The Influential Mind Made Me Think #13: On Learning From Experience...

Through the last posts of The Influential Mind Made Me Think, I have talked about how the decisions and actions of others influence us. I believe this will be my last post where I talk about how such influences in a direct manner. Today I will talk about how our brains process learning when it comes from our own experiences, compared to when it comes from observing the decisions and consequences other people experience. In addition, I will take it a step further and also talk about how what we think other people are thinking affects our actions as well.

Scientists were trying to figure out how is the learning from observing the experiences of others different from the learning from experiencing something yourself. From experiments on monkeys, we know that the neurons that respond for one type of learning do not for the other. The groups of cells sit next to each other, but are not part of the same unit. This differentiation allows us to distinguish between our own consequences from those of others, while enabling us to learn from both.

It gets even more interesting when looking at the striatum. The striatum is part of the brain, and it is a critical component of the motor and reward system. The striatum is important, among other reasons, because it helps in the learning process of what can bring us joy and what may bring us harm. The dopaminergic neurons in the striatum increase their firing when outcomes are better than expected, and reduce their firing when outcomes are worse than expected. It would almost seem like some sort of re-calibration process after an outcome that was different from what was expected. What is most interesting about this process is that experiments show that the neural firing pattern is completely reversed if the learning is coming from observation and not self-experience. In other words, imagine a friend is experiencing the unexpected outcomes. If the outcome is worse than expected, the dopaminergic neurons in your striatum would increase firing. On the other hand, if the outcome was better than expected, the same neurons would decrease their firing rate. For a moment, let's remember that the striatum is associated with learning of what will bring joy or pain. Perhaps this interesting behavior of the striatum is giving us insight into our competitive nature. Maybe we perceive the mistakes of others as a reward and their successes as a loss. Hey, maybe this even has a role to play in envy or why we find people falling to be funny. If someone knows the answer or a reading that might answer those questions, please let me know.

Now, let's take this a step further and study how what we think others are thinking influences us. The fancy name for our capability of putting ourselves in the shoes of someone else is "theory of mind". We seem to be the only species able to do this and we practice it constantly. We think about what our client, patient, employee, boss, or partner is thinking and based on our conclusions, we adjust our behavior. Theory of mind helps us predict what people will do next. Nevertheless sometimes it can make us reach the wrong conclusions.

We can find a perfect example of how theory of mind can make us reach a wrong conclusion in financial bubbles. In short, financial bubbles occur when people trade in high volumes at prices that are unrealistic. There are many reasons as to why these bubbles are generated, but theory of mind definitely plays a big role. If the market suddenly shoots up, you might ask yourself "What is happening? What do people know that I don't?". Research from Benedetto De Martino and his colleagues shows that traders who are most susceptible to bubbles are the ones who performed best in theory of mind tasks. Theory of mind tasks include guessing someone's internal states by simply looking into their eyes. Why does this happen? These specific traders tend to ride bubbles because they assume that the people buying at such high prices must have a reason for it. In other words, they assume that people are buying rationally, so they must have some information that they don't. This is not a reality. A lot of people buy into the hype without knowing much about the market. I know a lot of people on the Steem blockchain are playing in the cryptocurrency markets. If you are reading this, you are on the Steem blockchain. So, dear reader, please take this into consideration next time you think of buying high!

Pixabay image source.

In other words, even in a swarm, one divergent voice can cause others to act independently. (Tali Sharot, The Influential Mind)

I know that in the last posts I have somewhat bashed on free will. This is not my objective. Many times, influence happens under the radar, so all we can hope for is to become more aware. More aware that influence is going on, that our inferences might be wrong, and more careful not to mindlessly trade our own unique tastes for those of another. We have to be conscious that the masses influence the individual, but also that the individual influences the masses.

What do you think? I'd like to hear your opinions.

In the past, I was sharing all the links to the posts of this series. Now that the series has a decent amount of posts, I will only share the ones that I think are most correlated with the current post. So, if you want to check out other thoughts that this awesome book has evoked, and are related to this post, click on these past posts:

Best,

@capatazche

The Influential Mind Made Me Think #13: On Learning From Experiences And Why Financial Bubbles Are Generated