Future Fluency: “In Depth: Brains and Bias” Published by the National Association of Corporate Directors ERIN ESSENMACHER Ashley, we’ve talked to so many amazing thought leaders across this series so far. ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME We really have. Sociologists, business leaders, researchers . ERIN ESSENMACHER . Professors, investors, board members. And while we shared some of our favorite nuggets as they relate to the topics we’ve covered, there is so much more they had to say! ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME And these conversations are so good. ERIN ESSENMACHER That’s why I’m really excited about these next several episodes. We’re featuring extended interviews with some of our favorite guests. ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME And I love that we are starting with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Her insights on the neuroscience behind bias were fascinating. ERIN ESSENMACHER I agree. Game changer. Her book How Emotions Are Made—which completely blew my mind, pun intended—questioned some fundamental assumptions about the neuroscience and physiology behind decision making. I’m Erin Essenmacher. ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME And I’m Ashley Marchand Orme. ERIN ESSENMACHER And you’re listening to Future Fluency—the podcast where we explore the changing face of America through the lens of innovation, culture, and their impact on business, brought to you by the National Association of Corporate Directors. ERIN ESSENMACHER Our listeners may remember that Dr. Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She and I met at her home in Boston and she explained how this research applies to everyone, from baseball players to board members. ERIN ESSENMACHER We're here in Boston with Lisa Feldman Barrett. Lisa, thank you so much for making time to talk with us. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT Oh, it’s my pleasure. ERIN ESSENMACHER I just finished your book, How Emotions Are Made, and I was completely floored. Maybe you could just start by talking about this idea, this long-held notion that we've had that humans are rational actors, and there's such a thing as being impartial and rational. You really kind of explode that in your book and talk about how that's kind of a fiction. Can you talk a little bit more about what that’s based on? LISA FELDMAN BARRETT Sure. It's possible to start at many places in history, but I always like to start with Plato, because that's the clearest, I think, example. Plato was writing about the psyche which we would translate as understanding the human mind. He was really writing about moral behavior. He characterized the human psyche, the human mind, as having three parts: instincts, these animalistic instincts like hunger, the drive for hunger, the drive for thirst, the drive for sex; emotions or passions, so what we would think of as anger, sadness, fear, and so on. He described them as two wild stallions that were controlled by a chariot driver, a human, which stands in for reason. The assumption is that a human mind is really a battleground between this sort of, your irrational inner beast, the wild stallion, and the rational part of your mind, which we then came to understand had evolved over time. You can see this narrative that emotion and cognition or rationality are in battle over your soul, over your mind, over your behavior. That's a narrative that just continues through 2,000 years of writing about the human condition. The law embodies this philosophy of mind and that there is a rational actor, and that, in fact, our understanding of responsibility and culpability is based on the idea that crimes that we commit, harms that we commit, when the rational part of ourselves is in control. We’re more culpable and more responsible and therefore need to be punished more severely in those cases. We also see it in economics. It used to be the case that the assumption was that there is the rational economic man or rational economic actor. The initial assumption was that individual humans were rational. Then when study after study after study showed that this wasn't the case, as if we needed studies to really show it. I think every financial meltdown that’s occurred since people have been tracking such things in the twentieth century you can trace, really, to a miss like a false belief in humans’ rationality in their economic decision making. The assumption is that they’re rational, and it turns out they're not, and that wreaks havoc basically with the markets. I think now the assumption is that, okay, individual humans are irrational, but maybe as a whole the markets are rational. There's still this hold on this idea of rationality as cold, cognitive, deliberative, and free from sentiment of any sort. That certainly matches our intuitions and our experiences of ourselves. To us, we have moments where we feel very strongly, we have moments where there's no sign of feeling at all, it feels like, and maybe those are our more rational moments. The problem is that that narrative doesn’t [match] brain architecture. If you were to look at the architecture of the brain and the way that it functions, it's actually not biologically possible for you to have any moment of your life that is free from feeling unless there's something structurally wrong with your brain. At the core of your brain are a set of regions that form themselves into networks that are responsible for many things, including memory and decision making and our evaluations of other people. Also, these exact same brain regions regulate the systems of your body like your cardiovascular system, your respiratory system, your immune system, your gut. Actually, it's the sensations from the inner body is where your feelings come from. It's just not possible for you to ever have to make a decision or ever engage in any action that is completely free from sentiment, from feeling. ERIN ESSENMACHER We are talking a lot about unconscious bias, and we’re talking about it more with lots of examples of how it manifests in the workplace and other areas of life. As a neuroscientist, how do you think about unconscious bias? How do you see it working? LISA FELDMAN BARRETT I want to take a step back and maybe continue with this narrative about how the brain evolved and what it's for and how it works because, I think, once we understand that a little bit, then our understanding of unconscious bias just becomes obviously clear about how it works. Because we're human and we are fascinated by our own thoughts and feelings and other people's thoughts and feelings, we assume that brains evolve to think or they evolve to feel or they evolve to let us see really well or what have you. Actually, brains didn’t evolve for any of those reasons. All brains on this planet evolved for the purpose of regulating the systems of your body. The main job that your brain has is to anticipate the needs of the body and try to meet those needs before they arise. What kind of needs am I talking about? I’m talking about needs for oxygen, needs for glucose. For example, if your brain is going to stand you up, it actually has to raise your blood pressure before you stand so that oxygen and glucose can get to your brain. Otherwise, you’ll faint and that’s expensive. That's costly from a biological standpoint. You can think about your brain as kind of running a budget for your body. It’s trying to move resources around, so in this case, it's not a budget for money; it's a budget for glucose and salt and oxygen and water and so on. It's moving resources from one system to another anticipating what the needs are going to be and trying to meet those needs before they arise, because it's expensive to try to meet those needs afterwards. If you think about it in economic terms, just really simply you or if you’re a company, let's say, there's a financial office which, if you’re branches all over the world, attempts to move resources around so that all branches of the company are solvent. If you go into the red and you start to run a deficit, paying that deficit back is more expensive because there's usually interest to pay and things like that. That's the same thing with your body. Your brain is basically running a budget for your body, and it's attempting to keep everything solvent. Now, that doesn’t mean keeping you calm. That means keeping everything efficient, whether you're sitting at your desk and talking on the phone, whether you're running and your heart rate is you know 160 beats a minute, whether you are asleep, or whether you're in the middle of a debate in a board meeting. The point isn't to bring you back to a set point of rest. It's to keep everything efficient whether you’re super charged or super calm, okay? What's interesting is that your brain is doing this throughout your entire life from the moment that you're born until the moment that you die. You are mostly unaware that this is happening unless something goes wrong. Actually, there is a whole kind of symphony going on inside your own body that you're completely unaware of. All of this regulation of these by systems have sensations that go along with them that mostly you don't experience in a very direct way, because if you did, you'd never be able to pay attention to anything else in the world ever because it would be so loud and it would just capture your attention so much.