How Hormones & Status Shape Our Values & Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt

Key Concepts

• Decision-making: How humans and primates make choices, influenced by factors like hormones, hierarchies, and valuation.
• Valuation: The process of assigning value to objects, people, and experiences, often influenced by subconscious factors.
• Attention: The prioritization and amplification of focus, influenced by both internal desires and external stimuli.
• Foraging: The process of searching for resources, including information, and the optimal strategies for deciding when to stay or leave a source.
• Theory of Mind: The ability to infer the mental states, intentions, and knowledge of others.
• Hormonal Signaling: The ways in which humans and primates signal their hormonal status, influencing social interactions and mate selection.
• Oxytocin: A neurohormone that promotes social bonding, reduces anxiety, and increases synchrony between individuals.
• Synchrony: The alignment of behavior, neural activity, and physiological processes between individuals, serving as a marker of close relationships and effective teamwork.
• Value-Based Decision-Making: The process of weighing evidence, assigning value, and making choices based on expected outcomes, influenced by factors like time, fatigue, and social context.
• Ecological Rationality: The idea that human rationality is bounded by cognitive constraints and shaped by the environment in which our brains evolved.

Attention and Foraging

• Attention is a prioritization process, amplified by eye movements.
• Attention is driven by what we're looking for and what the world presents, shaped by ancestral and developmental experiences.
• Bright, shiny, moving, loud, or different things grab attention. Faces are particularly salient for primates.
• Attention operates according to foraging principles, mirroring how animals search for resources.
• The marginal value theorem dictates abandoning a resource when its yield falls below the environmental average.
• Example: On social media, emotional faces grab attention.
• High-speed internet creates a "rich" environment, leading to rapid switching between resources.
• Turning a phone monochrome reduces its appeal as an information source.
• Working memory is significantly improved when a phone is completely outside the room.
• Urgency signals build up in the anterior cingulate cortex when experiencing depleting rewards.

Training Attention

• Maintaining a thought train independent of visual input can improve attention.
• Practices that teach us to maintain attention and redirect our attention that are very deprived of visual input as a kind of training ground for being able to harness and maintain visual input when we need to get work done work on problem sets.
• There's a "warming up" period required for focused cognitive activities.
• Analogy: Like warming up before a workout, the brain needs preparation for specific cognitive tasks.
• Distraction can be the opposite of warming up, dispersing cognitive focus.
• Focusing on a fixation point before cognitive work can improve attention.
• Looking at dots that are close together you're then cognitive space becomes kind of more bundled into a tighter bundle.
• Looking at dots that are more dispersed and you tend to you know kind of disperse your cognition it becomes almost like more of a creative exploration.
• Behavioral interventions can increase endogenous release of neurochemicals that increase arousal and attention.

Foraging Styles and Career Alignment

• People fall on a continuum from hyper-focused to hyper-exploratory.
• Variation in foraging style may make individuals more or less suited to different careers.
• Creative professions and entrepreneurship align well with exploratory attention styles.
• Entrepreneurs often have attention problems, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.
• Support for entrepreneurs can involve psychiatric care, focusing practices, and team building.
• Neuroscience-based games can measure creativity and social competence for hiring purposes.
• Example: A mimic soccer game can assess strategic planning and theory of mind.

Theory of Mind and Covert Attention

• Humans can attend to a location with their eyes but pay attention to something else in the periphery.
• This ability is linked to living in complex societies with differentiated relationships.
• Covert attention allows tracking information without overtly signaling interest.
• Theory of mind develops through gaze following and joint attention.
• The hypothesis is that we have two spotlights of attention that we can merge, split, or focus inward.

Hormonal Signaling and Mate Selection

• Primates signal status and mating opportunities through visual cues.
• Males have large canines and square jaws, while females display perineum swelling and coloration.
• Humans also signal hormonal status, though it was previously thought to be suppressed for monogamy.
• Females display changes in facial turgidity and flirtatious behavior during ovulation.
• Exotic dancers get bigger tips when ovulating.
• Males signal testosterone levels through perineum redness.
• Humans are sexually dimorphic, suggesting that strict monogamy is not the dominant strategy.
• Pair-bonded species have less complicated behavior and smaller relative brain size.

Naturalistic Neuroscience

• Neurons in prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe are modulated by behaviors and social context.
• Individual neurons are multitasking, responding to multiple factors.
• The brain carries a mental account of social relationships, tracking who owes whom what.
• This account is tracked in the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe.
• In equitable relationships, the balance is one-for-one.
• In relationships with power differentials, the conversion rate is not one-to-one.

Power Dynamics and Social Media

• Power dynamics are tracked for conflict and collaboration.
• Some individuals are very transactional, tracking every exchange.
• Others are elevated by the idea that a relationship is tighter than it is.
• The "don't feed the trolls" strategy aims to avoid rewarding negative behavior.
• Ignoring someone's insult can be a display of power.

Testosterone and Behavior

• Testosterone levels are signaled through muscularity and jaw shape.
• Testosterone gel increases desire for conspicuous consumption and risk-taking.
• Higher testosterone is associated with more impulsive responses, less reflection, and more confidence.
• Purchasing items that signal wealth or status is a display of vigor.

Oxytocin and Social Bonding

• Oxytocin is a dial that turns up or turns down aspects of social behavior.
• It helps build bonds between mother and baby and is co-opted for other relationships.
• Oxytocin is released during childbirth, nursing, and orgasm.
• Intranasal oxytocin relaxes individuals and reduces vigilance to threats.
• Oxytocin flattens hierarchies, making dominant individuals more chill and subordinate individuals more bold.
• Oxytocin increases pro-social behavior and behavioral synchrony.
• Behavioral synchrony is a marker of strong relationships and effective teamwork.
• MDMA increases dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, reducing anxiety.
• Social touch stimulates oxytocin release and is essential for building bonds.
• The loss of social touch contributes to loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

Building Bridges and Overcoming Division

• Deep conversation is an effective way to get in sync with others.
• Structured sets of questions can facilitate deep connection.
• Confirmation bias leads to reward-based activation, reinforcing beliefs.
• A new value-based system is needed to bridge political divides.
• Group selection favors groups with selfless individuals.
• Having a common goal or enemy can build affiliations.
• Uniforms can take attention away from differences and emphasize shared identity.

Value-Based Decision-Making

• The brain takes in evidence, weighs it against stored information, and assigns value to options.
• This process takes time, leading to a speed-accuracy tradeoff.
• Fatigue causes individuals to emphasize speed over accuracy.
• Offloading decisions to an external person can help when fatigued.
• The challenge is to study decision-making in real-world environments with complex factors.
• Celebrity endorsements leverage our wiring to attend to high-status individuals.
• Monkeys favor brands paired with celebrity and sexy monkeys.
• There's overlap in the brain's valuation maps, merging visual and conceptual images.
• Loss aversion causes individuals to focus on potential losses rather than gains.
• Manipulating the visual display to emphasize gains can shift decisions.

Meme Coins and Social Influence

• Meme coins leverage proximity between reputation and value.
• They harness our wiring to attend to what other people are doing.
• Celebrity endorsements enhance confidence and trust.
• Social sensitivity increases the likelihood of getting caught in a bubble market.
• The brain circuit involved in theory of mind drives bubble behavior.
• Urgency is suggestive of a scam.

Rationality and Ecological Adaptation

• The concept of rationality assumes we are computers with complete access to information.
• Bounded rationality acknowledges cognitive constraints.
• Ecological rationality considers the environment in which our brains evolved.
• Our brains are designed for small groups, face-to-face contact, and slow change.
• Industrialized societies create a mismatch between our brains and the environment.
• People who live in subsistence environments are generally healthier and happier.

Longevity and Time Perception

• The economics of decision-making relate to living fast and dying young versus living a long time.
• Humans are plastic and flexible, adapting to different environments.
• The fundamental drive is to climb the hierarchy, though individuals can intentionally choose to be content.
• What you attend to is amplified in the brain, influencing your perception of the world.
• Loss aversion causes individuals to focus on potential losses rather than gains.
• Humans' knowledge that we are going to die someday can be the ultimate motivator.

Brand Loyalty and Tribalism

• Apple and Samsung are dominant smartphone players, but Apple has stronger brand loyalty.
• Apple customers express empathy for Apple and hate Samsung.
• Samsung customers show no feelings towards Samsung and hate Apple.
• Apple is like a family, while Samsung users are like islands.
• Apple people are in sync with each other, while Samsung people are not.
• The parts of the brain involved in social relationships are larger in Apple people.
• It would be interesting to run similar experiments on politically leaning individuals.

Conclusion

The conversation with Dr. Michael Platt provides a comprehensive overview of the neuroscience of decision-making, valuation, attention, and social behavior. It highlights the interplay between evolutionary pressures, hormonal influences, and cognitive processes in shaping our choices and interactions. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding our inherent biases and limitations in order to make better decisions and build stronger relationships. The key takeaway is that while we are all "little monkeys" driven by subconscious forces, we also have the capacity to consciously shape our environment, focus our attention, and cultivate empathy in order to create a more fulfilling and connected life.