Free Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Matthew D. Lieberman Page B

than half of them took more than the one piece of candy that they had been instructed to take.But when they could see themselves in the mirror, fewer than 10 percent of the children took more than one piece of candy.This is staggering.The mirror made children five times less likely to violate a social norm.Just seeing one’s own reflection is enough to bring our self-control online to overcome the impulse to snag some extra candy.
A century ago, George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley each suggested that self-consciousness is essentially a dialogue between our impulsive self and a simulation of what we imagine people important to us would say to us if they knew what our impulsive self was getting ready to do.We experience self-consciousness as a private internal process, but according to these psychologists, it is actually a highly social process during which we are reminded of what society expects of us and then we prod ourselves accordingly.In essence, this view suggests that we are our own panopticon: both seer and seen.
This isn’t just about Halloween trick-or-treatery in young children though.In a laboratory study, first-year college students were ten times less likely to cheat on a test in the presence of a mirror (71 versus 7 percent).In the absence of any observers, the natural impulse is to cheat (apparently), but people uniformly restrain thisimpulse when they see themselves. People are also more likely to conform to others in the presence of mirrors across a variety of contexts.
Other species exhibit self-control, and some can even recognize themselves in the mirror, but only humans are built such that seeing themselves, a reminder of their potential visibility to others, is sufficient to trigger self-restraint.Seeing ourselves as others would see us (that is, our visible appearance) is sufficient to engage our self-control to overcome our unsocialized impulses in order to fall in line with society’s expectations.When we began our discussion of self-control, it seemed like a mechanism that would primarily support our own individual interests, putting ourselves in control of our lives.As we have seen, self-control operates at least as often to benefit society.We are built such that the most trivial reminders of ourselves as social objects keep us in check.Self-control enhances social connection because it helps us to prioritize the good of the group over our own narrow self-interest.Self-control increases our value to the social group, and by conforming to group norms, we reinforce the group’s identity as well.Self-control is a source of social cohesion within the group, putting the group before the individual.This is the essence of harmonizing.
Reminders that we are the kind of creatures that can be seen, judged, and evaluated engage our self-restraint in the service of pro-social outcomes like not cheating and conforming to group norms.These three processes (being evaluated, engaging in self-restraint, and complying with social norms) seem quite distinct from one another taken at face value, and yet there is reason to think they are each tied to rVLPFC functioning, efficiently converting our sense of being judged by others into self-control efforts that result in social compliance.We have already encountered plenty of evidence on the role of the rVLPFC in self-restraint, so let’s focus on the other two processes.
Imagine an experimenter gives you $100 and asks you to decide how much you want to give to another person in the experiment.You won’t ever meet that person, but he is real, sitting in the next room, and he knows you’ve been given the money to split between the two of you.You have complete control over the money.How much do you give?What are the options that go through your mind?Given that neither of you earned the money, the social norm of fairness prescribes that you should split it down the middle, fifty-fifty.However, selfish motives dictate taking as much as you can get away with.Under