On Deciding

Whoever has the choice has the torment.
Adam Gopnik writes about some advice given to him by a former professor, Albert Bregman, at McGill University who he much respected. In trying to decide whether to major in psychology or art history, Bregman “squinted and lowered his head.”

“Is this a hard choice for you?” he demanded. Yes! I cried. “Oh, he said, springing back up cheerfully. “In that case, it doesn’t matter. If it’s a hard decision, then there’s always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant.”

The advice immediately raised a red flag for me. Is that a sound decision making strategy?

To begin, it really didn’t help Gopnik to decide, did it? He had to choose one at the expense of the other, even though he liked them both. Gopnik is still left in a quandary. Which of the two?

More importantly, Bregman’s strategy focuses on the positive outcomes of each discipline. Is that what really counts? Or do the potential disadvantages, the negative outcomes of each field, matter more?

In the end, that is going to be what really counts once you begin the pursuit of either one. Sure you might enjoy the study of art history. But what about all those hours in a dark lecture hall looking at those slides the professor is displaying on the screen? What about all those periods in history where the work of the artists leaves you cold? How long is this guy going to take to get to the Impressionists?

Let us say, you opt for psychology, you are impressed with what you’ve read about it and from what your friends tell you about its potential. So you start your study, hoping to get a better understanding of human behavior, including your own.

What you find is that the work of psychologists today is so varied that to meet the requirements you’ll end up taking a course in psychophysics, one in conditioning theory studying animals, sometimes rats at other times pigeons, and along the way you’ll be asked to take a course in neuro-anatomy.

What happen to behavior, who among those members of the department are studying what people do? Perhaps it is social psychology, the study of social interaction? What you’ll find today is that most social psychologists are currently studying social cognition or the neuroscience of interaction. Where happened to the behavior in social behavior?

In short, it isn’t the positive features of the field that are going to matter, say the smart group of students and professors, the absence of course exams, and the pleasure of small group discussions. What is going to matter are all the things that grate on you.

Perhaps a better decision strategy is to try to predict all the positive features of the field, as well as the negative ones. Try to rate them, say, from 1 to 10 with 10 the most positive or most negative. Add up the pluses and the minuses and see what the results are.

The field of study with the least negative total is probably the field for you. Of course, any estimates of this sort are inevitably going to be imperfect. But there’s no alternative but to accept that. Simply focusing on your estimate of the desirable features of any field is going to ignore those that aren’t. And in the end, those will weigh more heavily.

It’s the pains that outweigh the pleasures. You try to shake them off, but they don’t go away.

To Think or Not to Think

Like Malcolm Gladwell in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Jonah Lehrer on his blog The Frontal Cortex recently made a strong case for the value of unconscious thought. His argument was based on evidence derived from one experiment, in a European laboratory, under conditions of unknown generality. This kind of “cherry picking,” which Gladwell also employs, doesn’t do much for the fine art of science writing

Lehrer draws on a recent experiment by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis who asked three groups of subjects, a mix of experts and novices, to predict the outcome of soccer matches. The first group was asked to predict the outcome after thinking about it for two minutes. The second group was asked to make a decision immediately without thinking about it at all. The third group was asked to decide after being distracted by an unrelated memory task for two minutes.

The results indicated that experts, regardless of the group they were in, were very poor at predicting the outcome of the matches. So were the groups that thought about the matter for two minutes and those asked to make the decision immediately. In contrast, subjects who were distracted by the memory task for two minutes were “significantly” better than the other two groups. Lehrer concludes from this study that the practical implications are to “trust your gut.”

He then says the question is “what is the unconscious up to. What information is it processing during those two minutes of distraction?” I disagree. The question that seems most important to me is how representative of the decision-making process is this study, one that asked individuals to predict the outcome of soccer matches? How widely does it apply? Under what conditions doesn’t it hold? And let's not forget that the study was conducted under highly-reactive laboratory conditions with unknown relevance to natural situations.

We know that at times we benefit by trusting our gut reactions but at other times we don’t. Is there any way we can know when to trust them and when not to? A recent study by McMackin and Slovic sought to identify these conditions by comparing two decision-making tasks--one designed to favor an intuitive approach, the other a reasoned one.

On the intuitively biased task college students were asked to predict how a group of “experts” would rate the effectiveness of a set of consumer advertisements. The so-called expert ratings were obtained from group of psychology and marketing undergraduate students.

On the reasoned biased task, the students were asked to answer five questions requiring numerical estimates of matters of fact. For example, they were asked to estimate the area of the United States or the length of the Amazon River.

Two conditions of decision-making were compared with one another on each of these tasks—a group that was asked to decide immediately and a delayed responding group that was asked to respond after thinking about their reasons for a few minutes and then writing them down on a form provided by the experimenter.

The results indicated the immediately responding group was more accurate on the advertisement task than the group asked to think about their decision for a bit. In contrast, the immediately responding group (gut reactors) performed less accurately than the thinking group (also asked to provide reasons for their answers) on the more difficult task requiring numerical judgments.

Here then is one situation in which the characteristics of the task can critically affect the accuracy of a decision. Under some conditions, it may be more effective to respond without doing much thinking. In other conditions, a more deliberative, reasoned approach may be more effective.

I think it is essential not to ignore such limiting conditions when discussing the results of any scientific finding. All too often, we emphasize the outcome of a single study, without recognizing other studies that contradict, call it into question or suggest an alternative interpretation.

I fear this is one of the reasons we find ourselves so confused about the research we read or hear about in the popular media. No sooner do we learn that drinking wine is bad for our health, then the very next day we learn that it has no effect on our health and may, in fact, be essential for a long life, the very fountain of youth.