How We Decide

First of all, I have to recommend the book itself, written by Jonah Lehrer I love how he explores the two general factors that affect out decision-making process: our feelings/emotions and our logic/reasoning. The book is very lightly written yet contains relevant and significant concepts, with great examples highlighting how our brain works, including scientific-based ones.

The book starts off by exploring our ‘natural/instinctive’ ways of making decisions, which is through our feelings and emotions. In fact, he showed that without emotions we will be unable to make any decisions at all, despite still having our rational being doing the evaluation of all the choices. In a way, our feelings are acting like graphs that show the general overview of the wealth of data that our sensory functions and memory collect. Imagine you have an Excel document open, with a thousand rows and columns, and you need to look for a pattern. It would be impossible to do without turning it a graph that shows the trends/properties we’re looking for. That’s similar to when we have to make decisions without having any feelings at all. We ended up looking and evaluating every single options, yet unable to see patterns.

Despite this amazing ability of our feelings to provide us a rapid glimpse into a certain situation and help us make decision, it turns out that they are easily manipulated. Some examples are framing effects and risk aversion. Therefore, we can’t only rely on our emotions to make all decisions. This is where the importance of our rational brain shows up. With our rationality, we won’t be controlled by our emotions and act simply based on impulses. We take time to evaluate and reason before making a decision, which often leads to a better decision. For example, a fireman instead of running away from an unavoidable forest fire – the instinctive thing to do – figured that he won’t be able to outrun the fire and created a patch of burnt grass by lighting an area of dry grass and lied down on it to avoid the fire. He came out surviving, whereas the rest of his company died engulf by the flames. Sometimes, resisting our natural urges is the best thing to do.
Unfortunately, a research showed that our rational brain is very limited, with most people only able to evaluate about seven properties before being overwhelmed with too much information. Hence, having more information won’t help us at all. In fact, he gave some examples that ‘knowing’ – in a sense that we are consciously aware of them – too much will make us worse decision. One of them was the role of MRI scan in diagnosing back pain. Before, doctors tend to tell patients with back pains to just have bed rest and some pain killers, however after they start using MRI scans and seeing abnormalities in the discs and spinal cortex, and started suggesting more invasive treatments. This didn’t result in better outcomes for patients; in fact, often the additional treatments weren’t necessary and can cause further complications. Several researches performed a study by showing doctors MRI scans of patients without telling them whether these patients have back problems or not, and apparently the doctors diagnosed those without back pain as having serious spinal problems whereas they are perfectly healthy in real life. Now, medical journals advise doctors against using MRI scan to diagnose patients with back pain.

As a conclusion, he illustrated our brain as an airplane cockpit: our feelings and emotions are the indicators, the autopilots, and the computers that run most of our functions, while our consciousness/reasoning is the pilot that continually monitors the situation and provide intervention as needed. In the end, there is no one best method making decision. It all depends on the situation that we are facing. However, he cautioned that we shouldn’t favor one way of thinking of another otherwise we might fall into their limitations. He suggested that the best we can do is to take into account both our emotions and reasons, allowing them to make their arguments and use the outcome as our decision.

What I like about his book:

I felt so happy when he used concepts that I have learned from my courses, such as “cognitive dissonance,” “framing effects,” that I learned from Communication and Behaviour in Organisations; “ultimatum game,” from my game theory class. I like how it reminded me of those classes and brought back concepts and ideas that I almost forget about. I love it when what I learned is connected all around, ala spiral learning. He also explored some of the concepts in more depth and providing detailed studies, such as showing the role of the different part of the brains in a particular situation.