How Hormones & Status Shape Our Values & Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Michael Platt. Dr. Michael Platt is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His laboratory focuses on decision-making, more specifically, how we make decisions and the impact of power dynamics, such as hierarchies in a given organization or group, as well as hormones on decision-making. We also discuss valuation, that is how we place value on things, on people. And what you'll find is that there are many factors that impact whether or not we think something is good, very good, bad, or very bad, that operate below our conscious awareness. In fact, today's discussion will teach you how you make decisions, how to make better decisions in the context of everything from picking out a watch or a pair of shoes all the way up to something as important as picking a life mate. Indeed, hormones, hierarchies, and specific things that are operating within you and adjacent to, nearby the things that you're evaluating, whether or not those things are people or objects, are powerfully shaping the neural circuits that lead you to make specific decisions. So today you're going to learn how all of that works, and as I mentioned, how to make better decisions. Dr. Platt also explains how we are evaluating the hormone levels of other people, both same sex and opposite sex, and the implications that has for relationships of all kinds. It's an incredibly interesting and unique conversation, certainly unique among the conversations I've had with any of my neuroscience colleagues over the decades. And I know that the information you're going to learn today is going to be both fascinating to you, it certainly was to me, and that it will impact the way that you think about all decisions at every level in everyday life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Michael Platt. Dr. Michael Platt, welcome.

**Michael Platt** (2:14)
Thanks, it's awesome to be here.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:16)
I've been following your work since I was a graduate student and it's really interesting. You're an anthropologist by training, turned neuroscientist, turned practical applications of neuroscience and related fields to everybody as it relates to business, decision making, social interactions, hormones. You've worked on a lot of different things.
The first question I have is, let's all agree, we're old world primates. Yes, most people don't even think of us as old world primates, but we are all old world primates and we share many similarities in terms of the neural circuits that we have in our skulls with some of the other old world primates like macaque monkeys, for instance. When you step back and look at a process like decision making or marketing out in the world or how people interact with one another and gauge value of objects, relationships, or even their own value, if I may. How much of what you see in human old world primates do you think is reflected by the interactions of old world primates like rhesus macaque monkeys and vice versa? I mean, in other words, how primitive are we and or how sophisticated are the other old world primates?

**Michael Platt** (3:40)
That's a great way of putting it because I think it's both. I always like to say there's a little monkey in all of us, right? And I believe that going in, you know, having spent actually my formative years, you know, studying, just watching monkeys. And I worked at the Cleveland Zoo, you know, when I was in college and I took every opportunity I could get to go, you know, I went to the field, you know, I watched monkeys in South America and in Mexico. And I think we all get that. But over the course of my career, I'm astonished at how deep that goes. And basically, for every behavioral, cognitive, emotional phenomenon that we have been in, that we've trained our lens on, it looks almost exactly the same in people and monkeys. Now, obviously, we're not just monkeys and, you know, we can talk and we're doing this and that's a big, big difference. But all the things that you talked about, decision making, social interaction, our, the way that we explore the world, the fountain of creativity, not only the neural circuits, but the actual expression is so, so similar. We have monkeys and people do the exact same things in the lab. And if I didn't label the videos, the outputs of like the avatars and whatnot in games, you couldn't tell the difference.