Interview with David Eagleman: What Is Our Brain Doing When We Click News Articles?
I call this interview “neuro-literacy” about news. I’ve transcribed it from audio and edited it slightly for clarity.
For a while now, there has been much brouhaha over trust and news in the U.S. The connection between the two is implicitly made by everyone from journalism’s leading thinkers to foundations worried about American democracy. But the neuroscience on what is trust in the brain in the context of digital news and media stress is hardly discussed.
I interviewed social neuroscientist David Eagleman (of the Emmy-nominated PBS Brain series) about this. We got into what the brain is actually doing when we are about to click a news article and many exchanges followed.
Eagleman flat out says we place too much semantic weight on the word “trust”. Read his explanation on this because it offers clarity on how trust comes into play as a behavior. This will help us re-examine whether the trust word is overloaded into too much of our current discourse about tech, news distribution, and human behavior.
Let’s start with when people are actually about to click an article on their feed (they haven’t actually read it), they’ve seen the headline — it could be something outlandish like the “Pope Endorsed Trump”, the usual fake news — or it could be a normal headline, like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi cut a deal. The decision on whether to click the headline on not — how much of it is a particularly thoughtful one? We make these decisions every second we’re on the feed. We’re not spending an hour thinking about clicking something that we read only for half a minute. So is there something to the thinking process about how these decisions are being made?
I think probably there are many reasons why somebody clicks because you have these competing neural networks, all of whom are trying to drive the ship. Something feels threatened, something thinks they’re going to get some amusement. Our brains (neural networks), they’re predicting some future reward. The reward could be laughter, somebody thinks this contradicts what was said by someone they love and trust, they think they’re going to get some deal out of it. So there are things about money, there are things about predicting an emotional experience and there are things about social context, like what you think your friends would approve of or not approve of or you know, what your friends would do or wouldn’t do.
All of these are different reasons why you might click on something. So there’s never a single reason. What happens in the brain is all of your decisions are driven by all of these different networks, each of which is competing to steer the ship. The way to think about the brain is like a neural parliament where we’ve got different political parties, all of whom are trying to get their voice heard. The reason you click on news articles not ever because of one thing. It’s could be multiple things. And of course, it depends exactly on who you are at that moment. Are you hungry? Are you worried about your finances? Are you thinking about your spouse’s fidelity? Are you thinking about what you’re going to do that weekend? This will all determine which articles you click on and don’t.
Is your metaphor for the brain as a neural parliament different from Daniel Kahneman’s slow thinking vs. fast thinking?
Yeah, totally. And I wrote about this by the way before Kahneman wrote about his thing in my book Incognito. The “thinking fast and slow” is the two parties in the parliament version. But in fact, we know from two decades of neuroimaging that there are lots and lots of different networks. Some networks are involved in, for example, you know, price points, like, which is a better deal with evaluation or something. Others are involved in emotional experience, others are involved in social context, like what your friends think about something and, and, and lots and lots of other things. And you have stuff working at different timescales too. So something about “Will this benefit me in the long term for who I want to be” is a different network, and other networks are fighting for will this benefit me right now in terms of instant gratification? So the thinking fast and slow is an oversimplification by a very brilliant economist, but not a neuroscientist.
Kahneman is also a psychologist. Let me ask you this. This is actually fascinating to try to apply. On the issue of whether as a user I’m going to click a news article or not, would your explanation change if it wasn’t a news article but was a blog piece or was a post that somebody has written? Does news particularly have a behavioral implication any different than any other posts that are coming up on a social media feed?
Yeah, it would depend if it’s obvious that, I was looking into Fred’s blog and this is his opinion and I might be interested in his opinion either because I love what Fred has to say or I hate what Fred has to say or whatever, cause that’s part of my social milieu. If I can tell on the link that it’s a blog instead of a news article, I would imagine the things that are driving me are approximately the same, which is to say, do I want to be entertained in this moment either because it makes me mad or it makes me laugh or whatever it is that I’m predicting. The difference is, of course, it is much more understandable to me that this is Fred’s opinion and whatever I’m about to dive into, as opposed to the illusion that we have that if it’s a news source, it is just, you know, the truth.
It’s interesting that you’re using the word illusion. Can you explain?
Take Newsmax and Huffpost. The reason I say illusion is because their audiences think what they say is completely factual. Verified and so on. So you have this impression that they must have some journalistic integrity to survive. So it must be true. If (I see it on) Huffpost, it must be true. I’m only mentioning this to say that if it’s a blog, it’s obvious you take it, you interpret it through that filter of “Oh, that’s okay. That’s Fred’s opinion.”
There is a lot of talk about trust. Can we talk about it?
Sure.
So what is trust to you as a neuroscientist? One, how would you define it?
Oh, God. ( Nine-second pause.) I think that’s one of those words that has too much semantic weight on it. Yeah. And one more, um, can you narrow down, give me like in the context of seeing an article, that kind of thing?
From a neuroscience standpoint, would you differentiate trust between people, vs. trust between a person and a news organization?
Actually, no, I wouldn’t. And here’s why. Fundamentally they’re exactly the same.
How so?
Because we have developed all kinds of social circuitry to assess other people. Because we grew up in hunter-gatherer tribes that were small and so much of our brains are devoted to understanding other people. And this is an emerging field called social neuroscience. And this is funny because this is one that’s been totally ignored. The fact is that I have circuitry in my brain representing you, and I’ve only known you for an hour, a total over the course of two meetings. But like I have a representation of you and you have of me. And, both of us have of 5,000 other people too. The point is your brain is unbelievably social and tied into everything going on around you. And it turns out that brains of course did not have time to evolve separate mechanisms for thinking about companies or newspapers or banks or whatever. So your brain uses precisely the same circuitry when it’s thinking about trust and integrity and reputation when thinking about another person or when thinking about a newspaper.
Are you saying that because of research or research-led intuition?
I’m saying this because I published papers on exactly this. I’ll show you exactly what I’m saying. We make moral judgments about people or we take exactly the same story and swap out a company name and we’re measuring people in the scanner. I won’t go through the data right now, but I’m just going to say it’s exactly the same circuits that light up, whether you’re making moral judgments about people or about companies.
[Eagleman shared this paper: “Are corporations people too? The neural correlates of moral judgments about companies and individuals” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470919.2014.978026]
That’s really interesting.
Yes. You know, say Fred cheated you out of $5. And say some big brand shoe company cheated you out of $5. It’s exactly the same brain circuits that light up when we are thinking about these moral things.
Which means the news companies should be no different from companies that are also organizational entities, for e.g. the San Francisco Chronicle or some other news outlet.
Our brains evolved to do this thing about trust and integrity, and the reputation of the people around us. And then during the last blink of an eye in evolutionary time, suddenly you had organizations.
When you bring up trust, integrity, and reputation, you’re bringing it up together. Why are you bringing these up together?
Because what I’m saying is these are all words. I can probably come up with five others.
You’re saying that’s the same circuitry that gets activated when those types of judgments are presumably being made?
Yes, to the best of our technology’s resolution. They are exactly the same circuit. Say when you think about Huffpost or Breitbart, it’s like a person who you don’t like, who doesn’t have integrity, who you don’t trust. All your friends think that person has a bad reputation.
So do you care about whether a neuroscientist should have a definition for trust? Because the sociologists and the philosophers, all have theirs. I mean there’s a whole set of pages in Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy on trust. Do you care?
I don’t care.
But it’s used a lot in media literature, David. Every major foundation funding journalism has been barking about it, on the fact that public trust in journalism, media, liberal institutions, and liberal democracy is busted. But again, just as a neuroscientist, what is trust to you? Is it a single rival team that’s voting into our brain or is it a complex process?
It’s a complex process but I still stand by what I said before, which is that there’s probably too much semantic weight on that one word. Just like the Stanford Encyclopedia would have it.
But what I’m saying is there’s a sense in which that doesn’t matter. Because when you’re judging — is that person trustworthy, is that news site trustworthy — what your brain is trying to do in the end, while it has lots of things going on, is just trying to come up with a single answer like, “Nope, not spending my time on that one”. Because what you’re always trying to do is figure out, given all the opportunities in the world, how do I navigate my time given that it’s a limited thing before I have to get to my next dinner meeting or whatever. And so trust comes down to “Nope, not going there.” I’m reading that less, it is less valuable to me because it’s not trustworthy. That’s the only thing I care about trust.
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Also see: ‘Values,’ Not ‘Trust,’ is American Journalism’s Great Challenge
I direct Journalism and Media Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Thanks to journalist-author and playwright Sarah Shourd (@sshourd) for introducing me to David Eagleman.
