Employees dreading their next performance review might have a new secret weapon: simply closing their eyes and pretending their manager is nice.
Merely imagining a positive encounter with a difficult colleague can physically rewire the brain to like them better, according to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
The study, published in Nature Communications, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that imagination is not a passive daydream but an active neural process that updates our real-world preferences.
“We show that we can learn from imagined experiences, and it works very much the same way in the brain that it does when we learn from actual experiences,” said senior author Roland Benoit, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU Boulder.
Tensions at work
The findings suggest a powerful new strategy for navigating office politics. The researchers explicitly noted that to ease tensions at work, an employee might imagine a fun time with a coworker they are unsure about to change their internal bias.
“This provides a mechanism-level reason for how vividly imagining future scenarios, like a conversation, a social encounter, or a challenging situation, might influence our motivation, avoidance tendencies and later choices,” said first author Aroma Dabas.
The experiments centred around a neural mechanism called “reward prediction error.” This is the system the brain uses to learn: when an experience is better than expected, the brain releases dopamine to signal surprise, helping to lock in a new preference.
To test if imagination alone could trigger this machinery, the team asked 50 participants to list people they felt neutral about. Inside an fMRI scanner, the participants vividly imagined a positive experience with these individuals for just eight seconds.
The scans revealed that the ventral striatum — the region governing reward prediction error — lit up during these imagined scenarios. It worked in tandem with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for storing memories of people.
Crucially, subsequent testing showed that participants developed a genuine preference for the people they had merely imagined having fun with.
While the technique offers a way to improve relationships or treat phobias, the researchers warned that the mechanism works both ways. People with anxiety or depression who vividly imagine negative outcomes may inadvertently reinforce those fears, exacerbating their condition.
“You can paint the world black just by imagining it,” said Benoit.
However, the study uncovered an interesting discrepancy: whilst imagining positive encounters made people more likeable, imagining negative experiences did not necessarily make participants like individuals less — a finding the authors hope to investigate in future research.
