Your brain is a social brain. It can tell what your friends are thinking, how they feel and it can even predict the future. It’s this intimate connection to others that lets us work together to build everything from sports teams to civilizations. But this is our social brain in the physical world. What happens when we move online?

Because we know how our brain works in social situations we can see that the whole beautiful system is reduced to a crude shadow by social networks like Facebook. But why does it all go wrong?

Lets start by taking a tour through our social brain and how it works.

I’ve never met you, but I know your type

The first way the social brain organizes information about individuals is by considering what category it can lump them into. Tribe, sex, race, job, politics. It doesn’t matter what the grouping is, as long as our brain can categorize them into some class its experienced before.

Voila! We’ve just labeled someone with a stereotype.

From an evolutionary perspective we need to be able to make a quick and dirty quick judgment to see if a stranger will affect our survival. Strangers compete with us for food and resources, and may even threaten us physically. The key brain region involved here is the amygdala, it deals with just about everything to do with value judgments, both positive and negative. Fear, desire, danger, food and sex.

Since we’re not in the Stone Age, stereotyping is rarely the difference between life and death for us, but it remains as a handy shortcut when we don’t have enough detailed information about someone new.

Let’s get to know each other

Being social animals we can’t leave our interactions with others at the stereotype level. When we move closer socially, crude groupings just don’t cut it. We now switch to the second way our brain process social information; People as individuals.

1) Direct experience. This by far the most common way of learning and doesn’t need a lot of explanation. The main nugget of information we assess with one-on-one interaction is measuring the trust and reciprocity people are capable of.

2) Observation. Here we learn the reputation of individuals through observing their interactions with others. A neat example of why this is important to us is the phenomenon of altruistic third party punishment. This is where a third person observing an economic transaction will willingly punish someone they see being unfair, even if they are not involved in the situation.

3) Learning about individuals from others. The previous two points apply equally well to other primate species, but learning the reputation of an individual from talking to other people is uniquely human. It’s the foundations of gossip, and moving from a tribe size of 150 to millions.

But what if you know someone personally and you also know about the group they’re from? How does your brain decide which information to rely on – especially if the two views are opposing? In what is a vote of confidence for a tolerant society, personal information trumps the crude sketch of stereotypes. Our social brain just loves gathering more detailed information and isn’t satisfied to leave it at stereotypes given the opportunity.

So stereotypes and personal interaction are the two basic ways we collect information about people. But it’s what happens next that is truly amazing. Our social brain begins to see into the minds of those around us.

I know what you’re doing

Decoding social signals is a complex dance of observation and interpretation. But for our social brain it’s so automatic that you don’t even notice it. In fact it’s so adept with social cues, that it’s constantly predicting the future outcome of others actions. When we observe others in motion we automatically calculate what happens next. If you’re watching a basket ball game and you see a free throw in action, a lot of the time you can tell if the ball will go in only moments after it’s left the hands of the shooter.

While this is a useful way for our brains to learn physics and throwing spears at woolly mammoths, it has deeper implications for social interactions. And it’s all due to one region of your brain called the superior temporal sulcus (STS). We not only predict what will happen but also assign intent to peoples actions. Why did they do that? What is their goal?

A great example of this is a study where researchers asked people to pick up a variety of different boxes. They were all told how much the boxes weighed, but on rare occasions they were misinformed and the box was either lighter or heavier than expected. The entire process was recorded and then shown to a different group of people.

The brains of this group were monitored and it was revealed that the levels of activity in the STS changed when determining if the actions were intentional or unintentional. Even when the weight difference wasn’t great, the subtle postures before and after picking up the box were enough to let us peer into the minds of others and see what they were thinking before and after picking up the odd box.

While simplistic, this experiment demonstrates how finely tuned our brain is at determining if actions are intentional. This of course is an essential skill in all social interactions to determine if someone’s actions are genuine and not merely faked.

I feel your pain

We have an automatic tendency to share others experiences, to empathize with them. The most obvious example is yawning. If you see someone yawn you yourself are quite likely to yawn. Yawning is so contagious that since I’ve written the word yawn six times now it’s a good bet that yawning has broken out amongst a lot of you reading this. I certainly yawned a lot writing it.

It’s likely that empathy and shared experience is due to an amazing set of circuits in our social brain called mirror neurons. These nerve cells respond to the perceived experiences of others, and mirror the effect by activating similar regions of our own brain. If you see someone wince when they hit their thumb with a hammer, we also react and even pull our hand away. For better or worse, the entire reality TV genre couldn’t exist without mirror neurons, making us flinch when someone gets hit or eats something disgusting.

We also see more subtle examples of empathy all around us under the guise of body language, and the tendency to mimic others we have a connection to.

Empathy only goes so far though. If our knowledge about an individual and the group they belong to grows and we deem them untrustworthy, the shared response to their experiences is diminished. In fact when it comes to feeling their pain, the opposite may even be true. In one study observers of a trading game saw that one individual broke the trust of the group by “cheating” and that they were also in pain. This actually activated the striatum of the observers, a region associated with pleasure and reward instead of the mirror system.

I see what you mean

A key part of empathy is being able to see things from another person’s perspective. But the reverse isn’t true: you can understand someone else’s perspective without feeling what they do. The prefrontal cortex does the heavy lifting here, away from the amygdala and those messy emotions.

Strangely enough, one thing that seems to automatically trigger mental perspective taking is cartoons. Even with something as simple as XKCD, it’s is easy to assign emotions and intentions of movement to the characters, and it’s even easier when cartoons are animated.

Our almost unlimited capacity for abstract concepts allows us to antropormorphize these objects into something resembling human social behavior. It’s also the reason nudges and virtual gifts on Facebook are so popular – it’s a proxy for our lack of real social information.

Information flow is not a one-way street

So what’s the purpose of collecting and calculating all his information about other people? Why do you care where they’re walking to, what they’re thinking about, and what they intend to do?
The machinery of the social brain in all it’s guises is concerned with only one goal: better communication with others. But not only do we need to know what others are thinking, it’s also just as important for us to communicate our mental state, feelings and trustworthiness.

A staggering sense of loss

The brain has developed and devoted considerable resources to predicting social situations and even though you may not be consciously aware, it’s very good at making predictions. The brain still makes mistakes though (the crude group stereotype) but like forecasting the weather, the more detailed information the brain has, the more accurate the predictions get.

This is why interfaces like Facebook are but a shadow of true social interaction. Static pictures, text based hugs and instant messaging omits all the nuances of normal interaction. We are hard wired to gather information at multiple levels, which just aren’t possible with the stunted interfaces of online communities like Facebook.

In the first section of this article I discussed how we judge an individual by the groups they fall into, it’s crude but the only option for our brain to grab onto when information is limited. Our knowledge of individuals only improves with more nuanced and more detailed exposure. Social networks like Facebook have turned this information flow into reverse, where group association is the strongest measure of an individual and observation of personal behavior is absent. Needless to say that determining intention from actions is all but impossible.

Empathy and “other people’s perspective” are also reduced to crude caricatures that can’t move beyond someone typing, “I am sad” and buying a virtual bouquet of flowers.

The fallout from understanding the neuroscience of the social brain is that we don’t have 500 friends on Facebook. Indeed, we ourselves are no more than a stereotypical member of a group of 500.

But as we discussed, the social brain has an automatic and strong desire for information about other people. This in part, explains the multi-million dollar Facebook application industry, by monetizing our desire to connect and understand others and to let them know we are the same. A quick glance at the recently popular Facebook apps page reveals that nearly all of them transport information about yourself to others and vice versa. Not toys, not amusing games, but communication tools. But you can’t substitute the intricacies of human interaction with trinkets such as virtual poking, and charging money for virtual gifts.

In this way, tapping into our social brain and our wallets is as insidious as charging a blind person for glasses. It cannot hope to replicate the cues our social brain evolved to look for.

Facebook does serve a purpose though, it’s a communication tool – like a cell phone. But every tool has its limitations. You don’t buy a cell phone because it’s as good as getting a hug from your friends.

Don’t stop using Facebook, just don’t forget to keep your social brain active in the area were it works brilliantly – the physical world. Online networks will always have a place in our communication tool box, but to call Facebook a social network is to say the Sesame Street coloring book has the same emotional impact as Shakespeare.

Since the human brain is a social brain, so you already know you won’t find me on Facebook, but you can still make a great connection when you subscribe to the RSS or Email updates.

original image by jmsmytase remixed by Patrick

February 16th, 2009