Hacking Your Mind

-Discovering why the human mind is so easy to hack has turned out to be like opening Pandora's box.

-Understanding how social learning works, understanding how social persuasion works can be used not only for good but for ill. -Many scientists are convinced that hacking for good could be humanity's best hope.

-The analogy I like to use is GPS.

It helps people get where they want to go, and it doesn't make anybody do anything.

-We are now armed with the tools of making our own lives better, both at an individual level and a society level.

-But the same discoveries are giving 21st-century authoritarians the power to manipulate us in ways of which Hitler and Stalin could only have dreamed.

-In China, if you have misbehaved, well, very sorry, your life is going to become very unpleasant.

This is no longer a science-fiction future.

It is already happening.

-Should a democracy like ours use the behavioral science in this Pandora's box to make our lives better, or is it so dangerous that we should let the authoritarians alone wield this power?

Fortunately, you've got a say in what we decide, and you'll find out what you need to know to make that call on this final episode of "Hacking Your Mind."

-"Hacking Your Mind" was made possible by a major grant from the National Science Foundation, where discoveries begin.

-Hi.

I'm Jake Ward.

Most Americans are certain about one thing, that democracy where we all get to vote is the best form of government.

But there have always been some people, including among our founding fathers, who've worried that letting everyone have a say in our decisions would lead to chaos.

And now leaders of other countries are pointing to the chaos gripping American democracy to defend their increasingly authoritarian regimes.

In the eyes of 21st-century authoritarians, a responsible government controls the media so all citizens are exposed to the same facts.

And some have even begun using the same combination of big data and behavioral science that marketers use to get people to buy products to get their citizens to buy the government's policies.

The result is that, while Americans seem to disagree about almost everything, the Chinese government today trumpets their nation's ability to act with one voice and calls China the responsible superpower.

With the entire human race confronting intractable problems like global warming, the mass migration of refugees, and potential nuclear conflicts to name just a few, which form of government really is best suited to cope with all of the challenges we face?

One of our most beloved myths suggests that it's not as easy a question to answer as we might think.

"Star Wars" is about an ongoing battle for control between those who are convinced that authoritarianism is the only practical government and those who believe in individual freedom.

And perhaps surprisingly it's not at all clear in the "Star Wars" saga whether it's the rebellion or the empire that manages the world better.

-"Star Wars" is, in large part, a saga about chaos and order.

You can see that when the empire isn't in control, when there isn't an authority, things may not be very well organized, and people might suffer, and there's a risk that there will be discontent and dissatisfaction, which will give rise to a threat of a new empire.

-The Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire for a safe and secure society!

[ Crowd cheering ] -The Sith Lords are onto something deep in societies and I think in every human heart, which is thinking that chaos is extremely dangerous, and you need to have some kind of centralized authority who prevents things from spiraling out of control.

-So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.

-In the end, the "Star Wars" saga opts for freedom, and that means the risk of chaos, but it recognizes that that risk can sometimes be very high.

[ Men clucking, screeching ] -Today, the United States is experiencing firsthand the risk of chaos, with equally powerful warring factions fighting fiercely over the solutions to almost every challenge our democracy faces.

Meanwhile, 21st-century leaders like Assad of Syria broadcast scenes that could come straight out of "Star Wars" to their people in order to convince them that giving all the power to their leader is the price of avoiding chaos.

But as any good myth would recognize, the real answer to what makes some societies function well and others function poorly can only be found by looking inside of human beings to find out how we decide to behave the way we do.

A scientific revolution has revealed that, far from making our decisions slowly and logically, we often make them so fast, we're not evenly consciously aware of it.

It's as if we're operating on autopilot.

And now that same scientific revolution is discovering how the autopilot decisions you make shape the society you live in and how, in turn, the people around you influence your decisions.

A key discovery was made by a young scientist who realized that she could journey back to the environment in which the human brain evolved to study how people influenced each other's decisions back then.

-I thought, "If we're really going to, you know, move this field forward, we need to be studying, you know, populations that exist in an environment that more closely approximates the environment that our ancestors lived in."

[ Indistinct conversations in native language ] We need to look at, what were the evolutionary pressures that led to many of the extraordinary traits that we exhibit as a species?

And that's how I first became interested in the Hadza.

[ All conversing in native language ] -The Hadza are some of the last hunter-gatherers on earth.

They roam a remote corner of the Serengeti in Tanzania And like the hunter-gatherers we are all descended from, they live most of the time in groups of 10 to 20 people.

[ People conversing in native language ] Each group only stays in one place as long as there is enough food to be found, and when it runs out, they move on.

Spending six months living with the Hadza enabled Apicella to identify a key reason why some groups of people get along and function well, and other groups do not.

And here's a clue.

It's a key part of your life you probably take for granted.

-[ Laughs ] -[ Speaks native language ] -When you compare us to other mammals, we humans are very unusual in the way that we develop close ties with people who we're not having children with and who aren't our relatives, people, in other words, who are our friends... -[ Speaking native language ] -...friends that, you know, we spend time with, we hang out with, we develop a connection to, a shared sense of humor, a shared group of habits, all of the things that make us human.

[ All conversing in native language ] And now the next generation of decision scientists is figuring out the remarkable extent, and it's amazing, to which our friends and the people who belong to the same groups we do influence the decisions we make.

-Apicella realized that, because the Hadza relocate so frequently, they constantly get to decide whether they want to live with their friends and their friends' friends, the people who make up what scientists call a person's social network.

And that allowed Apicella to investigate whether the influence that friends have on each other can affect how their entire social network behaves.

-Because the Hadza have such flexible living arrangements, what this means is, I can track individuals over time to examine, well, how do they choose the individuals that they want to live with, right, and also, how do they then themselves change depending on the people that they then surround themselves with?

-Apicella's first step was to figure out who from among all of the Hadza was part of each person's social network.

To do that, Apicella and research assistants like Deus Haraja visited all the different Hadza camps and took photographs of every Hadza.

Then they printed out all the photos on posters.

[ Conversing in native language ] -So what I did is, I brought out a photographic census of the Hadza.

-[ Speaks native language ] -And I just showed them to subjects in each camp, and I asked them, "Who would you like to live with after this camp ends?"

And they could name up to 10 individuals as a future camp mate.

-[ Speaking native language ] -One of the most interesting things I observed with the Hadza social-network study was the fact that just bringing out these posters with pictures of people that they've seen from their past, they were just in awe of it.

[ Conversing in native language ] -Just like we want to go through Facebook and look at pictures of our old friends, the Hadza too want to see these pictures.

-Next, Apicella began studying how similarly people behaved to the other people in their social network.

[ People conversing in native language ] The two key behaviors she focused on were cooperation and its opposite, selfishness.

[ People conversing in native language ] To find out whether an individual was somebody who tended to cooperate for the good of the group or somebody selfish who took advantage of others, Apicella gave each person in private four sticks of one of the Hadza's most prized foods, honey.

-[ Speaking native language ] -Next, each person was told they could contribute as many sticks as they wanted to the larger group to be shared equally by everyone once they'd all contributed, or they could keep as many sticks as they wanted for themselves while still getting an equal share of what everyone else had contributed, and no one else would ever know what they decided.

-[ Speaking native language ] -Then the researchers compared how many sticks each person had contributed to the larger group to how many sticks the people in their social network contributed.

-[ Speaks native language ] -Apicella suspected that the selfish people would be very eager to join social networks that included cooperators so they could take advantage of them.

-And I found an unexpected result.

-[ Speaks native language ] -What I found is that individuals were choosing other camp mates that were very similar to them based on levels of cooperation.

-The selfish people had social networks filled with selfish people, and the cooperators had social networks filled with cooperators, and that suggested something remarkable.

In the environment our brains evolved in, behavior within a social network is literally contagious.

[ Whistle blows ] Of course, most of us don't live in that environment.

We live in this one.

But experiments by Apicella's colleagues have revealed that behavior within our social networks is contagious, too.

-What we're interested in is social contagion.

How can other sorts of things -- How can ideas, norms, behaviors spread from person to person and from person to person to person?

Our initial thought was to look at obesity.

Could we find evidence that, as one person gained weight, it made their friends gain weight and then their friends' friends and friends' friends and so forth?

So these are some results of that study.

What we show here is, is that, at one degree of separation, if your friends are obese, you've got about a 45% higher likelihood of being obese yourself.

-Right.

Right.

-And if your friends' friends are obese, you've got a 25% higher likelihood of being obese.

And if your friends' friends' friends are obese, you've got a 10% higher likelihood of being obese, and it's only when I get to four degrees of separation... -Wow.

-...your friends' friends' friends' friends... -Right.

-...that there's no longer a relationship between that person's body size and your body size.

-So the truly amazing thing is that, even though you may never have met your friends' friend, their behavior is contagious to you through the friend you have in common.

Follow-up studies have demonstrated that whether you drink alcohol or not is contagious within your social network, and so is smoking and taste in music and books.

Both happiness and loneliness are contagious, too.

And yet we are not consciously aware of any of that because we're making most of the decisions that shape those behaviors on autopilot.

And that is what gives 21st-century hackers so much control over whether a group of people functions well or functions poorly.

All they have to do is hack into our autopilot system and seed a behavior, and without our even being aware of it, we will spread that behavior throughout our social network, either for good or for ill. -You take a group of people, and you assemble them one way with one set of rules of interaction, and those people are kind to each other... -Yeah.

-...or cooperate or innovate or are healthy.

-Right.

-Or you take the same human beings and connect them a different way, and they're none of those things.

They're mean to each other.

They don't learn from each other.

They're unhealthy.

They're un-innovative.

They're uncooperative.

Same human beings connected different ways gives the group different properties.

-Christakis' goal is to design hacks that will help entire societies function better.

His latest project is aimed at improving the health of babies in rural Honduras with this simple hack.

First, strategically select just a few people in a village.

Next, educate them about best practices like only giving babies clean water, and then count on those people to make that behavior contagious throughout the village.

-And in this village over here, you pick six people at random, the six yellow dots, to whom you're going to give some sort of an intervention, a public-health intervention, a clean-water intervention... -Right.

-...a vaccination intervention.

And what I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to understand not what happens to the people to whom you give the intervention but what everyone else in the village does.

-The goal is to create hacks that countries can use to dramatically improve the health of their citizens at a cost they can afford.

-For us, the holy grail is to be able to provide a kind of multiplication factor for public-health interventions so that we recognize that if we only have so much money and we can only reach 100 people, maybe rather than targeting 100 people in one village, maybe we could target 20 people in each of five different villages and still get all five villages to change their behavior.

And so now we've multiplied by five the impact of our intervention by exploiting some of these ideas about behavior change and social embeddedness.

Incidentally, the same paradigm can hold not just for villages in the developing world but for classrooms who are trying to get kids to not smoke, who are trying to get kids to be studious, who are trying to get them to wear their bicycle helmets, from workplaces who are trying to increase worker safety to hospitals who are trying to get doctors to wash their hands or order fewer tests.

This is, in my eye, one of the coolest things you can do in science today.

-It turns out that hacking people's autopilot system, like Christakis is doing, works vastly better than appealing to logic, as another expert in social influence has discovered.

-I've been studying how to use social influence to move people in directions toward more positive treatment of the environment.

We did a study where we went door to door and put fliers on the doorknobs of people asking them to reduce their home energy consumption, and we use one of three normal appeals -- Do this for the environment... -Right.

Right.

-...or do this to be socially responsible so your children will have resources in the future, or do this, and you can save money at the end of the month on your energy bill.

-Right.

-Right?

We looked at their energy usage.

None of those made any difference.

-Wow.

Wow.

-But one other message that we employed increased their energy savings significantly -- "The majority of your neighbors are taking steps to reduce their energy consumption."

-Right.

-That was the only thing that made a difference.

-Wow.

-It was 350% more successful than any of the messages that we normally use.

-But that's ridiculous.

Why are we influenced that way?

Why does that influence us?

-It's not logic, Jake.

-That's ridiculous.

-It's social proof.

The multitude is the message.

-Multitude is the message.

-"What other people around me like me are doing tells me what's appropriate for me to do."

-Inspired by those findings, Cialdini and a company called Opower convinced energy utilities around the country to start telling their customers how much power their neighbors are using.

Mary Milliken in Glendale, California, is one customer who now tries to make sure she gets a great score.

-I think we are probably top 10, top 5 for the area.

-Yeah.

Does that sort of imprint itself on you in any way?

Do you take pride in being a highly ranked, highly efficient home?

-Yeah, I do.

I mean, if were to get a "good," I'd probably feel disappointed.

-Right, as opposed to a "great."

-Yeah.

And I open up the report, and I see that we're great, and I think, "Okay.

Well, that's good.

We're on track."

-Do you think that your energy usage can influence the choices your neighbors make?

-Yes, I think it could because it is in our nature to want to keep up with the Joneses.

-Right, right.

And so it turns out that, though we like to think of ourselves as independent individuals, a dominant force in human behavior is the drive to do the same thing the Joneses or the Petrovs or the Zhangs are doing.

And of course hacks designed to take advantage of that instinct can be employed not just by scientists trying to make societies work better but by authoritarians eager to control every aspect of human behavior.

The scientists themselves are well aware of that danger.

-Any authoritarian regime, any communicator who can tell us, "If you do this, you will be part of the 'we,' part of the collective that is approved and valued in our society," that will be a very powerful impetus for movement in the direction of what those communicators or authorities are hoping we will do.

-That's precisely the tactic the Chinese government is now using to control the behavior of the nation's more than 1 billion citizens.

Rogier Creemers is the world's leading expert on what the Chinese government calls a social credit system, a hack aimed at ensuring that China remains a safe and secure society.

-It is a fundamental element of Chinese political thought and has been for the last 2 millennia at least that society can be harmonious.

Therefore, any form of social conflict or tension means that someone did something wrong, and that underpins that whole notion of the social credit system.

It's essentially creating technologies and mechanisms to ensure that people behave in the way that they are supposed to behave according to the governmental model of good citizenship.

-What's most ingenious about this Chinese hack is the way it mimics something familiar to every American teenager -- video games.

Just like the games they play, China's social criticism takes advantage of our desire to get a higher score than the Joneses to get people to want to play the game.

The catch is that, in this game, players don't advance by catching more Pokmon.

They advance by amassing more and more points for behaving in the way the government wants them to.

So maybe it's not surprising that the best explanation of how the system works comes from a video-game expert.

James Portnow created this video to alert people around the world to the danger posed by the gamification of government.

-Going under the innocuous name of Sesame Credit, China has credited a score for how good a citizen you are.

They dredge data from your social network, so if you post pictures of Tiananmen Square or share a link about the recent stock-market collapse, your Sesame Credit score goes down.

Share a link from the state-sponsored news agency about how good the economy's doing, and your score goes up.

And having a high score gives you special benefits like making it easier to get the paperwork you need to travel or making it easier to get a loan.

-So China has gamified being an obedient citizen.

What does that mean?

-It means that they've taken systems that we use in games... -Right.

-...to make things engaging and put them towards something outside of a game, in this case, making someone want to follow the party line.

-Here is where this goes from being repulsive to downright insidious.

Because this is all part of a social network, it also scans your friends, so you will lose points for having friends with low obedience scores, and it tells you this.

At any point, anybody can check anyone else's score.

And when you check your own score, Sesame Credit provides a handy map of your friends to show you who's dragging your score down.

-Are people in China just sort of going along with this like it's no big deal?

I mean, what would motivate them to comply with this?

-It's being introduced in a voluntary fashion, which is one of the most brilliant things about it.

-Mm.

-You can opt into the system and show off your score on Twitter.

And, I mean, literally as sort of a patriotic thing, you can show how good a citizen you are, right?

-Wow.

-A government doesn't even have to tell neighbor to spy on neighbor to rat each other out because that's all built into a seemingly innocuous game system.

The government need not step in.

Re-education will be handled for them by friends, classmates, and relatives who want to maintain a high score.

-That's the truly evil-genius aspect of this, because if you have a friend who has a low score and you want to have a high score, well, you can't have a high score -- -If you're associating with the low-score people.

-Right.

-Wow.

-And so what are you going to do?

You're going to unfriend them.

This allows the government to just sit back and let you tell me, "Hey.

Those articles from that, like, radical newspaper, just please stop posting them," and either I do, or I disappear from your life without the government having to do anything.

-There are consequences besides just losing your friends for Chinese citizens with low scores.

-So for instance, in Chongqing, a city in the south of China, certain intersections, there are facial-recognition cameras that recognize jaywalkers.

And if you jaywalk, then your face essentially gets put on a big screen in a sort of public naming-and-shaming game.

And if you jaywalk five times, you get put on the blacklist.

And that is connected to your social-credit status.

If you have misbehaved, well, very sorry, your life is going to become very unpleasant.

This is no longer a science-fiction future.

It is already happening.

-But here's something essential to understand -- The Chinese see it as a far better alternative to the divisiveness that grips the U.S. -I think one of the things that we underestimate when we talk about China is the extent of disillusion that is present in China at the moment where they looked at the West and primarily the United States as something to emulate.

[ Indistinct arguing ] And increasingly it almost seems like China is now learning that, "Wait a minute.

There are a whole number of things there that we really shouldn't be emulating and that this West that we saw as so powerful and so strong in many, many ways is very, very weak and has gotten progressively weaker."

-So if authoritarian governments don't want to be like us, maybe we should do everything we can to avoid being like them and, among other things, treat hacking as a Pandora's box that a democracy should not open.

But that is not how James Portnow sees it.

-Actually, I think there's a lot of good we can do here.

That, to me, is the future, and so if we don't just use this for ways to manipulate us but rather to encourage us to do the things that are genuinely positive, I think there's a bright future ahead.

We could make school something that every child wants to go to.

We can make work something that everyone enjoys.

-Mm.

-And so there's a lot of power there.

-Laurie Santos of Yale agrees.

Her research compares the behavior of humans to that of dogs and monkeys, and she has helped demonstrate that it's we humans whose minds are by far the easiest to hack, both for ill and for good.

-There's a real question about how we should use these strategies, and when folks think about them, people sometimes have a worry of, like, "I feel a little weird about using these strategies and affecting people's behavior.

Isn't that manipulative?"

To that, I say, "Well, everything we do is manipulative."

Because we are going through life on autopilot, every small piece of the way the world is structured or our social groups is structured, those things are affecting us.

They're going to affect us anyway.

If we happen to be in a group that's doing good, that's going to affect us.

If we happen to be in a group that's doing bad, that's affecting us, too.

Given that we're affected anyway, why not use those strategies to make positive changes?

-Let's go back to the "Star Wars" analogy.

Remember the Force?

The good guys and the bad guys can both use it, and the one thing neither side can change is that the Force exists, and it's going to play a pivotal role in human affairs.

In the real world, hacks are a little like the Force.

Everyone from marketers to politicians to governments uses them, and they're going to continue playing a pivotal role in human affairs.

But could the good guys set limits on how they use hacks to ensure that they only use them for good?

That is the goal of a leading advocate of using hacks he calls nudges -- to only use them if they help people achieve their own goals.

-The analogy I like to use is GPS.

So if you turn the GPS on in your car or your phone, you plug in the destination.

You decide where you want to go, and you also don't have to follow the instructions.

If you say, "No, I don't like that route," you go another route -- You know, unlike spouses, the GPS doesn't even yell at you.

So GPS is a perfect nudge.

It helps people get where they want to go, doesn't tell them where to go, and it doesn't make anybody do anything.

-In Thaler's view, virtually everyone's goal is a comfortable retirement.

But one of the flaws of our fast-thinking system, that it does not do statistics, was keeping a lot of people from achieving that goal.

-For years, retirement plans all worked the same way, these 401(k) plans, which is, you come to the firm, and you're hired, and you get a big pile of forms to fill out.

-Right.

Right.

-"Welcome to Our Team!"

And there's going to be pages and pages.

You got to pick health insurance and life insurance.

And when you get to the retirement plan, there will be a long list of funds that you can choose from.

So a lot of people, in some firms as many as half, simply would throw up their hands at this point and say, "Oh, I'll do that tomorrow."

-They're overloaded, and they just say, "Never mind."

-Even though the company would be matching their contributions 50 cents on the dollar.

It's like turning down free money.

-If people don't sign up for a 401(k), I mean, that has terrible effects down the road, right?

What are the effects on people's lives?

-Well, they're going to be poor when they're old.

-Right.

-It's as simple as that.

So how do you solve that problem?

A very simple idea called automatic enrollment.

Now you walk in.

You're a new employee.

You still get a big pile of forms and still got to pick your health insurer.

But when it comes to retirement, the first page of the form is going to say, "If you don't do anything, we're going to enroll you."

Now, there is a page here that you can fill out saying, "No, I don't want to."

-"No, thanks.

Free money?

No, thanks."

-Yeah, or, you know, "I'm planning to inherit my money."

-Yeah, yeah, whatever, right.

-But unless you fill out that form, you're in.

Millions of people have been enrolled as a result, and they're saving billions of dollars.

-Billions?

-Billions of dollars.

-Wow.

-My mantra is, if you want to encourage people to do something, make it easy.

-Yeah.

Right.

-"Make it easy," sung to the tune of The Eagles' song.

-Yeah.

-You know, some critics will say, "Oh, you're meddling with people by messing with the choice architecture."

What those people fail to get is it's impossible not to meddle.

So you can nudge for good or nudge for evil.

-In 2009, Thaler's coauthor on the book "Nudge," Cass Sunstein, was charged by President Obama with making federal government programs and regulations easier to deal with by reducing bureaucratic red tape.

-My coauthor and friend Dick Thaler has a very new term, "sludge."

Government has a lot of sludge.

To take the sludge out of the system saves time and money, but it's actually much better than that, because if you have a loan program, let's say, from which farmers can benefit so that they can keep their land, taking out the sludge isn't just time or money.

It's a way of producing basic opportunity.

It can get people's lives on track.

-Sunstein found that partisan bickering also creates sludge.

For instance, Republicans have an autopilot bias against regulations.

Democrats have an autopilot bias in favor of regulation, and the result is gridlock.

[ Siren wails in distance ] But Sunstein found that when he got both sides to slow down and consider the real-world impact of a regulation, they often came to the same conclusion.

So, for instance, let's talk about backup cameras, you know, to nudge people to back up safely.

In order to put backup cameras into the millions of new cars built each year, it costs billions of dollars, and that is a cost that gets passed on to you and me.

Now, you and I, we could spend that money on other stuff, so the question is, is it worth it?

-News coverage of parents backing over their children regularly grips the nation.

-Heartbreaking tragedy for former Baltimore Raven Todd Heap.

Police say he hit and killed his 3-year-old daughter in his driveway.

-We're talking about the greatest source of anguish, I think, that's imaginable in the human head, not only the death of a child but the death of a child at one's own hands.

The word heartbreak doesn't come even in the vicinity of describing what that's like.

-Once Democrats and Republicans considered the real-world impact, they both supported requiring the cameras.

-And I think the right word -- words for that is, "God bless that decision."

-But there are those who detest nudging, including libertarian Glenn Beck, who frequently declared on his program that Sunstein posed a dire threat to Americans' freedom of choice.

-Cass Sunstein, this guy, we said for a long time, the most dangerous man in America.

-And according to Rogier Creemers, the American nudgers were a key inspiration for China's hackers.

-China's Social Credit System certainly has the potential to become the ultimate nudge system.

And the Thaler and Sunstein book about nudging was one of the major bestsellers in China, and pretty much every senior party official will have read at least a synopsis of it.

These things are hugely influential.

-So maybe it's not surprising that some Americans see hacking for good as the first step in the creation of the American version of the Chinese Social Credit System.

But even if that frightens you, there is no avoiding this fact -- Because human behavior is contagious, hacking is an inevitable part of life.

To be human is to constantly be hacked by other human beings.

But there is a fascinating flip side to that.

Because how you behave is also contagious, to be human is also to be a hacker.

And that means that, no different than a government, we each face the choice whether we are going to hack for evil or for good.

-There's a real power to human social contagion.

We're affected by others, and we can affect others ourselves.

-I'm right here!

-Being more prosocial, being more cooperative, being healthier, just doing those actions is going to make others do them, as well.

And when we use those strategies to do good things, we can effect really important, positive change.

-Consider, for instance, prison reform.

Chris H. was sent to jail by British cops nine times before he figured out how to stop doing the things that were landing him behind bars.

And then he came up with a hack aimed at making his new way of living contagious, and it became the writing on the walls in British jails.

-"When I was sitting here, I thought this was me.

I thought I'd just keep coming back, thought it was just meant to be that way.

Couldn't change.

But the thing is, we do stuff for lots of reasons.

We do stuff because our mates did it, because you thought it felt good or just didn't think.

But when I was here last time, I realized, this is on me.

What I do is my choice, and it's time I choose something else.

When I left, I said I would do things differently, and I did.

It took effort, I won't lie, but it paid off.

If I've got one piece of advice, it's that the first step is the hardest, so make it small.

Think -- What's the one thing you can do to make sure you don't end up back in here?

And when the door opens, do it.

-I want to help people, intervene in their lives and show, "Look, you don't have to be taking drugs.

You don't have to be committing crimes.

You don't have to be going to these places.

You can live a life free."

And that's what inspires me.

-To the chief of police, using hacks likes Chris' to decrease criminal behavior is a no-brainer.

-This cost nothing, so you could virtually say, "Here, we've got 20 victims less for that much cost," and then you can go to any police chief, and you say, "Look, you can do this.

This is the cost.

This is the outcome.

You make the decision."

So these behavioral insights are for the right reason.

-Another way each of us can hack for good is to literally hack our own minds in order to create new habits that will benefit not just us but our family and friends, too.

-So, let's say that I have, you know, decided I'm not going to pound a big burrito at lunch, but instead, I'm going to spend my lunch break here doing this, pedaling.

-Good for you.

-Why -- Thank you.

Thank you.

Why can't I just make that decision?

-Well, your life is full of habits.

Our conscious decision-making is just not good at perpetuating behavior consistently over and over.

It's not designed to do that.

-Right, right.

-That's why we have habits, so that we can use them to repeat the behavior without thought.

So you have to deal with the habits in your life in order to change a behavior.

They're going to be there, so you might as well make those habits work for you.

-So there really is sort of a recipe for creating these habits.

-Yeah.

You need to repeat the behavior in the same way over and over again, and you need a reward.

-Mm-hmm.

-So you have to find something that is fun for you... -Right, right.

-...that you like doing, and if you can't find an exercise that's fun, add something to it.

-Like reading a book or looking at a movie.

-Exactly, something that you do only here that rewards it and makes it more pleasurable, or find a good friend that you talk to while you do it.

There's always a way to add rewards and to make it more likely that habits form.

So it's the repetition.

It's the reward, but it's also the context in which you're doing it.

You really want to make it easy.

If you have a gym next to your office, that's where you should go.

-Right, right.

-Or if you can figure out how to walk home... -Yeah.

-...that's what you should do.

-Right.

-Building it into your day and making it easy is most likely to be successful at forming a new habit so that you just repeat the behavior without thinking.

-So I come here every day and just do this automatically.

-Exactly.

-According to Woods' research, if you intentionally do the same thing at least 66 times, it will become an autopilot habit, one you'll repeat without even thinking about it.

And if you get really serious about hacking your own mind in order to improve your autopilot decisions, you can become an expert at something important to you.

So, how do you become an expert?

First move.

Well, take my friend Paul here.

Paul has spent a lot of his life playing chess, and as a result, he's got me right now in what's called a knight-pawn endgame, and it does not look good for me.

No matter what I do, he pretty much automatically knows how to respond.

[ Sighs ] But he wasn't born this way.

He doesn't have some genetic gift for this.

He had to spend years using his slow-thinking brain to teach his fast-thinking brain how to do this until it pretty much became automatic, that everything he does here just clicks for him, just like driving a car or putting on his clothes.

Mm... -Checkmate.

-Ah.

And that is why, in the end, he just smokes me in this totally automatic way.

You an imagine lots of examples of experts, right?

The fire captain who knows exactly when a burning building is going to collapse or the test pilot, right, that knows just when to eject from the plane, but how do you and I become experts in our own lives?

Well, let's talk about marriage.

That's not something that anybody would really say they're experts at, and let's think about the standard fight you have about which one of you took out the garbage last.

Maybe that escalates into that bitter argument you've been having for years about which one of you is sacrificing more to keep the house functioning.

What's the solution?

Well, you can train that other part of your decision-making system, the logical, slow-thinking part to be on alert for the trash issue.

And before your autopilot instinct to react angrily takes over, your slow-thinking system can tap the brakes and turn off your autopilot system, and you can instead say, "Ah, shoot.

I forgot.

I'll take it out right now."

And if you work at it, that response can become basically automatic, and you can turn yourself into at least a little bit of a marriage expert.

And maybe then there will be one more happy marriage or, because behavior is contagious, more than one.

But as news footage from protests like those in Ferguson regularly reminds us, some of the biggest challenges we face involve our entire society, like accusations that America's police treat black people differently than white people.

Can we use the fact that behavior is contagious to tackle that problem?

That's the goal of cutting-edge training police officers in California are undergoing.

First, Stanford behavioral scientist Jennifer Eberhardt helps the cops grasp that bias is frequently the result of nonconscious, autopilot decisions they make.

-It's about your brain and the culture.

-Then each of the officers comes up with their own way of communicating to their fellow cops how implicit bias can distort their choices.

-A black person or a white person, and that person's either holding a gun or holding an innocuous object like a cellphone or a soda can or something like that.

And if you look with black targets and white targets, it shows that there's a higher error rate for black targets.

-The officers will then go back to their local police stations and focus on influencing how their fellow officers interact with the community.

-Once you do understand and know that it exists, you would be remiss not to employ the ideas, the tenets behind it, in your everyday job.

It's disturbing to think that there may be some out there that want to still argue that they don't have any bias or, even worse, that they're okay knowing that they have it, and they actually allow that to affect their interactions with anybody, both in personal life or in professional life.

-Millions of Americans have gone online to take the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, with the goal of finding out if the decisions that they make about people of other races, sexes, and ages are influenced by autopilot biases.

The test was co-created by Mahzarin Banaji, and she's been impressed by the way many people react to a test result that suggests they are biased.

-When people see that their test score is saying something about their minds that they know not to be true, of course they could've just walked away from the test and said, "Who cares?

Some silly, little test tells me that I have race bias or age bias.

Why should I believe that?"

But people don't do that.

They engage with us.

They engage with the test.

They take the test many times over.

The first responses to the test is, "That's not who I am," and then soon after that, "Well, what can I do to improve myself?"

And I'm always reminded of the Sufi poet Rumi, who said in the 13th century, "Each and every one of us is a jackass but with the wings of angels tacked onto us."

And I think that when I talk to any individual person who has gone through this experience with the IAT, I can see that their mind is sort of flooded with these thoughts of their jackass side and then how they must use the wings of angels to fly away from their native and natural selves.

-But none of us will ever be able to overcome all the biased decisions that we tend to make when we're operating on autopilot.

And so Banaji suggests that throughout our society, we use hacks to protect us against the mistakes we all make because of our autopilot biases.

-I think it's very important as our science is moving forward and we're discovering more and more about the human mind that we also begin to think about solutions in ways that will be kind, considerate, that will take into account that this is not happening because people intend to harm.

And I would love for us to move in the direction of no-fault insurance, for example.

[ Car horn honks ] With cars and car-driving, we certainly understand that I could be a good driver, and yet, I could hit somebody, not because I want to but because that was a mistake that I made.

-And that's the idea behind the creation of a sort of no-fault insurance to protect against some of the mistakes we make when we're operating on autopilot.

-Could we have candidate number five, please?

-For instance, male conductors of orchestras have long believed that men are inherently better musicians than women.

-We'd like to start with excerpt number two.

[ Violin playing ] -And so even after women finally got the chance to audition, men continued to win almost every open position in the world's orchestras.

-The paradox of these biases is, of course, that the conductor or the selector is not trying to pick the least good person.

[ Violin continues playing ] The conductor is trying to pick the very best person.

New York wants the very best violinist before some other city can steal that person away.

-Could we have candidate number six?

-But it turns out that even though you as the conductor want the very best person to be the one that you select for your symphony, that you actually are quite willing to give up the better woman for the more mediocre man because you've seen their gender, and that's what's getting in the way rather than what you believe you're choosing on, which is the music.

So they began to do blind auditions where they dropped a curtain between the player and the selectors.

[ Violin plays ] And the reason symphony orchestras are well-known to us is because scientists have shown that they changed a lot faster than many other industries did.

Over a 15 or 20-year period, American symphonies went from being almost entirely male, with the one little harp player, maybe, in the corner doing her thing, to all of a sudden becoming deeply gender-integrated.

So this is at once shocking and very pleasing -- shocking that it took something like a curtain to actually take away the offending data that were otherwise getting in the way of selecting the best musicians, and then, of course, this happy outcome that with such a simple device like dropping a curtain, symphony orchestras began to pick better musicians, and I wish to emphasize that.

Many people said to me, "Oh, it allowed women to enter the orchestra," but let's, for a moment, not care about that.

Let's just care about the quality of what we are producing.

The reason the blind audition is so great is not because it let women in but because it let better musicians in, whatever their gender.

-So carefully designed hacks can help a diverse democratic society function better.

But like any science, this one can also, as we've seen, be abused.

So why risk opening this Pandora's box?

The answer, according to many scientists, is that we cannot overcome the serious challenges we face without coming up with strategies for coping with the predictable mistakes we make when we're on autopilot.

Here's my favorite example of how you can do that in your personal life and why it's worth the effort.

Skiers and snowboarders love a pristine, untracked slope like this one, but they know there's a serious risk -- being buried alive in an avalanche.

Now, it turns out most backcountry adventurers know the warning signs of an avalanche, and yet some of them go down a dangerous slope anyway and set off the avalanche that buries them alive.

New studies of skiers show that their actual mistake is something that we've been talking about throughout this series, because it's a mistake that you and I make all the time.

We use our gut feelings to make sense of what's happening, and that gets in the way of our ability to see what's really going on.

For skiers, the gut feeling is, "This is going to be amazing," but the intensity of that emotion automatically, without their even knowing it, convinces them to feel that somehow the risk of an avalanche is low when, in fact, the risk is high, and they wind up dying as a result.

So what's the solution here?

Well, the first thing is to understand that you and I are biased in favor of our most intense emotions, but we shouldn't just do what that emotion says.

Instead, slow down.

Take it easy, right?

Never mind that the slope is amazing.

Make a real decision based on an analysis of the facts.

Second, gather more facts.

Experienced adventurers like Jared and Allison, they want to have fun out here, but they don't want to die.

Hey, Jared?

-Yeah, what's up, Jake?

-How do you avoid dying out here?

-Well, in the backcountry, we use pits like this to determine whether there's a danger of avalanche throughout the day while we're traveling.

We're looking for suspect layers, and the suspect layers that we're finding today are in within the first foot or two of the surface of the snowpack.

And so based on that, in my opinion, I would not ski this slope today.

-And that is how you make a real decision.

-As a society, we face numerous dangerous situations where the wrong decision could result in a different kind of avalanche.

And if we decide to let our autopilot biases determine how we react to those situations, there's every chance we will wind up triggering the very avalanche that buries us.

But decision scientists have discovered that we also have another choice.

We can take advantage of the freedom we have in a democracy to discover how we really make decisions and use that knowledge to improve our own lives and those of everyone around us.

And whether you succeed at becoming a cop who's helping other cops deal with implicit bias, or you're determined to embrace the better angels of your nature, or you begin hiring the most talented people regardless of their gender, or you start using energy more efficiently, or you just make your marriage work better, you will influence not just the lives of all the people in your social network, you'll help our entire society function better.

And if we have the courage to do that, maybe we can prove to the world that it's a democracy with informed and engaged citizens that is far and away the most successful form of government on earth.

-Learn more about "Hacking Your Mind" by visiting pbs.org.

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