Manipulation: Your Brain Is Not an Honest Witness

Two famous experiments about influence, and the cracks that run through both of them.

We live in a time when information reaches us from every direction: news, opinions, promises, warnings, images that frighten us and images that give us hope. Everyone seems to want something from us, our attention, our vote, our money, our belief.

A question I have been asking myself more and more these past few years is this: why are we human beings so easy to influence? Why do people sometimes believe things that later turn out to be untrue? The answer does not lie in stupidity. It lies in the way our brain is built. Two famous studies reveal two weaknesses of that brain, weaknesses that people with power know all too well. And once we come to know them ourselves, we become a great deal harder to manipulate.

The first experiment: the door that only opens for good news

The neuroscientist Tali Sharot is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. She is also an adjunct professor at MIT. She spent years studying how people think about their own future. What she described has a name: the optimism bias.^1,2 In plain language: people systematically underestimate the chance that something bad will happen to them. And they overestimate the chance that things will go well.

Ask a hundred people whether they think they are more or less likely than average to face a divorce, a serious illness, a redundancy. Most will say: less than average. Statistically that cannot be true, not everyone can be better than average. Yet our brain believes it anyway. The pattern has been described across ages and cultures, and even, in adapted form, in other species.³

Sharot also looked inside the brain itself. Participants lay in a scanner and imagined future events. When they pictured positive events rather than negative ones, two regions became more active: the amygdala and part of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex.⁴ In plain language: these are regions that help weigh up how emotionally important something feels. A scan like that shows a correlation, not a cause.

She then found something even more interesting: how people adjust their beliefs when they receive new information. Imagine your brain has two doors through which new information must pass. When good news arrives, “your future is brighter than you thought”, the door stands wide open; you take it in easily. But when bad news arrives, “your future is bleaker than you thought”, the door is almost shut; your belief barely shifts.⁵

This is called selective belief updating. On that account we are not honest processors of information: we let good news in easily and keep bad news out. Not consciously, but by itself, deep in the brain. In a follow-up study, participants were given L-DOPA, a drug that strengthens the action of dopamine. Afterwards they adjusted their expectations even less in response to unwelcome news.³

Why this makes us vulnerable

Imagine someone wants to convince you. What works best? A promise of a better future: “It will all be fine.” “With this product your life will be better.” Such messages glide straight through the open door, they fit our optimism bias perfectly. And what works badly? Warnings: “Be careful, this will go wrong.” Those collide with the closed door; we ignore them, even when they are true.

This explains a great deal: why people ignore health warnings until it is too late, why societies underestimate risks, and why a leader who sells hope often gathers more support than someone who tells the truth about hard times ahead. Something important, though: the optimism bias is not only a flaw. It keeps us going, it gives us the courage to get up, make plans, carry on after setbacks. Without a little unrealistic optimism, almost no one would start a business or chase a dream. But anyone who does not know the bias can be steered by it without noticing.

Where the two doors stop being true

And here the qualification belongs straight away. The two doors are an image, not a measured mechanism. That mechanism has drawn serious criticism, and the criticism deserves a place of its own.

In 2011, Adam Harris and Ulrike Hahn showed that part of the optimism bias may be an arithmetic effect.⁶ In plain language: when an event is rare, and you ask people to compare themselves with the average, even honest answers produce a pattern that looks optimistic.

In 2016, Punit Shah and colleagues went further.⁷ They rebuilt the task with simulations and ran five experiments of their own. They found no evidence of selective updating at all. Their conclusion is blunt: the pattern is a statistical artefact, and no sound test of optimistic updating yet exists.

So what still stands? That people judge their own future to be rosier than average has been described widely. How exactly that arises in the brain is disputed. The two doors are a useful image for thinking about yourself. An established mechanism they are not.

But wait, don’t we actually remember bad news better?

If you are paying close attention, you might be thinking: this doesn’t quite add up. Doesn’t a hurtful remark linger for years? Doesn’t a disaster on the news grip us harder than good news? You are right, and this is not a contradiction, but one of the loveliest subtleties in psychology. There is also an opposite tendency: the negativity bias. One insult weighs heavier than ten compliments.⁸ That makes evolutionary sense: the ancestor who remembered the warning about the predator survived; the one who forgot it was eaten.⁹

How can two biases contradict each other? They work on different things. The negativity bias works on experiences, on what is happening now or has already happened; there the negative weighs heavier. The optimism bias works on expectations, on how we judge our own future; there the positive weighs heavier. That explains something you will surely recognise: people can be gloomy about the world and hopeful about themselves at the same time. Ask someone whether the world is in a bad way, and they list the problems. Ask that same person whether something bad is going to happen to them, and they say: “probably not to me.” Pessimistic about the world, optimistic about ourselves, at once, in the same brain.

And here, for the theme of influence, it becomes almost unnervingly clever. Because anyone who wants power over minds can use both biases at once: make people afraid of the world (“danger is coming, be afraid”) and promise them personal safety if they follow (“but with me, you are safe”). The fear grips them, the hope binds them. It is the oldest formula of persuasion there is and anyone who recognises both biases in themselves sees that formula coming from a mile away.

The second experiment: the brain that would rather be doing something

In 2014, researchers led by the psychologist Timothy Wilson published a study in Science.¹⁰ Wilson works at the University of Virginia; the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert was a co-author. The setup was simple. People sat alone in a room for 6 to 15 minutes with nothing to do but think. No phone, no book, no music. Just you and your thoughts.

How did that go? Less well than you might hope, but far less dramatically than the story that grew around it. On average, participants rated their enjoyment 4.94 on a nine-point scale. Just under half, 49.3 per cent, sat at or below the midpoint of that scale. Something else was clearer: 89 per cent reported that their minds wandered, even though there was nothing competing for their attention.

Then the researchers went further. In one of the eleven studies, participants could give themselves a mild electric shock at the press of a button. The crucial detail: everyone in that analysis had said beforehand that they would pay money to avoid that shock. Even so, some pressed the button. Among the men it was 67 per cent, among the women 25 per cent.

And here the qualification belongs straight away. Behind those percentages sit small numbers: 12 of 18 men and 6 of 24 women, 42 people in total. The men who pressed mostly did so once to four times. There was one outlier who gave himself 190 shocks. The researchers themselves left that man out of the average.

What the shock experiment does and does not prove

The image of people who would rather be hurt than think travelled the world. That is how this article told it before. It was too confident, and I am correcting it here.

That same year, Kieran Fox and colleagues went back to the raw data.¹¹ Of those 42 participants, 57 per cent never shocked themselves at all. Only 17 per cent pressed more than twice. The eighteen people who did press had been asked why. Fourteen of them gave curiosity about the shock as their reason. And those who shocked themselves did not enjoy the thinking any less than those who did not.

So the honest conclusion is quieter than the headline you read about it. For most people, being alone with their thoughts was not unbearable. What does still stand is perhaps more important. Given the choice, people almost always choose doing over thinking.

That last finding has been checked properly. In 2019 a large team repeated the study with 2,557 participants at twelve sites in eleven countries.¹² The result was the same in every country: those assigned to do something enjoyed it more than those assigned to think. Where enjoyment of thinking differed by country, the differences were explained by the participants themselves, by things such as meditation experience and how much they used their phones.

Now think of our world. We carry a device in our pocket that can fill every moment of emptiness. No queue at the till, no waiting room, no quiet moment before sleep need pass in silence any more. The moment emptiness threatens, we fill it, with scrolling, news, videos, other people’s opinions.

And here the two studies meet. If we fill every emptiness, we fill it with information from outside. And if that information enters a brain that likes to hear what it wants to hear, we are shaped by what others feed us. A person who is never alone with their thoughts rarely thinks their own thoughts. They think the thoughts that are handed to them.

The two weaknesses together: the perfect target

Picture a person who likes to hear what they want to hear and would rather be busy than still. That is not a weak person, that is a normal person. That is all of us, to a greater or lesser degree. And it is precisely the kind of brain that is easiest to influence. Anyone who wants power over minds need do very little: make people afraid of the world, promise them a beautiful future of their own, and make sure they are never quiet enough to think about it critically. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is simply how persuasion works, in advertising, politics and propaganda. The good leader and the manipulator use the same mechanisms; the difference lies in their intention, not in their method. And that is exactly why it is so important to understand the mechanisms themselves.

The defence, and it lies within you

Here comes the hopeful part. Both weaknesses have an antidote, and it lies entirely within your own reach. No money, no power needed, only awareness and practice.

1. Know the two doors. When a message promises you an easy, beautiful future, pause and ask: “do I believe this because it is true, or because I want to believe it?” That question alone opens the closed door a little.
2. Seek out the bad news on purpose. Because we brush unwelcome information aside so easily, we have to go looking for it actively. With every belief, ask: “what evidence argues against me?” This feels unnatural, which is exactly why it works.
3. Practise silence. Perhaps the most important skill of our time. Spend a few minutes alone with your thoughts every day, without a phone. At first it may feel awkward. What the research shows above all is this: when there is something to do, most people choose it. But whoever learns to be still learns to think their own thoughts.
4. Slow down before you believe or share. Manipulation works through speed. The simplest defence is slowness: wait a day before adopting a strong opinion, an hour before sharing something that makes you angry or euphoric. In that delay, your own judgement returns.
5. Be kind to yourself. You will never be completely rid of these tendencies, they live in every brain, including those of the scientists who write about them. The goal is not perfection, but awareness: pausing a little more often, doubting what you would like to believe, and bearing the silence.

In closing

We live in a restless world full of voices that profit from our fear and from our hope, with more information than ever and less silence than ever. It is tempting to think the solution lies outside us: better leaders, better media, better rules. Those matter. But there is one defence that no one can take from you, and that is always within reach: understanding your own brain.

A person who knows they hear what they want to hear, hears more sharply. A person who can bear silence, thinks their own thoughts. And a person who thinks their own thoughts is freer than any power would wish them to be. In a world that constantly tugs at our minds, that may well be the most important freedom there is.

When was the last time you spent a few minutes alone with your thoughts, no phone, no distraction? And what might happen if, just every now and then, you dared to do it again? No demanding exercise. Just a question to carry with you, into the silence you may soon grant yourself.

Related reading

• Introvert or Extrovert: The Quiet Brain and the Loud Brain
• Self-Image: The Scar Only You Can See
• A Mother Kisses Her Baby in an MRI

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Sources

The numbers in the text refer to this list.

1. Sharot, T. (2011a). The optimism bias. Current Biology, 21(23), R941–R945. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.10.030
2. Sharot, T. (2011b). The optimism bias: A tour of the irrationally positive brain. Pantheon Books.
3. Sharot, T., Guitart-Masip, M., Korn, C. W., Chowdhury, R., & Dolan, R. J. (2012). How dopamine enhances an optimism bias in humans. Current Biology, 22(16), 1477–1481. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.053
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6. Harris, A. J. L., & Hahn, U. (2011). Unrealistic optimism about future life events: A cautionary note. Psychological Review, 118(1), 135–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020997
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10. Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C. L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75–77. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1250830
11. Fox, K. C. R., Thompson, E., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Christoff, K. (2014). Is thinking really aversive? A commentary on Wilson et al.’s “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind”. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, Article 1427. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01427
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Sources on this site are cited in APA style, with a DOI wherever one exists. Why I made that choice →