Hey there, I'm Chloe Wangu, the brand scientist, and this is the midweek lab note coming at you not in the middle of the week.
Apologies.
Life is just lighting.
Um.
But I did want to.
Share the thoughts that I wanted to impart to you this week via video, honestly, because writing it up just didn't seem like the right medium, even though I tried several times um to make it so.
So the question maybe ironically, that um, Has been on my mind has been about engagement, right? How do we get people to engage? Right? Um.
How do we get people to show up? And I think that this is a question that is Underneath a lot of other questions that folks in our world are asking, especially when we think about resistance and the science of resistance and building towards a better future, and what it takes to shape that future.
So, um, I came across a study that sort of put to mind why this can be so hard.
Um, But first I have to take you back to a previous study that um I.
Found, read, found incredibly interesting and leveraged in an analysis that I wrote up about why your stable revenue has just dropped off a cliff, right? This is an old piece that I wrote.
I'll link it down below in case that's interesting to you.
Um, But the number one reason that I put um in that piece, which honestly sounds like it could have been written today, is brains, right? Brains.
Um, more specifically, the study that I mentioned, they We're able to demonstrate that economic instability is linked to unhealthy aging in the brain.
More specifically, economic instability impacts executive functioning.
If you want to know more details about that, I'll link the paper below and I'll also link, like I said, the piece that I wrote below so that you can see.
The translation essentially of that study.
Um, so, for those of you who are sort of unfamiliar with executive functioning, there's a quick primer on it, right? It's responsible for key cognitive functions like planning, right? Making plans, um, cognitive control over our behaviors.
And so what that means is our ability to control our behaviors mentally, right? Um, Another thing is attentional control, so our ability to actively choose what we pay attention to.
That's something that's connected to executive functioning, um, our working memory.
And so that's essentially where our relevant memories are held as we are making a decision, right? Um, Our cognitive flexibility, so that's our ability to adapt our behavior and our thinking in response to the environment that's around us.
Um, and when you think of that overarching subject, there are a whole bunch of other sub-subjects that are really important that are connected to executive functioning that are Made Increasingly worse by economic instability.
Some of these include metacognition, so that's our ability to think about our own thoughts, like when you're trying to evaluate a strategy that you've come up with, um, our ability to regulate stress, our ability to debate, as in our ability to shift between actively listening, um, and rationally defending our ideas.
Our abilities to think outside the box, our abilities to empathize.
Do any of these things sound familiar? Right? So, The things that happen in the world around us are reflected in our cognitive landscape and our cognitive realities.
And those things have very real effects on our behavior and our capacity and capability to behave in the ways in which we You know, might prefer to.
Um, So that was the older study, and I think that came out in 2019.
It wasn't old at the time that I um wrote the piece, but it um and it's not even really technically that old now, but it's something that came.
To mind, when I thought about this question of how do we get people to engage? How do we get people to show up, right? I think the first answer to that question is understanding what we are asking people to step into and doing the best that we can to ensure that To ensure that what they're stepping into is not only worth it, but is something that will Um, how do I wanna put this? Something that they.
can actively see will see the future they're hoping to build.
Um, And do so in a way that they feel and know is worth it.
And so that's why I mentioned, I don't remember if it was last week or the week before that, you know, like, make this, make, make it fun, right? Like, what are the ways in which we're making this fun or something that we want to be a part of.
Um, what are the ways in which you are assessing, and this is a piece from even longer ago, assessing the resources that people have to bear, whether or not that's their time, their energy, their money.
And, and making sure that what we ask them to engage in falls within the resources that they believe they have, right? Um.
And so This also brought to mind some reading that I've been doing recently about the idea of influence and how largely we think about influence and building influence.
We are thinking of doing so, um, by crafting the perfect message, right? Crafting a message that is perfectly tailored.
To a specific target, right? That's kind of how we think about influence.
And in, in research too, right? This isn't just a everyday people like us thing, right? This is also something that's happening, um, with the scholars, um, and academics who are doing primary research, right? That largely the focus when it comes to building influence, especially interpersonal influence, has been around, OK, like the The actual message from the source of influence and the effect of that message on the target, right? Rather than on the interpersonal and then perhaps like intergroup dynamics um and rituals therein, um, themselves, right? So Understanding that influence isn't only about message to target and effect on target, right? Um, this is why This is why this second study that came to my attention, ended up connecting back to this first one, aside from obvious reasons, right? And it's this study that was done, and I think, I believe it's in 2022 that the study came out.
And it was about the effect of racial discrimination on structures in the brain, specifically white matter, right? And what they were able to demonstrate is that racial discrimination is independently related to Mm, what's, what's a non-jargony way to say this? To white parts of white matter in the brain, sort of Becoming more and more anemic.
Maybe that's a way to put it, right? So, um, wasting away, maybe that's another way to put it.
It's not correct, like, completely from a neuroscience, neurobiology perspective, but from like a lay perspective, that's generally what it is, right? Um, additionally, They were able to demonstrate that racial discrimination has an additive and distinctive effect on white matter structure, right? So, what that means is that, and here, let me actually pull up my notes, so I'm not just quoting this stuff from memory and so I don't get it wrong, right? So, what this means, cause white matter has a lot of Fingers and a lot of different pies, right? But What they were able to sort of assess or assume from the study is that the part of the brain whose morphology, and so, Morphology, for those who are unfamiliar.
The morphology of something is sort of its shape, right? Imagine you have like some twisted clay in your hands.
What you're feeling with your fingers and your palms, that's its morphology, right? So, the part of the brain whose morphology is known to be affected by things like early life adversity and PTSD, the That part of the brain was further deteriorated by racial discrimination, right? Another part of the brain that was known to support cognitive and emotional functions in the brain, like attention and executive functioning, which we just spoke about, right? Um, language and social cognition, right, all of these things.
These were also affected by racial discrimination, trauma responses as well, right? And so, all of the things that this study observed in the way that racial discrimination sort of deteriorated pieces and parts of white matter in the brain.
These were all observed after the study controlled for things like poverty, or other trauma exposures, or PTSD, right? So when all of those things were controlled for, they still saw an effect from racial discrimination.
Who, yeah.
So What does that mean for the question that I posed to us at the start? How do we get people to engage? How do we get people to show up? I think in order to answer that question, we have to ask the question, why people aren't showing up in the first place? Why are people not engaging or why are they opting out? Why are they disengaging, right? Why is it now that the new form of luxury, for example, um, looks more like, um, Cultivating a farm somewhere far off and having someone else take care of you, rather than, you know, being in the nitty gritty of stuff, being at the center of everything that's happening, right? Why does it feel like going away and opting out? is the new, the new luxury, the new thing that people are reaching for.
There's a reason for all of this, right? And that reason Exists in part in this cognitive landscape that I've sort of just illustrated for you with only these two papers, and there are plenty, plenty of papers, um, that contribute to this reality, right? That The environment has almost made it too painful to opt in.
And so, when you are asking people to engage, when you're asking people to show up, you're asking them to opt into an environment and a reality that is often painful for them and actively hostile and harmful.
And so that's something that we need to do with real intention and responsibility.
So, that's it from me for now.
Um, this is obviously a subject that I am really interested in, um, and I continuing to study.
Um, If you have thoughts, feelings, and questions, feel free to um share them with me, reply to this email.
Um, I will try to link every relevant, uh, piece that I've been reading that sort of contributed to my thinking today so that you can do your own thinking.
Um, Yeah.
That's it for me.
Thaksin
NC