0:14 Morning. We all want those that we love
0:16 to be around longer, right? So maybe
0:18 you've tried to convince someone that
0:21 you care about to eat a healthier diet,
0:23 quit smoking. And on a broad scale,
0:25 public health officials tried to do this
0:27 as well. They do this with health
0:28 campaigns because there are a lot of
0:31 data showing that behaviors that we can
0:35 change like smoking, sitting around too
0:37 much or for teens, car crashes are the
0:40 leading causes of death. So if we could
0:41 change these behaviors, if we could
0:43 motivate people to want to change them,
0:46 it could have a really big impact. If we
0:47 have an effective campaign, it could
0:49 save many, many lives. Whereas if we
0:51 have an ineffective campaign, it could
0:53 waste millions of dollars or even make
0:55 things worse. But figuring out what's
0:56 going to be an effective campaign is
0:59 actually a really challenging task. For
1:01 example, if you think back on the
1:03 various anti-smoking messages you've
1:05 seen in your lifetime. Now consider the following
1:14 ad. I quit when yesterday
1:17 girl. But I could always quit again
1:20 tomorrow. Quitting is hard but dialing
1:23 1800 quit now is easy.
1:24 Okay. Okay. So, if you are a public
1:26 health official considering whether to
1:29 spend your budget on a series of ads, a
1:32 campaign made up of fingers that look
1:34 like people encouraging people to call a
1:36 tobacco quit line, you might first start
1:38 with your own intuition, right? What do
1:39 you like? What don't you like? Do you
1:41 think this will be an effective
1:43 ad? And in a study that my colleagues
1:45 and I ran, we started out with some
1:47 similar information. We went and talked
1:49 to a number of different professionals
1:50 about what kinds of televised
1:52 antismoking campaigns they thought would
1:55 work and not work. And their intuition
1:57 suggested that this group of ads, these
1:59 finger ads in a campaign probably
2:00 wouldn't be that
2:03 effective. But next, you might go and
2:05 talk to your target audience. And we did
2:07 this as well. We recruited a number of
2:10 smokers and we surveyed them. We said,
2:12 "Which campaigns, which ads do you think
2:14 are the best and which do you think are
2:16 the worst?" Their intuitions also
2:18 suggested that these finger ads were a
2:20 little bit annoying. They might not work
2:22 that well. But the problem with both of
2:25 these methods, expert and lay intuition
2:26 alike, is that people are actually
2:29 notoriously bad at guessing what's going
2:32 to be effective for themselves. So for
2:33 smokers, what's going to motivate them
2:36 to change their behavior? And for other
2:38 people, what's an effective campaign on
2:41 the whole? So to get around this issue,
2:42 my team asked a question that hadn't
2:45 really been asked before. Namely, is
2:48 there hidden information in the brain
2:49 that can help us figure out things that
2:52 are hard to figure out otherwise? Maybe
2:55 our brains are smarter than our
2:57 intuitions. And what we found in my lab,
3:00 I direct a lab at Penn where we spend a
3:02 lot of our time trying to go behind the
3:03 scenes in the brain and figure out how
3:06 it makes decisions. And we've discovered
3:08 that by knowing what's happening in
3:10 people's brains, we can actually predict
3:12 the effectiveness of campaigns,
3:14 different kinds of persuasive messaging
3:16 better than just by knowing what people
3:19 think is going to work. So to give you a
3:21 little bit of an example of this, I told
3:23 you we asked a number of different
3:24 people for their opinions about those
3:26 smoking ads. And actually, the finger
3:28 puppet ad that I showed you was one of
3:30 several in a campaign that I'm going to
3:32 refer to as campaign C. So, I'm going to
3:34 refer to campaign A, campaign B, and
3:36 campaign C. There are three campaigns
3:38 that we are comparing. And as I said,
3:40 first we asked what people thought would
3:42 be effective and ineffective. And the
3:44 height of the bars here represents how
3:46 much they liked the campaigns. So, they
3:48 thought campaign C would be the worst
3:50 and campaign B would be the
3:53 best. Next, we looked at what happened
3:55 in their brains when they were watching
3:57 the three different campaigns. And
3:58 there, we saw a slightly different
4:00 pattern. We saw the greatest amount of
4:04 activity in response to campaign C, then
4:06 B, then A, in a part of the brain that
4:08 sits right here behind your forehead and
4:11 tracks how relevant and valuable people
4:13 find information, how much it really
4:15 resonates with them. Finally, we went on
4:18 to say, how much did these campaigns
4:19 actually affect something that we care
4:21 about in the real world? So, we looked
4:23 at how much they changed calls to a
4:26 tobacco quit line. What was the
4:28 population level effectiveness? And
4:30 there what we found was that although
4:32 all three campaigns increased calls to
4:34 the quit line, they did so at different
4:37 rates. So campaign C increased the calls
4:41 the most, then B, and then A. So one
4:43 thing you might notice is that the
4:45 pattern that we saw in the brain was
4:47 similar to what happened when we looked
4:48 at what actually worked in the real
4:50 world. And that was different than what
4:52 people told us they thought would happen.
4:53 happen.
4:55 So this highlights one of the
4:57 limitations of just asking people what
5:00 their intuitions are as well as one of
5:02 the potential promises of understanding
5:04 how the brain works and using that to
5:06 try to make better
5:09 campaigns. We then went on to run
5:11 another campaign to see if we could get
5:13 this to happen again. And so we looked
5:15 at images this time, images that
5:18 highlight the dangers of smoking. And we
5:19 partnered with the Michigan Center for
5:21 Health Communications Research in the
5:23 state of New York. And we took dozens of
5:24 different images. Here, I'm just showing you
5:25 you
5:27 two. And you can see that on the
5:30 surface, these two images look pretty
5:32 similar. But in order to figure out
5:33 which were the good images and which
5:36 were the bad images, we formatted each
5:38 of those images into an email. And at
5:41 the top of the email, there was the
5:44 tagline, "Stop smoking, start living."
5:46 And at the bottom there was a link where
5:48 smokers that we
5:51 emailed could click to get help
5:54 quitting. So our real world measure of
5:55 effectiveness here is going to be how
5:57 many smokers once they see one of these
6:01 images click to get help quitting. But
6:02 first what we did was we collected brain
6:04 data on a really small group of smokers
6:07 in Michigan. We showed them all the
6:08 different images, the dozens of images
6:10 that we were comparing, and we looked at
6:12 what happened in this brain region that
6:15 tracks self-relevance and value. Then
6:17 next, in collaboration with New York, we
6:20 sent an email with one image per smoker
6:23 to hundreds of thousands of people, and
6:25 we looked at how much they were willing
6:28 to click and think about getting
6:30 help. So, first, what we found was that
6:32 there were some clear winners and losers
6:34 here. And what I'm going to show you on
6:37 this slide is images that did really
6:38 well, that were the winners, that
6:40 generated a lot of clicks in the email
6:41 campaign. I'm going to show those higher
6:43 up on the slide. And then I'm going to
6:45 show you the brain activity in terms of
6:47 how far to the right it
6:50 is. And what we discovered was that
6:52 there was a clear relationship between
6:56 the brain activity and the email clicks.
6:58 So the images that generated the most
7:00 brain activity in our small group of
7:02 smokers in Michigan then went on to get
7:04 the most clicks in the real world
7:07 campaign in New York. For example, if we
7:09 go back to those two images that we were
7:11 comparing, although they look pretty
7:12 similar on the surface, you can see that
7:15 the one in the upper right generated
7:17 both a lot of brain activity in our
7:19 small group of smokers as well as many
7:22 more clicks in the email campaign. So,
7:24 so far what I've shown you is that da
7:26 that data from this part of the brain,
7:28 information from this part of the brain
7:31 that tracks the self-relevance and value
7:32 can predict behavioral outcomes that we
7:34 care about. It can predict what people
7:35 are going to
7:38 do. But how do we use this in practice?
7:39 Right? Assuming we're not going to run
7:41 every single campaign, every single idea
7:42 that we want to air going forward
7:45 through a brain scanner. We have to
7:47 understand what the brain is telling us
7:49 about why some messages are effective
7:50 and why some messages are less
7:52 effective. So what's the brain telling
7:54 us? Well, first I've mentioned a few
7:56 times now that this part of the brain
7:58 that we've been focusing on tracks
8:00 self-relevance and value. So how do we
8:02 make campaigns resonate? How do we make
8:05 campaigns feel self-relevant to our
8:08 target audience? You may have given
8:10 advice to someone you care about, right?
8:11 And you know that it's easy to give
8:13 advice, but it's hard to give that kind
8:15 of advice that resonates. So let's think
8:17 about one reason that messages fail.
8:19 Well, one reason that messages fail,
8:21 even though we could all exercise more,
8:23 eat healthier diets, right? Maybe you've
8:24 tried to convince your kids to study
8:26 harder, right? We could all do these
8:29 things, but when we ask people to do
8:31 them, you might have found that people
8:32 don't like having this kind of
8:34 information pointed out about
8:36 themselves. We get defensive. We come up
8:38 with reasons why the information doesn't
8:42 apply to us. Why do we do this? Well,
8:43 one of the reasons that we do it is
8:45 because we all want to feel good about
8:47 ourselves, right? We want to feel like
8:48 we're behaving in reasonable ways. We're
8:52 reasonable people, right? So, when we
8:53 have it pointed out that the way we're
8:55 behaving isn't
8:59 optimal, this can threaten that sort of
9:00 self-image. Psychologists have been
9:02 studying this phenomenon for a long
9:04 time. And what we now know from a few
9:07 decades of research is that actually if
9:09 you give people a chance to first think
9:11 about sources of broader meaning and
9:13 purpose in their lives, things like
9:15 their friends or family, other core
9:18 values that they care about before you
9:20 deliver this potentially threatening
9:21 information like a health
9:24 message. What this can do is highlight
9:26 that our sources of self-worth aren't
9:28 tied up with any particular behavior,
9:30 whether we're a smoker, whether we
9:32 exercise enough. And so then that can
9:33 make the specific message less
9:35 threatening and can open us up to behavior
9:36 behavior
9:39 change. The kinds of values that work
9:41 the best are things that really give us
9:44 that wider scope. So for a lot of people
9:45 this is their friends and family, maybe
9:48 their religion. For me, if I were going
9:49 to engage in this kind of values
9:52 affirmation or what psychologists call
9:54 self-affirmation, I might think about my
9:57 husband and our now four-week old twins
9:59 and all of the meaningful things that
10:00 I'm hoping that we get to do together going
10:01 going
10:03 forward. And what our lab has found is
10:05 that if you first give people a chance
10:06 to do this kind of
10:08 self-affirmation, it fundamentally
10:11 changes the way the brain responds to
10:14 the information that comes next. For
10:15 For
10:17 example, we studied this in the context
10:20 of people sitting around too much. And
10:22 we found that self-affirmation can
10:25 change that. Sitting around too much has
10:27 a number of negative health consequences
10:29 from feeling worse on a day-to-day basis
10:31 to increasing your risk for heart
10:32 disease and
10:34 cancer. But if you get a chance to
10:36 self-affirm first, that can change the
10:39 way you process information about the
10:41 benefits of getting more active. The way
10:43 we've studied this is by bringing people
10:46 in whose level of couch potato dum or
10:48 for many of us desk potato dum puts us
10:51 at increased levels of risk. And some of
10:54 the people we've given a chance to first
10:56 self-affirm to think about these sources
10:59 of broader meaning and purpose in their
11:02 lives whereas the other people don't. We
11:04 have them just think about something
11:06 that's less important to them first.
11:08 Then while we look at what's happening
11:11 in their brains, everybody's exposed to
11:14 messages like the more you sit, the more
11:16 damage it does to your body. Or
11:17 according to the American Heart
11:19 Association, people at your level of
11:21 physical inactivity are at increased
11:24 risk for heart disease.
11:26 And we've discovered that the people who
11:28 get to self-affirm first, the people who
11:30 think about these sources of meaning and
11:32 purpose before we show them the health
11:35 messages show much more activity in
11:38 these self-relevance and value regions
11:40 in the brain than people who aren't
11:42 affirmed. And then the people who are
11:45 affirmed go on to change their behavior
11:48 more in the month following. So
11:50 something as simple as reflecting on
11:52 core values that we all have. There are
11:54 things that are important to all of you.
11:56 Reflecting on those kinds of things can
11:59 fundamentally change the way our brain
12:01 responds to the information that comes
12:03 next. And as we think about how to
12:05 change ourselves, our loved ones, and
12:08 our communities for the better, the
12:10 brain is helping us understand how this
12:13 kind of focus on meaning and values has
12:16 benefits not only in itself, but also in
12:18 opening the brain to positive
12:21 change. And even
12:23 though health and happiness are areas
12:25 where we feel like we know ourselves
12:28 really well, we feel like we know what's
12:30 going to help us take the next step and
12:32 do better. Our intuitions about these
12:35 things often turn out to be wrong. But
12:38 data, including secrets that are hidden
12:40 in the brain, can help us figure out
12:43 what works and what doesn't work and can
12:45 also help us figure out how to create
12:48 the conditions that make people more in
12:50 open make people more open to
12:52 information that can help them lead
