How We Decide (33 page)

Tetlock explained the difference between successful and unsuccessful pundits with an allusion to an ancient metaphor made famous by historian Isaiah Berlin in his essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox." (Berlin's title is a reference to the ancient Greek expression "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.") In that essay, Berlin distinguished between two types of thinkers, hedgehogs and foxes, and Tetlock used those same categories to describe the pundits' methods of decision-making. (Tetlock did not find any significant correlation between political ideology and thinking style.) A hedgehog is a small mammal covered with spines; when attacked, it rolls itself into a ball so that its spines point outward. This is the hedgehog's only defense. A fox, on the other hand, doesn't rely on a single strategy when threatened. Instead, it adjusts its strategy to fit the particulars of the situation. Foxes are also cunning hunters. In fact, they are one of the hedgehog's few predators.

According to Tetlock, the problem with a pundit who thinks like a hedgehog is that he is prone to bouts of certainty—the big idea is irrefutable—and this certainty causes him to misinterpret the evidence. If the amygdala contradicts one of his conclusions—it's worrying about some bit of evidence that doesn't support the pundit's accepted worldview—then the amygdala is turned off. A diversity of brain regions isn't brought to bear on the problem. Useful information is deliberately ignored. The inner argument is badly argued.

A successful pundit, on the other hand, thinks like a fox. While the hedgehog reassures himself with certainty, the fox relies on the solvent of doubt. He is skeptical of grand strategies and unifying theories. The fox accepts ambiguity and takes an ad hoc approach when coming up with explanations. The fox gathers data from a wide variety of sources and listens to a diversity of brain areas. The upshot is that the fox makes better predictions and 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.
In other words, he thinks about how he thinks, just like Binger.
^*
According to Tetlock, such introspection is the best predictor of good judgment. Because foxes pay attention to their inner disagreements, they are less vulnerable to the seductions of certainty. The fox doesn't tune out his insula or ventral striatum or nucleus accumbens just because it contradicts his preconceptions. "We need to cultivate the art of self-overhearing," Tetlock says, "to learn how to eavesdrop on the mental conversations we have with ourselves."

That's also the lesson of Michael Binger's success. Although Jamie Gold went on to win the 2006 WSOP, Binger's third-place finish earned him a consolation prize of $4,123,310. The next year, in the 2007 WSOP, Binger tied the all-time record for most cashes in a single tournament. (To
cash
means to win money.) He began 2008 by winning one of the main no-limit Texas hold'em events at the LA Poker Classic, earning another six-figure payday. He is now regarded as one of the best players on the professional poker circuit. "What I love about poker," Binger says, "is that when you win, it's always for the same reason. You might lose because you got unlucky, but you never win because of luck. The only way to win is to make better decisions than everyone else at the table."

We can now start to sketch out a taxonomy of decision-making, applying the knowledge of the brain to the real world. We've seen how the different brain systems—the Platonic driver and his emotional horses—should be used in different situations. While reason and feeling are both essential tools, each is best suited for specific tasks. When you try to analyze a strawberry jam or feel your way to a vegetable peeler, you are misusing your machine. When you're certain that you're right, you stop listening to those brain areas that say you might be wrong.

The science of decision-making remains a young science. Researchers are just beginning to understand how the brain makes up its mind. The cortex remains a mostly mysterious place, an extraordinary yet imperfect computer. Future experiments will reveal new aspects of human hardware and software. We'll learn about additional programming bugs and cognitive talents. The current theories will undoubtedly get complicated. And yet, even at the dawn of this new science, it's possible to come up with a few general guidelines that can help us all make better decisions.

SIMPLE PROBLEMS REQUIRE REASON. There isn't a clear line separating easy questions from hard ones, or math problems from mysteries. Some scientists, such as Ap Dijksterhuis, believe that any problem with more than four distinct variables overwhelms the rational brain. Others believe that a person can consciously process somewhere between five and nine pieces of information at any given moment. With practice and experience, this range can be slightly expanded. But in general, the prefrontal cortex is a sharply constrained piece of machinery. If the emotional brain is a fancy laptop, stuffed full of microprocessors operating in parallel, the rational brain is an old-fashioned calculator.

That said, a calculator can still be a very useful tool. One of the drawbacks of emotions is that they contain a few obsolete instincts that are no longer suited for modern life. This is why we are all so vulnerable to loss aversion, slot machines, and credit cards. The only way to defend against such innate flaws is to exercise reason, to fact-check feelings with a little arithmetic. Remember Frank, the unlucky contestant on
Deal or No Deal?
If he'd taken the time to rationally evaluate the offer, to plug the proposal into a calculator, he would have ended up with €10,000. Instead, he walked away with €10.

Of course, it's not always obvious which decisions are simple. Picking a strawberry jam or breakfast cereal might seem like an easy task, but it's actually surprisingly complicated, especially when a typical supermarket stocks more than two hundred different varieties of each. So how can anyone reliably identify the simple problems that are best suited for the prefrontal cortex? The best way is to ask yourself if the decision can be accurately summarized in numerical terms. For example, since most vegetable peelers are virtually identical, not much is lost when the various peelers are sorted by price. In this case, the best choice is probably the cheapest: let the rational brain take over. (Especially since the emotional brain might be misled by spiffy packaging or some other irrelevant variable.) And if someone really doesn't care about strawberry jam—he or she just wants something to put on a peanut butter sandwich—then this deliberate decision-making strategy can also be applied to jam. Or wine. Or brands of cola. Or any domain in which the details of the product aren't particularly important. In these situations, remember what we learned about expensive wine in chapter 5, and don't spend too much money on overpriced items that won't be appreciated. (After all, cheaper wines often taste better than more expensive ones in blind taste tests!) If the decision doesn't matter all that much, the prefrontal cortex should take the time to carefully assess and analyze the options.

On the other hand, for important decisions about complex items—leather couches, cars, and apartments, for example—categorizing by price alone will eliminate a lot of essential information. Perhaps the cheapest couch is of inferior quality, or maybe you don't like the way it looks. And should anyone really choose an apartment or a car based on a single variable, such as the monthly rent or the amount of horsepower? As Dijksterhuis demonstrated, when you ask the prefrontal cortex to make these sorts of decisions, it makes consistent mistakes. You'll end up with an ugly couch in the wrong apartment. It might sound ridiculous, but it makes scientific sense: Think
less
about those items that you care a lot about. Don't be afraid to let your emotions choose.

Likewise, there's a whole subset of everyday decisions—those mundane choices that don't really matter—that could benefit from a little more conscious deliberation. Too often, we let our impulses make the easy decisions for us. A person will pick a vegetable peeler, laundry detergent, or boxer shorts on a whim and automatically trust his instincts when he gets an obvious poker hand. But these are precisely the sorts of emotion-driven decisions that might benefit from rational analysis.

NOVEL PROBLEMS ALSO REQUIRE REASON. Before you entrust a mystery to the emotional brain, before deciding to let your instincts make a big bet in poker or fire a missile at a suspicious radar blip, ask yourself a question: How does your past experience help solve this particular problem? Have you played poker hands like this before? Seen blips like this before? Are these feelings rooted in experience, or are they just haphazard impulses?

If the problem really is unprecedented—if it's like a complete hydraulic failure in a Boeing 737—then emotions can't save you. Stop and think and let your working memory tackle the dilemma. The only way out of a unique mess is to come up with a creative solution, like Al Haynes did when he realized that he couldn't steer the plane in the ordinary way but that it was possible to steer the plane with the thrust levers. Such insights require the flexible neurons of the prefrontal cortex.

However, this doesn't mean that our emotional state is irrelevant. Mark Jung-Beeman, the scientist who studies the neuroscience of insight, has shown that people in good moods are significantly better at solving hard problems that require insight than people who are cranky and depressed. (Happy people solve nearly 20 percent more word puzzles than unhappy people.) He speculates that this is because the brain areas associated with executive control, such as the prefrontal cortex and the ACC, aren't as preoccupied with managing emotional life. In other words, they aren't worrying about why you're not happy, which means they are free to solve the problem at hand. The end result is that the rational brain can focus on what it needs to focus on, which is coming up with a solution for the unprecedented situation that you've found yourself in.

EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. Hard problems rarely have easy solutions. There is no single way to win a poker hand, and there is no guaranteed path to making money in the stock market. Pretending that the mystery has been erased results in the dangerous trap of certainty. You are so confident you're right that you neglect all the evidence that contradicts your conclusion. You fail to notice that those Egyptian tanks on the border aren't merely engaging in a training exercise. Of course, there's not always time to engage in a lengthy cognitive debate. When an Iraqi missile is zooming toward you or when you're about to get crushed by a blitzing linebacker, you need to act. But whenever possible, it's essential to extend the decision-making process and properly consider the argument unfolding inside your head. Bad decisions happen when that mental debate is cut short, when an artificial consensus is imposed on the neural quarrel.

There are two simple tricks to help ensure that you never let certainty interfere with your judgment. First, always entertain competing hypotheses. When you force yourself to interpret the facts through a different, perhaps uncomfortable lens, you often discover that your beliefs rest on a rather shaky foundation. For instance, when Michael Binger is convinced that another player is bluffing, he tries to think about how the player would be acting if he
wasn't
bluffing. He is his own devil's advocate.

Second, continually remind yourself of what you
don't
know. Even the best models and theories can be undone by utterly unpredictable events. Poker players call these "bad beats," and every player has stories about the hands he lost because he got the one card he wasn't expecting. "One of the things I learned from counting cards in blackjack," Binger says, "is that even when you have an edge, and counting cards is definitely an edge, your margin is still really slim. You can't get too cocky." When you forget that you have blind spots, that you have no idea what cards the other players are holding or how they'll behave, you're setting yourself up for a nasty surprise. Colin Powell made a number of mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq war, but his advice to his intelligence officers was psychologically astute: "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."

YOU KNOW MORE THAN YOU KNOW. One of the enduring paradoxes of the human mind is that it doesn't know itself very well. The conscious brain is ignorant of its own underpinnings, blind to all that neural activity taking place outside the prefrontal cortex. This is why people have emotions: they are windows into the unconscious, visceral representations of all the information we process but don't perceive.

For most of human history, the emotions have been disparaged because they're so difficult to analyze—they don't come with reasons, justifications, or explanations. (As Nietzsche warned, we are often most ignorant of what is closest to us.) But now, thanks to the tools of modern neuroscience, we can see that emotions have a logic all their own. The jitters of dopamine help keep track of reality, alerting us to all those subtle patterns that we can't consciously detect. Different emotional areas evaluate different aspects of the world, so your insula naturally takes the cost of an item into account (unless you're paying with a credit card), and the NAcc automatically figures out how you feel about a certain brand of strawberry jam. The anterior cingulate monitors surprises, and the amygdala helps point out the radar blip that just doesn't look right.

The emotional brain is especially useful at helping us make hard decisions. Its massive computational power—its ability to process millions of bits of data in parallel—ensures that you can analyze all the relevant information when assessing alternatives. Mysteries are broken down into manageable chunks, which are then translated into practical feelings.

The reason these emotions are so intelligent is that they've managed to turn mistakes into educational events. You are constantly benefiting from experience, even if you're not consciously aware of the benefits. It doesn't matter if your field of expertise is backgammon or Middle East politics, golf or computer programming: the brain always learns the same way, accumulating wisdom through error.