But that’s not all. Our brains are not only designed to make us feel good when we have high status—they are also programmed to make us pursue it. The reason for this is that the ventral striatum rarely acts alone. It’s part of a group of regions that neuroscientists like my colleague Kristen Lindquist call the “motivational relevance network.” Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist from the University of Michigan, is an expert in the motivational relevance network and has studied the brain’s likes and wants—in other words, what feels good and why we so doggedly pursue more of it. His work has revealed that the ventral striatum sends neural outputs to locations throughout the brain, such as the ventral pallidum. The ventral pallidum translates our likes into a strong motivation to act—to get more of what we want. In other words, it affects our behavior and can also affect our emotions. In fact, the ventral pallidum has been linked with a variety of addictions and the emotional attachment we may develop to things we know are not so good for us.
Some of the connections that govern our likes and wants also occur in the cortex, the region of the brain that sits atop the subcortical regions we share with many other species. The cortex is where we think—a process that includes consciously recognizing what we like and deliberating whether or not to pursue it. Among adults, thinking helps restrain us from becoming too obsessed with any of our desires, such as popularity. By our mid-twenties, the rest of our brain has caught up to the early-developing ventral striatum, and the cortex helps us act sensibly, enabling us to resist the urge to fulfill every want.
But many neural connections also occur below the cortex, like the ones between the ventral striatum and ventral pallidum. Berridge explains that these subcortical connections can lead us to pursue certain behaviors without realizing we are doing so, and later, we may even reflect upon them as being irrational—like becoming giddy when we see a celebrity, or blurting out our desires when it is inappropriate to do so. In fact, subcortical connections are so strong that we begin to “want” not just those things that directly give us social rewards, but anything that has been paired with social reward, Pavlovian style. We soon begin to want things that simply remind us of high status, such as beauty or excessive wealth, whether or not they will actually benefit us. Berridge refers to these links as “motivational magnets.”
If you talk to any adolescent, it is easy to see how their wants are related to a craving for social rewards and high status. By the time we are thirteen, it seems as if there is nothing more important to us than this type of popularity. We talk about who has it. We strategize how to get it. We are devastated when we lose it. We even do things we know are wrong, immoral, illegal, or dangerous merely to obtain status, or to fiercely defend it. Adolescents are virtually addicted to popularity—at least the type based on status.
This is exactly what we learn when my graduate students and I meet with teenagers to study their behavior with peers. In fact, this predilection seems to be becoming even more pronounced now that teens can enter a social rewards lottery with every mouse click on social media. When we talk with teens about what’s most important to them, it seems all we hear is a craving for, and strategy to attain, social rewards.
“I want the most Twitter followers in my school,” one subject tells us.
“If I post a pic on Instagram, and it doesn’t get, like, thirty ‘likes’ in the first few minutes, then I take it down,” another says.
“You have to ‘like’ whatever your friend posts right away or you are not being a good friend,” explains a third.
“Why?” we ask them. “Tell us why your social media profiles are so important.”
“It’s like being famous” is a typical response. “It’s cool. Everyone knows you, and you are, like, the most important person in school.”
Or, “If you’re popular, if everyone is talking about you, you can go out with whoever you want. You can be friends with anyone. It just, like, feels good.”
Is this obsession with social media also true of adults? We all know those who use it as fervently as today’s teens—posting incessantly, soliciting attention in the form of “likes” and retweets, and so on. In fact, the ventral striatum remains just as active in adulthood. Granted, as we age we are better able to control these impulses. But for the rest of our lives, we will still experience the drive to gain social rewards and to have high status. The more we learn about the brain, the more we discover how much this desire for status can change us, without our even realizing it.
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What did you do today to raise your status? Did you pick out attractive clothes to wear so others would notice you? Did you put on an expensive watch that makes you feel powerful or prestigious? Maybe you sent an email to colleagues that you hoped would leverage your influence at work. Or perhaps you just posted on Facebook or Twitter. These are all pretty obvious things we might do to make us feel as if we have higher status, and we’re usually pretty aware of what we are doing when we do make choices like these to gain social rewards.
But is that all? What else reflects our status yearnings? It turns out that our ventral striatum is linked to a much wider range of our behaviors and emotions than we once thought.
For instance, research shows that when we read about high-status people, talk about them, or even just look at them, those actions are sufficient to activate the social reward centers in our brains. In fact, we tend to gaze at high-status peers (of the same or opposite gender) much longer than we look at others around us. In other words, without our even realizing it, our brains habitually orient us toward status all day long.
We also experience social rewards when we believe that someone we admire likes us in return. Anyone who has ever fantasized about meeting a celebrity and then becoming best friends can relate to this concept. This is not a far cry from the high school yearning to have the most popular kid notice us, and it all can be traced back to the same adolescent surge in our desire for social rewards.
Chris Davey and his colleagues in Australia and Spain tested this idea in a study of adults. They asked participants to review a series of photos of people they had never met before and then to indicate how much they admired each individual. They were led to believe that the subjects in those photos did the same to them. Next, they were placed in an fMRI (functional MRI) scanner and shown the photos again, but this time given information about whether each of the individuals in the photos admired them in return. The reward centers of the brain became active whenever participants believed that others esteemed them. That finding makes sense, as being admired provides us with social rewards. But the most interesting result of the study was that those same brain regions were most strongly activated when participants believed they were admired by their own favorite peers. Gaining approval from those we look up to seems to be particularly valuable to the reward centers.
Research also shows that when we are tempted by social rewards, we are particularly likely to act impulsively. This may explain why so many of us have done regrettable things when we are in the presence of high-status peers.
This was most recently demonstrated by Leah Somerville at Harvard and B. J. Casey at Cornell, who adapted a computer game to determine whether we lose some of our inhibitions when faced with social rewards. The game was simple: participants were asked to press the space bar on a keyboard when they saw one stimulus on-screen, but not when they saw another. When this game is used with letters as the stimuli (e.g., press the space bar when the letter R is displayed, but not when the letter J appears), it can help make a diagnosis of ADHD. But in their study, Somerville and Casey replaced the letters with pictures of smiling or neutral faces, and the participants were placed in an fMRI to have their brains scanned. The researchers found that the sight of smiling pictures offered social rewards—after all, a smile is an instinctual cue of approval, like the approval we get when we have high status. Most relevant, however, was that in the presence of these social rewards, partici
pants performed much more poorly at the task, suggesting that they weren’t able to control their impulses as well. This was especially true of subjects who were adolescents or older. No one is immune to this effect—ask my wife and she’ll tell you about the time we ran into one of my favorite actresses, and I began fawning like a twelve-year-old fan. There is something about status that naturally reduces our inhibitions.
The promise of social rewards can even change our own most basic attitudes and preferences without us even realizing it. Stanford student Erik Nook and psychologist Jamil Zaki investigated what happens in our brain when we conform to others. In their study, Nook and Zaki initially asked adults to report on their liking of different foods (chips, candy, fruits, vegetables), which were displayed in a series of photos. After they rated each item, participants were then shown a statistic that ostensibly reported the average rating of the previous two hundred study participants for the same food. The statistic was bogus, of course, but it enabled the investigators to examine the brain’s response to the opinions of others. As expected, corroboration produced activity in the ventral striatum. We experience social rewards simply by learning that others agree with us.
The investigators then took their experiment one step further. After the participants were presented the bogus feedback, they were asked to rate each food again. Nook and Zaki wanted to see if any of the subjects would change their assessments after hearing how their responses lined up with those of others, even for something as inconsequential as food preferences. Their findings suggested that this is exactly what happened: most everyone conformed to others at least to some degree, but most interestingly, the people most likely to conform were those who had the largest responses in their ventral striatum in the first part of the experiment. The results demonstrated that not only are we biologically primed to enjoy feeling that others agree with us but those of us who have the most dramatic social reward response are especially likely to conform to the views of others. This all takes place outside of our conscious awareness.
Our desire for social rewards doesn’t only affect our behavior. It also has significant effects on our emotions, even our most fundamental feelings about who we are. Adolescence, the stage in our lives when our biological cravings for status are suddenly heightened, is also the period when we first develop our sense of identity.
Ask young children how they feel or what kind of person they are and they will offer answers that are based on whatever happened to them in the last few minutes or hours. But in adolescence, we become more capable of thinking about ourselves in a way that cuts across time and recent experiences. We develop a stable sense of self, and the juxtaposition of our identity development with the rapid increase in ventral striatum activity leads to a process psychologists call “reflected appraisal.” In other words, we begin to base our self-esteem not on how we feel, but on how we gauge that others approve of us. If everyone in homeroom thinks that we’re cool, it means that we are cool. If we are teased or ignored by our peers, we don’t interpret it to mean that they are being mean or rude; rather, we take it as evidence of our own unworthiness. In adolescence, our self-concept is not merely informed by how our peers treat us but is fully dictated by such experiences.
Reflected appraisal continues into adulthood, too, but for some more than others. Many people’s sense of identity seems to be overly influenced by the last bit of positive or negative feedback they received. Hearing that someone likes them makes them feel like a good person, while exclusion turns them into total failures. Some are so invested in having high status (whether fame, beauty, power, or wealth) that it seems as if their entire identity is dependent on it. Neuroscience research supports these observations. We now know that neural outputs from the ventral striatum lead to our brain’s “emotional salience” network, including the amygdala and parts of our hippocampus. These regions influence our emotional arousal, our most meaningful memories, and our experience that something has affected us in a personal and profound manner. Consequently, when we crave social rewards, we don’t feel casually about it but view it as the basis of our self-worth. We may even begin to believe that status is synonymous with contentment. If we are not famous, powerful, beautiful, wealthy, or influential, then we must be worthless. This is not a great recipe for happiness.
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Do you still long for status? Do you desire motivational magnets—things that you associate with high standing, like beauty or great wealth? How often is your behavior driven by a yearning for extrinsic reward, and to what degree do you allow your inner experience of happiness and self-worth to be influenced by your popularity among peers?
It’s much safer to say popularity sucks, because that allows you to forgive yourself if you suck.
—Cameron Crowe
The truth is, we all want to have a certain degree of status. It is a natural product of our neurochemistry and our developmental history. Enjoying social rewards—feeling the high of exalted status—and seeking even more of it is perfectly normal. It’s when we begin pursuing high status excessively that we can get into trouble.
In contemporary society, there are at least four ways that our pursuit of popularity through increasing status has gone awry.
POPULARITY PROBLEM #1:
How Far Will We Go for Status?
In 1939, a five-year-old girl named Valerie Jane disappeared. For an entire day, her family, neighbors, and the police searched tirelessly for her, but to no avail. The little girl had recently become curious about animals and particularly concerned with one puzzling question: how could something as large as an egg come out of a hen—an animal with no obvious opening to accommodate it? To answer her question, Valerie Jane quietly crawled into a henhouse, covered herself with straw, and lay motionless for the entire afternoon until she watched one of the fowl lay an egg. Only then did she emerge and return safely home.
Valerie Jane grew up to be Dr. Jane Goodall, who at the age of twenty-six quietly entered the Gombe Forest of Tanzania to observe chimpanzees—our closest evolutionary cousins, which share at least 90 percent of our DNA. Over the years, Goodall’s discoveries challenged accepted notions in ethology, revealing that many behaviors originally thought to be unique to humans are also common in other species.
Goodall discovered that chimpanzees want to be popular, too. They don’t brag about how many Twitter followers they have, but they do use status to determine which individual gets first access to resources. Among many animals, the most popular members of a group are young and able to maintain loyalty from others. High-status males typically are strong; females are socially shrewd. Popular chimps get first pick of food and mating partners. Status therefore offers chimpanzees a survival advantage: the more they are attuned to status and driven toward the social rewards it offers, the better chance they have at meeting their basic needs.
Goodall has described a day in the life of a sanctuary built by her foundation to help chimps and other primates return safely to their natural habitat. On a beautiful spring day in the Republic of the Congo, one of these chimps, a female whom Goodall calls Silaho, met some of the new sanctuary residents. Silaho had been transferred there a few months earlier, and in the time since, she had established a community among ten others. She was indisputably the “alpha” of the group. But then three new chimpanzees arrived. Naturally, Silaho did what any host might do when greeting guests: she violently attacked them into submission. Later, she did so again. Ultimately, Goodall explains, Silaho and three others in her group teamed together and tormented the visitors until they fled to the opposite side of the island. These three new chimpanzees remained ostracized from the rest of the community for months, while Silaho’s status remained intact. Goodall, along with many other ethologists studying species in every corner of our planet, suggests that aggressive behavior is one very effective way that animals establish dominance and status among their peers. It is their natural instinct to do so.
Seven thousand miles east of Congo, anthropology professor Don Merten was observing a group of cheerleaders in an American high school. In this school, the cheerleaders ruled. Others looked up to them, they had first access to the most popular boys, and they set the trends that many other girls followed.
When an unpopular girl decided to join the cheerleading squad, Merten reports, the other girls reflexively behaved aggressively toward her. They teased her. They ostracized her. They made sure that her reputation was besmirched across the entire grade.
The cheerleaders knew their treatment of her was mean, and even recognized that it would earn them reputations as stuck-up snobs. It didn’t matter. Merten’s research suggests that the function of aggression is to protect the exclusivity that defines status itself. It is a necessary evil to maintain dominance. The cheerleaders explained to Merten that allowing a lower-status girl to join their group would come with a cost—a decline in the squad’s status. His work subsequently demonstrated that each time a high-status teen acted aggressively in school, whether toward someone in his group or even someone similarly high in status, it was to preserve the social hierarchy. A punch in the face or the start of a nasty rumor was an act of dominance, letting victims and onlookers alike know the boundaries that defined status in that school. Threats to the social order are sanctioned by publically forcing submissiveness.
Psychologists refer to this type of hostile behavior as “proactive aggression,” and research suggests that it is highly reinforcing. Unlike other uses of aggression that are hot-blooded, impulsive, and uncontrolled reactions to anger or frustration—also known as “reactive aggression”—proactive aggression is cold-blooded, calculating, and targeted precisely toward those who threaten the perpetrators’ dominance. Proactive aggression is goal oriented, and the goal is to obtain or defend status.
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