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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Most of us tend to think of the first conversation, the content, as the important one. We worry a lot about what to say when we’re preparing for an important meeting, giving a big speech, or proposing marriage. We rarely give as much thought to the second conversation: the body language.  Then when the communication doesn’t go well, we’re surprised and don’t understand why.

The reason is usually that our two conversations have been in conflict with one another. Our words were confident perhaps, but our body language — the second conversation was nervous. And as research into how the brain works grows in depth and sophistication, we’re coming to understand that what I’m calling the second conversation is actually more important in some ways than the first one.

What we’re learning is that we get nonverbal, unconscious impulses for a lot of the important things that drive us: relationships, safety, emotional needs, fears, desires, meeting new people, seeing old friends, and so on.  Our bodies immediately start to act on these impulses, and then, a bit later, we form a conscious thought about what we’re doing. It’s as though our rational minds are explaining to ourselves after the fact why we’re doing something.

For example, we are all unconscious experts at reading other people’s body language. But few of us are good at reading body language consciously. Instead, we get impressions and ascribe intent to the other person. We think to ourselves: “He doesn’t like me very much,” or “She’s trying to cut me out,” or “They really think I’m funny.”  And it’s at this level of intent that most of our own body language begins.

If you start to think consciously about your body language because you want to control it and make it align with your content, you run into a problem: you’re thinking consciously about an unconscious activity, which slows your body language down and makes it happen just a bit late. The people around you, those unconscious experts, sense that something is wrong, but they can’t put their fingers on the problem precisely. They’ll think something like: “He didn’t seem real” or “She looked fake — scripted or something.” They won’t tell you the real problem — that your gestures and content are out of sync — because they’re not consciously aware of what’s going on.

Instead, then, of trying to control your body language consciously, work on it unconsciously.  Get an emotional attitude, and because emotion drives gestures, that will take care of your body language.  So, if you’re giving a big speech, decide what your emotional attitude is toward it:  excitement, passion, fun – anything but nervousness.  Then focus on that emotion hard before you start to speak.  Think to yourself: “I’m thrilled to be able to speak with these people. It’s a great opportunity.  I’m going to rock!” You’ll find that your body language and content are aligned when you do this, and you will become a persuasive, effective communicator.

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