about the condom recent contributions recent years the
25:42contribution of behavioral economics was in primarily one direction thinking
25:47about how emotions affect rational behavior or distorting rational behavior
25:54example that I just gave you if you believe it is about how rationality
26:01affect our emotion it’s it’s basically about the fact that incentives kick back
26:09to affect our emotional state of mind can give you another example that i’ve
26:16been i’ve been the Chairman for several years of the Economics Department at the
26:21Hebrew University and one of the one of the things I put some effort team was
26:30the something that you Bridgestone don’t know about because you have these double
26:38examination going through two different individuals in israel it’s very common
26:45for students to appeal again to appeal on the grates on the marks there are
26:51very elaborate billing procedures and peeling is really a tough issue in
27:01israel because it really very bad emotions on the part of the students
27:07this is where get students to cry to be extremely angry and one-time even to we
27:16had to remove a student with an ambulance because she fainted during
27:20this negotiation visa field instructor of these abuses and we started to
27:31experiment with different regimes and also inquire with other
27:35with other universities that
27:38different regime and one inside that we converge to is that the most liberal you
27:48make the procedure
27:52satisfied at the end of the year
27:55K the most regions you make it the more they’re satisfied if you make it a very
28:03liberal system you can peel and then appeal against them and then write a
28:08letter to the problems and the president this is where all these bad feelings
28:14coming guards when you tell them listen this is only one out of many examples
28:20you go through in your career here is a student and you just need to believe
28:27that the professor didn’t intentionally tried to reduce your great and then you
28:37can expect that this mistake here will be washed away with with another mistake
28:43in which which would be in your favor if we couldn’t get that much that close to
28:50this regime in which they are not allowed to appeal at all but the closer
28:53we got there the more satisfied the student where and again the reason for
29:01it some of these emotional reaction are being are being incentivize
29:11they incentives affect these emotional emotional state of mind mapping tell you
29:19about an experiment that we published several
29:28two or three years ago Journal corn or assigns social neuroscience that is
29:35focusing on research in neuroscience that is concerned social behavior one
29:44board we wanted to do is to highlight what I wanted to do is to highlight the
29:52this aspect that emotions can be incentivize incentives in reasoning
30:00about incentive call it rationality can affect emotions not only emotion can
30:05affect rationality but also rationality can affect emotions what we did we used
30:11a machine called skin conductance skin conductance assumption that actually can
30:16actually read emotional reactions ok it’s based on reading physiological
30:23signals from the body basically the conductance of the scheme we know that
30:27people are experiencing emotional reaction they tend to sweat more and in
30:35the level of conductance in the body increases and also the heartbeats and
30:39these are there is a laboratory very elaborate procedure went to measure
30:43these signals and for decades now
30:48psychologies use this machine together with the battery of question here that
30:53are completely dad when I saw your talkin out to the strategic environment
30:58they created the lab and these two things allow them to not only identify
31:03what kind of the motion the person is experiencing whether it’s anger or fear
31:09or empathy or whatever but also the level of the emotional reaction I wanted
31:17I said as I is sad to see whether we can incentivize people to become emotional
31:27and some emotional to specific so we created basically three treatments we
31:34used one getting into too much detail but but roughly we we created a
31:40strategic situation which to individual interacted and we we connected one of
31:49them to the skin conductance and with all these person in treatment one we
31:53have a way to measure your anger due to unsatisfactory unsatisfying behavior on
32:01your count of your counterpart
32:04we could we could actually can actually measure how angry or about the way he’s
32:09treating you and if I and the more angry or going to be the more we are going to
32:15compensate you in treatment be with said the same but not respect to anger but
32:21rather with respect to happiness the more happy or going to be by the way
32:25your counterpart is treating you the more we are going to reward you and
32:30treatments three was basically was basically a new trial there was no
32:38rewards whatsoever
32:39neutral environment and what we found out is that the emotional reaction the
32:44objective emotional reaction read through the skin conductors was WAY WAY
32:52higher at the anger group
32:56the one we measured in the two other treatments the one in the happy group
33:01was slightly was somewhat higher than the control group but the difference
33:10there was not significant the only the only difference which was significance
33:13is the level of anger that people experience the emotional reaction in the
33:20anger group compared with the two other groups so this was this was an evidence
33:28that let us believe that people can use emotion strategically can can be
33:39motivated to be emotional and and the question of why why did the reaction was
33:49so much more pronounced when he was about anger and happiness is is itself
33:55an interesting question whether it could be several answers to it one of them is
34:00could be simply a ceiling effect that we are potentially would have been nice if
34:07we could by means of small incentives make people happy
34:13should government abuse used it put a lot of resources into into this if this
34:19was was the case unfortunately this is not the case
34:23potentially one reason that it’s not the case is that it it
34:28it’s not the case because it’s it’s apparently it’s much easier to
34:32incentivize people to be angry and incentivizing them to be happy and
34:38potentially this is because anger is from evolutionary point of view is much
34:44more useful emotion than happiness as I said before anger is get us to do stuff
34:53when we’re angry were motivated we are alert want to do stuff to change the
34:58situation may be vengeance against somebody that requires a lot of you know
35:07a lot of motivation we are happy we tend to feel things are fine why should we
35:13care so much about what happened we would rather go to the beach but this is
35:20still at the level of speculation so this is this is one of the experiments
35:28that we did and let me tell you that behind the general readers book the time
35:38I’m telling you about there is a more serious scientific paper which is called
35:45mental equilibrium and strategic emotions this is basically a
35:52game-theoretic paper with the tries to incorporate that actually attempts to
35:57incorporate emotions as part of an equilibrium concept and it will appear
36:03soon in management signs and
36:08once I had these while writing this paper about ways of checking some of the
36:20assumptions that lie behind this modern one of them indeed is the idea that we
36:25can incentivize ourself or other people too
36:30to be emotional there is another another assumption which is crucial for for the
36:37idea of rational emotions and and this is the assumption that we are
36:43capabilities to some degree to recognize the emotional state of the other person
36:50remember I told you about the role of commitment in in generating benefits to
36:56us in the state department maybe one more word about the back to the airline
37:04story and that’s asking gain what would have happened if instead of gangrene we
37:16would have come to the airline desk in a perfectly rational state of mind right
37:22perfectly rational state to file would’ve said this but still we request
37:30that you reroute us and if you don’t do it we’re going to see you this is
37:37ridiculous because if you think about it at the time the money that would involve
37:42suing the company compared to the potential benefit the probabilistic
37:49benefit of winning the
37:54the legal procedure and getting compensated just doesn’t make sense from
38:00from rational point of view to do something like that
38:04a mental state of anger allow us to transmit to the other party the fact
38:12that in spite of the fact that from the rational point of view that doesn’t make
38:16sense I’m so pissed off about the way I’m dealt here that the entire thing of
38:23suing the companies still seem appealing to me because I’m angry this is
38:30something like this something like same listen I’m not rational so don’t expect
38:35me to behave rationally by avoiding to look you want revenge for the way I
38:47treated here by this company so so 11 aspect which we used experiment is the
39:00fact that emotion can be synthesized the other aspect which will talk later is
39:06the fact which is really necessary the fact that we are capable of recognizing
39:11at least to a certain degree the mental state of other people because if we
39:15cannot do it there is no there’s no advantage of being angry because if the
39:22other party cannot realize that I’m angry it will affect the other parties
39:26behavior it would be a waste of resources on my part so before I tell
39:31you about these other experiment that we use to verify this suspect let me tell
39:38me tell you a little bit about these parts of the brain which is called the
39:42prefrontal cortex where we know today is the part of the brain where most of the
39:48interaction between russia now latina motion is taking place if you want the
39:54type of decision to impose the most intensive interaction between
39:58rationality and emotions are either social decisions or moral decisions when
40:04we are where we
40:05deliberate about the moral issue it involves an emotional reaction we for
40:14instance empathy is very crucial to be able to have to do to think about moral
40:19issues but also but also reasoning and analysis is required
40:28think about moral issues we we have to do lots of comparisons with this case
40:33like this case with this person between right if he did this thing in this
40:40situation compared to that situation there’s a lot of analysis and we know
40:44that when we get people under the ephemera and MRI scanner
40:50to think about moral issues the part of the brain that is highlighted the most
40:58in which most of the consumption of oxygen oxygen is maximized is this area
41:05of the brain which is called the prefrontal cortex and this is also the
41:12area which is poor person that I told you about Damascus book had his injury
41:20there why he could that’s why he could you could pretty well but he could not
41:26get connection between his is rational deliberation of rational thinking the
41:37drives emotional reaction that has to complement to make correct decisions
41:43what I want to do now is I want to say about giving and and the way it connects
42:19to rationality sweet and this is one of the
42:25big griddles one of the paradoxes
42:29to some extent economies but also to be to pollution everybody colleges and as I
42:36told you some of our people in the rationality century learned immensely
42:43from these people here is here is an example one way to understand human
42:50human giving behavior is to look at the animal world and this is a startling
42:57example these birds flying big flocks and the mail basically you know very
43:12spontaneously take the role of guarding the floor and causes flock make himself
43:19make themselves victims of big predators like eagles that that like to hunt them
43:26one of them is flying above above the floor and whenever he encounters Big
43:35Bird coming coming by he screams very loudly whenever one of these birds are
43:42being given its most likely gonna be him
43:45ok so really it’s it’s it’s not only spending energy it’s also risking your
43:51life and the questions why why these why these birds are doing here is another
43:55startling example about giving the bird among birds these these birds are very
44:06common in desert area in Israel and in fact in the entire Syrian African reef
44:13and what you see happening with these birds is that when they mail leaves the
44:19nest and start seeking cool food for his offspring he gets back to his nest but
44:26he doesn’t put all them back with a full mouth of food but he doesn’t put all of
44:31it in his honesty actually goes
44:34to the other national put a little bit of of the food there as well
44:40when the female sometimes have to go and help him was searching on certain food
44:47one other females in the flock will jump to her nurse to warm the air is really a
44:57kibbutz type which is also quite startling I’m going to give you some
45:04explanation very soon
45:07whatever the explanation and is is basically involves an idea which was
45:15simultaneously introduced into the literature by biologists and economies
45:19in this is called the handicap principle get a handicap principle is is due to a
45:26famous Balaji by the name of Harvey who introduced is in the seventies pretty
45:32much the same time that Michael Stancil got the nobel prize for the same idea
45:37introduced they do signaling and what he was trying to explain is why does the
45:45peacock has such a big till biologists found out that it sits on a burden
45:54makes it hard for him in terms of chasing food escaping predators breeding
46:05whatever and Travis said this is precisely why it’s it’s it’s
46:11advantageous because having this burden can serve as a signal to females and
46:19eventually peacocks are only interested in females they can singled with his
46:25speech to the fact that in spite of the burden in spite of the handicapped this
46:30tale is introducing in their life they’re doing pretty well look at this
46:35time over there
46:38tiny tell he’s doing as well as I’m doing this must mean that I have so many
46:44other traits that are compensating for these burden and these trades are way
46:54more important than so much much of these argument is about showing other
47:02people that I can do things that other people cannot too and this is exactly
47:06the role of serving us the guard among these cockatoos ok they they they risk
47:15their life but they don’t die necessarily sometimes go back to the to
47:19the floor and when they do so they actually get the best female and this is
47:23record right cuz they are able to say I can afford
47:31human you’re giving us to some extent likely it’s it’s it’s showing I can do
47:38it the other the other case is is is a different story it’s it’s about
47:47inclusive fitness it’s about the fact that you are better off buying an
47:54insurance policy from an evolutionary point to fuel and support not not only
47:59your direct offspring but perhaps also you second nephew or niece or nephew are
48:03you
48:04cousins so if your own offspring stone survives used least have transmitted
48:10your genetic profile part of its who you are more relaxed more remote and
48:14relative members can gain fact these these other thing kicks in a very
48:20interesting finding by Jim mondrian who is an economist who writes a lot about
48:27the nation and he finds for instance that the nation in the us- communities
48:34very much dependent on the level of diversity ok a 10 percentage point
48:41increase in ethnic diversity reduces donation by 14 per cent gasoline if you
48:47go back to these birds I mean when they give to other nice they don’t give to
48:52somebody who were absolute genetically very different from them and we are
49:00south prefer to give to a family member and even more emotive family member 2010
49:06stranger and apparently we prefer to give to our own ethnic group then giving
49:10it to other ethnic group and when will you look at these arguments it all
49:16becomes quite rational giving the Norwegian government wants several years
49:26ago wanted initiated big initiative to market Scandinavian economy to other
49:36countries and they recruited several economies me among them to consult with
49:42them how to do this and that was a big long discussions and meetings and
49:48conferences
49:50debating how how it should be done in one of the issues that I raised during
49:56these meetings is whether it is you know if you get to be in one of these
50:01scandinavian countries you see how different it is in terms of people for
50:09instance pay the highest tax rate in Norway and have the lowest in the entire
50:16world and have the lowest tax evasion in the entire world this is these guys are
50:22actually enjoying paying taxes not only the enjoy pay taxes they they are
50:28extremely effort to exposing financial superiority over the piers this is
50:37phenomenal this is outstanding
50:40this is unbelievable and my my argument about this was was a bad basically asked
50:47the question is it really the study set of rules that apply in Scandinavia lets
50:53in normal and does not apply in the USA that makes the big difference in the
50:58economy or maybe is the differences the people behind these rules maybe it’s not
51:05the rules but the people behind this world the country and indeed Norway and
51:10the other Scandinavian countries before the big influx of immigration that
51:16started about two hundred years ago we’re extremely uniform in terms of
51:25ethnic ethnicity right extremely homogeneous right the actually these are
51:32countries that emerged from a very small number of tribes that grew into
51:37countries and I know and I believe that this is partly the reason why why
51:45economic country so different there than in any other place ok so if you allow me
51:51feel lonely I want to to say just a few words about the suspect or recognition
51:59of emotional state I’m going to start by showing you
52:03short video of a very game that was played here
52:10run here in several years ago I don’t think it exists anymore calls later
52:16still this is a game in which there to individual that raised a lot of money
52:21together by solving trivia questions and eventually they have to decide how to
52:26divide us money that they accumulated together and they do it through a very
52:34simple game which will appear to you to be very similar to prisoners dilemma I’m
52:40going to start a little bit about how we use these games to run experiments on
52:46emotion recognition
55:22first still about her she’s going to steal
56:40we could talk to each other based on the ques the body accusing whatever make a
57:17guess about whether they choose little steel and they would there would be
57:20rewarded with money if they made the correct decision if they have the
57:27correct answer whether we wanted to do two things we wanted first to know
57:33whether people have the ability to do so if they have the ability to do this
57:36party about other two people associated
58:02between the mother and the child immediately after birth
58:06we know that that women are endowed with it
58:12when the breast feed during the pregnancy and about ten years ago
58:20fifteen years ago people started economy started doing experiments by
58:24administrating this month it is also used as a drug to the other
58:29physiological function which is generating the contractions so important
58:37in the delivery and often when women have delayed
58:42delivery it is used to induce to induce the delivery and basically synthesize
58:50these contraction and it’s a very by nine people started doing experiments
58:58with these medicine one of the one of the things that sound about it is that
59:03this hormone generate trust how do we know that it generates a famous game
59:09called the trust game you take two individuals you give some money to
59:12player one can keep the entire amount of money let’s say one hundred pounds or he
59:18can transfer part of it to player to whatever he transferred to play a two
59:23player to with his three times this transfer let’s say 12 transfer attends
59:30the player to win said 3051 transfers 20 will see sixteen so force player 1 have
59:37trust in player to watch within 200 the other person will see 300 if it’s fair
59:46enough you will give him back then we’ll get 150 if he doesn’t trust because the
59:56other parties not compelled to giving back anything has been found is that
60:02those people who were administrated the oxytocin compared to those who took the
60:09placebo plus it contains basically all the elements in the Madison except the
60:14active one it smells the same it feels the same people cannot tell the
60:19difference
60:20those who took the oxidizing trusted the other party much more than those who
60:26took the placebo
60:27transferred much much greater amounts ok and what we wanted to do is is to this
60:36was published
60:38not long ago in journal Psychological sign which is important journal
60:46psychology we wanted to see the effect of these drug on the ability to
60:53recognize intentions of other people so we used two groups some some some oxy
61:00tossing some got the placebo and thus all these videos
61:05what do you think we did that the one thing we found is that those basically
61:23did much better than just guessing and those who got the placebo sorry got
61:30those who got the oxytocin did much wars the way they did moore’s interesting is
61:37that they felt compelled to make a decision they were very averted to it
61:4422 spanned energy and thinking these decisions
61:50acted very quickly and eventually made decisions which weren’t better than just
61:58guessing and the reason why they felt avert to engage in this decision making
62:05to potentially with the role of this form one in generating trust if you
62:11think about it why is it that we are asked required to find or speculate
62:20about the intention of other people when we trust them thinking about it usually
62:27that when we think about is when we suspect other people because these drugs
62:34generates higher level of trust it’s basically
62:39tells the brain don’t get yourself engaged or don’t get yourself working in
62:48task that you suspect other people may use your brain is constantly active in
62:56in lots of task once we are in doubt was trust we feel awkward spending energy
63:04and resources in trying to figure out the intentions of other people who might
63:09ask yourself why why aren’t we using it in all sorts of you know when before we
63:14sign a contract and you’d be surprised to know that there is a substance like
63:19this I don’t suggest you can buy it on the internet I don’t suggest you do it
63:23for two reasons
63:2411 of it is it can affect you yourself before it
63:29counterpart but the other reason is because you can buy over the counter in
63:34the you s probably the FDA approves it which means that the content of
63:39oxidizing in this substance is is almost zero wouldn’t affect you
63:47other ways to increase your level of oxidizing and this is how we know that
63:53targeting actually makes you makes you raises the level of oxygen and and and
64:04this is probably why politicians tend to hug each other much more than normal
64:08between politicians and apparently they live by themselves the advantages of
64:20raising the level of oxidizing in themselves and in other people and we’re
64:28about now to do some more experiments more in the context of competition to
64:32understand better how this hormone can affect