Transcription
Eggs or pancakes? Golf or church? The front page or the crossword puzzle? Even on Sunday morning, decisions, decisions, decisions. You know, I like to think of life as just one decision after another. This is everything from the most mundane decisions—what kind of toothpaste to buy—all the way up to who to marry.
Science writer Jonah Lehrer sees every one of those choices as a tug of war, an exhausting battle between our gut feelings and our reasoned thoughts. For a long time, people have said the best way to make a decision is to be rational. And yet, in recent years, scientists discovered that the rational brain can only take in a few bits of information at any given moment. So you start giving it too much information, and it starts to short-circuit and sputter. To eliminate the sputtering when buying a car, a computer, a house, or making any complex decision, Lara says, stop all the thinking; just go for it. Our emotional brain is actually much better at taking in lots and lots of information, summarizing lots of data very efficiently, and saying, "Here's a feeling. Don't worry about all the details. Here's the feeling; we've already taken those details into account." We process emotions in the front part of the brain, and damage to those frontal lobes can be disastrous for decisions.
Take the strange case of a brilliant former business executive known only as Elliott. Surgery for a brain tumor left his intellect intact; his doctors were thrilled until they realized what the surgery had not spared: he lost the ability to experience emotions. It turned out that Elliott became pathologically indecisive; he would spend all day trying to figure out where to eat lunch or which pen to sign his name with. I think the larger point here is about just how essential our emotions are in the decision-making process—essential and unavoidable. You know how when a storm comes in, it affects everything in its path? That's what an emotion does.
The work of psychologist Jennifer Lerner at the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory shows how impossible it is to make the rational decisions we all think we make. She demonstrated an experiment for us in which she shows subjects emotional movie clips. No one could watch this and not feel sad. Once subjects are sad, she gives them a decision to make, like how much they'd pay for something, and she's found she generally can predict their answers just based on their mood. These are feelings you just happen to have at the time you're making a judgment or decision, but they really should not be an input to your decision. These are things like: you're cut off in traffic, get mad about the commute, and you're more likely to make a risky decision at the office. And oddly enough, being happy works the same way. Okay, happiness and anger are remarkably similar; they both make you under-perceive risk, they both make you take more risks, and they both are associated with this sense of certainty and control, which can be downright dangerous. Take seatbelts: if you're happy or angry, you're less likely to wear one. You're also less likely to use a bike helmet, lock your car, or buy life insurance. And if you're sad, stay away from the mall; you'll probably spend too much. But sad or still, we've never succeeded—never—in having people recognize the irrational influence of incidental emotion. Never. And then to make steps—no, never. I'm sorry, yeah.
So, baseball legend Yogi Berra once had some great advice for making decisions: "When you come to a fork in the road," he supposedly said, "take it." But what if you have more than two choices? What if you have five, or ten, or a hundred, or, as they claim here at Starbucks, 87,000 choices for a cup of coffee? Then what? Whether it's a mocha, a latte, a cappuccino, a peppermint mocha Frappuccino, a povano, a smoothie, a café… Americans certainly love choice more than anywhere else in the world. Columbia University Professor Sheena Iyengar says her experience as a blind person gives her a different take on all these choices. Her book, *The Art of Choosing*, argues more isn't always better. Certainly, in theory, the more choices I have out there, the more likely I am to find that perfect dress, or that perfect ring, or that perfect food item that I want to eat, or that perfect job. Is that true? For the most part, we don't have the resources to find it. I mean, we get overwhelmed. Two pumps sugar-free vanilla, two pumps cinnamon dolce, three pumps white mocha soy, 180 degrees… Even experts on decisions are not immune. It's a slightly embarrassing confession, but I got interested in the subject in large part because of my own chronic indecision. I was the type of guy who would walk into a drugstore for toothpaste and lose an entire afternoon. Don't tell Baskin-Robbins, famous for its 31 flavors, but in fact, more choices may make an actual purchase less likely, as Professor Iyengar discovered with her supermarket jam experiment. In one display, she put out six samples of jam; in another, 24. Result? Shoppers mobbed the table with the 24 varieties, but they were ten times more likely to buy jam when they were staring at only six. I know everybody wants to go to that store that offers you a thousand options, and that's the best recipe to walk into that store, get completely overwhelmed, and walk out and buy nothing. What is the cumulative effect of having to make all these choices? Actually, what happens is they get so tired and emotionally drained that we even find that their immune system drops. Come on, because I've had to make too many decisions? Yes, they even find they're more likely to get a cold, to get the flu. We're very fragile beings, aren't we?
I think there's this tug of war in our brain that we've all experienced. It's perhaps most clear on a diet. You've got part of you that wants to lose that last 10 pounds, and then there's another part of you that wants to gorge on Double Stuff Oreos. When it's literally a battle between our guts and our heads, the Heath brothers recommend: well, trick yourself. So if you want to go on a diet, store away the dinner plates that you feel like you have to fill up in order to have a good meal, and eat off your salad plates. Studies have shown that you eat 20-25% less by doing that. If you're having trouble spending because you're being bombarded with messages about the things that you should have, then freeze your credit cards in a block of ice and force yourself to go through a warming-up period before you actually spend. By now you may feel decidedly decisive, so start a diet, choose a new toothpaste, buy a house… what will it be?