Opening Hearts & Minds—One Brain At A Time

We bring you this guest blog post authored by Laura Ligouri, executive director & founder of the neuroscience and psychology nonprofit, Mindbridge.

For months, a team of Galvanize Action leaders and Mindbridge scientists met weekly to explore ways that cutting-edge research from neuroscience and behavioral psychology could be used to catalyze civic engagement.

Sound pretty nerdy? (And fabulous!)

Here’s the deal: to open hearts and minds, organizations need to know how to access hearts and minds. Moving beyond surface-level forms of engagement to access what matters to us most means getting to the root of values, beliefs, and motivational mechanisms underlying behavior. Many neurobiological and psychological mechanisms lie beyond what might be accessible to our conscious mind. Here’s why:

According to cognitive neuroscience and psychology, upwards of approximately 95% of everything we do is unconscious.

That may seem hard to believe, but it’s true.

Recent research indicates that consciousness may in fact only be playing a bit part in this game we call life, with the vast majority of our cognition taking place outside of our conscious awareness. Why is that? Because in any one moment, our brains receive more than 11 million pieces of information, with the reasoned, conscious parts of our brain only able to process about 40 of them. Other studies have used a different bar to interpret this phenomenon, estimating that on average the individual must make approximately 35,000 decisions per day, translating to roughly 2,000 decisions per hour or one decision every two seconds during waking hours. That’s a lot of decisions. That means that the vast majority of our decision-making process must take place outside of our conscious awareness. (Also called “Passive Frame Theory” for those of you who want to geek out on this.)

That also means that traditionally we’re pretty bad at predicting future behavior. So bad that psychologist and behavioral economist, Dan Ariely, wrote an entire book on the topic, entitled Predictably Irrational. Decisions on everyday activities, such as what shirt to wear, to choices that bear long-term consequences, such as choosing whether or not to vote in the next election, are often based on deeply held beliefs and cognitive mechanisms that lie beyond the conscious mind.

And that’s where insight from neuroscience and behavior psychology comes in.

Galvanize Action has teamed up with our organization, Mindbridge, to explore and apply key neurobiological and psychological insight into the implicit, unconscious mechanisms underlying women’s choices to engage (or not to engage) in American politics including:

• Understanding the biology underlying emotions in mobilizing distinct types of individual engagement.
• The role of Tribal Psychology, categorizing people based on similarities that sets us up for an “us versus them” orientation, and the psychology of social identity in an ever-widening gulf of polarization and divisive politics.
• The complex interaction of empathy, self-esteem, trust, and community in building political efficacy.
• The opportunities present in hope and the neuropsychological benefit of being able to imagine a transformed future.

Opening hearts and minds means understanding the key, underlying drivers that influence behavior, one woman at a time.

[This is Part 1 of a three-part series authored by Mindbridge. Check out Part 2 for more brain science exploring “us versus them” and how insights from neuroscience might be providing real opportunities for change, and Part 3 on the psychology of GIFs.]