Prediction errors also appear to be involved in another common human social behavior, when we find out whether another person likes us or not. In a recent study by Rebecca Jones and colleagues from Cornell University, participants learned how often unknown peers wanted to interact with them by seeing how often these peers sent them “facebook-like” notes. Prediction errors captured the difference between participants’ expectation of receiving a note and actually getting one. Similar to the Behrens study above, prediction error signals were related to brain activity commonly involved in learning about how likely non-social outcomes such as money are to be experienced.
How can prediction errors help us to understand optimism? Tali Sharot, Ray Dolan and I conducted a study at University College London to investigate how people maintain their optimistic predictions. Participants estimated their likelihood of experiencing 80 negative events including various diseases and criminal acts. They then saw the statistical likelihoods of these events happening to an average person of their age. We then measured how much participants updated their predictions by having them re-estimate their personal likelihoods of experiencing these 80 adverse life events. When given good news -- i.e., a bad outcome is not as likely as you thought -- people responded strongly. But given bad news, they tended to change their prediction only a little bit. Importantly, distinct brain regions seemed to be related to prediction errors for good and bad news about the future. Interestingly, the more optimistic a participant was the less efficiently one of these regions coded for undesirable information. Thus, the bias in how errors are processed in the brain can account for the tendency to maintain rose-colored views.
Still, a word of caution to avoid being too optimistic is warranted. Neuroscience won’t tell us anytime soon everything that’s going on in the mind of a bride walking down the aisle.
Christoph W. Korn is a third year PhD student at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. He studies how the human brain integrates information that is relevant in social settings.
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3 Comments
Add CommentIt appears that association is a significant process through which memory derives supporting evidence:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe add evidence which supports our cognitions at this moment, and fail to dredge up events producing results counter to our desires.
Over and over, whether in private plans and reveries, politics, marriage, hopes for lotteries, we appear to create a partial personality supporting our most recent, most emotional experience, wishes, desires, beliefs.
Social psychologists have repeatedly shown that we refuse to entertain cognitive dissonance, and this phenomenon is key to further experiment.
The trait the author discusses is certainly neurohormonal, and obviously highly plastic in that we entertain chaotically conflicting beliefs at alternate times, should we have not developed such cognitive protection.
Remember the brain-mapping studies of cat hearing, in which the neuroimaging showed complete shutdown of response to the aural experiment when the cat(s) became aware of rodents in the lab?
Neuromodulation is adaptive, signalling losers of contests to reduce their output of testosterone; likely this effect kept key ancestors alive to reproduce when later out of range of winners.
As readers may know, it is likely that most of our later-evolved brain areas were social adaptations. The complexity of our many, many slightly differing neurotransmitters were possibly the microevolutionary adaptations for social success.
The newlywed is eager to socially succeed, in spite of what reservations she may have hidden from herself when proposed to by the most socially dominant suitor she could attract. Love (as a descriptive factor of long-term loyalty, and attendant behaviors and cognitions) may not be a part of the wedding at all, as social success veils reservations,at least until oxytocin is no longer produced in sufficient quantities to overcome negative experience.
It is more complex than this, yet we must look to the most outstanding cognitive and behavioral activators for indications -she's not going to tell us about reservations she is convincing herself are not real while walking down that aisle.
Facts on divorce rates, messy divorces and so forth are poor benchmarks for understanding why any persons marriage may fail. Most do not understand no one ever knows anyone, even when married for decades; living compatibility in marriage must be discovered and in time with age we become someone else and very different from who we were when we married; yet we don't know what we may become.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut as we weigh factors in predicting if one might have a successful and happy marriage much is left to emotional decision, not based upon far to many unknown elements and individual events which will test any relationship. Even persons who lived together for years have discovered once legally committed to each other the couple behaves differently, thus it's not a good test of sustainability either.
Overall, most fail to understand we should take off the rose colored glasses and see a person who may hold our physical, emotional and financial lives in their hands. Yet, we trust without ever doing a background check on them and assume everything we see and hear is the truth. Assumptions are poor indicators in sorting out fact from fiction. Yet, chemistry trumps logical thought and in that no statistics seem to make a difference. In that it seems we humans love to be charmed.
The author didn't say if the participants, in the study on changing estimating positive or negative experiences when presented with actual statistics, were undergraduates or mature adults. If undergrads, then the results need to be taken with a grain of salt as their frontal lobes are not fully wired.
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