Q&A with Emily Falk, neuroscientist and author of What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change.
Emily Falk is a professor of communication, psychology, and marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and the vice dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, where she directs the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. She is the author of the book, What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change.
I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to sit down with Emily to chat about her work. I learned so much from this conversation about how to think what we think we value and what we actually value in the choices we make, and how to better align our choices with our values. I’m so excited to share this conversation with you.
Why did you feel you had to write this book?
Annie: One of the things I’m always curious about with authors, partly because I’m trying to figure out my own motivation, is, “Why did you feel you had to write this book?” I just think that nobody puts themselves through the process of writing a book unless they feel like they can’t not write it. I’d love to hear why you couldn’t not write this book.
Emily Falk: Yeah, great question. I’ve always really wanted my work to be useful. As an undergraduate I was a neuroscience major, but it was hard to see the immediate applications in terms of the neuroscience research that an undergrad typically does or that I did at that point. I ended up doing a Fulbright Fellowship in health policy and realizing how hard it is to change people’s behavior, trying to think about ways that we can help individuals make decisions that lead to more happiness and healthiness in their own lives. But then also thinking, how should we think about policy decisions? I ended up getting a healthcare consulting job after that and then went to grad school because I felt like there were so many things that we didn’t know about how to change people’s minds, change people’s behaviors.
I spent the first part of my career thinking about that question of how we persuade people, how we create better media campaigns, and what the brain can tell us about people’s choices that might be hard for them to tell us themselves. As I’ve been doing that work more and more, it’s morphed into the question of how can we give people more agency and a stronger sense of autonomy and connection with other people so that they can spend their time in their day-to-day lives in ways that are aligned with their bigger-picture goals and values? And then, how can we come together to figure out where we have shared goals and values, and use that to do something bigger that nobody can do by themselves?
In my lab we do a mix of basic science theory work on decision making in the brain and media effects work, but we also work with local communities and talk with government folks and companies. I feel like I was often looking for resources that would put together the kinds of things that I would tell a friend or a family member if they called and asked for advice, but also that these other kinds of stakeholders could use when they were looking for advice.
There are lots of great behavioral science books, your work included, and I felt like it would be useful to have something that might resonate with a high school kid who’s thinking about how they spend their day-to-day time. Or for a teacher or somebody who’s thinking about shaping public health policy or doing marketing for other kinds of causes.
What does value mean?
Annie: Obviously, with What We Value, “value” is right in the title. I’d love to explore this word value with you, to start because I think that this is something that people don’t necessarily have a shared definition of.
I think that there are a few confusing things around it. Within behavioral science, of course, we talk about people acting irrationally, and one of the things that I get from my students is they assume they know what is rational for somebody else. I’m always very careful to say, “Acting irrationally is acting against what your stated goals and values are.” I always put that caveat in because I think that we may assume we know what’s best for another person and we don’t necessarily. Then, even within that world, once you narrow it down that way, there’s this whole issue of competing values and competing timescales. I think it gets very sticky in there.
When I say that we have competing values, I know there’s long term, there’s short term, and some things might outweigh other things we value. But I think that an intuition we all have is that we can pretty clearly state what it is we value. I know there’s a lot in there that’s not a particularly well-formed question, but I would love for you to talk about how you think we define values. How do we figure out what it is that somebody values, or how they deal with competing values or competing timescales?
Emily Falk: Yeah, it’s a great question. I do think that the way that neuroscientists use the word value is different than the colloquial use. The way that many people who think about big-V values, like the kinds of aspirational or higher-level things that we care about most that are fundamental to us, that’s one input to our daily decision making. But fundamentally, as a neuroscientist, when I think about value, I’m thinking about value-based decision making. I’m thinking about all the different kinds of inputs that are filtered through this value system that weighs things that aren’t inherently comparable.
If I say to you, “Annie, would you rather have a puppy right now that you could snuggle, or have $10 I give you and you can go buy a snack?” Those things are not inherently comparable, but you can answer that question. And that itself is wild, that you can take these things that have so little in common and take into account your current needs, your past experience with those different kinds of things, and your future goals.
In different moments, we weigh those different things differently. We may be paying more attention to our past experience, with maybe a puppy who peed on us or a puppy that was really dear to our hearts as a kid, or how hungry you are right now and how convenient it would be for you to go get the snack. In terms of what we mean by value or values, it’s useful to think about the way that our brains are breaking that down.
Temporal discounting: How much now vs. how much later?
Emily Falk: When we’re making a conscious decision, there are all of these different inputs, including our emotions, the social context that we’re in, and the temporal scale. Like you were saying, what’s happening that would be immediately available or rewarding to me right now versus something that I might care about in the future? How certain is the outcome? Is this risky or is it relatively more certain? There are all these different elements.
For a long time, people didn’t know if those would all be treated in a common brain system or if there would be different brain systems that would care about all those different attributes. What’s so interesting about this value system that our brain has is that it creates a common currency that lets us compare inherently incomparable things and make choices, and it systematically weighs certain kinds of things more.
When you’re talking about rewards now versus later, most of us prefer the rewards now.
Annie: And we’ll take a pretty big discount for it.
Emily Falk: Exactly. Certainly, if it’s a matter of whether you want $20 now or $20 next week, people are going to choose now. If I say, “Would you rather have $20 now or $30 next week?”, that might be something that you would weigh. Whereas, if I say $20 now or $20.25 next week, that’s a trade where we’re probably going to choose $20 now. Even though you’re going to lose money and maybe you don’t even need the $20 right now, still it’s not that much gain and it’s far in the future.
Mostly, we’re not that patient, and that happens in our decision making in lots of different spheres. If I’m thinking about exercising so that I can stave off heart disease or cancer when I’m 75, that’s much less rewarding than if I think about having some me time right now.
Annie: When we’re thinking about temporal discounting, you can also reverse it for money you have to pay. Would you rather pay a parking ticket now for $100 or pay $150 in a year? People will say, “No, I’d rather wait,” to avoid the pain of paying. We have it working both ways, making these weird decisions on different timescales, but it’s not just dollars.
I think this is where it gets confusing, when we see people act against their stated goals or their stated values. You can talk to somebody who says, “I would like to be very healthy.” That’s a pretty common goal. Then, you see that they don’t go to the gym and they’re sitting on the couch and they’re eating ice cream. And you’re like, why aren’t you acting in your stated self-interest?
What I hear you saying is that our brain is trying to handle taking all these things into account. In the same way that we can compare a hugging puppy to getting a snack, we’re also comparing these other things, like this thing I want to do in the future, but I also have these things I want now.
A little bit on how our brain deals with comparing and competing values
Annie: How do we decide which thing is going to win in that moment? It’s probably implied from the question, but this also seems like a good time to touch, at least lightly, on the neuroscience involved.
Emily Falk: Absolutely. Within our brains, one of the things that’s really interesting about this is that our future self gets treated basically like another person.
Another thing that I think is so fascinating about the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, one of the key parts of this system, is that, like you said, it doesn’t just do this for time, for the you that will exist in the future. It does it for a bunch of different kinds of psychological distance. Things that are farther away in time, in the far future, or things that are farther away in distance, something that’s a problem for somebody on the other side of the planet, or things that are farther away in social distance, like people who have a different identity than I have or that I don’t know. We see this systematic bias in prioritizing the things that are closer to the “me” that’s right here, right now.
Annie: One of the results of that would be, and I think this is an argument that people have made, that if you care about human life, why do you care about an American’s life more than the life of somebody in Africa? But that’s that distance that you’re talking about.
Can you talk a little bit about the fMRI data? Just for people who don’t know, explain what the fMRI is doing. And when you say that the brain treats a future version of you as somebody different, what do you mean by that?
Emily Falk: First, in terms of the part of the question about how fMRI works, fMRI is neuroimaging that we use to look at what happens in people’s brains as they do different kinds of tasks. They see things on a computer screen and engage like you would with a computer game. We look at changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated blood that flow through the brain. The reason that’s a proxy for brain activity is because all cells in our body need oxygen and glucose. As our blood brings new oxygen to the cells, it can replenish the firing that’s happening as our brains activate. We can monitor where that blood is flowing as a proxy for where our brains are more active. Then, we can test hypotheses about what brain systems might be engaged as we do different kinds of things.
For example, we know that there’s one brain system that handles this complicated decision making. A lot of that early work was done in animals. It was looking at reward systems in rats and eventually in monkeys making choices between different things like grape juice and peppermint tea or lemonade or water. Scientists uncovered that there was this systematic relationship between the firing of neurons within what eventually came to be called “the value system” in monkeys’ subjective preferences. If a monkey prefers grape juice 3-to-1 on Wednesday and 5-to-1 on Friday, that’s also going to be reflected in the firing of their neurons. Then, taking that into humans, scientists designed tasks where we can compare different kinds of situations.
Like, would you rather have potato chips or a chocolate bar? That’s the monkey equivalent of a squirt of this juice or that juice. Which snacks do you prefer? Human subjective preferences activate particular brain regions across many people, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the ventral striatum, and other brain regions that have come to be known as this value system. When I say something like, the brain treats future you in a similar way to other people, what I mean is that we have a foundational knowledge of where we tend to see activation when people make judgments about themselves, like their own traits, what they’re like. We have a pretty robust idea of what brain regions are activated as we think about ourselves as we exist right here, right now. But then when scientists have looked at people imagining themselves in future scenarios, that looks more like when people are imagining making judgments about other people.
Annie: Just to clarify, let’s imagine you have me in an fMRI machine and you’re saying, “Are you hungry? Are you tired? What do you think that you want to do when you get out of the machine? What do you like? What don’t you like?” You’re asking me things about me, and as I’m answering those questions, certain parts of my brain are consuming glucose and oxygen, and so they’re getting energy. Then, you do the same thing, and you say, “Imagine that you’re talking to a stranger in a grocery store,” and you ask the same set of questions about them. Different part of the parts of the brain are being recruited as you’re imagining a stranger in a grocery store. But then if I ask you about some version of you in a year, it looks more like you’re thinking about the stranger in the grocery store than talking about you. Is that a reasonable summary?
Emily Falk: I’m aggregating across different studies. There was a really nice study that Hal Hirschfeld and Elliott Wimmer and Brian Knutson did where they looked at what happened in people’s brains when they made self-versus-other judgments. Making judgments about what I’m like versus what another person is like. Then, they also looked at making judgments about the self now and in the future, and they found that there were these differences in the way that the brain processes the self now versus in the future.
Then, they also did a nice thing, which was that they linked that to people’s behaviors that matter in the real world. To the point you mentioned earlier about temporal discounting, how patient or impatient people are, they found that people who had more continuity between the way their brain handled their current self and their future self were also more patient in rewards for that future self.
This line of work led to some other interesting testable hypotheses about, if you could bring the future-self closer to now, in one case using an aged avatar of the self, then maybe that would motivate people to care more about that future person. Essentially, introducing people to their future self made them more willing to save for retirement, and that got turned into a tool that banks used to help encourage future savings.
What’s going on under the hood? The value calculation behind everyday decisions
Annie: In your book, you use the term value calculation. We haven’t used that term yet, but it’s been implied throughout our discussion about how our brain figures these things out. Could you explain what the value calculation is, and what does it look like in reality? I do think that it’s very hard for people to understand why is it that I keep failing in the things that I commit to. I make a New Year’s resolution and then I don’t follow through.
I think that’s the feeling that we get of some of what’s happening under the hood, like, I know I have this value. I’ve said out loud. I want to go to the gym. I want to be healthier. Why is it that I can’t do that? I think people feel a failure at that. I know that I’m not happy in this job. I know that if you told me this was what it was going to be like, I would never have taken it in the first place. Yet, here I am and I’m afraid to quit. There’s all this stuff going on in terms of that choice. I think we’re confused by it because I think we think that, somehow, we’re supposed to know what the brain is doing. We think we know how we make choices, and that we have much more control over it than we do.
I would love for you to address how much of that is stuff that is going on under the hood. We feel like we’re supposed to have control over it. How limited is our control over it? How can we understand this value calculation that’s occurring that I think, in a lot of ways, perplexes the person whose brain is making the calculation?
Emily Falk: Yeah. I mean there are so many things to unpack in what you just laid out. One thing I find really interesting and illuminating from the neuroscience side is how intertwined the value system is with the self-relevance system. We’ve mentioned both of those so far in this conversation, where we have this value system that takes all these different inputs and then outputs decisions, learns from those decisions in terms of whether this was better than you expected or worse than you expected, and shapes future choices. We also have this brain system, the self-relevance system, that decides whether things are “me or not me,” what has happened to me in the past that helps us make meaning.
There’s this really lovely work that Rob Chavez led where they had people make me-or-not-me judgments. They also had people make valence judgments like, this is good or this is bad. They trained a machine learning classifier to figure out whether people were thinking, this is me or not me, whether this is good or bad. When they took the classifier that was trained on the self-judgments, it also did a good job of predicting whether people were thinking something was good or bad and vice versa. When I say that the self-relevance and value systems are intertwined, I mean they’re deeply intertwined both in terms of the regions that are involved and presumably how they’re doing these computations.
Annie: Can you ground that in an example?
Emily Falk: Yeah, sure. If I’m looking at a word like “intelligent” or “messy” or “acrobatic,” I could say, “I like to think of myself as intelligent. I’m also somewhat messy. I’m not very acrobatic.” I’m making these judgments about what’s me and what’s not me. I can also make judgments about whether these are good or bad qualities to have.
They had images of terms, and they had people rate how positive or negative the images are and how self-relevant or not the images are. Whereas a ton of the work that’s been done the self-relevance system has used these kinds of trait adjectives, in the specific study that I was talking about, they focused on the valence and the self-relevance of these kinds of things.
On the surface, intuitively, I think those seem like different judgments. It seems like a different thing to say whether something is me or not me, than to say whether something is good or bad. But under the hood, those are handled in a very similar way or at least using neural mechanisms that are intertwined with each other. I think that has a lot of potential consequences for some of what we’re talking about here.
Annie: What are some of the cognitive biases that this helps explain?
Emily Falk: One is the endowment effect, where we tend to think of things that are mine as being more valuable than things that are just random objects in the world. That’s not only true of things; it’s also true of behaviors. Stuff that I’ve been doing in the past tends to persist. In that job example, jobs are a really big part of our identity. Shifting gears with what I’m doing jobwise is potentially a big challenge to who I am. What I would be if I weren’t an academic or if I weren’t a marketing executive or whatever?
Annie: Doesn’t this get us back to the question of why is it so hard to follow through on changes that we consciously want to make?
Emily Falk: I think there are a lot of things that maybe we’re not taking into account. People make decisions for really good reasons. We’ve already talked about this idea that, by default, the value system is prioritizing the me that’s right here, right now. In deciding whether to go out for a run, I might be focusing on how effortful that is and how sweaty and gross I’m going to be during it and the 20 other things that are on my to-do list. if I think about it that way, versus how nice would it feel to stay here and snuggle my kid or watch a TV show or clear some of these things off my to-do list, it’s hard to prioritize the run.
Annie: If we’re more focused on doing what feels better right now, are there ways to recruit that focus to get us to do things that we tend to resist because they’re “future me problems”?
Emily Falk: When we manage to focus on how it’s going to be immediately fun, we’re more likely to prioritize it. I’m thinking about Katy Milkman’s work. One of the things that I love in terms of practical advice from her work is the idea of temptation bundling. How do we bring the rewards closer to the me that’s right here, right now? But, in understanding how our brains work, it’s also helpful in terms of that self-compassion or that compassion for other people to realize good reasons why we might choose to do something that is gratifying in the moment. Maybe we need a break or maybe the thing that we were focusing on in terms of all the possible inputs to that decision space made sense to us in that moment.
If we want to make different choices, then we have to think about how we shine our flashlight on different elements of that decision space. Instead of thinking about how hard the run is going to be and how sweaty I’m going to get, maybe I take advantage of the fact that my neighbor is willing to go with me. Focus on that opportunity for social connection, which is another core value that I hold, or think about how doing it could be congruent with my identity as somebody who works really hard.
There are many good reasons why our brain is trying to help us out to prioritize our wellbeing in the moment. But we could potentially have more agency if we take the luxury we have in the moment to step back and think about what is it that’s actually important to me? What are my big-picture goals and values? Often, there’s a little bit of space to maneuver. How do I make the choices in my day-to-day life about how I’m spending my time and energy a little bit more aligned with those bigger picture goals and values? And how do I make it immediately rewarding to do those things?
The role of uncertainty (and our discomfort with it) in value calculations
Annie: You mentioned endowment and you mentioned competing values, identity, all these issues that make it hard to, say, leave a job. I’m interested in how, as you think about the value system and this calculation that the brain is doing, uncertainty plays into that? We’ve talked about different timescales. I would probably take a discount to satisfy something now than some future thing that maybe I want. You’ve talked about different types of distance, me versus a stranger or geographical distance. All these kinds of distance are going into that calculation. How much does the uncertain thing versus the uncertain thing enter the value calculation?
We could imagine something with a very high expected-value that has more uncertainty to it versus something that’s lower expected-value that has certainty attached to it. I’m thinking about, for example, leaving a relationship or leaving a job where if you just did the math, leaving is better, but there’s this very big difference, which is one thing is certain, and one isn’t. How does ambiguity aversion play into this?
Emily Falk: You’re talking about how the certainty of different kinds of things plays into it. There are a lot of different ways to think about this. As I’ve mentioned, the value calculation is taking into account our past experiences, our current needs, our future goals, and it’s weighing different kinds of things. Actually, one of the very first studies that I was ever part of, when I was thinking about grad school, was as a participant.
I participated in a study that Sabrina Tom was a lead author on, in Russell Poldrack’s lab, when they were both at UCLA, where I was a student. (Tom is still at UCLA. Poldrack has been at Stanford since 2014.) They had participants, in this case including me, making choices while lying in the fMRI scanner. Was it more important to me to have money in hand right now, like $20 for sure, or have a 50% chance at $50, which has a greater expected value of $25 but comes with uncertainty.
They found that, consistent with prospect theory and with the classic findings on loss aversion, when people were trying to decide whether to accept or reject gambles, there were a broad range of value system regions that showed increasing activity as the gains increased. That’s just the bread-and-butter thing that the value system tracks. But they also showed that potential losses were represented disproportionately in these regions as well. I think that’s one piece of this, that a lot of what we’ve seen behaviorally in things like prospect theory also are instantiated in the way that our brains are computing value.
In terms of answering your question about ambiguity or risk aversion, a lot of these same brain regions that handle valuation like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, but also what sometimes are popularly thought of as emotional processing regions like the amygdala or insula or anterior cingulate cortex also monitor the degree of conflict and uncertainty, and then that factors into the calculations that we’re making as well.
How do we get our decision-making to align more with our most important values?
Annie: You are giving us this look at what’s happening under the hood. Very much from the perspective that we all feel that I know that I want these things and I’m not doing them, how am I deciding this separate from the interesting fact of how do I decide the difference between a puppy and $10 to go get a snack? That seems weird. That’s not really an apples-to-apples choice, but I seem to be able to do it that. There are a lot of other competing things and sometimes the thing that we think we want, we aren’t choosing.
How do we design our lives so that our decision-making is aligning more with those things that we have decided, with thought and consideration and compassion, are things that we would like as part of a values-driven life?
Emily Falk: In the book, there are three systems that I’m focusing on. One is this value system that we’ve been talking about. The second is the self-relevance system that we’ve been talking about. The third is the social relevance system that helps us think about what other people think and feel. In the first part of the book, I’m just describing what these systems are and that’s a lot of what we’ve been talking about here. Why do we know this and how do they work and what are some of those takeaways?
But in the second and third parts of the book, I take up exactly this question of how can we use that knowledge to change and to connect with other people in a different way? Maybe just a couple of things at the level of each of those systems. We’ve already talked a little bit about, in terms of the value system, of prioritizing immediate rewards.
If we can bring the rewards closer for things that we actually care about, then that’s a winning strategy. If we can think about, in addition to “I don’t want to get cancer and heart disease in the future,” how can I make working out or eating healthy or connecting with people that I care about immediately rewarding right now? What are the things that I can replace my smoking habit with? That could mean focusing on the delicious tastiness of the healthy option rather than just how healthy it is for me in the future. That could mean thinking about, which we mentioned, temptation bundling. Listening to exciting audiobooks or watching hot-fudge-sundae-like TV while we’re working out. It could mean going to a networking event that seems like it might be stressful and annoying with somebody that we really like and want to joke around with. One of the things that’s personally helpful for me is that reframing, to bring the rewards closer to the me that’s right here, right now.
As we think about the self-relevance system and how it can lead to defensiveness, there are two different kinds of strategies that can seem like they’re in opposition, but I actually think can work together. One is leaning into the idea of identity congruence, thinking about how best decisions really have to do with who we are. Using the example of wanting to become athletic, in the book I talk a little bit about how I’ve never thought of myself as much of an athlete. I’ve thought of myself as a nerdy academic and my brother made a pitch to me a couple years ago about trying to get faster as a runner, which was not an ambition I particularly had, but could see some benefit to that.
I was like, I don’t know if I really have that in me. He was like, well, academics often make good runners because they’re good at planning and they’re good at hard work and they’re good at follow through and you have all those things in these other parts of your life. He helped me connect that identity to behavior that wasn’t specifically identity-congruent for me. When we can help people understand why the thing that they want to do is compatible with strengths and skills and identities that they already hold, that can be helpful. The other side of that coin is noticing where it’s holding us back. There are a lot of stereotypes about what kinds of identities tend to be investment bankers or poker players or athletes. If we notice the ways that those things might be making us feel like, “somebody like me doesn’t do this,” we can maybe let go of some of that.
One side of it is leaning into the identity part of it. The other side of it is more the Buddhist meditation focused side, letting go of a bounded or fixed sense of self, and saying, once I realize that the version of me that my brain is manufacturing is this stylized social media profile, and that it’s not an absolute truth, then we can let go of some of that constraint around who we are and what’s possible and let go of some of the boundaries between ourselves and other people.
When we do that, I think that can be transformative for not only our wellbeing, but also for our ability to do things with other people, which is the third main bucket of things. Let me illustrate with the example we’ve been using of getting exercise. When we do things with other people, that can be so powerful because social rewards get treated in our brain similarly to other kinds of primary rewards like food or sex. Getting a compliment, getting a hug, really connecting with somebody is deeply rewarding. When we can construct environments and situations where we go for that brisk walk with a friend or we call somebody that we love while we do it, that’s a different thing than trying to go it alone. We know that even in much higher-stakes situations, like thinking about the climate crisis, for many people that feels overwhelming and there’s nothing I could possibly do. But when people start to work on solutions with other people in their community to brainstorm what are the actions that I can actually take, then not only is that in service of a future goal but also can be immediately rewarding. Those are a few of the kinds of things.
Annie: Let’s just think about to the idea of bringing the reward closer. Instead of thinking that I want to make sure that I extend my health span because I’m really concerned about health span, and I want to make sure that when I’m 70 I can still get around and walk and so I should be exercising, maybe I think about it differently. That might be the initial reason for committing to exercise, but how can you make the reward for exercise immediate so you could focus on how do I feel right afterwards? For example, actually I feel really good and that’s nice to feel that way in that moment regardless of how it’s going to make me feel later.
You could focus on something like that if you’re wanting to eat healthy. You could be like, I love creating new recipes and then making those work and figuring out it’s delicious and so I’m going to think about that as opposed to what the long-term goals of eating healthy are. That would bring the reward closer to you. In terms of identity, I think of myself as a hard worker, and I particularly pride myself in terms of my identity on my ability to do things that are really hard. Then, I could focus on that to get myself to exercise.
That’s completely different than what I’m worried about when I’m 70. I’m actually getting an immediate reward from it that has to do with my identity. That would be strategy number two.
By the way, when it comes to resisting dessert, there’s nothing I like more than if I’m at dinner and everybody orders dessert and I don’t.
Emily Falk: It’s a challenge in the dessert situation. I love that you get the pleasure of just being like, “I am made of stone.” I am not made of stone. I only have situational self-control. If there is dessert in front of me, I’m totally going to eat it. But a thing that works for me is swapping out something that is tasty and unhealthy for something that’s tasty and healthy. Maybe there’s a delicious chocolate cake, which sometimes I’m going to eat. I love delicious chocolate cake, but maybe there’s also a perfectly ripe mango and I love a perfect mango. If I can keep those kinds of things around so that I have the choice of something that’s also going to be rewarding and pleasurable, like a delicious mango, and that also plays into the norms.
Food is so tricky because there are so many cultural norms around it. I feel like people will judge me, but for years with our kids’ parties, our tradition was birthday watermelon. Instead of having a cake, we would slice a watermelon and put the candles in that and have birthday watermelon. Our kids just thought that was normal until they discovered at school that people have cake.
Annie: They were like, what happened? I love that. I feel like we have now psychoanalyzed each other.
Emily Falk: Then the third category is social reward. In my lab, for example, we have a Slack channel that comes from my best friend Emma, who is married to a woman named Courtney. Courtney is a Hollywood manager, and she is such a good hype person. If I go to Emma and Courtney’s house and I make myself a piece of avocado toast, Courtney is like, “oh my God, look at what you just did for yourself. You are amazing. You just made that avocado toast. Look at that thing you’re doing for your body.” That sounds a little cheesy, but from her it’s amazing.
Annie: I love it.
Emily Falk: We also have this Slack channel where whenever somebody does something that is hard, they post it. One of my postdocs recently posted an amazing video of herself climbing a rock wall, and it’s like everybody can be like, oh my gosh, you did that thing that was freaking amazing. Part of the purpose of that hyping up is a little asynchronous boost. We can do that for each other in real time, too. Actually, what I’m going to do right after this is my pal from Wharton and I get so strong on Tuesdays and we go and we gossip and we lift weights and we shout, “so strong!” and “f*ck osteoporosis!”, and it makes it so much more fun. I would never be able to lift weights without Corrine.
Can we train our brains to be better at this?
Annie: Here’s my question. I decide that I have something that I value. My brain is doing all these calculations under the hood. I don’t have so much control over that initially. It is just doing the calculations and then I’m like, damn, I feel like I value this thing, but then I’m not doing it, and this is really frustrating for me. I use your strategies. I’m asking, how can I make it more rewarding in the moment? I don’t have this timescale competition. I don’t have this self-relevance problem because I think about myself now differently than I think about myself in the future. That’s intertwined with what I think is good and bad. That’s a whole thing, and I’m just like, okay, so I’m super frustrated. I have all this competition, so now I’m going to try to solve for the competition that’s occurring. I’m going to make it important to me. I’m going to tie it in with my identity. I’m going to give myself a social reward, and now I do that successfully. I am going to the gym, and I am doing this. Does my brain actually start changing the value calculation?
Emily Falk: Thank you for highlighting that because when you do those things and you get the rewards now, it does shift the value calculation in various ways. There are a couple of key things to say about this. One is while it’s still deliberate, if you choose the things that are rewarding now, you get the social rewards, and you think about identity as we talked about earlier. There are a couple different phases in this value-based decision making. One is like, what are the things I’m even choosing between? Now, the idea that I could go to the gym is maybe more salient. That’s going to come up more often as a choice of a thing I could do right now. Whereas before, maybe you never even thought about it when you’re considering, what could I do on a Saturday afternoon?
The next part is, as you’re weighing the different elements of it, you might be weighing like, oh, I know I’m going to get some time with my pal right now, so that could be more salient. As you get this experience of things that work for you, that might be a plus. Then, there’s what we call reward prediction error. After something happens, if it’s better than you thought it was going to be, you get this positive prediction error, which your brain then encodes as like, oh, that wasn’t so bad. That was better than I thought. I should probably do that again in the future. Whereas when you try to muscle through and do the hardest possible version of it, like trying to start running by going by yourself and doing it in the freezing cold, because you just want to show that you can do it. If that ends up being worse than you thought it would be, that negative prediction error can make it less likely that you want to do it in the future.
I think that the ultimate payoff is when we do these things over and over again, that gets handed off to a totally different brain system, to a habit system, which is the holy grail for the things that you want where there’s a cue and then you do the behavior over and over again. It takes that active decision-making out of the calculation. For things that you really want, the things that are aligned with the person that you want to be, I think a real big, big picture goal is to set up your environment and the active choices that you’re making so that it becomes habitual to be the person you want to be, to do the things that you want to do. I think that requires, every once in a while, taking a step back to audit. I’m a different person now than I was 10 years ago, and so some of the kinds of things that made a lot of sense for me then may or may not make sense for the person that I want to be now.
Annie: Check back in with your habits.
Emily Falk: Check back in with where there are opportunities for more active decision making also.
Annie: This has been amazing. I think that there’s so much to be gained for compassion, both for yourself and for other people, but also the ability to achieve the things that you have decided that you want by having a deep understanding of how you’re coming to the choices that you’re making, and then how we become intentional in shifting those things toward what we actually want. I think this book is so incredibly helpful for anybody who is interested in either just understanding or in doing even more and changing.
Emily Falk: Thank you. That means so much coming from you.
Annie: I love what you’ve written, and I wish you all the success in the world.