DEAN BURNETT IS A DOCTOR OF NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHIATRY TUTOR,
COMEDIAN AND WRITER. HIS DEBUT BOOK, THE IDIOT BRAIN, IS AVAILABLE NOW
have to let her borrow your car at all. But you have.
There’s also the ‘low ball’ technique, where you’ll
agree to do something in return for a reward, then the
other person removes the reward, but you go through
with it anyway. A car salesman says you can have the
car with a 10 per cent discount, so you agree. He goes
to “speak to his manager”. It turns out you can’t have
the discount, but you buy it anyway. Because your
brain is stupid.
All these stem from the brain wanting us to be liked
and to stay in other people’s ‘good books’. And as a
result, we get screwed over. So-called self-centred or
antisocial people seem to have shaken off this
neurological need for people to like them, and tend to
be more successful for it.
It could be argued that the brain isn’t even cut out to
be altruistic. There’s a brain region, the supramarginal
gyrus, which suppresses our egocentric bias and stops
us from assuming everyone thinks and feels the same
as us. But it only works to a certain point; it struggles to
let us empathise with people who are in drastically
different situations to us. This is why we can watch the
plight of overseas famine victims amidst our frivolous
daytime TV shows without being reduced to a
blubbering mess.
Maybe this empathy and ‘compassionate’ reflex is
just an evolutionary leftover, some sort of emotional
appendix we’d be better off without. Because once
you do abandon it and start living for yourself and
nobody else, you seem to get a lot more done. Just
look at any typical politician or CEO. It may not be
‘good’ to be bad, but it clearly pays well. ß
The brain wants us to be liked and to
stay in other people’s ‘good books’.
And as a result, we get screwed over
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