What Should I Read Next? Social by Mathew Lieberman

Nick Michelioudakis, Greece

Nick Michelioudakis has been a Teacher Trainer for many years. His interests include Motivation and Social and Evolutionary Psychology. He regularly posts comedy clips on YouTube under ‘Comedy for ELT’. To see more of his work, you can visit his blog at www.michelioudakis.org

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Born social
The default network
What about education?
Social exclusion 1
Social exclusion 2
Mentalising
Peeer teaching
The clever way of being selfish
References

Born social

Q: What is people’s number one fear? A: Public Speaking! Amazingly, fear of death comes second! Which means, according to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, that if you go to a funeral ‘you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy’...  Yet Matthew Lieberman sees nothing strange about this fear; according to him (p. 43) the reason why we are so mortally afraid of even the possibility of making fools of ourselves in public only goes to show how important our social connections are for us. Indeed, he believes Maslow’s famous pyramid should be revised, with social needs right at the base. Hence the name of the book.

The default network

The book contains some amazing discoveries. Did you know for instance that there is a part of our brain that lights up in fMRI scanners when we are NOT thinking about anything? Neuroscientists have called this the ‘default network’ because it is switched on when our brain is not otherwise engaged. Nothing special about this, except that this also happens to be the part of the brain activated when we are engaged in social cognition activities! (p. 19) It seems that evolution considers our social relationships so important that it has programmed us to make the most of our ‘free’ time by thinking about our friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances and whether everything is ok in this department…

What about education?

At this point you may be wondering ‘OK – how is all this related to our work as educators?’ The answer is ‘In at least four ways’.

Social exclusion 1

In a fantastic study, Lieberman and his colleagues got their subjects to play an easy game in the computer (p. 58). Try to imagine yourself as one of them. The game is the simplest game in the world. It is called ‘Cyberball’. The rules are very straightforward. There are three people. You are one of them (your hand is the one at the bottom of the screen). All these people have to do is toss a ball between them. Each person has a choice of who to toss the ball to. And so the 'game' starts. Just click here to watch the clip… Note by the way, that similar effects were observed even when the subjects were told that it was all pre-programmed and there were no other people involved! (p. 68) The implications of all this for educators are I think obvious…

Social exclusion 2

If social exclusion can be debilitating, bullying is even worse. Lieberman gives some interesting statistics about how ‘socially connected’ and how ‘safe’ people feel in various countries (see the first table). Apparently, figures are very disappointing for a number of countries in the first world. Bullying, the most extreme form of social exclusion apparently affects 40% of teens in the ages between 11 and 15 (p. 278). Quite apart from the immediate psychological impact that this has, it also affects students’ school performance (see the second table). In an amazing study conducted by the Baumeister lab, subjects made to feel socially rejected showed a drop in performance in IQ tests from 82% to 69%, while their GRE results plummeted from 68% to 39%! (Baumeister et al 2002).

Mentalising

Avoiding problems is one thing; but we can also use our innate predisposition to focus on the social world to make education more effective. One way of doing this is to bring school subjects to life by injecting a human element into them – using stories in order to teach and including elements about how the protagonists thought and felt. There is a reason why soap operas are so much more popular than fact-laden documentaries. Now, as Lieberman points out, History for instance has always been a giant soap opera yet we fail to exploit this fact (p. 286). Events and dates are instantly forgettable, but a good teacher will infuse his/her narrative with insights into people’s motives, their dilemmas, their frustrations and machinations, thus making the subject come alive. Two outstanding examples of this are ‘Rubicon’ by Tom Holland and ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson.

Peeer teaching

Here is another stunning discovery: (p. 284) apparently, when we study something so as to remember it, we activate a certain part of the brain; however, when we study something with the intention of explaining it to someone else, we engage a different module. The question here is this: which of the two ways is more effective assuming our aim is long-term retention? Once again, I will let Dr Lieberman explain – just click here. There are two very important take-away lessons for us here: i) studying with the intention of teaching is far more effective than ordinary studying because somehow the knowledge ‘sinks in’ better (even if we never actually teach anyone) and ii) it is the weaker students that stand to benefit the most as ‘teachers’ in peer teaching. And this is not taking into consideration positive side effects, such as increased motivation and learner independence or the transfer of more power to the students.

The clever way of being selfish

So important is social connectedness, that evolution has equipped us with a reward mechanism which is activated every time we help others. And this is clearly what Dalai Lama had in mind when he gave the following somewhat paradoxical piece of advice (p. 89): ‘If you would like to be selfish, you should do it in an intelligent way. The stupid way to be selfish [ … ] is to seek happiness for ourselves alone, in the process becoming more and more miserable. The intelligent way to be selfish is to work for the welfare of others’ – because doing this is inherently pleasurable. Excellent! :)

References

Lieberman, M. (2013) Social. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Baumeister, R. F., Twenge, J. M. & Nuss, C. K. (2002) Effects of social exclusion on cognitive processes: Anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 817.

Please check the How the Motivate your Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.