Managing with the Brain in Mind
strategy+business
Managing with the Brain in Mind by David Rock
from strategy+business issue 56, Autumn 2009
reprint number 09206
Reprint
features special report
1
by David Rock
Naomi Eisenberger, a leading social neuroscience
Managing with the Brain in Mind
researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles
(UCLA), wanted to understand what goes on in the brain when people feel rejected by others. She designed an experiment in which volunteers played a computer game called Cyberball while having their brains scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Cyberball hearkens back to the nastiness of the school playground. “People thought they were playing a ball-tossing game over the Internet with two other people,” Eisenberger explains. “They could see an avatar that represented themselves, and avatars [ostensibly] for two other people. Then, about halfway through this game of catch among the three of them, the subjects stopped receiving the ball and the two other supposed players threw the ball only to each other.” Even after
they learned that no other human players were involved, the game players spoke of feeling angry, snubbed, or judged, as if the other avatars excluded them because they didn’t like something about them.
This reaction could be traced directly to the brain’s responses. “When people felt excluded,” says Eisenberger, “we saw activity in the dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate cortex — the neural region involved in the distressing component of pain, or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘suffering’ component of pain. Those people who felt the most rejected had the highest levels of activity in this region.” In other words, the feeling of being excluded provoked the same sort of reaction in the brain that physical pain might cause. (See Exhibit 1.)
Eisenberger’s fellow researcher Matthew Lieberman, also of UCLA, hypothesizes that human beings evolved
Managing with the Brain in Mind by David Rock
from strategy+business issue 56, Autumn 2009
reprint number 09206
Reprint
features special report
1
by David Rock
Naomi Eisenberger, a leading social neuroscience
Managing with the Brain in Mind
researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles
(UCLA), wanted to understand what goes on in the brain when people feel rejected by others. She designed an experiment in which volunteers played a computer game called Cyberball while having their brains scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Cyberball hearkens back to the nastiness of the school playground. “People thought they were playing a ball-tossing game over the Internet with two other people,” Eisenberger explains. “They could see an avatar that represented themselves, and avatars [ostensibly] for two other people. Then, about halfway through this game of catch among the three of them, the subjects stopped receiving the ball and the two other supposed players threw the ball only to each other.” Even after
they learned that no other human players were involved, the game players spoke of feeling angry, snubbed, or judged, as if the other avatars excluded them because they didn’t like something about them.
This reaction could be traced directly to the brain’s responses. “When people felt excluded,” says Eisenberger, “we saw activity in the dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate cortex — the neural region involved in the distressing component of pain, or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘suffering’ component of pain. Those people who felt the most rejected had the highest levels of activity in this region.” In other words, the feeling of being excluded provoked the same sort of reaction in the brain that physical pain might cause. (See Exhibit 1.)
Eisenberger’s fellow researcher Matthew Lieberman, also of UCLA, hypothesizes that human beings evolved