Neuroscientist Tania Singer and her team recruited volunteers to play a game. Some were asked to play by the rules. Others were instructed to ignore them. To not play fair.

After all participants played the game together, they were then asked to observe each other in a second activity. Scientists measured some of the volunteers’ brain activity as they observed some of their former game opponents apparently being subjected to different levels of pain.

Result?

The brain areas that signal pain became active in all who thought they were observing pain in others. This provides neural evidence of their empathy.

Yet, when those who’d played “unfairly” in the earlier game appeared to be in pain, male volunteers who observed them showed significantly less empathetic brain activity than when they saw fair-players in apparent pain. In fact men felt more desire for revenge.

For women the response was different. They showed the brain responses of empathy regardless of how they felt about the participants’ moral behavior. Earlier research supports this finding.
Regrettably, I feel I’d respond more like a man in this experiment.

Learn more about how our brain affects our behavior in Donald Pfaff’s book, The Neuroscience of Fair Play. Relatedly read On Being Certain and Predictably Irrational.

Here’s the good news. Men and women can use meditation to change our instinctively negative reactions – even in the face of unfair or otherwise negative behavior. Monitoring the brains of Tibetan monks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, neuroscience professor Richard Davidson found that the monk’ first instinct was compassion rather than anger.

Here’s the bad news, at least for many of us.

To become that compassionate, monks spent at least 10,000 hours in meditation. Learn more about the power of compassion in Emotional Awareness, a book by the foremost expert on reading faces and on lying, Paul Ekman.

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According to David Holmes’ research up to 40% of the information displayed on MySpace is fabricated. Holmes believes that many people are being brutalised by the online experience of assuming you can trust someone and suddenly finding you cannot. One day you are pouring your heart out to a virtual buddy, and the next this “soulmate” is simply gone.

They got bored, or found someone else, or simply switched off. It is no semantic detail that users often talk of “friending” rather than befriending.

As well, a third of people on social networking sites give false information about themselves, according to emedia. Why all this ‘lying’? They say they are worried about the security of their personal data. Falsification maintains privacy, though of course also undermines the value of social networking sites. Or again, according to recent YouGov research, ten percent of teenagers said they have been bullied online, by being bombarded with instant messages and emails that make their life a misery.

The “casual callousness” of the Internet is partly at work here. Who has clicked ‘Ignore’ on Facebook? Someone contacted you whom you hardly know or even don’t much like. In the real world, such callousness is usually avoided because you can read the signs and avoid the direct confrontation. Online, the issue is forced. You have to give the virtual cold shoulder.

Anyone who has received an email that struck them as blunt understands this reaction. Yet, now that some send a cancellation, a rejection, even a notice of dismissal by email – on the grounds that it is more efficient – the world can seem a little less humane, less friendly.

Online living is deskilling us, found MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle. We are less able to be alone, or manage and contain our emotions. Instead, we are developing new intimacies with machines that lead to new dependencies – a wired social existence, ‘a tethered self’. Paradoxically, online friendship hovers between communication and solipsism.

Yet, for good and ill, the Internet is as much a part of modern friendship as a pint of beer or a phone. The answer is to be wiser not about the Internet but about friendship. What is it, what does it take, what are its perils as well as its promise?

Professor Ray Pahl, for example, studied how people use Blackberrys. He found that they are used to keep people at bay as well as to stay in touch with those they love.

Yet at an experimental village in Canada where all the houses were wired to make getting online as fast as turning on the telly, neighbours physically met up more as a result.

There is a vital difference between apparent friendliness and friendship – and between different kinds of friends, from work colleagues, through people in the pub, to personal soulmateship. Hold onto this hierarchy because if friendship is flattened human life is eroded too. And friendship is what’s most vital for happiness according to Aristotle.

Then the practice of differentiating the kinds of friendships – and deepening them – might begin where we face the greatest “newness” – online. For starters, why not take this Friendship Intelligence Test?

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The most obvious example is the a-ha. You study a science problem from every angle, yet have no idea whether or not you really understand it; then suddenly, without any effort on your part, you suddenly “get the picture.”

To understand why our brains might have developed such a mechanism, consider how we recognize a face. You’re walking down a busy street; you subliminally see but do not consciously notice hundreds of passersby. Nevertheless, your visual system is silently looking for good matches for faces from your past. When it “recognizes” a face as being quite similar to Joe Blow, your college roommate, it notifies you that you are looking at Joe Blow. This recognition occurs at an unconscious level; the feeling of knowing that it is Joe is an unconscious visual system calculation of the likelihood that the face actually is Joe’s. Without this mechanism, all perceptions from the trivial to the urgent would be given equal weight. With this feeling of knowing as part of perception, the unconscious brain can steer us toward looking at or thinking about things that it considers important.

However, we are subject to all sorts of perceptual errors. To grasp how difficult it can be to shake an unjustified sense of correctness, look at Muller-Lyer optical illusion.

Though the two horizontal lines are exactly the same length, we “feel” that the top line is longer than the bottom one. Our intellect tells us they are equal; our unconscious perceptual processes tell us that they are unequal. Worse, even knowing they are the same length cannot dispel the clearly irrational feeling that one is longer than the other.

Take-away point #1:

Just as we cannot consciously will ourselves to see the two horizontal lines as equal, we cannot will away false feelings of knowing.

Take-away point #2:

There are two types of knowledge—that which can be scientifically (empirically) tested, and that which cannot. Whenever you have a sense of “being right,” ask yourself if this feeling can be objectively tested. For example, you can measure the length of the two horizontal lines and “know” whether they are equal or unequal. You can ask the passerby if he is Joe Blow from college.

But, for those thoughts and ideas that cannot be objectively tested, you must operate with considerable caution and due respect for the possibility that your “sense of knowing,” no matter how overwhelming, can be dead wrong.

The antidote to unjustifiable “certainty” is a healthy dose of humility. It might even be that your biology is preventing you from seeing that a contrasting view has a grain of truth.

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The good news is we can support each other to change in positive, far-reaching ways. For example, Dr. Mimi Silbert at Delancey Street has transformed more than five thousand former drug addicts, pimps and thieves into productive citizens. Individuals who were once warehoused in prisons now have jobs that contribute to society.

In our book, Influencer, my co-authors and I chronicle the work of Silbert and other powerful influencers. We discovered eight principals these change agents use to resolve some of the world’s toughest challenges. Here are three:

1. Change the Way You Change Minds

Change starts with a change of mind. Before people will abandon long-standing behaviors and adopt new, healthier behaviors, they must believe two things. First, they must think, “I can do it!” and second, they must believe that, “If I do, it’ll be worth it.”

To help yourself or others believe they can change and that it will be worth it, create personal experiences. Instead, of trying to persuade or convince them, help people experience the new behavior and the resulting consequences for themselves.

To do this, take others on field trips where they can watch the target behaviors in action. For instance, when a production plant full of automobile employees didn’t believe their Japanese competitors actually produced more per employee; executives flew a team to Japan where they watched their competitors in action. Now they believed.

2. Find Vital Behaviors

How do you lose weight? You could follow a strict diet. Or perhaps you could take weight loss pills. It turns out neither approach is successful. However, if you study people who have successfully lost the weight and kept it off, you’ll discover a few vital behaviors that lead to the difference. These successful people ate breakfast every morning, exercised at home, and weighed themselves more than once a week.

Masters of influence understand that key results stem from changing a handful of vital behaviors. Instead of selecting the trendiest technique or solution, they go to great pains to locate the few behaviors that matter by studying those who have succeeded in the face of failure.

3. Make the Undesirable Desirable

Humans seek pleasure and avoid pain. So, when the requisite task is noxious, painful, or boring, find a way to make it more desirable. You can either change the task itself, or help people view it in a new way. Individuals who take pleasure in their work tie it to core values and human consequences. For example, help people see how a job, although not particularly interesting, is intimately tied to customer satisfaction.

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In a study, Yale students were sent, one-by-one, down a hallway where they would pass a lab assistant.  The assistant’s hands were full, holding a clipboard, textbooks, papers and a cup of either hot or iced coffee. He asked each passing student for a hand with the cup.

Just minutes later the students read about a fictional person then ranked that individual on a range from warm, thoughtful and social to cold, selfish and less social. You guessed it.  Those who’d held the cup of hot coffee were more likely to rank that individual more positively than the students who’d held the iced java. They were “primed” to do so.  It reflects “the automaticity of everyday life.”  Priming can prompt “good” or “bad” behavior.

Those, for example, who briefly saw words on a screen like “support” or “dependable” acted more cooperatively. Those who saw a briefcase during an experiment became more competitive. From what we touch, smell or see it takes only small sensory cues to influence our behavior.

Priming is most powerful when done in the same sensory mode as the original experience. For example, along the back of the yard of my grandmother’s modest home ran an abandoned railway track. The wood that supported the iron tracks was soaked with creosote. Even today, when I get even a faint whiff of that acrid smell I smile with the memory of many happy times with Grandma Louise.

How are you being primed to feel, act or buy? I have a Las Vegas hotel client that increased per-guest spending and positive views of the hotel staff’s service – even their attractiveness – all evoked by one sensory change. From check-in to gaming areas and hallways, the hotelier wafts the scent of sunscreen lotion. (“Hey honey, we’re on vacation, the world looks good and we’re going to play.”) Why not can prime yourself and those around you for positive experiences?

• What messages and images are on your walls at home to prime your family to feel secure, happy and, well, at home? Or behind you as you sit at your office? What do others repeatedly touch, smell or hear when around you? Do you like to effect those sensory cues evoke?
• What do you share, give away or show others with whom you want to feel closer?
• How can you cultivate closeness and positive memories by special, repeated multi-sensory rituals, foods and celebrations?
• As friends or clients meet with you, what will they smell, see, hear or touch? How might those experiences affect how they feel about you and what you discuss?  It is all about context.

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We don’t listen to words. We don’t believe “controlled” facial expressions. Our primal knowing cuts through social masks to feel the fear. Within seconds, we communicate our feelings with each other – intensifying whatever feeling we have. “Some stress is healthy and necessary to keep us alert and occupied,” says researcher, Spencer Rathus. In fact, “Most people do their best under mild to moderate stress,” finds Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Unfortunately, since our brain is wired to help us survive, we feel fear faster, more intensely and longer that any positive emotion. Plus we spread it faster.

Worse yet, research shows that we least like the person in the situation who looks or sounds most unhappy. That’s a downward spiral that isolates the most vulnerable person in the herd while making the rest increasingly upset and reactionary.

That’s why Emotional Freedom author, Judith Orloff believes that “Fear is the mother of all negative emotions.” It is often expressed as anger, blaming or frustration. “Fear renders intelligent people dumb. They are not clear-headed or intuitively in synch enough to make brave decisions,” found Orloff. Consequently, when you first begin to feel fearful or angry, change the channel in your mind. Rather than catastrophizing about the future, focus on your current situation. Your best bet is to immediately:

1. Breathe deeply and slowly, inhale and exhale – even for just a minute.
2. Think of what you can do – even a small thing – towards making the situation better.
3. Take that action, then plan the next one.

In effect, you are viewing the source of your fear as an obstacle not an insurmountable wall. As Nelson Mandela said, “Fear is contagious, so is fearlessness. The sooner you act to change your mood and behavior the less damage you’ll do to yourself or your relationships – and the more options you’ll have.

With practice this three-step Mood Channel Change Habit will become second nature. Inevitably that leads to a happier life with others.

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