 For those of you who might not have joined us this morning, I'm Melanie Greenberg, the President of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and we are thrilled to be here with all of you moving into our afternoon session. Every year we host an innovation panel, and the idea is to try to shake up your thinking about some areas that might be clearly within the realm of peacebuilding or a little bit outside, but to give us some new conceptual lenses. And this year, your shake-up and thinking is going to be very literal since we have an incredible panel coming up on peacebuilding and neuroscience. Peacebuilding and neuroscience and the link between them is revolutionary for our field. It helps us understand what does the brain look like on violence? How does our brain actually manage fear, bigotry, in-group and out-group relations? And conversely, what does our brain look like on peace? What do we know about altruism, the harmony of sacred values and reconciliation? And then even more intriguing, how do we design peacebuilding programs to take those hard-wired biases into consideration? What does this mean for evaluation? Will the gold standard for evaluation be that peacebuilding participants' brains have changed and do we map that? Are there processes that we need to change or reinvent based on what we know about our brains? This will be an ongoing area of inquiry for the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and it's an area that we invite all of you to join with us. And we're doing this in partnership with a number of our members who've already done groundbreaking work in this area. You'll hear today from Beyond Conflict, and Tim Phillips is the founder and chairman of the board. The Alhidri Foundation has done some fascinating work around this. Mari Fitzduck, who's here with us today from Brandeis, the Solia, which is now part of Searching for Common Ground, and a number of other organizations thinking about those links between the brain and peacebuilding. So today, we are very fortunate to have Emile Bruno with us, and Tim will officially introduce him. Your mind is not playing tricks on you. We are supposed to have a third speaker, Betsy Pollock, from Princeton. She, unfortunately, was supposed to take the train down today and was caught up in the Amtrak closure, and despite heroic efforts to try to rent a car and drive from Princeton and a dissertation defense this morning, it just couldn't happen. So the show will go on, but it will slightly expand the format to fit the time. So it's my great pleasure to introduce Tim Phillips, who is the founder of Beyond Conflict and a real visionary in the peacebuilding field. He's worked for years at the intersection of transitional justice and peacebuilding, and has made it his mission to create a whole subfield around neuroscience and peacebuilding. So we're delighted that Tim is here with us today, that Ina Brewer, AFP's board member, is also here, and I turn this over to you, Tim, to make a formal introduction. So thank you. Well, thank you, Melanie. I guess this is working. It is a pleasure for me to be here, and I'll soon introduce my friend and colleague, Emil Bruno. And let me start off by saying I want to thank the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, El-Hebri, and the other partners, including MIT, that have worked with us on this initiative over the last, really, three to four years. And the title of this session is rather bold, that it's revolutionary when you think of peacekeeping in issues of reconciliation, but I believe it's appropriate and I think it's accurate. We live in a time in which many conflicts remain intractable, many peace agreements remain fragile, and we see an increasing desire by many to identify by race, ethnicity, and nationality over any shared sense of nationhood. We also work in a field that is seeking more effective ways to measure impact, to understand change, and improve outcomes across a range of challenges. While we also have a vast literature and experience that shows what works or what seems to work, we also have a lot of experience about what doesn't work, and a lot of this is intuitive, as Emil will point out. The questions we ask and the frameworks we use are fundamentally shaped to measure and are based on a framework or a fundamental operating system or assumption that believes that humans are rational actors, that leaders and communities apply reason and even in the service of realpolitik to serve their goals. But is this fundamentally true? Are we principally rational actors who will also deploy violence as horrible as it is or division and fear without any regard to bias or the emotional basis of these choices? Or are we as Emil, and Betsy would have pointed out, first and foremost, deeply unconscious human beings with limited conscious access to what drives most of our behavior? Are we, as a retired neuroscientist once told me, which got us interested in this work, at our core emotional beings who can only think rationally when we feel that our identities are understood and valued by others? If this is true and science is showing that it is true, then don't we have a responsibility, actually an obligation, to better understand the structure of the human brain, to understand how the brain gives rise to the mind? Or, as one scientist said to me, everything we experience, all our senses, everything we experience as humans, is the result of neurons firing in the brain. So therefore, don't we have to understand what those neurons are doing in the brain? Behavioral scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, and many other disciplines are now showing us more fully what it is to be human. As I said that we are deeply emotional beings who blend emotion and cognition in the service of survival. As an example, that we experience social rejection as physical pain in the brain. That part of the brain that registers trauma cannot fully differentiate between emotional and physical trauma. Or the research of many others on sacred values, that we process those things that are sacred to us in different regions of the brain than every other calculation that we process. And when we hold on to a sacred value deeply, whatever that may be for us, when we are approached through a trade-off, through a regulation, we hold on more deeply to those sacred values and respond with aggression. So think of that in the context of the Second Amendment debate in this country. Think of it if you have a deep religious commitment, or a parent with their children. You know, sacred values, empirically we know what they are, but to recognize through nor imaging another research that they are processed differently in the brain is a very powerful insight. Emile will give you a glimpse into this emerging body of work. Emile represents a fraction of the emerging generation of scientists who are applying science to some of the most difficult challenges we face as a species. I want to end by mentioning that this event we're doing today, or at least this panel as part of this broader event, is part of a broader initiative that we have launched with partners on neuroscience and social conflict. It's not a panacea. It's not saying that science has all the answers. What it's saying and suggesting that to really understand what drives humans two and away from conflict to greater coexistence is that we need to understand how we as humans operate on the most basic and most fundamental of levels. Emile will give us, I think, a hint of that, and then we'll have a chance to go into Q&A, and then I may, we'll maybe also have a chance to tee up some questions, but I want to turn it over to my colleague Emile Bernaud, who we've worked closely with for the last three years, and also his colleague Rebecca Sacks at the Sacks Lab at MIT. Emile is a research scientist. If you've read The New York Times Sunday magazine two months ago, you may have seen an article about Emile's work on empathy, which is part of an initiative that we are jointly doing together on the Roma. The Roma, for example, are 8 million strong in Europe and one of the most marginalized, discriminated groups of people in Europe today. Literally, the European Union has spent 80 billion euros to reduce discrimination and nothing has worked. Various funders have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in nothing has worked, and the question was, could you apply experience and insights from behavioral sciences to come up with a different way of addressing this problem? And I think Emile will probably touch upon that as well. And the last thing I'll say that really touched me, and I think it was Emile and Rebecca who mentioned it a few years ago, what's really important to recognize or to think about is not what people say or what they think, but it's how they think. And when you recognize that how we think is deeply unconscious, and we don't have conscious access to most of what drives our decision making, that's a very powerful thing to understand. So with that, I'll turn to Emile and take it over. First, thank you all so much for having me here and being here. I'm really odd at the work that you do, and I come to this research not just to learn about the brain and how humans work, but actually to serve this community here. I want the work to give you some information that might be helpful, and so I'm going to present to you my path so far on that route. And I'm going to try to give you a little bit of the vision I have for how neuroimaging can apply to peace building, conflict resolution. So I come to this work actually from my personal experience mostly just by happenstance. I found myself in some very interesting places at some very interesting times. This was before I was formally working as a scientist. I was in South Africa in 94 when it transitioned from apartheid to democracy. I found myself in Sri Lanka visiting friends and narrowly missed one of the largest Tamil tiger strikes where they blew up the international airport right after I arrived. I was in Ireland where I volunteered at a conflict resolution camp during the troubles, and I spent a few summers now living in the West Bank doing research. So what really struck me across all these different conflicts was that despite the fact that these span three different continents, they involve seven different languages and at least seven different religions, that there were some remarkable similarities. First there are the kind of structural similarities that conflicts share. There's competition over scarce resources. There's often physical separation between the groups, but what really caught my attention were the psychological forces that seem to be driving conflict and how similar they seem to be. And I think this is captured really nicely by this quote by Anwar Sadat, who was talking about the conflict between Egypt and Israel, where he said, yet there remains another wall aside from the physical wall. This wall constitutes a psychological barrier between us, a barrier of suspicion, of rejection, of fear, of deception, a barrier of distorted and eroded interpretation of every event and statement. And I think what's really nice and insightful about this comment is it mentions both what we think of as emotional biases that we have, that conflict groups have towards each other, but also these more biases and these more what we think of as cognitive or deliberative processes. So I've been very interested in these questions of how do we identify and measure, but also how do we get past these types of biases? And there's actually a number of groups that try to do this and a number of people are in the room who do this really inspirational work. And this is the reason why I went and volunteered at this conflict resolution program. So these programs, like the one I volunteered in, are designed to try to bring these groups together, to try to ease the animosity that exists between groups. Here's a heartwarming photo that you might see in a brochure for a conflict resolution program. This is me visiting with a group of Protestant and Catholic kids in Belfast. They were eager to cross into the other neighborhoods to visit their new friends at risk to themselves. But what really typified this program for me was not this photo, but what had happened three weeks earlier. Because at the immediate end of the camp, when most of the volunteers had left, a fight broke out between two boys and it immediately split the group down partisan lines and there was a hundred child full scale brawl. So to me, I of course went away from this program thinking, what the hell had we just done? Had we made things worse? And are there other programs that do a better job? Of course, there are hundreds of programs that are engaged in this peace building work. I had friends who were working as volunteers in other programs and I came away wondering, are there programs that work particularly well? Are there programs that don't work very well? Are there best practices that we could implement? If I were trying to implement a program in the future, what guidelines would I use? And when I just started researching this myself, I found that the answers weren't very satisfying to me. So I think there's a reason to believe that it might not have just been a fluke, that the program I was involved in might not have been the only program that fails over time and we actually have some evidence from psychology to suggest that this is the case. Here's my favorite example of a common sense intervention that failed. This is not a conflict resolution intervention, but it's an intervention that's designed to change people's behaviors. This is at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona and at the Petrified Forest there was this sign, your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time. And of course, this is an intuitively appealing common sense intervention. It's designed to shock people into stopping this undesirable behavior, but a social psychologist who went and visited the Petrified Forest and saw this sign was actually horrified because there's a lot of research in social psychology showing that our behaviors are actually really strongly influenced by descriptive norms, what we think other people are doing. So they thought that this intervention might actually be backfiring by causing the behavior that it's trying to prevent. But they weren't satisfied with just documenting this. They wanted to run an experiment. So as good experimental scientists do, they created a number of different conditions. So they created a sign that included no norm. It just said, please don't remove petrified wood from the park. It had a little circle with the arrow through it and a hand reaching down trying to grab a piece of petrified wood. And then they had another sign that included this social norm. Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the petrified forest. This one had a picture of three hands reaching down and a sign. So it's emphasizing that a lot of people are doing this, so you shouldn't do it. And then what they did is they got the graduate students to painstakingly mark individual pieces of petrified wood in the forest so that they could quantify how much petrified wood was actually stolen when each of these signs were in play. And they compared this to a baseline with no sign. And here were the data. So 3% of the pieces they marked were stolen if they had no sign up. If they included a sign that had no norm, it decreased it pretty substantially, about a 50% decrease in theft. When they included the sign with the social norm, it about tripled the amount of petrified wood that was being stolen from the park. Okay, so this is crazy, right? We are being driven by forces that we might not be aware of. And there's actually good neuroscientific evidence to explain why this is happening. And this has to do with how our brain is organized. Oh, but first, I just have to point out that once you have this in mind, you're going to see unintentional social norms all over the place. Here's an anti-literating campaign from California saying cigarette butts are the most commonly littered item, and they show copious cigarette butts strewn across the street. The intuitive assumption is that people will stop this behavior, but the norms-based literature would say this is the exact type of thing that would encourage people to throw their cigarette butts on the ground since they're shown that everybody else does it. And slightly more tragically, here's a paraphrase of a pamphlet drop from the military over Somalia. And, of course, in Arabic said in Somalia, over 60% of the young males in your community are involved in piracy. Help us keep your young boys safe. So this is again emphasizing that everybody's doing it and then asking people to stop doing it. And the assumption will be that this actually increases the behavior that you're trying to decrease. Okay, so now the neuroscience. Why is this happening? Well, my favorite analogy of how the human brain works is that, and this actually has its roots in the first experimental neuroscientist, Buddhists, so it has a long tradition, but the analogy for the human brain is that it's like a rider sitting astride an elephant. And the rider represents that portion of your brain that you have direct introspective access to, that you can communicate with and can understand the processing of. The elephant, on the other hand, represents the large part of your brain that you have no access to that you're completely unaware of, that unconscious part of your brain. And so why this is important and interesting is that we develop interventions that have an intended effect, but they're designed for the rider on the elephant. Oftentimes, these interventions have an unintended consequence, though, that's affecting the elephant, that other part of your brain. And the output, the behavior you get is a combination of the rider and the elephant, but oftentimes the elephant has more of an influence. So what you end up with is an intended effect, the moral appeal for people to stop stealing petrified wood, but the unintended consequence, the expression of this norm that everybody's doing it has more of an effect on the elephant than the intended consequence on the rider, and you end up getting an output that's opposite what you intend. And it's not just norms that have this effect. We know some of where this is happening in the brain. We know that it's not just norms that are having this effect. We can have unintentional threat primes if you even just suggest that someone draws someone's attention to their mortality, that someday they will be dead, to try to convince them to do something like save for the future. That's, again, an intuitive appeal to the rider on the elephant. The unintended consequence is that ends up being a threat to their existence. And we know that threat activates a whole different set of brain regions, and it causes people to obey authority more, to engage more in conformity, and it increases their xenophobia. So this is, again, an example of the elephant being affected in ways that we're not consciously aware of. And we know, too, that this is happening in the brain. We're starting to get an understanding of the specific neural structures that are guiding these types of mental processes. Okay, so I think this means there are at least two things that we can take from this that are relevant to conflict resolution and peace building. One is that we have to accept the possibility of unintended consequences of all of our best intentions. That is, intuitive appeal and best intentions are not enough. You can have incredibly well-meaning people who are very smart, who have the best intentions, and they could create a program that unintentionally drives behavior in the opposite way than they intend. So it's very important, I think, to accept this possibility of unintended consequences. And I think what that means is you have to critically evaluate your programs to make sure that the outcome is what's desired, what you intend. And second, that we should come up with ways to measure the elephant directly to figure out how we can get access to these unconscious processes. So first, just a couple of examples of this, experimentally testing interventions. This is, of course, the principle behind evidence-based medicine. Medicine has found that intuitive medical interventions don't always work. There's this wonderful swan-getz catheter that was developed. It's a really beautiful instrument. You thread up through the leg, and it allows you to look directly at the heart as you're performing open-heart surgery. The problem is it doesn't help at all for recovery from surgery, that the mortality rates are exactly the same as if you didn't use this catheter. So the evidence shows that that's not an effective intervention. And even worse, that a common practice for diabetics coming into the intensive care unit was to do an extreme treatment of glucose lowering. And it turns out that that process that was used for many years and had this intuitive appeal is based on biology, it actually killed more people than it saved. So if they just looked at the evidence, if they just compared these interventions to each other, they find that sometimes their common-sense interventions are not the ones that are actually working. And this has actually been started to apply, a group has started to apply this to economic interventions, particularly in Africa. This is the poverty action lab headed by Esther Duflo at MIT. And they've done some really inspirational work where they've looked at a bunch of these anti-poverty programs. So these are programs that are designed to keep kids in school. And what they did is they just looked at these different intuitive programs and they quantified how many years of extra schooling they actually bought them over control condition for each $100 spent. And these are the programs, unconditional cash transfers, that's just you transfer one time large sum so that people can repair their roofs or invest in education. Conditional cash transfers are like food stamps, you can only use them for certain things and it's like doled out monthly. Merit scholarships for high achieving students, free primary school uniforms, that's often an impediment for kids in Africa going to school. They don't have the uniform they need. Deworming is just to take care of intestinal worms. Information on educational returns, this is just educating parents about the potential earning power of your kids if they're educated. And what they found was that, so I've asked this to audiences to have them raise their hand for their favorite of these interventions and I think this is generally how funding goes right now, right? That you have a representative from each of these organizations stand up and the most charismatic and convincing one gets the most money. But this I think is a much better way to allocate our money, our resources is to look at the evidence for which one is the most effective and most cost effective. And you can see here unconditional cash transfers buys you an extra 0.02 years of schooling for each $100 spent. And as you go across the line you see that there's a dramatic difference between the programs that are most effective and the programs that are least effective, right? So this is you know hundreds full difference in the actual impact and you wouldn't get that just with your common sense, right? That your intuition would not lead you to this conclusion. So this is an illustration of how important this can be. So both for medicine and for economics and I think there's no reason not to use it for peace building as well. And in fact some people have done these heroic efforts to organize really careful experimental designs, randomized control trials of social interventions, of psychological interventions even in wartime and unfortunately Betsy won't be here to speak. I'm a big fan of hers though so I usually present some of her work anyways so I am going to tell you one of the studies that she did that I was really impressed with. So her first study that she did this was a randomized control trial that was in Rwanda right after the genocide and the idea was to present villages with a radio drama that's kind of fashioned on Romeo and Juliet and it's designed to challenge the norms of conflict that existed in Rwanda and what she did is she got individual villages to agree to listen exclusively to this radio drama so they would bring it to the village, the village would gather around the radio and weekly they would get the updates and she got other villages who were distant but were matched on size and socioeconomics to agree to listen to a health-based message program so it was another program it was a radio drama they listened altogether as a village and she just randomly assigned these villages to one one of the conditions or the other and then she evaluated what happened she evaluated the change in specifically in the norms of the community over time so this is an extension of that this is repeating this procedure in the Congo about five years ago and again she had a soap opera that she had people listen to but she added another condition now which was a call-in talk show and again the villagers would gather around and they would discuss it afterwards and they would be listening to these things so either they had nothing they had the the soap opera or they had the soap opera and the talk show so it was three different conditions they had and she randomly assigned again villages to experimental and control conditions and here the data that she got and and this is one of the the most brilliant outcome measures I've ever seen for these types of studies this is one of the things that Betsy does incredibly well the outcome here is how much salt was donated by village members two members of the opposition group and how she would do this is she would plant research assistants in the market and they would be there with a clipboard and as people came to get salt they would say we're accepting donations today for needy members of a group and inevitably the person would ask well what group and the the researcher with the clipboard would say well is there any group you'd feel particularly uncomfortable donating to and the person would say well yes of course and they would name their their enemy group and the person would say well that's actually the group we're asking for donations for and so she could get donations specifically for that group's most hated enemy outgroup and then she quantified it and she saw okay well for the groups in the control condition do you get less salt donated to the needy members of that group versus the experimental condition where they were in the village that that listened to the soap opera and in fact she did so this replicates her work in Rwanda shows that these types of soap operas are effective at changing both norms that people feel towards the other group and conflict and also changes their actual behavior but when she looked at the condition where they also had a talk show she found that the talk show actually eliminated the positive effects of the soap opera so again here's an intuitive intervention this talk show that actually backfired it eliminated any of the positive effects that they got from the soap opera okay so we meaning Tim and beyond conflict and myself are trying to implement these types of interventions in Europe with respect to the Roma population so Tim gave you a little bit of a background but the the Roma are Europe's largest minority group and they've been subject to all sorts of historical injustice for the last millennia that they've been in Europe kind of culminating in the the Holocaust the Roma were as affected by the Holocaust during World War II as the Jewish population but it's not really commemorated or acknowledged and I think and they're all sorts of dramatic current injustices being visited upon them you probably see them in the news once in a while I think it's typified by this comment that was made by not by some guy during a hot mic moment but this was actually a published editorial where Zolt Bayer the founder of Hungary's ruling party said these Roma are animals and they behave like animals they're incapable of human communication in articulate sounds pour out of their bestial skulls you know they need to be eliminated so this this is unambiguous expressions of extreme prejudice towards this group so our goal is to try to see if we can shake some of the psychological foundations of of bias that are driving the widespread discrimination across Europe towards this group so how we're going about it is kind of the models that I just showed you we're trying a couple of different interventions and we're going to see how they compare to each other in changing people's attitudes so one of the interventions is a psychological intervention that was developed by psychologists the idea of this intervention is you present people with a fake article and the fake article includes information that either says that groups and individuals are malleable that is we are born with brains that are designed to change and that's kind of a fundamental principle of our neural structure so that people can change dramatically given a different environment or you give them an article that says groups are generally fixed that they don't change very much over time and what they found is that in conflict regions for so for Israelis Arab Israelis and Palestinians when they're in the malleable condition when they just read this article that argues that groups are malleable and and that our our dispositions are not fixed that they have a much warmer attitude towards the other group and this actually holds for six months and and predicts their support for major compromises on the conflict so this is just a one-time article that they read and it kind of changes their perception about people and groups in a way that's measurable over time so we're going to test this type of intervention in in Hungary in particular towards the Roma so this is one intervention that we'll try another one is based on what I think is a really clever economic self-interest argument developed by the World Bank the argument goes like this the majority ethnic Hungarians that are kind of typified by Budapest have this traditional bell shaped curve for their population demographics that is you have a lot of people in the middle ages and they're not having very many young kids and so if you just project this forward when the people who are now in the bulge right the baby boomers as we have here in the US when they get older and they start drawing pensions and and needing more health care then they don't have enough young people there to to supplement them the argument goes you have a large group of Roma people who are having a lot of children you have a choice then you can either educate those kids and they can become your future workforce or you can prevent them from being educated and not offer them jobs and they can become your future welfare recipients and so it's an economic self-interest argument I think this is really interesting it has this intended economic self-interest appeal but of course this also I think has an unintended effect which is it might be a threat prime this is actually exactly what social psychologists use to prime people to be feel threatened by other groups you say here's a here's a minority group that's growing over time and they're kind of going to be increasing in numbers and so the fear is that this will actually backfire that this will have a negative effect but I think an interesting question coming out of this is it might presumably it's going to have a positive effect on some people if we can figure out what types of people are most positively affected by this we could actually target these intervention to those people and this is a piece of the intervention equation that I don't think has been explored at all in in medicine in economics and I think it's something that could give a lot of traction in these types of messaging campaigns that if you can predict beforehand who will be most receptive to an argument you can target it towards that that group of people so for example these kids responded really well to the program I was involved in if these kids have a stable trait that we can measure we could then select kids who had that trait and put them into this type of program and then you might have more of a chance of having a positive effect or put another way if you could have a stable trait of kids who you know probably won't be affected positively by the program you track them to a different program so the the next piece that I think comes from this reality of how the human brain works is that we need to measure what's going on with the elephant here and not just the writer like typically when we have evaluations of programs we're asking people to self report and self report is inherently about the writer telling you you know what it thinks so the most common way to do this is through social psychology social psychology has been using indirect measures to examine neuroscience for a long time I think the analogy here is that a neurologist doesn't need a brain scan to diagnose a stroke in fact you want them to diagnose a stroke with indirect measures right whether the person is slurring their speech whether they don't understand language then you can diagnose it right away and so social psychologists have been doing this for a long time they use these indirect measures physiological measures but also measures of how much people endorse a certain norm for example in schools they find that the likelihood of someone bullying another kid has nothing to do with how that kid reports personally they feel about bullying it has much more to do with how they think bullying is normalized in the school so if they think their school is a place where kids are bullied that's the best predictor that they will actually bully so you can get an indirect measure that's predictive of behavior without asking them to self report how they feel but just as with neurology neuroimaging has a place to play there that you can guide treatment and particularly guide surgery with neuroimaging techniques I think neuroimaging has a role also when we're talking about peace building and and for the last bit of my talk I want to share with you some of the ways that I think neuroimaging specifically can can help with peace building and some of the progress I've made so far so this is all enabled because of a reality of the brain that is the brain seems to be organized into functional units that specialize for certain tasks so just by happens it didn't have to be organized this way but fortunately it is it means that the level of detail we can get with a brain scan gives us information that's predictive of behavior that is if you can get a signal from a large group of neurons in one of these brain regions that can tell you something about the processing that's going on which is wonderful so there are a few ways that I think are this is more the theoretical piece so there are a few ways that I think neuroimaging could be used practically to help with peace building one is to characterize these unconscious biases that we might not be able to self report very well or at all one is to use neuroimaging as a neural focus group to predict population behavior by looking at individuals brains as they respond for example to information campaigns and finally neuroimaging is a neuro diagnostic for individuals to determine like for those kids in irelands which kids might respond best to a program in which kids might not so I wanted to just present you with some studies that have been done outside of the realm of intergroup conflict that I that I'm trying to adapt to intergroup conflict situations so the the first one is characterizing unconscious bias so this study was very simple it was done a number of years ago there have been other versions of this but the basic study is to show people just pictures of black men and white men and then to look at the brain response to it and what they find is that in white college students they tend to get this activity in the amygdala this part of the brain that we know processes fear and threat and they get that response more when they're seeing the pictures of the black men than the white men but more importantly and interestingly for this study they did two different conditions they either flashed the face on the screen so fast that the rider the conscious part of the brain wasn't even aware that they had seen anything or they flashed it on the screen long enough that you were consciously aware and what they found was the dashed blue line is the subconscious presentation so you're being presented with this photo and you don't you're not even aware you saw it that's what gets the largest response in the threat centers whereas if you present it for a little less time you get less of a response in the amygdala and the reason for this is that you can consciously control that response to some extent so this is again in the amygdala but we know now from other studies we've characterized parts of the brain that actually control the amygdala's response in a top-down manner so you can have these kind of deliberative control processes that are motivated to damp down your your automatic fear response to another group and so this is some indication that this might be happening when white college students are viewing these pictures and that if it's so fast that your conscious brain isn't aware you're not able to bring these these parts of your brain online and you get kind of the full blown fear response okay so this this is the type of study that again reveals something that we might be completely unaware of another study is a really wonderful study done by emily folk that illustrates how neuroimaging can be used as a neural focus group so what she did this was an anti-smoking study what she did is she had smokers in Los Angeles who had an intention to quit come into the lab and she had each of them watch different anti-smoking campaign ads so the the first one campaign a was the talking cartoon cigarettes who are trying to convince each other to get their their human more addicted to them ad b was what this was the the dark comedy so this is a woman smoking alone in her bed at night and in a fit she throws her cigarette out the window there's a two second pause and then she jumps out the window after it so a bunch of ads like that of that variety and see are those totally depressing ads you've seen of like the realities of of addiction and the black lungs and all that stuff so she had them self-report which one of these campaigns they thought would be most effective using them as a typical focus group then what she did is she put them in the scanner and had them view these ads and she looked at this part of the brain that we know is related to norms so that represents subjective value to something so this is a part of your brain that registers how much you value something even if you're unaware of how much you value it and what she found was that the neural responses were completely different that is the brain was valuing the really depressing one much more than the cartoon ad and the other one and then what she did the critical next step was she got New Jersey to agree to play these ads in sequence and see how many people called into the 1-800-QUIT number at the bottom of the ad after each of the campaigns and what she found was that the call volume was predicted by the brain and not at all by their by their subjective responses right so the elephant predicted behavior was the rider didn't at all and anybody who's done focus groups probably knows that this is this is typical that focus groups are terrible at predicting actual outcomes okay and then finally neuro diagnostics so this is applying the same kind of prospective procedure but to individuals and this has had some traction with PTSD PTSD is obviously a really tragic condition and we want to avoid it we don't want to put people who have a susceptibility to PTSD in situations in combat situations where they would get full blown PTSD so they've done some studies where they've looked for this is actually anatomical markers to see if people with different brain structures size brain structures are more susceptible to getting PTSD or not this was a really carefully controlled twin study and they found that people with a different size certain brain structure the hippocampus were more susceptible to getting PTSD in in more time they've also looked at whether PTSD whether neuroimaging can be used to predict how responsive people are to treatments that are designed to to alleviate the symptoms of PTSD so right now there are two dominant treatments for PTSD one is pharmacological and the other is cognitive behavioral therapy and they each are about 50 percent effective and you can't tell from the outset whether that person is going to be whether they're going to respond to which of the treatment so right now it's just a coin toss so the hope is that you could use neuroimaging to predict which would be best for an individual and you will increase dramatically your your your outcome your efficiency of treatment so this has been demonstrated for PTSD it's also been demonstrated for things like dyslexia that they gave a number of kids a battery of tests everything they could think of on self-report measures it was 18 different tests and they had them do a neuroimaging scan and the neuroimaging scan was the only one that predicted future outcomes none of the 18 behavioral tests did so that's there's promise for this for predicting responses in individual individuals okay so these are these are three different ways that I think neuroimaging can be used I've done a little bit to characterize some of the some of the biases that I think are most relevant to intergroup conflict and I'm just going to share one study with you right now and I'll touch on the other two and and then and then I'll give you my future directions of what I'm hoping to do in the near future so the first one that I've examined is cognitive empathy so this is the ability to think what somebody else is thinking this I think of as one of the outcome measures that I'm particularly interested in is trying to understand whether someone is open-minded to the other side's perspective and so what I did is I brought Arabs and Israelis and control participants who are Americans who are not aligned with either group into the lab and I put them in the scanner while I presented to them narratives about the conflict so I presented to them a bunch of these narratives Palestinians have wasted 60 years they could have developed a modern economy but instead they chose violence and terrorism this is the type of thing that Israelis say yes this is totally rational completely reasonable and Palestinians will say that's completely ridiculous and irrational and we presented them with a lot of these types of statements right likening Israel to South Africa's apartheid regime which gets the opposite behavioral response in rationality and then I gave them a bunch of control statements that I thought both sides were think were irrational this one blaming Hurricane Katrina on the wickedness and sin of New Orleans both sides thought that was pretty irrational and then a bunch of rational statements like this one extolling the health benefits of the watermelon right who could disagree with that so for each of these I had them rate how reasonable they were not how much they agreed and we got the predicted responses behaviorally but what I was really interested in how their brain was responding so I use these control statements to identify in each person what parts of their brain were lighting up when they were reading about the irrational statements versus the rational statements so this is an example from one person so this is if you cut the brain straight in half this way you see the kind of red mark so that the places where you get more activity for the irrational statements and the rational statements and you see that this is pretty stable across people and we can actually get a quantitative measure of how much activity you get so this is an Arab participant and you can just take the difference in how much activity they get for the Israeli statement versus the Arab statement and you can plot it on a graph so psc is just the amount of brain activity you get so that the brain based bias and the reasonableness is how reasonable they thought the statements were towards each other here's this one person plotted and then if you plot everybody out the Arabs in red and the Israelis in blue you get a nice correlation here that the the brain activity correlates with how unreasonable they think the other side is and you can also note these two little blue dots in a sea of red those happen to be two Israeli peace activists who worked on behalf of Palestinians so ideologically they're looking like the Palestinians in terms of their neural activity and we've also done this most recently with democrats and republicans evaluating actual proposals and we find a similar area that's that's active for when you're considering the outgroups proposals versus your own groups okay so the hope is that we're starting to kind of add to the toolbox that we already know of in the mind and that we have these regions of interest that we can focus in on and look for changes over time that this might be some precursor of open-mindedness so there's a couple of other studies I've done I focused on affective empathy so how much compassion you feel towards the other group and I I just have had people read stories such as these I found some really interesting distinctions between reading about other people's physical pain which gives you constellation of brain regions that are that are very stable and strong in individuals but I find when I have them read about emotional pain of others that they're completely distinct so what's interesting about this is your own personal physical and emotional pain are processed in similar brain regions but when you're empathizing with other people's pain and suffering they're completely distinct from each other and I'm trying to explore the significance of this over time and then I've also looked at this you know warm and fuzzy measure of dehumanization which is just where do you place these groups on the evolutionary scale there's something as overt and offensive as we could possibly imagine and we find that when people are doing this process that they're actually very deliberative deliberative about this we often think of bias as being these automatic emotional responses this is not one of those this you get no activity in the emotional regions of the brain instead you get it in the deliberative regions of the brain so it seems like people are kind of very deliberately dehumanizing other groups okay so there are a couple of future directions you know I want to apply the neural focus groups and the neural diagnostics to actual intergroup conflict and I'm going to work with Emily Falk the one who did that anti-smoking study to do just that in a couple of months so this is just an overview of what I talked about I talked about how common sense interventions can fail with the example in Arizona I talked about why this might be so based on how our brain is organized I talked about what that means that we should evaluate our programs and not just assume they're going to work and I talked about how we can use neuroimaging to potentially measure these things and the last step will be of course applying the neuroimaging back to the evaluation so that's it I just want to thank everybody who's helped with the research and the funding and I'll offer my brain up to any questions so I think we have probably about 10 to 15 minutes of questions so if you could ask your question concisely quickly and and no brain teasing so who is the first person here and if you could identify yourself this gentleman yes and I think there's a mic right here thanks my name is Matt Pete's with FHI 360 civil society director first of all this is one of the best presentations I've seen at any development related event ever so thank you so much to the organizers for inviting you I think this is what the earlier speaker Miss Puffin Holtz said when she said we need to talk to people who are from outside our field this is really great did you ever find any explanation explanation for the lack of success in programs like seeds of peace that bring people together and the idea that they'll exchange you get to know each other and reduce their prejudices about the other the the one experimental study I've done about that was a behavioral study that I did in the Middle East where I had Israelis and Palestinians communicate over Skype and my so I was a I was a high school teacher before I started this this whole researching gig and that's I would travel during the summers and that's how I ended up in all these crazy places so I what I got from both the observations from the minority kids in the high schools that I was at after going through these diversity training programs and from Palestinian kids who had gone through the programs is they seem to experience a backlash about six months after the program where they were taught to trust the other side and then six months later they're going through the checkpoint and they're treated the exact same way they see that nothing structurally has changed and they felt not only negative towards the other group but now they felt betrayed right because before they didn't have trust now you've built up trust and you you eliminated it so there seemed to be a backlash from that experience and so I I also thought that the program is is often designed by well meaning members of the dominant group by wealthy Americans who are going to Ireland to set up this program and that their intuitions are based on what will work for the members of the dominant group not the the subordinate group and so I tested this in this experiment in the Middle East I went to the West Bank and I had a research assistant go to Tel Aviv and we had Israelis and Palestinians communicate over Skype and we had both groups either engage in perspective taking so listen to the other side this is really common for dialogue programs listen to the other side and kind of actively respond to what they're saying or I had them play the opposite role which I called perspective giving that is you get to talk about your concerns and the other person's goal is not to evaluate what you say not to agree or disagree but just to reflect back what you said so to actively listen rather than waiting for their turn to speak and I found that the effectiveness of the intervention was opposite for the groups that Israelis their attitudes towards Palestinians increased the most when they were perspective taking and for Palestinians their attitudes towards Israelis changed the most when they were perspective giving and the opposite intervention didn't work at all for either group and then I did the same thing with Americans white Americans and Mexican immigrants in Arizona and found the same pattern so these programs might be built and if you look at like if you some researchers have cataloged how many utterances people make in these dialogue programs and the most common finding is to find that Israelis make twice as many utterances as Palestinians which is exactly the opposite of what you would want for an effective program based on that research so so this might be one of the components that's driving the lack of success in some of these dialogue programs and can I just add to that point when I was mentioning earlier what this retired neuroscientist said to me three years ago that our capacity to think rashly depends on being understood as we see ourselves and it goes to the reference you just made disempower groups need to be seen they need to be understood as they see themselves because it's about feeling safe and when you feel safe you can then begin to think more rashly so these things all tie together is there any possibility in the future that a vaccine be invented to control the violent behavior of a human being well the way I look at it that's what you all are doing you're you're developing incredibly innovative programs to try to control violent behaviors my job I think is to to give you tools to decide whether they're working or not right so there are some psychological interventions that we can develop based on evidence-based results from psychology and I'll definitely try those out but most of the interventions that I want to try are the ones that that you all are developing and and I'm just you know I recognize that it's really hard especially for established programs you mentioned seeds of peace they've been around for a long time so at that point it's really a threat to have your program evaluated from the outside and I think that's scary and I totally understand how you'd be reluctant to do that so my hope is that as the new generation of scientists grow up who are developing tools to evaluate these programs as we're growing up with the new generation of intervention programs that we can start the ground start from the ground floor that the program can start with evaluation in place so then it doesn't become a threat 10 years after you're established it becomes part of what you use to fine-tune your program to tool it so that that's my my overall dream is that that kind of marriage could happen over time I thought it's our hand over here in the back first and then we have one more after you I'm sorry just unless the organizers give us five more minutes that's a share I school for international training first of all I I really think this presentation was revolutionary to me so really congratulate and thank you so much from the bottom of my heart and I wanted to ask you about the focus group being not so good predictor indicator whereas practitioners use focus group and interviews a lot so I like you to help me and help us understand the tension and connection between that the functioning of the amdala yeah according to the study versus like a rational brain an emotional brain kind of in a in conflict fighting each other or controlling each other whereby like the result of the study about that that aspect may or may not tell us a full story about how the rationality and emotional brain are actually you know competing with each other controlling each other if you could conclude that so that it becomes helpful for practitioners yeah I think it I mean that's that's a key really interesting question I think you have to design really control well controlled studies to start answering that but the takeaway point for me is not that focus groups never work I think in some situations a focus group can tell you exactly what you want to hear and and we find that some of our explicit self-report measures are very good at predicting behavior like if you ask hungarians how they feel about the roma you can ask them how they feel on this ascent of man scale and the degree to which they like blatantly dehumanize the roma is a really good predictor of how they're going to discriminate against them in educational settings elsewhere right so so there the rider is a really good predictor of outcomes and there you want to use it right it's easy it's cheap in other circumstances than the explicit measures you ask the people and they self-report they're not very good at reporting this and and I think it it just always depends upon the specific intervention that the intervention that includes the norm right that including the norm wasn't a part an intentional part of their intervention at all but that's the part that that kind of elephant that the unconscious brain keyed in on so whenever you're developing a program you have to realize that you're going to have a bunch of elements that are directly appealing to the rider but you're probably also going to have a bunch of elements that are appealing to the elephant and the problem is you don't know what those elements are right because they're unconscious because you can't self you can't reflect about them so I could look at an intervention now and I could look for some cues are you saying anything that might conjure up feelings of mortality if you are then that's probably going to be affecting the elephant in ways you don't intend are you unintentionally including a norm in the messaging or the program that you have if you are then that's probably driving behavior in that way but there's probably dozens of other things that could be in there and I think this is why we have to keep evaluating the programs because we haven't identified all of the things that are that are pushing the elephant without our awareness right it's hard to study because we can't introspect about it and if we could because I was able to get us four more minutes so if you could so it's a 30 second question my name is Ted Johnson I'm from the college school at Brandeis fascinating thank you very much I was wondering if you had also looked at the aspect of culture and cultural neuroscience has been a fair amount of work on that and whether or not the norms that you described in many instances are indeed cultural you cited one of the studies on here which was the the stereotype threat which was the Claude Steelework on African Americans who were taking the GRE because and didn't do well because they thought that it was just not something that they could do well on until they were later told that you take another portion of this test which was designed by African American scientists and is perfectly benign in that instance and they did much better so the the self-referential threat went away and then you can also think in terms of the notion of the the the norm that police officers have toward people of color with respect to their propensity to commit crime and that how that changes when police officers actually get out of their cars and do community policing so by changing the social cultural aspect of it some of these things are dealt with does your work look at potentially bringing together both culture and the other aspects of neural of the programming that you're talking about yeah well I think if you if you define culture as your environment more broadly I think that the response of African Americans to stereotype threat so this is if you if you have African Americans take a test they'll score lower than white Americans on the test if you if you just give them the test and say here's here's a hard test but if you instead say before the test these are just a series of word games now they they score equally right that the African American performance actually increases about 40 sat points just by changing your instructions about what the test is right and the and you can do this with Asian women if you prime their identity as women and you give them a math test they'll score 40 points lower than the men and if you prime their identity as Asian and you give them the math test they'll score 40 points higher than the men you can do with athletics you can have black and white athletes perform a task and you can change how well they perform at the task based on what stereotype you prime so I think culture here just means you could you could take a group of people and put them in an environment and make them aware of a stereotype and that's now going to affect their performance and it's going to affect their performance in ways they're not consciously aware of right that it's it is driving the amygdala which is very very good at at mobilizing your resources to avoid getting eaten by a lion but it's really terrible at taking an sat so if you if you're relying on your amygdala that's not the right thing to do when you're taking an sat and so you can you can do these types of things but one of the remarkable things about that is if you first teach people about stereotype threat like I just did with you you're no longer subject to its effect it eliminates the effects of stereotype threat so this is an illustration of the ability for us to bring some of these unconscious processes into your conscious brain and thereby inoculate yourself against them which I think is one of the most hopeful examples that I've ever seen in psychology of an intervention and I'm mystified at why we don't spend five minutes teaching every third grade student this reality because it could have a dramatic impact on on closing the achievement gap yeah before we go to the last question there is also research that shows when you think of SATs and other standard tests in the United States if you remove the questions in the beginning such as race ethnicity to the back the participants will score anywhere from 10 to 20 percent higher and it's all about priming anxiety if I understand and within the brain in a very unconscious way and it's about threat and the other thing before to the last question I think it's really important to say because I think people will be wondering where does this overall work go we're at the stage working with partners here of this larger initiative which is going to be working across disciplines working across labs and and practice to bring together these communities for those of you who are in the academic world you know collaborating across silos is almost an evil and what we're trying to do is not only get the collaboration across the various research silos but bring in theory and practice together and that's been the work for the last three years and it's the work we continue to do in the future and we're very open to hear from all of you because this is going to be an overall collaboration and it's about reframing what drives human behavior and within this broader context it's particularly interested in these broader issues of conflict and reconciliation whether we think of them globally or we think of them in our own communities and the way we've been thinking about this is one track is education like today the second track is research bringing together the scientists and practitioners and others to ask what is dehumanization how do we understand empathy how do we understand stereotype and the third is translation which is at the end of the day how do you translate all this knowledge and growing research into our real world problems such as what Emil's been doing with us on the roma or some of your other projects and this is really key work and so I think you know this is at the cusp you might say an inflection point but it is I think really to fundamentally not only reframe and understand what it is to be human but I think knowing what drives this behavior is empowering and liberating to people because if you look at this issue of bias and race with policing in the united states today we have been approached by scotland yard and what they found is just talking to their white policemen and women that they are biased not necessarily racist because every single human being is biased it changed the way they respond they now no longer feel stigmatized they no longer feel ashamed or sort of pointed out that you're acting in certain ways so just knowing this like you were saying about stereotype changes people's reaction so one final question and then we're going to thank everybody from let's go in extra 10 minutes thanks should be on is it on okay it's on thanks Ned Lazarus George Washington University and both in reference to the the first question and to your outstanding to your outstanding presentation and research the question of dialogue groups and generalizing I think this applies in some way to the peace building community but specifically the because of the example that you presented of a failure or a fight at a there are hundreds of dialogue programs which are very different methodologically many of which incorporate the research about asymmetry that you've mentioned in a very sophisticated way the specific program that was mentioned seeds of peace I happen to do a longitudinal study of the first 10 years of graduates of the program found that 50 percent of them were involved in peace building for three years after the program and that 20 nearly 20 percent of them were involved in peace building as adults 10 to 15 years after the initial program the thing that made the difference was follow-up programming and so where there was follow-up programming there was much more success that's one prominent case but there are many and so I I want to state this not about that program but just about our field as a whole I think that there are actually in terms of stereotypes I think there are stereotypes that peace building is not effective that dialogue is not effective that are based on the fact that we work in contexts where the conflicts are intractable where the conflicts are long-term and will be continuing and our interventions don't immediately resolve the conflicts or all of their corollary effects and I would I just want to raise that because I think it's actually in some sense we're helping internalize a stereotype of our own work but also in terms of the presentation whether it's important to present examples of success as well as examples of failure and failure is very important to present as well and no denial of that I agree yeah and so that's why I wanted to present some of Betsy's work I think that she's been the one who's shown these these great successes in these psychological interventions that that they have consistent effect in really tough situations and I totally agree that just because some medical interventions don't work or even backfire you don't want to conclude that medical intervention shouldn't be done right that's not the right statement to make and I think the same is true for peace building right just because you can demonstrate that some of them don't work or some of them some of them erase the positive effect of others the conclusion there isn't to stop peace building the conclusion is just like in medicine and just like in anti-poverty programs in Africa to evaluate them to compare them to each other and to stop seeing that or to try to transition away from seeing that as a threat and see it more as an opportunity to to improve the field right because ultimately that's what we're trying to do right we're trying to make the world a better place and so we want to make sure that we're implementing interventions that are that are doing that and not doing the reverse thank you