What do others think of you? How the brain perceives other people | Dong Seon-Chang | TEDxStuttgart

actually a friend of mine talked to me and said it seems like you care a lot about what other people think about you and my first reaction was no I don't care about what other people think about me I turned around then I thought actually it's true I care a lot about what other people think about me it's the same here I'm standing here looking at you and I'm wondering what will you all think about me and you are looking at me and probably you are thinking what will they talk about and if you think about then humans really think a lot about other people we think about what our boss might think about us or our colleagues or spouse we spend a lot of time thinking about other people and especially in my case I analyze myself why I do that and I realized I was born in Germany but I clearly looked Asian Korean not Chinese and when I went back to Korea when I was a child again I thought hey now everyone looks like me I must be the same but it wasn't the way I used gestures the way I pronounced Oktoberfest or other kind of words they revealed I was born and raised in Germany so day again realised pretty fast he's quite different he's some more different and it's pretty hard if you're a stranger somewhere you want to start new then you actually think even more about what other people might think about you and that somehow motivated me to become a social neuroscientist because it deals with the science of how other people perceive you and how the brain perceives other people so this is a title of my talk what do others think of you how the brain perceives other people and I want to start with an amazing animal a story about hippos these are two hippos male hippos and they fight for the true love of female hippo how do they fight one male hippo opens his mouth another male ape open his mouth the one with a bigger mouth always win that's it they don't really say thank you they open their mouth and then they give up their true love I thought why maybe the smaller Mouse one has stronger muscles maybe he can fight for his true love get a female but no with hippos the big mouth always wins why because evolution made the brain of a pro in such way they recognized it as a clear signal that the other one is more dominant luckily with humans it's not always like that at the big mouth wins but still sometimes we can realize who is the dominant one who is the boss here Tennessee I mean even when you don't know the person you know clearly who the boss is how did you know how did you brain realize it by looking at the facial expressions at the pose so the poster and the facial expressions revealed and you didn't even have to think about it who is the boss you knew it instantly and it's similar with actions so look at this video he's really nice young man he wants to cook a romantic dinner voice wife so he prepares flowers and he makes some food but as it is in life sometimes misunderstandings happen and in the last moment before he finishes his dinner what his wife sees is exactly this thank you I see again all of you you realize what situation that is right away how did you know you brain perceive the situation instantaneously within a few milliseconds within a few seconds and you knew what's going on for sure you can explain later but it was clear for everyone now it is similar with the way how we see other people our brain perceives a lot of social cues and it does it automatically for example if you look at this guy then if you need to describe him you'd say a young European guy maybe a young British guy right so there are three things your brain almost automatically perceives it is the age it is the gender and also the ethnicity of people for example whether I am Asian or European it's clear if you see African American you will be also realizing it without even thinking and there was a nice study if you see from the University of Cambridge just by changing the skin colour your perception really changes you have a different first impression of this guy although all what they did was changing the skin colour on a computer right so the way we perceive other people is to a certain degree also automatically really realizing our brain our brain works and doesn't let you think it automatically perceives some things like race ethnicity age gender another question I typed in one word on Google search it's one common word for all these people do you know what kind of word I could have been typing into Google no boss no so the same keyword i typed in becomes very clear in the next slide it's the same keyword I typed in for this picture medical doctor so these people are medical doctors in different countries these people are medical doctors how did you know by the way they dressed the white gown signalized that they are medical doctors ok so the way we dress the way we attire give social cues but not always reliable because not everyone who wears a gown is a doctor right but still the way you found what's common with these people is by looking at their dress style so that's one thing we also realize instantaneously this is an interesting study in a collaboration with Trinity College Dublin so we recorded motion captured a lot of people when they were running and it's amazing if you look you already can get certain feelings got feelings about a person so let's say you have to run a marathon together with someone to partner work look at the very right guy he's very motivated you'd ride away want to take him as a partner where is other people in the middle you can say oh he's a jogger he runs a lot so all these information about these people is clear just by the way when you look how they moved even when you ask them to dance rock roll - the same you might see someone is more shy someone is more extrovert and that's you got feeling about these people by the way it's interesting if you compare hundred people and ask them the same question what's your gut feeling about the personality of these people almost eighty ninety percent of people think the same about someone so if you thought that guy here in front he looks funny yeah and I think I might like him then maybe 80% of the people might think the same so there is an interesting interesting correlation between how people perceive other people which seems to be quite automatic this is one of my favorite studies from MIT and Northwestern University so they took people to study how gestures influence your judgments about trustworthiness so to make it easier they let people play a game so let's say you a new player game I give you ten red coins I give you ten blue coins and all you have to do is right after the experiment you have to give the coins to me I give you for each coin one euro that's it you get 10 euro home but if you give you blue coins to the other and you exchange and you give me the coin of the other person then actually you get double you get two euros per coin so you get 20 euros how easy is that you can just exchange but it is only when people are as good as you are here and you will think you are a good option because other people might calculate in their head and they think actually I can keep my 10 and if it gives me all I get 30 and I don't care whether he is zero right and actually you can do this kind of games especially with the economy students and you will get those kind of results not all the economy students but their interesting messages this game can be used as a measure how much another person might trust you and interestingly if you let the people who never seen each other before interact and they use certain kind of gestures like these then afterwards people gave the person significantly less money meaning they trusted the person less okay interesting Wow certain kinds of gestures exists but now they went to MIT this robots name is neck see they programmed a robot to perform five neutral gestures five negative gestures and then ask the people afterwards and when they were asked they said oh the robot is cool really interesting the robot producer loves gestures I like the robot but if they had to play the game again when the robot use negative gestures they also gave less money to the robot so it seems almost automatic how he realized those kind of gestures in the way we judge other people there's another study I performed it by myself so if you actually type in cooperation again in Google then it's this is one of the pictures two donkeys want to get the food rope is too short so they can only get to the food when they cooperate I thought this is nice I will I want to do the same experiment with humans so I connected them so they couldn't see each other the rope was too short and they had to kind of move and interact without seeing without hearing each other just by pulling a rope and interestingly people developed kind of a expectation that you need to do a turn-taking reciprocity so if I let you go then you should let me go this is automatic expectation although they couldn't speak about it they couldn't talk about it it was not ruled but people automatically expect it so even by pulling the rope they have certain kind of expectations and judge other people automatic Kerli by weather why how they pulled the rope whether this person is cooperative or not cooperative I found it really interesting so to sum up what do we perceive from other people there are a lot of social cues but similar to hippos there are a lot of things we automatically realize and there is age gender ethnicity attire dress style also poster and gestures and also certain kind of actions and the intentions okay but human versus hippos both can have big mouths but are humans really same as those animals what is different for humans so here is one example what kind of action do you see it can be someone pushing it can be someone with a stick it can be stretching and if you had a really great party last night it could be okay so you can see different actions here and it's the same for these two guys in this movie so here is one nice gentleman he owns a nice Porsche and then he did some sports he's kind of resting another gentleman is coming along he's seeing the same action as before anything's interesting okay and anything's hey I want to join looks interesting let me help you 1 2 3 so he thought he was pushing and he helped him to in the action so what does it tell force humans the same action can have different meanings so what do I see a big mouse is not all the brain perceives other things the same action can be interpreted in different contexts in different ways and I can have different meanings similarly you might think agents look all the same I already heard tonight that I look like someone they know whether they they knew someone like me before met me and it's true if you look at this picture there's a Miss Korean candidates from 2013 they look similar right and the reason why we perceive those faces as very similar is because we don't have so much experience with age faces imagine you'd go to penguin land and see penguins and have to distinguish their faces you have no experience you cannot distinguish the identity of penguins maybe these guys but in most of the cases not really okay so a friend from Korea actually called me and said by the way in Germany the news anchors in the evening news do they all look alike and I said no hey no they all look different no when I watched German television it looks like they look very similar and then I saw this picture the means for the Asians were not specialised in European faces it looked very similar like the same person we have one more feminine phenomenon this year it was all in the internet the same color of address was perceived differently by people right some saw it more like white gold some saw it more like blue black I'm not going to ask you you probably had a discussion already maybe your perception can also change so what do I want to say compare humans to hippos we all see the world differently even when we see one stimulus so we can see it with actions we can see what faces also addresses the way we see the world is a little bit more complex because all the experience we accumulated over the time changes to prior for our brain so we can perceive the world differently ok this is not all but you also need to measure it this is really nice but what do i do as a social neuroscientist in the laboratory I want to study sort on interaction how people see each other and for this I need an experimental method to measure it and at my Institute what we do is we make 3d models for example of faces or bodies so this is my PhD advisor professor built off from the Max Planck Institute for biologists and ethics we can keep his identity the same and then change the facial model to looking more Asian so with this kind of setup you test whether really asians can distinguish asians better or europeans because you have the same facial identity and you can make it perceived more asian or more european it's a nice method by using these 3d models and we can also use real time interaction with avatars in virtual reality so this is my advisor supervisor so he has a goggle which is tracked and also hand which is tracked and if you wear his goggle you see a 3d avatar really popping out and you can do high-five interact he actually programmed the Star Wars four to play together with avatar as well it's all possible it feels really real but you have all the control about how the avatar looks for example we can make the same motion performed looking like a robot or looking like a human and see how humans interact how do they differently use their motions or actions so this is a really interesting way to study social interaction in virtual reality and using computational models ok but I want to end with something which I find really interesting and it is a question about what is really special about our human brain compared to all animals or hippos so hippos or whales or elephants they've bigger brains talking about the size they have much bigger brain but if you look at the human brain one part of the brain which is the neocortex is the biggest compared to all the other animals so if you actually look where human intelligence comes from then it is due to the neocortex the big neocortex and interestingly if you look in evolution and look at fossil studies and they looked when did we humans become so intelligent then it was not when we were fighting nature or you started using tools it was when humans started to live together with other humans when the biggest friend and the biggest enemy of humans were out of humans so our brain is specialized for other people and thinking about what other people might think who might harm me who might be my friend this made us so intelligent this is called the social intelligence hypothesis and I find is really interesting because it shows something special so another evidence so if you look at this circle we humans perceive other humans much much stronger so if I draw just two more circles a line then you already perceive a face you can do it maybe with a car it looked like the eyes moving so you can already perceive from very simple things something like a face again this is a white picture with black silhouettes but you can already see people dancing this is not trivial your brain is specialized for realizing recognizing all those kind of actions and now the last question and this is the biggest evidence why we think so much about our people what makes you really happy think about the last moment when you were really happy I'm sure you are not alone you're with someone you really love you really like with your family maybe with your spouse with your girlfriend boyfriend because for me this little boy a master of disaster my son till he makes me really happy and what is special about the brain is what is food a reward for animals it is social interaction force humans so if you look at someone if you smile all these count as a reward for our brain and social interaction makes us happy and it is really something which made me happy that you all listen to my story you can also make other people happy by smiling at them interacting with them thank you for being here and listening to my story thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 382,281

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Germany, Life, Behavorial economics, Body language, Brain, Cognitive science, Culture, Science, Social Interaction, Social Science

Id: dfcnlADSuQ4

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2015