Farther to Go!

Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Reward Stickers
and the End of Civilization

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A+ grownup

If you listen to the dire warnings of the anti-reward-stickers faction, you’ll discover that giving kids reward stickers—or any kind of reward for that matter—is likely to turn them into anti-social schmucks who send their parents off to assisted living as soon as they can get away with it. Someone really said that. That’s because the kids will inevitably become “reward addicts,” which means they’ll need more and more of the reward to be satisfied. And eventually, they won’t be able to function without it.

No one is arguing that rewards don’t work. In fact, experts in the field frequently comment that they work “too well.” But the fact that they work isn’t good enough. One individual with a Ph.D. actually wrote this: “If I went to the doctor with a sore knee, one solution that would end the pain would be to amputate my leg. There is no doubt the solution would work. But it is still the wrong answer.” (Well, there is some doubt the solution would work, given that phantom limb pain is real and a real possibility.)

I’ve written and talked about rewards a lot, so I’m not going to go into the why of them again, except to say that the brain runs on rewards and we can’t change that. Rewards activate memory and learning circuits in the brain. You can figure out the implications. What I want to do is address some of the misguided thinking about rewards (including reward stickers) and behavior change.

Desired Outcome

What both the fellow with the hypothetical sore knee and the rest of the anti-reward folks seem to be missing is a clear definition of their desired outcome. In addition to being painful, a sore knee usually has some negative impact on mobility, so the desired outcome for treatment would include a return to normal function, thus eliminating amputation as a possible solution—and this particular example as a viable refutation of rewards.

So determine what your desired outcome is, and then decide whether or not rewards will help you get it.

Maybe you’re a busy person who wants to pursue your interest in Italian Renaissance art. You might decide that taking a class or spending a certain amount of time each week exploring the subject will help you achieve that outcome. In that case, you could set up a system to reward yourself each time you complete an assignment or spend your weekly allotment of time on your pursuit. Rewards can help you follow through and keep you on track. They can’t help you improve your talent or taste in art or sustain your interest in the subject.

Or maybe you’re a parent who wants to get your kid to develop a bedtime routine that doesn’t involve screaming, crying, or begging. You could set up a system to reward him or her for completing specific tasks. Rewards can definitely help with that, especially if you start small (with one task) and add new tasks one at a time and your kid is into the reward. But rewards can’t get him or her to love getting ready for bed, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to.

Intrinsic Motivation

All of the experts opining on the subject seem to believe that (1) kids should be intrinsically motivated to do the right thing—meaning whatever it is the adults want them to do—and (2) being intrinsically motivated will affect their behavior (i.e., will cause them to, in fact, do the right thing).

There should be a collective hysterical burst of laughter right about now. I’m an adult. You’re an adult. We can’t even get ourselves to do things we’ve decided we want to do when we’re crystal clear about the benefits of doing them and the consequences of not doing them. Why would we expect kids to behave better than we do?

Intrinsic motivation is a tricky concept, anyway, because it’s tied up with should. I should want to do this because it’s the right (healthy/ appropriate/ considerate/ responsible, etc.) thing to do. And you should want to do it, too. Some people are more bound by what they should do than others. They follow the rules. Whether they’re adults or kids, they generally cause less trouble. From the outside, they appear to be intrinsically motivated, but they’re not. The point is that I can’t tell what your motivation is for doing something and you can’t tell what my motivation is.

And being intrinsically motivated is no guarantee that anyone, adult or child, will follow through. Motivation and action are not one and the same, much to the disappointment of people who’ve paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to get motivated. Adding extrinsic motivation to the mix doesn’t conflict with the intrinsic motivation. It provides an extra boost and can help you deal with System 1’s siren calls of distraction and immediate gratification.

A couple of weeks ago, I described my current reward sticker routine for completing the same four tasks once in the morning and a second time before going to bed. They’re all things I want to do (am intrinsically motivated to do) and that I was doing more often than not. But since I wasn’t doing every single thing twice every single day, I decided to try the gold stars. That was my desired outcome, by the way: to do the four things twice a day. Period. And I would know I did them by the number of stars on my calendar. The extrinsic reward stickers have been just the boost I needed to get to—and so far to stay at—100% completion.

Maybe you’re intrinsically motivated to do a particular thing.  If you are doing it, congratulations! But if you aren’t following through to your satisfaction, add an extrinsic reward to the process.

Maybe your kid wants to learn to play an instrument (is intrinsically motivated), but doesn’t always feel like practicing. Add an extrinsic reward for following through on the practice schedule and see if that increases his or her practice time.

For both adults and kids, reward stickers are easy. You get a visual record of a series of successes that encourages you to keep the chain intact. But you can use anything that works.

Behavior change is not easy, for kids or adults. But it’s important to recognize that the concepts we have about how we should go about changing behavior need to be balanced against how our brain actually operates. Our brain wants a treat. So we can decide what kind of treat to give it or we can let it choose its own treats. See Eating the Entire Bag of Potato Chips.

The Other Problem with
Affective Forecasting

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The year it was published, I purchased a copy of the Best American Non-Required Reading 2004, which included an article written by Jon Gertner for the New York Times titled The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. The article reviewed the work of several psychologists whose work I eventually became familiar with—including Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Kahneman—in the relatively new field of affective forecasting. I was intrigued enough to copy the article, reread it, and highlight a good portion. From the vantage point of now, I see it was one of the small handful of bread crumbs along the trail to creating Farther to Go!

But I filed the article away, and in the interim between then and 2012, seem to have forgotten about it. Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness was already a best seller before I came across a copy of it, and I don’t recall connecting the dots between it and the article I’d been so interested in. I’ve recommended the book to numerous people and refer to it in some of my courses in spite of it’s focus on happiness, not because of it.

Don’t Worry; Be Happy

That’s the other problem with affective forecasting (read my previous post, Miswanting). The emphasis is on happiness rather than on satisfaction and meaning. Happiness is an ephemeral emotional state. We’re simply not always going to be happy—and trying to be isn’t even a worthwhile goal.

We are living in an era in which the Happiness Industry invades and permeates society and every unpleasant aspect of life is frowned upon, and dismissed as an unnecessary social ill. Rather than learning to cope with or contemplate certain aspects of life—fear, sadness, loneliness and boredom—we avoid them, gradually removing our ability to tolerate even the most mundane of the difficult aspects of life. —Siobhan Lyons, Philosophy Now

The things that make us happy are not necessarily the things we find satisfying or meaningful. That’s partly because happiness is a function of the unconscious part of the brain (System 1), which is focused on immediate gratification, while satisfaction and meaning are functions of the conscious part (System 2), which is focused on long-term goals and plans. The pursuit of happiness keeps us fixated on ourselves and on gratifying our immediate wants and needs.

Furthermore, because happiness is an ephemeral and transient emotional state, what makes us happy at one point in time isn’t necessarily going to make us happy at another. But because of the way we’re wired, it’s very difficult to recognize and account for that in the moment.

We’re more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person. —George Loewenstein, Educator and Economist

And maybe a certain amount of something makes us happy, but too much of it makes us sick—literally or figuratively. Too much craft beer, sex, alone time, hanging out with a best friend, tiramisu, dancing, cooking, listening to music, laughing—whatever it is that makes us happy has at least the potential to also make us very unhappy.

To be fair to Daniel Gilbert, he isn’t advocating the relentless pursuit of happiness, either:

If someone offers you a pill that makes you happy 100 percent of the time, you should run fast in the other direction. It’’s not good to feel happy in a dark alley at night. Happiness is a noun, so we think it’s something we can own. But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live. It’’s like the child’’s idea that if you drive far and fast enough you can get to the horizon—. No, the horizon’’s not a place you get to. —Daniel Gilbert, quoted in The Science of Happiness, Harvard Magazine

However, there is a considerable amount of discussion and debate about how we should approach the subject of happiness. This may be the most useful perspective:

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us. —Ashley Montagu, Anthropoligist

Satisfying and Meaningful vs. Happy

One way to bypass the errors we make in affective forecasting is to focus on creating satisfying and meaningful lives rather than happy ones by identifying what we really want. Higher order wants or, as I call them, Big Picture Wants, are abstract but they are neither transient nor ephemeral.

Research indicates that if you aim for satisfying and meaningful, you may get happiness as a byproduct. But if you aim for happiness, you will not get satisfaction and meaning as byproducts. And the people who pursue satisfaction and meaning, even when the going gets tough, report higher overall levels of satisfaction with their lives. Because what is meaningful is less transitory, we have a better chance of achieving and sustaining a meaningful life—and therefore a satisfying one—than we have of achieving and maintaining a happy life.

When we’re oriented to something bigger than we are, and bigger than our immediate wants and needs, we’re less susceptible to the pull of immediate gratification. When we give our big brain (consciousness, System 2) something worthwhile to focus on, we can achieve goals or create things that actually make a difference to ourselves and to others.

Our obsession with happiness may reflect a sense that our lives lack meaning, but pursuing happiness is not the solution. George Loewenstein recommends we invest our resources in the things that will make us happy. I think we’ll be much better off if instead we invest our resources in what makes our lives satisfying and meaningful. That path may be risky and not always easy or pleasurable, but…

If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster. –Clint Eastwood

Miswanting: The Problems with Affective Forecasting

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Affective forecasting refers to our attempt to imagine a future event and predict how we’re going to feel about it when it occurs. The term and the research on it may be relatively new, but we engage in the process whenever we attempt to determine a course of action. The results of numerous studies on affective forecasting reveal that (1) we’re not very good at it, (2) we don’t know we’re not very good at it, and so (3) we keep making the same mistakes when pursuing what we think will make us happy. The term for this coined by Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson is miswanting.

The reason we’re not very good at predicting our future feelings is that we routinely make all kinds of errors, some of which are described below. First the good news: we’re generally good at predicting whether a future experience will be positive or negative. And when we make short-term (tomorrow) versus long-term (a year from now) predictions, we’re pretty good at accurately identifying the emotions we’re likely to feel when we experience an event.

Impact

What we’re not very good at is predicting how intense our feelings will be and how long they will last. This prediction error is known as the impact bias.

Whether people overestimate how good or bad they will feel, overestimate how quickly those feelings will arise, or underestimate how quickly they will dissipate, the important point is that they overestimate how powerfully the event will impact their emotional lives—Timothy D. Wilson, Daniel T. Gilbert (2003)

So we tend to believe that both positive and negative events will affect us more intensely and that the duration of those effects will be longer than they’re likely to be. We think that getting the new job, the guy/girl, the new house/car, or winning the lottery will cause us to feel fantastic for the foreseeable future. We think not getting the job, failing a test, losing a friend, or experiencing a financial setback will cause us to feel devastated for the foreseeable future.

Big vs. Small

We believe that a bigger problem will have a bigger negative effect on us than a smaller, chronic problem or minor annoyance will. But that doesn’t turn out to be the case for a couple of reasons. One is that we tend to respond to and take care of the bigger problems but often let the smaller ones drag on and annoy us indefinitely. The other is that we have a so-called psychological immune system that’s triggered by big problems to help us cope with them.

Misconstrual

In order to predict how we’re likely to feel about something, we need to be able to imagine the event. That’s easier to do if we’ve experienced it or something similar in the past. If we’ve been to a lot of parties, we can imagine—in general—how we’ll feel about attending a party on Saturday. If we’ve cleaned out the garage before, we can imagine how we’ll feel about doing that on Saturday, too. But if we haven’t experienced an event, what we imagine or expect may not bear much resemblance to the way the actual event unfolds. Thinking we can predict the future leads us to believe in the veracity of what we imagine.

Memory

Even if we’re able to imagine an event because we’ve experienced it before, our memory of it—and how we felt at the time—may be faulty simply because it’s the nature of memory to be faulty. And the feelings we experience when remembering a past event are not necessarily the same feelings we had when the event took place. Additionally, when we don’t recall actual details of an event, we may come to rely instead on our beliefs or theories about how such an event will make us feel.

Variability

When trying to decide where to vacation, which movie to see, or which house to buy, we tend to focus on, compare, and overestimate the differences between various options and underestimate their similarities. Furthermore, the order in which people are asked to think about differences vs. similarities has been found to influence the accuracy of their affective forecasting. Those who thought last about the similarities tended to be happier about their choices.

Hot vs. Cold States

When we’re in a “hot” emotional state (anxious, fearful, hungry, courageous, or sexually excited, for example), we have a hard time predicting what we will want when we’re in a “cold” (more rational) state—and vice versa. That means when we’re in a cold state—satiated, for example—we’re likely to predict we’ll have enough willpower to avoid binging on the bag of potato chips we’re picking up at the supermarket. But later that evening, when we’re hungry—in a hot state—we do, in fact, binge eat.

These mistakes—which arise because of the way we’re wired, not because there’s something wrong with us—aren’t the only mistakes we make when trying to predict what will make us happy or sad in the future. But hopefully they help clarify why it’s so hard to make accurate predictions and why we’re often disappointed by the choices we make.

Next time: The Other Problem with Affective Forecasting

Upheaval Is Easy;
Sustained Change Is Hard

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change

Although we have a fundamental belief in human rationality, which our laws are based upon, the evidence is mounting that we are, as psychologist Dan Ariely says, “predictably irrational.” On the one hand, this explains quite a lot about the way things play out in the wider world. When you recognize how irrational we actually are, you’re less likely to be surprised by the things people do and say and think. On the other hand, if you’re in favor of fairness and justice, the situation is extremely troubling.

The path to correcting society’s most significant ills may need to begin with questioning some of our basic assumptions about human nature.

The Status Quo Is Status Quo

We have a hard time making behavior changes in our own lives, yet we’re often surprised that enacting social change is so frustrating, difficult, and time consuming. But the situation isn’t remotely surprising. Change is difficult and slow because our brain is wired to maintain the status quo, and it is we—people with brains wired to maintain the status quo—who put into place and are then affected by laws and social policies.

One part of our brain (System 2) can see the benefit of change and wants to make changes. The other part of the brain (System 1) actively resists change. The part of the brain that can see the benefit of change is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Much of the time it’s offline. The part of the brain that resists change is fast, vast, and always on. When System 2 is depleted, we revert to operating not logically and rationally, but on autopilot.

Furthermore, laws and social policies are based on the idea that people are rational actors, who respond to incentives in straightforward ways. We believe that education, awareness, and clearly defined negative consequences are effective strategies. This is a very logical position to take. It’s also one of the reason why our laws and policies don’t work the way we expect them to work.

Many of our social institutions—and laws in particular—implicitly assume that human actions are largely the product of conscious knowledge and intention. We believe that all we need for a law-abiding society is to let people know what is right and what is wrong, and everything will follow from there. Sure, we make exceptions for people with grave mental disorders, but we assume most human behavior is conscious and intentional. Even when we acknowledge the power of unconscious influence, we believe it can be overcome by willpower or education.—Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain

The hidden brain, as Shankar Vedantam refers to System 1, doesn’t operate logically or rationally. It isn’t necessarily up to the same thing the conscious part of our brain, System 2, is up to. For example:

  1. System 1 focuses on survival and detecting threats to our survival.
  2. System 1 can’t handle complexity, so it generalizes instead.
  3. System 1 is biased because biases make it easier to decide what we think.
Threat Detection

The brain is, first and foremost, a survival tool, and the way that it has found to be most effective at guaranteeing survival is through the threat and reward response. Put simply, your brain will cause you to move away from threats and move toward rewards. —Dr. David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work

This sounds reasonable and not particularly problematic until you realize that, in additional to actual survival needs (food, water, shelter, etc.) and actual physical threats, each of us has personalized our threat-detection system to include situations we have defined as threatening. And once the brain gets the idea that something is a threat, it responds as if it is facing a literal threat to our physical survival.

How logical do you tend to be when you’re facing a threat to your survival?

When the brain is under severe threat, it immediately changes the way it processes information, and starts to prioritize rapid responses. “The normal long pathways through the orbitofrontal cortex, where people evaluate situations in a logical and conscious fashion and [consider] the risks and benefits of different behaviors— that gets short circuited,” says Dr. Eric Hollander, professor of psychiatry at Montefiore/Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York.  Instead, he says, “You have sensory input right through the sensory [regions] and into the amygdala or limbic system.”

This dramatically alters how we think, since the limbic system is deeply engaged with modulating our emotions.  “The neural networks in the brain that are involved in rational, abstract cognition— essentially, the systems that mediate our most humane and creative thoughts— are very sensitive to emotional states, especially fear.” So when people are terrorized, “Problem solving becomes more categorical, concrete and emotional [and] we become more vulnerable to reactive and short-sighted solutions.” —Maia Szalavitz , neuroscience journalist

When we feel threatened, logic and rationality go offline.

Generalization

Statistical facts don’t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the “news-worthy” events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don’t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that we got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school). —gapminder.org/ignorance

System 1 processes data and information through association. It sees patterns and makes connections, whether or not the patterns and connections actually exist. It is, as Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) writes, “radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.” As a result, System 1 accepts anecdotal evidence as being as valid as verified evidence.

Seeing patterns and finding connections makes it easy to come up with sometimes sweeping generalizations.

One example: Person A is similar to Person B in some particular way; therefore, Person B is probably similar to Person A in other ways. Since I know Person A, I now believe I also know and understand Person B. And I see all of the people who share some of these same characteristics as being alike. This leads me to believe I understand more than I do and know more than I know about Person B and other people who bear some similarity to Person B.

Another example: Extrapolating from my own personal experience to assume that everyone thinks the way I think, feels the way I feel, or would respond the way I respond.

Generalizing can be useful when we need to make quick assessments. But it’s a lazy way of thinking that can be dangerous when used in important or critical situations.

It’s easy to find examples of generalizing in the opinions we have and the alliances we form around hot-button social topics such as climate change, GMOs, vaccines, immigration, and Planned Parenthood. It can also be seen in how people line up in the pro- or anti-science camps.

When we generalize, we make assumptions and draw conclusions from limited data or evidence.

Implicit Biases

Critical thinking doesn’t come naturally. Since we need to make all kinds of assessments and decisions in the course of our lives—and since the part of the brain that can think critically is often offline—we use mental shortcuts instead of thinking most things through.

[Implicit] biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection.

The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance.  These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages. In addition to early life experiences, the media and news programming are often-cited origins of implicit associations.

A Few Key Characteristics of Implicit Biases

Implicit biases are pervasive. Everyone possesses them, even people with avowed commitments to impartiality such as judges.

Implicit and explicit biases are related but distinct mental constructs.They are not mutually exclusive and may even reinforce each other.

The implicit associations we hold do not necessarily align with our declared beliefs or even reflect stances we would explicitly endorse.

We generally tend to hold implicit biases that favor our own ingroup, though research has shown that we can still hold implicit biases against our ingroup.

Implicit biases are malleable. Our brains are incredibly complex, and the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned through a variety of debiasing techniques.

Source: kirwaninstitute.osu.edu. Note: Harvard University has developed an implicit association test that is available online so you can test yourself for your own hidden biases.

Now What?

Change is hard because of the way we’re wired. If we can come to terms with the fact that we operate less rationally than we think we do, we might be able to create or modify laws and public policies to be more effective for more people.

Things to remember:

  • System 1’s agenda is to maintain the status quo, so most of the time that’s our agenda and everyone else’s, too. If it’s difficult for us to make personal changes, imagine how difficult it is to make changes that involve large groups of people—or to change other peoples’ minds.
  • System 1 is primarily a threat-detector. When we feel threatened, we are not going to be thinking or behaving logically, and we should expect the same to be true of others. People who feel threatened are easier to manipulate, and they may take actions that are not in their own best interest.
  • We generalize because System 1 doesn’t handle complexity well. Generalizing leads to a feeling of cognitive ease because we think we know more than we do and understand more than we do. That may not be a problem in trivial matters, but it has huge implications when it comes to laws and public policies.
  • We are all at the effect of implicit biases. Because we aren’t directly aware of them, it’s easy for us to deny we have them. That doesn’t make them go away, however. The best thing to do is to pay attention to how we act and react to other people so we can begin to recognize, acknowledge, and eventually neutralize some of these biases.

Making the unconscious conscious is difficult because the central obstacle lies within ourselves. But putting reason ahead of instinct and intuition is also what sets us apart from every other species that has ever lived. Understanding the hidden brain and building safeguards to protect us against its vagaries can help us be more successful in our everyday lives. It can aid us in our battle against threats and help us spend our money more wisely. But it can also do something more important than any of those things: It can make us better people. —Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain

Note: This is a slightly modified version of my 10/16/15 post as a response to recent events not only in the U.S. but around the world.

Rewarding Experiences Are More Rewarding to Extraverts

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Introverts and extraverts alike have a reward system in the brain that has the same purpose and that functions the same way. However, all brains don’t process rewards identically. Whether intrinsic or extrinsic, rewards are an important element of behavior change, which is why I became interested in the subject after noticing that some of my clients have a harder time than others in getting the hang of using rewards.

It’s commonly believed that the primary difference between extraverts and introverts is each group’s desire for alone time. Introverts want and need more of it, and extraverts want and need less of it. Although that’s not necessarily inaccurate, it’s wrong to assume that extraverts always prefer social interaction over alone time. And even if they do, that isn’t what differentiates one group from the other.

Research suggests that what distinguishes extraverts from introverts is sensitivity to rewards in the environment. A preference for social interaction—independent of the reward/enjoyment of the interaction—is not what’s at the core of extraversion. According to Colin G. DeYoung, Ph.D. (researcher in the field of personality neuroscience):

People who score low in Extraversion are not necessarily turned inward; rather, they are less engaged, motivated, and energized by the possibilities for reward that surround them. Hence, they talk less, are less driven, and experience less enthusiasm. They may also find levels of stimulation that are rewarding and energizing for someone high in Extraversion merely annoying or tiring (or even overwhelming). Their reserved demeanor is not likely to indicate an intense engagement with the world of imagination and ideas, however, unless they are also high in Intellect/Imagination.

It’s All in Your Head

Extraversion/introversion isn’t merely a psychological concept. The differences can be observed in the brain. According to DeYoung, the unifying function of dopamine is exploration. The release of dopamine increases motivation to explore and facilitates cognitive and behavioral processes useful in exploration. When dopamine floods the brain, both introverts and extroverts become more talkative, alert to their surroundings, and motivated to take risks and explore the environment. Both introverts and extroverts have the same amount of dopamine available, but dopamine is more active in the brains of extroverts than in the brains of introverts.

Here are some of the other differences that have been observed in the brains of extraverts and introverts.

GENES

Although no one gene determines temperament, D4DR (“the novelty seeking” gene) is found on the 11th chromosome which has been deemed the personality chromosome because of its influence on behavior, particularly exhilaration and excitement. Thrill seekers examined in a study conducted by geneticist Dr. Dean Hamer were shown to have a long D4DR gene and were less sensitive to the neurotransmitter dopamine. Those participants with more reflective and slower paced natures had shorter D4DR genes and a higher sensitivity to dopamine.

BLOOD FLOW

Rev up: In extraverts’ brains, blood flows in shorter pathways toward parts of the brain where external stimuli (visual, auditory, touch, and taste—but not smell) are processed. The neuropathways most used by extraverts are activated by dopamine. Extraverts, who tend to have a novelty seeking personality and can process a higher amount of external stimuli, are less sensitive to dopamine. Their brains use adrenaline to make more dopamine.

As a result, the brain becomes alert and hyper-focused on its surroundings. Blood sugar and free fatty acids are elevated to provide more energy, and digestion is slowed. Thinking is reduced, and the person becomes prepared to make snap decisions. While extraverts thrive on the dopamine-charged good feelings created when they engage the sympathetic nervous system, for introverts, it’s too much.

Throttle down: Introverts have more blood flow to their brains than extraverts, and the blood in introverts’ brains travels longer, more complicated pathways and focuses on parts of the brain involved with internal experiences such as remembering, solving problems, and planning. The more dominant neurotransmitter in introverts’ neuropathways is acetylcholine, which affects attention and learning, influences the ability to stay calm and alert, utilizes long-term memory, and activates voluntary movement. Acetylcholine makes us feel good when we think and feel.

GRAY MATTER

A 2012 Harvard University study revealed that introverts tended to have larger, thicker gray matter in their prefrontal cortex—a region of the brain that is linked to abstract thought and decision-making—while extraverts had less gray matter. The study’s author concluded this might account for introverts’ tendencies to sit in a corner and ponder things thoroughly before making a decision, and extraverts’ ability to live in the moment and take risks without fully thinking everything through (which has its cons and benefits, of course).

FACIAL RECOGNITION

The brains of extraverts pay more attention to human faces than do introverts. Introverts’ brains don’t seem to distinguish between inanimate objects and human faces.

Experiencing Rewards

Extraverts tend to experience more positive feelings and get more out of rewards in general, and they are more likely to seek and spend more time on rewarding activities. When they do, they also experience a higher boost in momentary happiness as compared to their introverted counterparts. This partly explains the direct relationship between extraversion and momentary happiness. [The relationship between extraversion and happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) is one of the most consistently replicated and robust findings in the SWB literature. –W. Pavot, E Diener, F. Fujita]

Extraverts are more likely to go for immediate gratification, while introverts tend to delay rewards and instead invest in the hope of a larger payoff down the road. They are significantly more likely to prefer smaller, immediate rewards compared with introverts overall. When extraverts are in a good mood, they are even more likely to choose an immediate reward. Regardless of mood, introverts were more likely than extraverts to prefer delayed rewards.

Extraverts are already sensitive to rewards, so when they are in a positive mood it primes the brain’s reward system even more, so they’re focused on immediate opportunities. That may explain why extraverts are so impulsive, since when they are exposed to potential rewards that puts them into a positive mood, which in turn cues them that now is the time to pursue that reward.

The reason extraverts seem to experience stronger positive emotions may be based on how their brains process the memory of rewards. Dopamine affects how we feel when we recall a reward. Stronger dopamine response in relation to the memory of a first kiss, for example, carries with it a certain rush (associative conditioning).

The brains of extraverts show an extremely high level of associative conditioning, while the brains of introverts showed essentially none. Over time, the brains of extraverts “collect” an increasingly more robust network of reward-memories. Recalling these memories triggers their brains’ reward system, eliciting positive emotions.

Introverts brains don’t do this sort of reward collecting—or at least they don’t do it nearly as much or as strongly as the brains of extraverts. On a day-to-day basis, introverts have less of a reward-memory network to rely on for a “boost,” while their extraverted counterparts are able to tap into their networks for boosts aplenty.

Extraverts report more happiness than introverts during effortful “rewarding” activities, such as sports and exercise, and financially rewarding work tasks. No difference was found in extraverts’ and introverts’ happiness during low-effort, low importance “pleasurable, hedonic” activities, such as watching TV, listening to music, relaxing, and shopping. Given that extraverts experience more happiness during rewarding activities, but not during pleasurable activities, it may be that extraverts don’t have a more responsive pleasure system, but rather a more active and responsive “desire system.”

Extraverts experience a bigger happiness boost than introverts when they perform rewarding activities with other people, rather than alone. Extraverts spend more time on rewarding activities than introverts, and they tend to have more social contact during their daily activities.

The brain’s reward system generally operates outside our conscious awareness, so it can be difficult to identify rewards. Some people are more resistant to rewards than others. As far as the brain is concerned, anything that produces a hit of dopamine is good regardless of our opinion of it. If you want to get serious about long-term behavior change, it’s important to understand the role of rewards and the way your particular brain responds to them.

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