Mind Hacks™: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain (47 page)
Read Mind Hacks™: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain Online
Authors: Tom Stafford,Matt Webb
Tags: #COMPUTERS / Social Aspects / Human-Computer Interaction
We are innately programmed to follow other people’s eye gaze to see what they are
looking at. It’s so deeply ingrained that even cartoon eyes can interfere with our mental
processing of direction.
Eyes are special. They’re part of a two-way sense. Wherever I look, you can tell what
I’m looking at. You can tell if I’m paying attention to you or not, as well as hazarding a
good guess as to what I’m really thinking about. Following gaze isn’t a learned behavior. As
far as the brain’s concerned, gaze direction is a first-class citizen of the real world, as
important as location. In the case of location, the Simon Effect
[
Don’t Go There
]
demonstrates that we have a
tendency to react to a prompt in the same direction as that stimulus. This hack shows that
we interpret gaze direction in much the same way as location: a cartoon pair of eyes looking
in one direction has the same effect.
A team at the University of Padua in Italy constructed an experiment to see the effect
of gaze.
1
They drew a pair of cartoon eyes — just two ovals with a colored oval (the
iris) within each, as shown in
Figure 10-5
.
The irises were colored either blue or green, and the cartoon could be looking either
straight ahead or to one of the sides.
People taking part in the experiment had to report the color of the irises, hitting a
button on the left for blue and on the right for green. The apparent
gaze direction wasn’t important at all. Despite that, it was faster to hit the
button for green on the right when the eyes were looking the same way (to the right) and
slower when they were looking the other way. The same held true for blue and the eyes
looking left.
and watch what her eyes do — see if you can catch her just flicking off to the right as
the cartoon eyes trigger her automatic gaze-following routine
Thinking this might be nothing to do with the ovals looking like eyes, to investigate
further, the team put together another task. Instead of ovals, the cartoon “eyes” were
squares, with square “irises” in each, and looked much less like eyes (as shown in
Figure 10-6
). And sure enough, the significant
reaction time difference (between gaze pointing in the same direction as the response key
and in the opposite direction) went away.
of robot eyes
It’s possible this is why the X Windows toy “xeyes,” which puts a pair of eyes on
your computer desktop that follow your mouse cursor around, is so uncannily handy for
avoiding losing your pointer.
2
— R.D.
Essentially, this experiment shares a mechanism with the Simon Effect
[
Don’t Go There
]
. Given that the
brain translates gaze direction into location, the same effect gets triggered: if
attention has already been directed to the left because of the stimulus, it takes a very
short time more to make a response on the right.
It makes sense that we treat gaze with such respect. If someone’s looking at
us, it usually means that some kind of interaction, for good or ill, is in motion. And if
there are a few people looking at the same place, they’ve probably spotted something you
should know about. Gaze is physically so tiny, but figures large in our social world. Just
think how it feels to make eye contact with a stranger (sometimes good, sometimes
embarrassing) or how difficult it is to have a conversation with someone looking
elsewhere. If you doubt this, try repeatedly glancing over somebody’s shoulder while
you’re talking with him, and see how long it takes him to crossly ask you what you’re up
to or glance over his shoulder to see what you’re looking at.
I’ve a suspicion that this is why arrows work so well as symbols. Given we can look
at cartoons of eyes and still follow gaze, how reduced can that cartoon get and still
work? OK, it doesn’t work with square eyes, but the salient features of eyes are that
they’re long and pupils go into the corner and pick up an arrowhead shape when they’re
looking off to the side. Just like an arrow, in fact — which leaves me wondering whether
arrows (in print, in signage, and everywhere) are very good learned symbols or whether
they tap into something deeper.
— M.W.
This deep gaze perception is also sometimes referred to as shared, or joint,
attention. The use of two people paying attention to the same object is most obvious for
infants. When infants are learning, they need to be able to make associations between
objects, words, actions, and so on. If there were no way to point or direct an infant’s
attention, it’d be next to impossible to teach her anything. At about 12–18 months,
children follow eye gaze: they can observe your eyes, tell what you’re looking at, and
look over
there
instead. It’s this automatic mechanism of joint attention that is used in
making a shared understanding of the world.
3
Pointing performs much the same function as gaze, indicating where to pay attention.
Of course, this doesn’t work for dogs, as is well-known by anyone who’s tried pointing
as a way to get a dog to look somewhere — only to have the animal stare at the end of the
pointing finger. The only way to teach association for dogs, who don’t understand such
abstract symbols as pointing, is to wait until they’re paying attention to whatever you
want to teach them about anyway and then do whatever you were going to do. It could be
argued that our real defining characteristic, as humans, is the ability to understand
the symbol “that.” Without it, we wouldn’t be able to talk about objects that aren’t
present, and wouldn’t be able to learn from other people’s mistakes.
(Some dog lovers may disagree, but then this is what makes them dog lovers, isn’t
it?)
— M.W.
Shared attention is one thing that infants use as a springboard to develop an
understanding of other minds, not just the world of objects. Children with
autism — individuals with an impaired understanding of other people’s intentions — don’t
follow gaze automatically as other children do.
The effortless, rapid, almost unconscious encoding of gaze direction makes it an ideal
social signal, which, of course, leaves it open for abuse. Spot how many advertisements
have a large face with eyes directed exactly at what they want you to read.
- Zorzi, M., Mapelli, D., Rusconi, E., & Umlità, C. (2003).
Automatic spatial coding of perceived gaze direction is revealed by the Simon Effect.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10
(2), 423–429. - Lowcoders have written a Mac OS X clone of xeyes, called iEyes (
http://www.lowcoders.net
). - Driver, J., Davis, G., Ricciardelli, P., Kidd, P., Maxwell, E.,
& Baron-Cohen, S. (1999). Gaze perception triggers reflexive visuospatial
orienting.
Visual Cognition, 6
(5), 509–540.
We mimic accents, gestures, and mannerisms without even noticing, and it seems
it’s the mere act of perception that triggers it.
We’re born imitators, even without knowing we’re doing it. I have a British accent, but
whenever I spend a couple of weeks in North America, I start to pick up the local
pronunciation. It’s the same with hanging around certain groups of friends and ending up
using words common in that group without realizing I’m picking them up.
Imitation doesn’t require immersion in a culture. You can start mirroring people’s
movements without realizing it in moments.
I find a lot of psychology experiments a little mean, because they often involve
telling the participants the experiment is about one thing, when actually it’s about
something else entirely. Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh’s experiments on what they dub the
Chameleon Effect fall into this category of keeping the participants in the dark (but are
harmless enough not to be mean).
1
Chartrand and Bargh had volunteers take part in a dummy task of describing photographs
while sitting in pairs, taking turns looking at each photo and speaking outloud their free
associations. What the volunteers didn’t know was that describing the photographs wasn’t
the point of the experiment and that their partner wasn’t a volunteer but a confederate in
league with the experiment organizers. The confederate exhibited some subtle behavior,
either rubbing his face or shaking his foot for the 10-minute duration of the
experiment.
What the experimenters were actually watching was how often a subject would rub her
own face or shake her own foot — ultimately, how much a person could have her behavior
influenced by the confederate, a person she hadn’t met before and had no requirement to be
friends with. The answer: behavior is influenced a lot.
Sitting with a face-rubbing confederate, a volunteer would rub her own face once every
100 seconds, on average. Normally, away from exposure to face-rubbing, she’d have about 30
seconds longer between touches.
The results are similar and more dramatic for foot shaking — a doubling of shaking from
just over once every 3 minutes to once every 80 seconds, just while sitting for about 10
minutes with someone who is shaking his foot every so often.
Given that this works, you’ve a chance to be rather mean. Next time you’re in
a café with friends, or at dinner, try scratching or touching your face and see what
happens. Triggering a very particular response like a nose scratch may be rarer, but you
can definitely get whoever you’re with to do a bit of face touching.
You can be quite subtle too. In the experiments, the subjects were asked whether
they’d noticed any standout behavior from the confederates: they hadn’t. So it’s not a
matter of deliberate mimicry.
Nonconscious imitation isn’t limited to gestures. We adopt the same tone of voice and
even the same sentence structure as conversational partners, and so in this way couples
who have been married for a long time really do come to resemble each other.
2
There’s a great example of how — nonconsciously — we mimic facial expressions, found
when O’Toole and Dubin
3
watched mothers feeding their children. The mother would usually open her
mouth, ostensibly as a signal for the kid to open his mouth too. But it turned out that,
80% of the time, the mother opened her mouth
after
the child did
so. The child was opening his mouth just because food was on the way; the mother was
mimicking without knowing it, just following her child’s lead.
So why imitate? That’s still an open question. It may simply be part of the mechanism
we use to perceive other people. Anything we perceive has to have some kind of
representation in the brain — otherwise it wouldn’t be a perception — and so there are
representations of straight edges, faces, colors, and so on. There are also single neurons
that activate when a very specific action takes place: grasping and pushing with your hand
activate two different neurons. What’s remarkable is that these same neurons activate when
you simply
see
somebody else doing the same movement, even if you’re
not doing it yourself.
4
Mirror neurons, found in the frontal cortex, are therefore not just what the brain is
doing to tell your hand to grasp or push, they’re actually the internal representation of
that movement, whether you’re perceiving it in yourself or in somebody else. They’re the
very idea of “grasp,” divorced from implementation detail.
Now, we know that if you hear a word, the representation of it in your brain causes
associated words to be primed
[
Bring Stuff to the Front of Your Mind
]
. Hearing the word
“water”
will mean you’re more likely to shout out “river” (which has therefore been
primed) than “money” when somebody asks you to free-associate from the word “bank.” You
don’t even need to have had conscious awareness of the word that has primed you
[
Subliminal Messages Are Weak and Simple
]
— all
that matters is the representation of the word being constructed in your brain somehow,
not that it makes it through the filter of attention.
The same may be true for perceiving gestures and movements of other people. Even
though you’re not concentrating on their movements, other people do have some kind of
representation in your brain, and the way you understand them is in terms of your own
mirror neurons. In turn, the mirror neuron for “scratch” is activated and primes that
activity next time your hand is idle. Seeing someone scratch, in this model, would make
it more probable for you to scratch yourself.
I find that even reading about it has the same effect. Are you a little itchy right
now?
— M.W.
Whatever the mechanism, the result of two people mirroring each other is clear:
mirroring is part of building rapport. If you’re a fan of people watching, you can often
tell how well two people are getting along by watching very small movements and how shared
they are — do the pair you’re watching lean back at the same time or synchronize laughing?
Try looking round a table and see whether good friends mirror each other more than
randomly chosen pairs. It can stand out a lot, when you’re looking for it.
One big question is why mirroring is such a strong part of rapport. I think the
question of why we mirror is a simple answer of learning from the society we’re born in.
We don’t have all the knowledge we need for the world hardwired in our brains from
birth; we have to acquire it from those around us, and mirroring is just the tiniest
manifestation of that picking up of behavior.
— T.S.
- Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon
effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction.
Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 76
(6), 893–910. - Dijksterhuis, A., & Bargh, J. A. (2001). The perception-behavior
expressway: Automatic effects of social perception on social behavior. In M. P. Zanna
(ed.).
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology,
33, 1–40. New
York: Academic Press. (Highly recommended as a broad and comprehensive review.) - O’Toole, R., & Dubin, R. (1968). Baby feeding and body swap:
An experiment in George Herberts Mead’s “Taking the role of the other.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
,
10
, 59-65. Cited in Dijksterhuis & Bargh
(2001).
2 - V. S. Ramachandran, “Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the
Driving Force Behind ‘the Great Leap Forward’ in Human Evolution” (
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html
).