How We Decide
How We Decide
Lehrer, Jonah
In this book, you will learn how those three pounds of flesh inside the skull determine all of your decisions, from the most mundane choices in the supermarket to the weightiest of moral dilemmas.
The goal of this book is to answer two questions
How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?1. The Quarterback in the Pocket
When we are cut off from our feelings, the most banal decisions became impossible. A brain that can't feel can't make up its mind.
According to LeDoux, much of what we "think" is really driven by our emotions. In this sense, every feeling is really a summary of data, a visceral response to all of the information that can't be accessed directly.
Feelings are what let us understand all the information that we can't directly comprehend. Reason without emotion is impotent.
2. The Predictions of Dopamine
Human emotions are rooted in the predictions of highly flexible brain cells, which are constantly adjusting their connections to reflect reality. Every time you make a mistake or encounter something new, your brain cells are busy changing themselves. Our emotions are deeply empirical.
Every time you experience a feeling of joy or disappointment, fear or happiness, your neurons are busy rewiring themselves,
constructing a theory of what sensory cues preceded the emotions.
Kasparov was able to instantly winnow his options and focus his mental energies on evaluating only the most useful strategic alternatives.
The subject's feelings figured out the game first.
When the mind is denied the emotional sting of losing, it never figures out how to win.
(Disappointment is educational.)
if the prediction was accurate— if he got rewarded for choosing a lucrative card— then the player felt the pleasure of being correct, and that particular connection was reinforced. As a result, his neurons quickly learned how to make money. They had found the secret to winning the gambling game before the player could understand and explain the solution.
Trusting one's emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice.
Cervantes
proverbs—" They are short sentences drawn from long experience"— also
studying its prediction errors.
Robertie had turned himself into one of the best backgammon players in the world. "I knew I was getting good when I could just glance at a board and know what I should do," Robertie says. "The game started to become very much a matter of aesthetics. My decisions increasingly depended on the look of things, so that I could contemplate a move and then see right away if it made my position look better or worse.
He knows that self- criticism is the secret to self- improvement; negative feedback is the best kind.
Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from cellular error.
Mistakes aren't things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated.
one of the crucial ingredients of successful education is the ability to learn from mistakes.
Instead of praising kids for trying hard, teachers typically praise them for their innate intelligence
fear of failure actually inhibited learning.
They wanted to understand their mistakes, to learn from their errors, to figure out how to do better.
Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.
experts are actually profoundly intuitive.
I'm looking really hard for my mistakes. I pretty much always want to find thirty mistakes, thirty things that I could have done better. If I can't find thirty, then I'm not looking hard enough."
the only way to get it right the next time is to study what he got wrong this time.
We've seen how the fluctuations of dopamine are translated into a set of prophetic feelings.
The best decision- makers know which situations require less intuitive responses,
3. Fooled by a Feeling
dopamine neurons get excited by predictable rewards— they increase their firing when the juice arrives after the loud tone that heralded it— they get even more excited by surprising ones.
The purpose of this dopamine surge is to make the brain pay attention to new, and potentially important, stimuli. Sometimes this cellular surprise can trigger negative feelings, such as fear, as happened to Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley. In the casino, however, the sudden burst of dopamine is intensely pleasurable, since it means that you've just won some money.
the brain will eventually get over its astonishment. It'll figure out which events predict the reward, and the dopamine neurons will stop releasing so much of the neurotransmitter.
Tversky and Gilovich
do players make more shots when they are hot, or do people just imagine that they make more shots? In other words, is the hot hand a real phenomenon?
If the hot hand was a real phenomenon, then a hot player should have a higher field- goal percentage after making several previous shots.
no evidence of the hot hand. A player's chance of making a shot was not affected by whether or not his previous shots had gone in. Each field- goal attempt was its own independent event.
made. Why do we believe in streaky shooters? Our dopamine neurons are to blame.
predictable— they can also lead us astray, especially when we are confronted with randomness.
The experiment was repeated with Yale undergraduates. Unlike the rat, the students, with their elaborate networks of dopamine neurons, stubbornly searched for the elusive pattern that determined the placement of the reward. They made predictions and then tried to learn from their prediction errors.
The problem was that there was nothing to predict; the apparent randomness was real. Because the students refused to settle for a 60 percent success rate, they ended up with a 52 percent success rate.
"When the brain is exposed to anything random, like a slot machine or the shape of a cloud, it automatically imposes a pattern onto the noise.
That's why, over the long run, a randomly selected stock portfolio will beat the expensive experts with their fancy computer models.
Wall Street has always searched for the secret algorithm of financial success, but the secret is, there is no secret.
When the possible outcomes were stated in terms of deaths— this is called the loss frame— physicians were suddenly eager to take chances. They were so determined to avoid any option associated with loss that they were willing to risk losing everything.
The pain of a loss was approximately twice as potent as the pleasure generated by a gain.
Kahneman and Tversky put it, "In human decision making, losses loom larger than gains."
Because human beings are wired to dislike potential losses, most people were perfectly content to sacrifice profit for security,
negativity bias, which means that, for the human mind, bad is stronger than good. This is why in marital interactions, it generally takes at least five kind comments to compensate for one critical comment.
Brain- imaging experiments suggest that paying with credit cards actually reduces activity in the insula, a brain region associated with negative feelings.
This failing is rooted in our emotions, which tend to overvalue immediate gains
Our feelings are thrilled by the prospect of an immediate reward, but they can't really grapple with the long- term fiscal consequences of that decision.
will. Understanding the circuitry of temptation is one of the practical ambitions of scientists studying decision- making. Jonathan Cohen, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, has made some important progress. He's begun to diagnose the specific brain regions responsible for the attraction to credit cards and subprime loans.4. The Uses of Reason
The problem with panic is that it narrows one's thoughts. It reduces awareness to the most essential facts, the most basic instincts.
Perceptual narrowing -- automatic emotions focus on the most immediate variables, the rational brain is able to expand the list of possibilities.
Framing effect, and it's a by- product of loss aversion, which we discussed earlier. The effect helps explain why people are much more likely to buy meat when it's labeled 85 percent lean instead of 15 percent fat. And why twice as many patients opt for surgery when told there's an 80 percent chance of their surviving instead of a 20 percent chance of their dying.
Whenever a person thinks about losing something, the amygdala is automatically activated. That's why people hate losses so much.
Even people who instantly realized that the two different descriptions were identical— they saw through the framing effect— still experienced a surge of negative emotion when they looked at the loss frame.
"People who are more rational don't perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better." How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them.
The Nicomachean Ethics,
"Anyone can become angry— that is easy," Aristotle wrote. "But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way— that is not easy."
The rational brain can't silence emotions, but it can help figure out which ones should be followed.
The ability to wait for a second marshmallow reveals a crucial talent of the rational brain.
It turned out that the same cognitive skills that allowed these kids to thwart temptation also allowed them to spend more time on their homework.
prefrontal cortex was forced to exercise its cortical authority and inhibit the impulses that got in the way of the goal.
The ability to supervise itself, to exercise authority over its own decision- making process, is one of the most mysterious talents of the human brain.
executive control,
But when you encounter a problem you've never experienced before, when your dopamine neurons have no idea what to do, it's essential that you try to tune out your feelings.
From the perspective of the brain, new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
5. Choking on Thought
Performers call such failures "choking," because a person so frayed by pressure might as well not have any oxygen.
Choking is actually triggered by a specific mental mistake: thinking too much.
Beilock has shown that novice putters hit better shots when they consciously reflect on their actions. The more time the beginner spends thinking about the putt, the more likely he is to sink the ball in the hole. By concentrating on the golf game, by paying attention to the mechanics of the stroke, the novice can avoid beginners' mistakes.
After a golfer has learned how to putt— once he or she has memorized the necessary movements— analyzing the stroke is a waste of time. The brain already knows what to do. It automatically computes the slope of the green, settles on the best putting angle, and decides how hard to hit the ball. In fact, Beilock found that when experienced
When golfers are forced to think about their putts, they hit significantly worse shots.
"When you are at a high level, your skills become somewhat automated. You don't need to pay attention to every step in what you're doing."
(One of the problems with feelings is that even when they are accurate, they can still be hard to articulate.) Instead of going with the option that feels the best, a person starts going with the option that sounds the best, even if it's a very bad idea.
As they tasted the jams, the students filled out written questionnaires, which forced them to analyze their first impressions, to consciously explain their impulsive preferences.
Instead of just listening to our instinctive preferences— the best jam is associated with the most positive feelings— our rational brains search for reasons to prefer one jam over another.
"When looking at a painting by Monet," Wilson writes, "most people generally have a positive reaction. When thinking about why they feel the way they do, however, what comes to mind and is easiest to verbalize might be that some of the colors are not very pleasing, and that
the subject matter, a haystack, is rather boring." As a result, the women ended up selecting the funny feline posters, if only because those posters gave them more grist for their explanatory mill.
(It's easier to consider quantifiable facts than future emotions, such as how you'll feel when you're stuck in a rush- hour traffic jam.)
Prophecies.
The placebo effect is a potent source of self- help. It demonstrates the power of the prefrontal cortex to modulate even the most basic bodily signals.
Shiv found that people who'd paid discounted prices consistently solved about 30 percent fewer puzzles than the people who'd paid full price for the drinks.
consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since they expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if the goods are identical to more expensive products.
only one brain region seemed to respond to the price of the wine rather than the wine itself: the prefrontal cortex.
Fifty- nine percent of people trying to remember seven digits chose the cake, compared to only 37 percent of the two- digit subjects. Distracting the brain with a challenging memory task made a person much more likely to give in to temptation and choose the caloriedense dessert.
Because working memory and rationality share a common cortical source— the prefrontal cortex— a mind trying to remember lots of information is less able to exert control over its impulses.
Economists call this sleight of mind mental accounting, since people tend to think about the world in terms of specific accounts, such as scoops of candy or bowls of soup or lines on a budget. Because the brain engages in mental accounting, we end up treating our dollars very differently.
Decisions depended less on the absolute amount of money involved (five dollars) than on the particular mental account in which the decision was placed.
The brain relies on mental accounting because it has such limited processing abilities.
Since the prefrontal cortex can handle only about seven things at the same time, it's
constantly trying to "chunk" stuff together, to make the complexity of life a little more manageable.
We rely on misleading shortcuts because we lack the computational power to think any other way.
Anchoring
If people were perfectly rational agents, if the brain weren't so bounded, then writing down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers should have no effect on their auction bids. In other words, a student whose Social Security number ended with a low- value figure (such as 10) should be willing to pay roughly the same price as someone with a high- value figure (such as 90). But that's not what happened. For instance, look at the bidding for the cordless keyboard. Students with the highest- ending Social Security numbers (80– 80) made an average bid of fifty- six dollars.
On average, students with higher numbers were willing to spend 300 percent more than those with low numbers.
The inflated sticker is merely an anchor that allows the car salesperson to make the real price of the car seem like a better deal.
the brain's spectacular inability to dismiss irrelevant information.
the group with less information ended up earning more than twice as much as the well- informed group. Being exposed to extra news was distracting, and the high- information students quickly became focused on the latest rumors and insider gossip. (Herbert Simon said it best: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.") As a result of all the extra input, these students engaged in far more buying and selling than the low- information group.
Knowledge has diminishing returns, right up until it has negative returns. This is a counterintuitive idea. When making decisions, people almost always
assume that more information is better.
In other words, seeing everything made it harder for the doctors to know what they should be looking at.
6. The Moral Mind
Neuroscience can now see the substrate of moral decisions, and there's nothing rational about it.
"Moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment,"
writes Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. "When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgment, you confabulate ... Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented
People come up with persuasive reasons to justify their moral intuition.
the central reality of moral decisions, which is that logic and legality have little to do with anything.
People who showed more brain activity in their sympathetic regions were also much more likely to exhibit altruistic behavior.
Being nice to others makes us feel nice.
The broken mind helps us understand how the normal mind works.
scientists discovered that the autistic brain, unlike the normal brain, showed no activity in its mirror- neuron area. As a result, the autistic subjects had difficulty interpreting the feelings on display.
They never developed a theory about what was happening inside other people's minds.
Their "extreme aloneness" is a direct result of not being able to interpret and internalize the emotions of other people.
Once people become socially isolated, they stop simulating the feelings of other people.
According to Slovic, the problem with statistics is that they don't activate our moral emotions.
In 1966, Nicolae Ceausescu, the despotic leader of the country, banned all forms of contraception, and the country was suddenly awash in unwanted babies.
The children that managed to survive the Romanian orphanages were permanently scarred.
Many of the abandoned children suffered from severe emotional impairments.
Couples that adopted Romanian orphans from these institutions reported a wide array of behavioral disorders.
Neglected children showed significantly reduced levels of vasopressin and oxytocin, two hormones crucial for the development of social attachments.
What these abused children were missing was an education in feeling.
7. The Brain Is an Argument
The brain's decisions often feel unanimous— you know which candidate you prefer— but the conclusions are actually reached only after a series of sharp internal disagreements.
Different brain areas think different things for different reasons.
Regardless of which areas are doing the arguing, however, it's clear that all those mental components stuffed inside the head are constantly fighting for influence and attention.
The sting of spending money couldn't compete with the thrill of getting something new.
Even though you probably won't buy the Rolex, just looking at the fancy watch makes you more likely to buy something else, since the desired item activates the NAcc.
But exciting the NAcc is not enough; retailers must also inhibit the insula.
We go broke convinced that we are saving money.
A brain that's intolerant of uncertainty— that can't stand the argument— often tricks itself into thinking the wrong thing.
"The most important thing is that everyone has their say, that you listen to the other side and try to understand their point of view. You can't short- circuit the process."
Westen realized that voters weren't using their reasoning faculties to analyze the facts; they were using reason to preserve their partisan certainty.
The reason knowing more about politics doesn't erase partisan bias is that voters tend to assimilate only those facts that confirm what they already believe.
Once you identify with a political party, the world is edited to fit with your ideology.
We all silence the cognitive dissonance through self- imposed ignorance.
one of the best ways to distinguish genuine from phony expertise is to look at how a person responds to dissonant data.
the best pundits are willing to state their opinions in "testable form" so that they can "continually monitor their forecasting performance."
The people on television who are most certain are almost certainly going to be wrong.)
parts. This is why being sure about something can be such a relief. The default state of the brain is indecisive disagreement; various mental parts are constantly insisting that the other parts are wrong.
Being certain means that you aren't worried about being wrong.
Instead of admitting that his brain was hopelessly confused, the patient wove his confusion into a plausible story.
especially ridiculous claims, they seemed even more confident than usual.
"The need for cognitive closure prompted leading analysts, especially Zeira, to 'freeze' on the conventional wisdom that an attack was unlikely and to become
impervious to information suggesting that it was imminent."
having access to the necessary information is not enough.
We must force ourselves to think about the information we don't want to think about, to pay attention to the data that disturbs our entrenched beliefs.
We can consciously correct for this innate tendency. And if those steps fail, we can create decision- making environments that help us better entertain competing hypotheses.
Interagency rivalries can create their own set of problems.
When making a decision, Lincoln always encouraged vigorous debate and discussion. Although several members of his cabinet initially assumed that Lincoln was weak willed, indecisive, and unsuited for the presidency, they eventually realized that his ability to tolerate dissent was an enormous asset.
The same lesson can be applied to the brain: when making decisions, actively resist the urge to suppress the argument.
8. The Poker Hand
When it comes to playing poker, the only thing that separates the experts from the amateurs is the quality of their decisions.
"You get so wired playing poker that it's not easy coming down," he says. "I tend to just lie in bed, thinking about all the hands I played and how I should have played them differently."
The casinos have algorithms that automatically monitor your betting, and if they detect that your bets are too accurate, they'll ask you to leave."
"There's no doubt that the analytical skills I learned in cards also helped me with science," Binger says. "It's all about focusing on the important
variables, thinking clearly, not getting distracted. If you lose your train of thought when you're counting cards, you're screwed. Physics is a little more forgiving— you can write stuff down— but it still requires a very disciplined thought process." After a few
brains. Remember the experiment involving the fine- art posters and the funny cat posters? In that study, led by Timothy Wilson, sub jects were less satisfied with their choices when they consciously thought about what to choose; analyzing their own preferences caused them to misinterpret those preferences.
"The moral of this research is clear," Dijksterhuis says. "Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision. But don't try to analyze the information with your conscious mind. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it.
But the conventional wisdom about decision- making has got it exactly backward. It is the easy problems— the mundane math problems of daily life— that are best suited to the conscious brain.
Complex problems, on the other hand, require the processing powers of the emotional brain, the supercomputer of the mind. This doesn't mean you can just blink and know what to do— even the unconscious takes a little time to process information— but it does suggest that there's a better way to make difficult decisions.
different situations required different modes of thought.
historian Isaiah Berlin in his essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox."
the ancient Greek expression
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.")
decisions. But being open- minded isn't enough. Tetlock found that the most important difference between fox thinking and hedgehog thinking is that the fox thinker is more likely to study his own decision- making process.
introspection is the best predictor of good judgment.
Some scientists, such as Ap Dijksterhuis, believe that any problem with more than four distinct variables overwhelms the rational brain.
Think less about those items that you care a lot about. Don't be afraid to let your emotions choose.
Always entertain competing hypotheses.
Colin Powell:
"Tell me what you know," he told his advisers. "Then tell me what you don't know, and only then can you tell me what you think. Always keep those three separated."
Coda
The best decisions emerge when a multiplicity of viewpoints are brought to bear on the situation.