The Frontal Cortex

Facebook Friends

Posted by Jonah Lehrer on February 1, 2009
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In the latest Seed, there’s an interesting dialogue between political scientist James Fowler and physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. I was particularly intrigued by their ruminations on the network dynamics of Facebook:

JF: When we move from five friends in real life to 500 on Facebook, it’s not the case that we are having a close, deep relationship with each of those 500 friends. In fact, one of the intriguing things I’ve noticed about these online networks is that they have a property that’s different from realworld social networks. As you know, in the real world, popular people tend to be friends with popular people. But in these technological networks, as in metabolic networks, it’s just the opposite. The nodes with many, many links will tend to be linked to nodes with few links.

ALB: Right.

JF: It makes me wonder if the dynamics of online social networks are going to be reflective of realworld social networks. Because to a large extent, in your work and some of the work that I’ve done, we’re relying on the idea that what we see online is telling us something about the real world. But there’s a pretty fundamental difference.

I’m not on Facebook, so take what follows with a hefty pinch of salt, but there’s some suggestive evidence that the brain might contemplate other people very differently when that person is a virtual Facebook “page” and not a flesh and blood individual, with a tangible physical presence. Humans, after all, are social primates, blessed and burdened with a set of paleolithic social instincts. We aren’t used to thinking about people as computerized abstractions.

Consider this elegant experiment, led by neuroscientist Joshua Greene of Harvard. Greene asked his subjects a series of questions involving a runaway trolley, an oversized man and five maintenance workers. (It might sound like a strange setup, but it’s actually based on a well-known philosophical thought puzzle.) The first scenario goes like this:

You are the driver of a runaway trolley. The brakes have failed. The trolley is approaching a fork in the track at top speed. If you do nothing, the train will stay left, where it will run over five maintenance workers who are fixing the track. All five workers will die. However, if you steer the train right⎯this involves flicking a switch and turning the wheel⎯you will swerve onto a track where there is one maintenance worker. What do you do? Are you willing to intervene and change the path of the trolley?

In this hypothetical case, about ninety five percent of people agree that it is morally permissible to turn the trolley. The decision is just simple arithmetic: it’s better to kill fewer people. Some moral philosophers even argue that it is immoral to not turn the trolley, since such passivity leads to the death of four extra people. But what about this scenario:

You are standing on a footbridge over the trolley track. You see a trolley racing out of control, speeding towards five workmen who are fixing the track. All five men will die unless the trolley can be stopped. Standing next to you on the footbridge is a very large man. He is leaning over the railing, watching the trolley hurtle towards the men. If you sneak up on the man and give him a little push, he will fall over the railing and into the path of the trolley. Because he is so big, he will stop the trolley from killing the maintenance workers Do you push the man off the footbridge? Or do you allow five men to die?

The brute facts, of course, remain the same: one man must die in order for five men to live. And yet, almost nobody is willing to actively throw another person onto the train tracks. Greene argues that pushing the man feels wrong because the killing is direct: We are using our body to hurt his body. He calls it a personal moral situation, since it directly involves another person. In contrast, when we just have to turn the trolley onto a different track, we aren’t directly hurting somebody else. We are just shifting the trolley wheel: the ensuing death seems indirect. In this case, we are making an impersonal moral decision.

What makes this thought experiment so interesting is that the fuzzy moral distinction⎯the difference between personal and impersonal decisions⎯is built into our brain. When the subjects were asked whether or not they should turn the trolley, a network of brain regions assessed the various alternatives, sent their verdict onwards to the prefrontal cortex, and the person chose the clearly superior option. Their brain quickly realized that it was better to kill one man than five men.

However, when people were asked whether they would be willing to push a man onto the tracks, a separate network of brain areas was activated. These folds of gray matter⎯the superior temporal sulcus, posterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus⎯are believed to be responsible for interpreting the thoughts and feelings of other people. As a result, these subjects automatically imagined how the poor man would feel as he plunged to his death on the train tracks below. They vividly simulated his mind, and concluded that pushing him was a capital crime, even if it saved the lives of five other men. Pushing a man off a bridge just felt wrong.

What does this have to do with Facebook? I think it demonstrates how thinking about a person in physical terms – as someone we need to physically push – changes how the brain represents that person. When the person is a virtual abstraction, an impersonal representation on a computer screen, the brain treats them accordingly, and seems to invest them with less agency, emotion, etc. Perhaps – and this is a big perhaps, since nobody has done the scanning experiment – we make social decisions concerning many of our Facebook acquaintances using these “impersonal” brain areas. In other words, we might push a Facebook friend off a footbridge, but we’d never push a real friend.

I don’t mean to criticize Facebook. I simply agree with Fowler: Facebook is a new experiment in human social interaction, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the network dynamics of Facebook don’t resemble the network dynamics of the real world, whatever that is.

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Comments

  1. #1 Anibal
    February 1, 2009

    Come on! Jonah, register you as a member on facebook, i would like to be your friend.

    By the way, nice reflections about how the “social brain” overcome the quirks of e-life.

  2. #2 Celeste
    February 1, 2009

    I’m a college-age student addicted to Facebook, and I buy this argument. Though I often “unfriend” people on Facebook, the real life equivalent–telling someone, “sorry, I don’t think we should talk or see each other anymore”–seems ridiculous and a little cruel.

    Also: if Facebook notified people when I unfriended them, I would almost never delete friends. To translate this to the trolley problem, it would sort of be equivalent to someone shouting: “CELESTE DID IT!” as I pulled the switch and directed the car towards the single maintenance worker.

    The Wallstreet Journal had a pretty good article awhile back about cyber etiquette and unfriending: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123007984542431845.html

  3. #3 Luciana Christante
    February 1, 2009

    Sorry, but this is so … obvious. Of course it’s different and I think this is quite clear for those who are part of these virtual social networks, as they make possible interactions that couldn’t take place in the “real world” mainly because of spatial and temporal constraints, among other factors. I don’t mean this is intrinsically good or bad. I think this may be a very exciting topic to be studied by cognitive sciences, as soon as we take a closer look and ask “how different” it is, either qualitative and quantitatively.

    Don’t understand your resistance of being part of such experiment, you may have a lot of insights… :-)

  4. #4 Blaze
    February 1, 2009

    The difference described may not be due to differences in online vs. real world networks in as much as it may be a reflection of the fact that not all people visit facebook frequently (or even have accounts for that matter). Not to mention facebook has a strategy of using friends of friends to grow the network, which would also drive the network to highly connected hubs with satellites of people with few connections.

    Facebook adoption issues aside, it may also be the case that the networks which we establish in modern society are not the size and shape we would have if we didn’t live in a post-industrial society. For years commentators lamented the ‘disconnectedness’ of modern societies; these systems’ popularity may be driven more by a return to more native social structures.

  5. #5 Anonymous
    February 1, 2009

    The recent short-lived Burger King promotion supports your conclusion. People were offered a coupon for a free hamburger for “de-friending” five people. And many people were willing to do so.

  6. #6 glow-owl
    February 1, 2009

    might the difference in our attitudes and actions re: facebook de-friending (or even facebook trolley-pushing) be due to an appreciation of the difference in the consequences of our actions?

    pushing a man (flesh and bone) in front of a trolley is significantly qualitatively different than its electronic correlate. the biggest difference being: in one case, a human being -actually- dies.

    we understand this. we know that defriending someone on facebook has less impactful conequences than doing it to a friend in real life.

    my point: i do not think that the crux of the moral difference here is between action/inaction or personal/impersonal, as JL suggests. i think the moral difference may be a matter of our unconcious awareness that the consequences are quantitatively and qualitatively different.

  7. #7 Tony Jeremiah
    February 1, 2009

    almost nobody is willing to actively throw another person onto the train tracks. Greene argues that pushing the man feels wrong because the killing is direct: We are using our body to hurt his body. He calls it a personal moral situation, since it directly involves another person. In contrast, when we just have to turn the trolley onto a different track, we aren’t directly hurting somebody else. We are just shifting the trolley wheel: the ensuing death seems indirect. In this case, we are making an impersonal moral decision.

    This can also be observed in variations of Milgram’s obedience experiments. In the original experiment, when shocker and learner were in separate rooms, 65% of the shockers went to the maximum (450) voltage. However, this fell to 40% when both shocker and learner were in the same room, and to 30% when the shocker had to force the learner’s hand on a (presumed) shock plate.

    What does this have to do with Facebook? I think it demonstrates how thinking about a person in physical terms – as someone we need to physically push – changes how the brain represents that person. When the person is a virtual abstraction, an impersonal representation on a computer screen, the brain treats them accordingly, and seems to invest them with less agency, emotion, etc. Perhaps – and this is a big perhaps, since nobody has done the scanning experiment – we make social decisions concerning many of our Facebook acquaintances using these “impersonal” brain areas. In other words, we might push a Facebook friend off a footbridge, but we’d never push a real friend.

    Facebook’s primary purpose is to reunite with people one has already encountered in the real world (e.g., high school and college friends). This is unique from several other social networks (e.g., Myspace) that unite complete strangers. So the above analysis would probably be more appropriate for social networks having people who have never met each other.

    Facebook might be more appropriate for testing something like socioemotional selectivity theory, which is meant to explain why there is a tendency to have fewer friends as we age. From my own anecdotal observations on Facebook, it does seem my younger FB friends have more acquaintances than my older ones (mostly from high school and college). If this observation is real, it would be interesting to see if it is due to Facebook having a population skewed toward 20-somethings, or, whether it is evidence for socioemotional selectivity.

  8. #8 gadfly
    February 1, 2009

    maybe everyone just takes it for granted, but it amazes me how often scholarly speculation about facebook ignores the crucial fact that nobody (or at least very few) who uses facebook takes its definition of “friend” in the same sense they would use it in the real world. it’s much closer to “acquaintance” in practice. as someone who was in a fraternity in one of the early facebook schools, i have mountains of anecdotal evidence of this. i can’t tell you how many times i’ve met someone briefly at a party and, in the morning or even later that night, been friended. despite the warming nature of alcohol, i seriously doubt that any of these people regarded me as a close or serious friend. this is still a use of facebook that i welcome – it helps tremendously in keeping faces and names straight among friendly acquaintances. but it points out the difficulty of making sweeping generalizations about the service or forms of social interaction. especially so when you consider that, relatedly, i’ve several times had the experience of suddenly realizing that a good friend of mine was not my facebook friend because neither of us had bothered to announce the friendship digitally. i know (again, anecdotally), that these experiences are not unique to me, but shared by many young facebook users.

    in short, it’s a huge mistake to assume that facebook and the everyday world use the same definitions of friendship.

  9. #9 Hannah
    February 1, 2009

    I agree with gadfly about the differents definition of the word friend that apply in Facebook life versus real life. However, I’m not sure I agree with the idea from the main article that we think of our Facebook friends as virtual pages rather than flesh and blood people. With very few exceptions, I’m only Facebook friends with people that I’ve actually met in real life, so Facebook really plays the role of a proxy – basically a glorified cell phone. When I interact with someone through Facebook, for me the idea of the real person is always there, even if it’s someone I haven’t seen in real life in quite a while. I suppose it might be different with people you haven’t actually ever met.

    Also – there’s a highly amusing expansion of the trolley car question here.

  10. #10 Phillip
    February 1, 2009

    Jonah, you should consider getting a Facebook. =)

  11. #11 Ryan Barnes
    February 2, 2009

    All you people with long posts can shut your DAMN mouths!!!

  12. #12 Anonymous
    February 2, 2009

    I am 44 years old and I am 13 months sober. I am also on Facebook. My 12 step program has suggested that I resolve the resentments, regrets and harms in my past, and not fear the future. I try to live “in the NOW” now. For my generation, many of us lost touch with each other rather than pay the long-distance phone bills to keep in touch. It wasn’t a real decision to lose touch, but we were a post-letter-writing generation, and already scattered from our friends before e-mail/Google/Facebook came along. Google became a verb partly because so many of us Google our estranged associates, but it was too stalker-ish and intrusive, needy or pathetic to approach them in real life. I think some of us felt a lot of guilt for letting relationships slide and lived with regret, but were too cool to go to a great effort to find someone. Many people still don’t come up on Google, so I considered them lost (maybe even perished!) until Facebook’s matrix revealed almost all of them to me. I sense that my generation is having a big group hug on Facebook right now. Facebook has impressed me as a collective uprising of human beings putting out an abstraction of themselves, with a willingness to mingle with and voyeurize other abstractions of other people. It certainly means less to click “add friend” than it does to call someone out of the blue. My abstraction of the newly sober me can handle this! He has successfully been out there on Facebook fearlessly confronting my past and discovering that it is wonderful to replace the bad abstractions I had of some people with the good (usually very domestic) abstractions they make of themselves. I appreciate this new opportunity to re-adjust what people think of me, so-far-so-good. The timing of Facebook’s rise couldn’t be more perfect. With this second chance to understand people and be understood (by way of the safety of these buffering abstractions), I find myself more prepared to deal with these people in the real world. In fact, I saw an ex-partner of mine on a crowded street and let him pass because it had been 20 years and too strange to suddenly be face to face. I think many people would do the same as I did. Now, after a Facebook re-union of our abstractions, I would be very happy to see him in person. We can let our Meta-me test out the waters.

    My fascination is for the next generations — my 7 year old son may never know the feeling of wondering where an old friend went, instead everyone he ever meets (and more that he hasn’t met) will probably be neatly organized for him and immediately available. I can’t comprehend what this means for his social life.

  13. #13 Anibal
    February 2, 2009

    The last anonymous,
    Exactly! mate. You described perfectly what social networks such us facebook do.

  14. #14 Z
    February 2, 2009

    “When the person is a virtual abstraction, an impersonal representation on a computer screen, the brain treats them accordingly, and seems to invest them with less agency, emotion, etc.”

    I wonder how this would translate to other websites such as Match.com and other e-dating sites.

  15. #15 4now
    February 2, 2009

    Do we really invest them with less agency or does it become a Rorschach (sp?) test for our emotions of the moment?

  16. #16 Coturnix
    February 2, 2009

    danah boyd and Fred Syutzman got dissertations on this topic. And no, “friend” online does not mean what you think it means. Throws off some people initially, I know. It’s a contact. On FB it’s called ‘friend’, on Twitter it’s a Follower, on FriendFeed it’s a Subscriber, etc. FB friend is as friendly as your blog’s RSS feed subscribers, or they can be real friends – up to you.

    On FB, you can separate your contacts into groups, e.g., family, RL friends, colleagues, old highschool friends, blog-friends, customers, potential customers, etc.

    Initially, FB was for college students only, soon highschoolers were added as well. They tended to friend people who they were RL friends with, hence the origin of the name.

    Later, people like me joines, in our 40s, with brands to push and sell. We used FB very differently – as a business network, not a social network. The two groups (~20s and ~40s) tried to stay away from each other, as the two style of FB use clashed.

    Over the past year, a third group started joining in huge numbers – the non-tech savvy: your Mom, your highschool friends who have otherwise no presence online. Some of them use FB like highschoolers – for social networking, organizing parties and flirting. Others use it like us – for business networking, orgaizing conferences and meetups, etc. Some combine the two quite well and are bridging the divide between the two older cohorts. But they differ from the older cohorts by their use of communication tools on FB: the two older cohorts use Walls, Groups, Pages, Events, etc., i.e., all public spaces. The newest cohort is old-timey in that way: once they friend you, they prefer to switch on the privacy shades and Direct Message you on FB, or even switch to e-mail or Skype – their notions of privacy as they change in the 21st century are not well developed yet.

  17. #17 Coturnix
    February 2, 2009

    Stutzman, sorry for the typo. Both Fred and danah are easy to find on Google and their blogs.

  18. #18 ken
    February 2, 2009

    The last anonymous. Amazing post and so so true

    Ken

  19. #19 jeffliveshere
    February 4, 2009

    Interesting Facebook conclusions aside, there has something that has always bothered me about the fat-man trolley thought experiment: For me, the “brute facts” don’t only include the 5-people-die vs. 1-person-dies, but also the fact that the people on the track already are track maintenance workers, who presumably know every day they go to work that there is some danger of something terrible happening, while the man who may be pushed is simply an observer. And I think at least part of why I would hesitate to push him is his being once-removed from the situation.

  20. #20 McFawn
    February 5, 2009

    The problem with Facebook is that it takes the mystery of out of the fates of others, and takes away the joy of chance meetings. There is something deflating about finding someone from one’s past so easily, as one of the rare pleasures in life is “running into” an old friend in an unexpected place.

    Facebook is a digital enviroment of chance encounters that takes out the real appeal: chance.

  21. #21 Michael
    February 5, 2009

    I disagree with mcfawn that FB takes away mystery of the fates of others, or that this is not in some way a good thing. There will aways be people we cannot find on FB but FB brings another realm of chance into play. I searched for a friend 3 months ago and then searched again last week and that person now is on FB.
    Some of us have moved so many times, lived in so many places, and been a part of so many different groups of people there will aways be mystery about some of these folks and chance will aways be a part of who connects again and who does not.
    And the meaning of friend varies not by generation or whether its real life or on-line. Rather it varies from person to person. We all know people who network continually and know a lot of people. Then there are people like me who socialize less and spend time with one person at a time. My wife, who was in a co-hort structured grad program at a ivy league school two years ago, networked
    and I, who went to grad school for education at night pre-facebook, did not. A very social 25 year old friend of mine who attended 2 different 4 year colleges and played football on scholarship has seven hundred friends. All those team-mates and football lovers. The world is his contact. His smile and sense of humor are huge social hubs onto themselves. Another friend is shy enough only to accept friends who contact her. She also does not accept many of the people who try to friend her.
    Someone who smokes and drinks has friends in a way that someone who does not smoke and drink does not because these end up being incredibly social ativities: bonds form when you grab a smoke or share drinks.
    In these ways defining friendship in the age of FB is not generational or technological- rather it is situational and highly individualistic.

  22. #22 Patrick
    February 6, 2009

    I think the contrasting scenarios given are poor and typical of ‘moral philosophers’ who always seem to load the scenarios in a manner to try and catch people out. When you are driving a trolley you are fully aware of what it is capable of, your choice does not involve you needing to come up with a new use of an object. If instead of a fat man there was just a large passive object, and its existence was not pointed out to them I wonder how many people would push it and how many would just not think about it and start shouting at the 5 men.
    Also there must be a group survival instinct at play. The fat man falling to his death is 100% going to die, but his death would reduce the chance of the 5 men dying from say 60% to 20%. In a split second we are trying to keep everyone safe. In my mind (somewhere) is the idea that the 5 men also have brains and can make choices, my awareness of that comes into my actions.
    A more interesting scenario would be 5 men on one track and a large food store on the other only this time I am in a famine region and I know that without the food hundreds will die. The food does not have a brain, so I must make choices from it. That would be an interesting dilemma.

  23. #23 Gen
    February 7, 2009

    I’m sorry, but I disagree with Greene on why people’s reactions to the two scenarios vary…I think it has less to do personal or impersonal morale, based on body-to-body contact, as it does with inevitability. In the first instance, death of either one or five is unavoidable. In the second scenario, a spectator would assume that there is only one option, that five men are about to be killed. I believe that few could be the kind of “opportunist” who would divulge a plan to save the lives of five, by sacrificing the life of one who does not need to die, without said intervention.

    You are correct about the comparison to impersonal Facebook friends, however. Burger King recently had to end a promotion where they offered a free Whopper to every customer who would sacrifice ten of their Facebook Friends. Apparently in as few as five or so days, 50,000 virtual friends were discarded in the US.

    What would be very interesting would be the multiple different ways that people approach Facebook, compared to their brain activity, and regular real-life traits…Some people, for example will just request the friendships of many, and ANY. They will add them to their “List of Friends” bank, and never make even recollection of it afterward. There are some, however who keep their friends’ list very low, accepting requests from only those they consider to be friends, people with whom they’d like to keep in touch. I myself go through my list every couple of weeks, removing those who I thought I would like to catch up with, but apparently are just involved in a numbers game.

    I found an article in Adbusters on the subject on Facebook, and I’m hoping to read more people investigating studies about activity on the networking application. Forget about market research…Sociological study is prime here!

  24. #24 Shrommer
    February 11, 2009

    I agree with these last several posts, that the situation with the fat person is not the same as with the electrocution experiment. I may be able to raise the voltage higher for someone in the other room than I would for someone in the same room with me, but I could not bring myself to throw someone to their death, no matter how many lives it would save. With all my rational faculties working, I’d rather allow a million people die from some cause external to me than cause one person’s death directly – unless, of course that one death were my own. I don’t think it is my place to make the choice to kill someone, although I can reconcile my conscience with allowing people to die if the only way to save them were by killing someone else.

    Part of the question that never comes up is, How many people are on the trolley who just might be killed if the trolley stops in a derailment? Would you risk killing an unknown number of people on the trolley in order to save five lives of people you can see on the tracks?

  25. #25 Shrommer
    February 11, 2009

    I’m sorry, I didn’t make my point very well. If instead of throwing the person onto the tracks, all I had to do was push a button from three miles away, knowing that it would force an unseen person onto the tracks to stop the trolley from killing five workers on the tracks, I still wouldn’t push the button.

    If I were steering the trolley, however, I would definitely divert it to the track with one worker and save the five. I wouldn’t view it as my choice to kill anybody then, and I would opt for the least number of deaths caused by the trolley – a trolley accident which is really out of my control.

  26. #26 Palacemuse
    February 14, 2009

    I agree with Gen above that the scenario hinges on the perception of inevitability, but not in the way she/he describes. Leave the trolly be and the 5 workers will probably die. Change tracks and the one worker will probably die. Push the fat man off a bridge and who knows what might happen? Our experience in the world tells us that that option is much more chaotic than the first two options.

  27. #27 Speck
    February 15, 2009

    This piece and the intelligent commentary developing from it soothes me. As a 40yr old academic (humanities) who has been on Facebook since 05 at her students’ request, I find that the last few months of activity on the site are “messing with my mind” quite a bit. As Anonymous suggests in his/her wonderful post, our generation is indeed engaging in a “big group hug” right now, as we find all of our lost connections. In the last two months, I have found or been found by about twenty folks from my middle school. This is not the love-fest that some describe — connect with old friends, feel warm and fuzzy– but, rather, a serious challenge to my sense of self, my memories, and my current well-being.

    While you friend some, your friends friend others, and there in the news feed, as often as you log on, appear old nemeses, and with them rise old hurts. Newly befriending L, I see that she is regularly engaging in wall-to-wall banter with C, the bane of my existence in 7th grade.

    Someone posts a photo, and ten people comment on each other back then. I remember the scene vividly but am not in the picture. Then more photos are posted. I’m not there either. Waiting to find oneself in the memories of others. Adolescent envy and insecurity comes up again– for my twelve-year old self — where is she? acknowledge her– AND for my 40 year old self (why aren’t R and L friending me now that they see me on J’s wall???)

    My demographic (35-45?) is poignantly engaging in what I perceive as a massive chronological crisis (I hesitate to call it “mid-life”) and Facebook is capturing its dynamic. It’s moving and interesting, but engaging in the sociological experiment first-hand is causing me a lot of pain. It’s raising anxiety, it’s reshaping my recollections, it’s replacing vague senses of lost “friends” with 2D snapshots of faces and career profiles and kids (thus flattening and dulling my sense of my own life).

    I would be interested to hear if others of you are experiencing anything like this. The solace I am creating for myself this week is STUDYING Facebook late at night, rather than logging on. Articles on the psychology of Facebook, blog entries like this one, etc. It’s calming and safely meta.

  28. #28 berlin
    March 1, 2009

    Gut!

  29. #29 fussball
    March 2, 2009

    Gute Arbeit hier! Gute Inhalte.

  30. #30 Moazzam Hossain
    March 10, 2009

    to be a friend a man need a mind of pleasure,to share sorrow each others

  31. #31 FacebokProxiesaa
    August 6, 2009

    crave new a new proxy?

    then surf over to;
    Facebook Pr0xy

  32. #32 emoticons facebook
    June 25, 2011

    I want to warn that a lot of FB users would find that sort of thing annoying, like, dump-from-friends-list annoying. ‘Every time I update I get a mail from Nancy? WTF? Does she expect me to reply to this stuff? Now I feel like I have to send her a message and I really don’t want to get into an exchange with her and…ugh. Why is she mailing me? This is weird and it is making me uncomfortable; if she wants to comment on my posts why doesn’t she just comment on my posts? Is she trying to flirt or something? This is too much and I don’t like drama so I think I’m going to just de-friend on this one.’

    Particularly as it would be coming on the heels of the weird behaviour of making comments on his page and then deleting them. ‘Nancy has some issues going on.’ It would not be seen as issues with FB, just as odd behaviour. ‘She runs away from my friends, deletes stuff if they reply, but when it comes to me, I get DMs? Isn’t Nancy married? This is strange.