Welcome to Your Brain (27 page)

second-guess. Psychologist Barry Schwartz has popularized the maximizer-satisficer

dichotomy, pointing out that satisficers are, on average, happier than maximizers.

The two of us are slowly getting better at making choices that are perfectly good for the

task at hand. Our satisficer spouses are trying to come to terms with our maximizer ways.

At least, as satisficers, they are unlikely to question why they married us.

So people persist in buying lottery tickets, a fact exploited by financially strapped governments

everywhere. Even more extreme examples of irrational decision making have been demonstrated.

Among the brain rules of thumb explored by Kahneman and Tversky (see
Chapter 1
) is that people are

notoriously bad at estimation problems. When people are asked to guess the number of beans in the

jar, their answer can be swayed by spinning a roulette wheel in front of them while they are thinking

about the question, and asking them to consider the outcome of the spin as a possible answer. Despite

the obvious irrelevance of this randomly generated number, it can nonetheless nudge the guess

upward or downward.

Practical tip: Can willpower be trained?

Psychologists have shown that making choices and decisions, making plans to act, and

carrying out those plans call upon a resource that can be depleted. In a series of studies

done at Case Western Reserve University, people who were asked to do one task requiring

an act of will to finish were less persistent in a second task. The two tasks could be as

unrelated as eating radishes and working on an impossible-to-solve puzzle. To really drive

home the unattractiveness of radishes, they were presented while other subjects received

freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Radish eaters gave up on the puzzle sooner, in eight

minutes on average, less than half as long as the subjects who were given cookies.

Similarly, subjects asked to perform a boring text-editing task showed less persistence in

watching an extremely dull video. Willpower is also reduced after physical exertion or

under conditions of stress.

One interesting aspect of the finiteness of willpower is that a variety of tasks call upon

the same reserves. Based on this “ego depletion” model, one might expect that exercises

that increase willpower in one area might then increase one’s capacity to carry out other

difficult tasks. Similarly, doing several unrelated tasks in a row that all require active will

might be an even more effective means of will “exercise.” This is consistent with the

sentiment of some psychologists—and self-help books—that willpower is like a muscle.

The idea of willpower exercise has culminated in military boot camp, where recruits

perform many challenging tasks, and in such spectacles as Watergate-era criminal and

maniac G. Gordon Liddy improving his willpower by holding his hand over a candle flame.

Although effortful willpower of any kind interferes with effortful willpower of any

other kind immediately thereafter, no one knows why willpower is finite. One possibility is

that brain mechanisms for generating active control rely on a resource that can somehow be

depleted. Conversely, executive function—the ability to plan and execute a purposeful

series of actions—works better if you do it more frequently, which suggests that this

resource can grow with practice. One likely place to look is the anterior cingulate cortex,

since after damage to this brain region, attention and decision making are impaired.

Broad similarity may exist with other learning systems, which are thought to rely on

changes in synaptic connections elsewhere in the brain: willpower-strengthening exercises

may cause physical changes in the anterior cingulate and other regions involved in

executive function, such as the prefrontal cortex. So practice difficult tasks such as being

nice to people you don’t like. It might help you stick to that diet.

One general principle that has emerged from studies of economic reasoning is that costs and

rewards seem to count for less if they are not immediate, and less still if they are in the distant future.

This bug in our brain mechanisms has been used to persuade people to save more for their pension

funds. In a plan known as Save More Tomorrow, workers are not asked to put away money

immediately for retirement, something they are reluctant to do. Instead, they are asked to promise to

commit some fraction of their future raises to savings. In this plan, people give up something that they

have not yet received. As a result, they do not perceive a loss to their existing lifestyle and are more

willing to go along. This is an example of turning a brain bug—the same one that induces you to have

bacon now, even if you know it may cause heart disease later—into a feature that works in your

favor.

The essence of ultimate decisions remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed to

the decider himself.

—John F. Kennedy

Chapter 22

Intelligence (and the Lack of It)

The idea of intelligence gets people wound up and sometimes defensive, but that’s mostly because

they focus on the wrong questions. Scientists know a lot about individual differences in intelligence

and where they come from, but that information doesn’t sell newspapers and magazines. Instead,

journalists tend to report on comparisons between groups of people—by gender, by race, by

nationality, and so on—and worry that any differences are likely to be used to justify treating people

unequally.
That
is the part that gets people wound up.

Intelligence research has a bad reputation, one that was fairly earned by some of the early work in

the field. The history of this field is closely tied to attempts to prove that certain groups of people

were superior to others and thus deserving of special treatment. In the process, these researchers

became the basis of a classic cautionary tale of how biases can influence scientific conclusions.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

—Stephen Hawking

I n
The Mismeasure of Man
, Stephen Jay Gould describes how nineteenth-century attempts to

relate brain size to intelligence were compromised by the selection of data to support the conclusions

that the researchers knew had to be correct. These guys didn’t cheat deliberately; instead, they

unconsciously used different standards for data from different groups, which resulted in consistent

(and incorrect) findings that their own group had larger brains. Because of the potential for such bias,

scientists today often analyze data in a “blinded” fashion, without knowing whether a particular

measurement came from the treated or untreated group. In addition, early tests mixed up intelligence

with people’s knowledge of facts, so that educated test takers did better even if they weren’t any

smarter than people with less schooling.

Practical tip: How expectations influence test performance

Being reminded of a stereotype just before an exam—even by something as simple as

being asked to check a box for male or female—can influence performance substantially.

People do worse when they’re thinking about a negative stereotype that applies to them,

especially when they’re told that the task is a difficult one designed to reveal differences

between groups. Such effects are seen for stereotypes related to gender, race, age, and

socioeconomic status. They can be activated even if test takers are not aware of the

reminder, for instance when African-American faces are flashed on a computer screen too

quickly to be consciously perceived. Even more curiously, these effects can occur in

people who are not members of the stereotyped group: young people walk more slowly

after hearing stereotypes about the elderly. This appears to happen because thinking about

the stereotype takes up working memory resources (see main text) that would otherwise be

used for the test.

The good news is that this problem can be reduced or avoided with a little care.

Obviously, teachers shouldn’t communicate, directly or indirectly, that certain students are

not expected to perform as well as others. Standardized tests should collect demographic

information at the end of the answer sheet, not at the beginning. The effect also works in the

opposite direction: performance can be improved by exposure to material that contradicts

the stereotype, as in girls who hear a lecture on famous female mathematicians before a

math test.

Almost everyone fits into more than one group, so perhaps the most practical approach

is to bring a more positive stereotype to the task. For example, a mental rotation task shows

consistent sex differences, with men performing faster and more accurately than women

(see
Chapter 25
). When college students were asked questions that mentioned gender

before completing this test, women got only 64 percent as many correct answers as men. In

contrast, when they were asked questions that reminded them of their identity as students at

a private college, the women got 86 percent as many correct answers as men. The men did

better when reminded of their gender, while the women did better when reminded that they

were elite students. Thus the gap between men’s and women’s scores was only a third as

large when women were reminded of a positive stereotype that fit them as opposed to a

negative stereotype.

Our brains like to make generalizations about groups, as we discussed in
Chapter 1,
so

it may be too much to expect stereotypes to disappear entirely. Instead, we recommend

taking advantage of your brain’s eagerness to take these sorts of shortcuts by choosing the

image that suits the way you want to perform. Now that’s using your head!

Did you know? Great brains in small packages

In 2005, a crow named Betty made the news by constructing a tool. Experimenters

challenged Betty and another crow, Adam, to retrieve a bucket from a deep, transparent

cylinder. First the birds were given a curved piece of wire, which they used to hook the

bucket handle and lift out the reward, a morsel of meat. When given a straight piece of

wire, Betty had her insight. She used her beak to bend it into a curve and retrieved her

reward. Betty’s feat may have been unusually creative for a crow, given that Adam was

unable to make the mental leap. But many nonhuman animals engage in complex mental acts.

Among both birds and mammals, some intelligent species come to the front of the class.

Parrots, ravens, crows, chimpanzees, and dolphins all have exceptional problem-solving

abilities and complex social structures. As we noted in
Chapter 3,
the common feature of

mammals and birds with sophisticated cognitive abilities is that a large fraction of their

brains are forebrain.

Another impressive feat is the ability to imitate, which requires an animal to observe an

action and then translate these observations into motor acts that reproduce it. The non-

human animals with this skill are great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans),

dolphins, corvids (crows, ravens, and jays), and psittaciforms (parrots, budgerigars, and

keas). In a typical test, ravens were given a lidded box whose compartments contained

pieces of meat. The lids were hinged so that they could be opened by pulling on a flap near

the center of the box, but they could also be slid open by pulling sideways on a second flap.

Eventually, by trial and error, the birds discovered how to open the box. For a few ravens,

the researchers covered the center flap, forcing the birds to discover the sliding method. If

one raven watched another successfully open the box by pulling on the sideways flap, the

new raven was much more prone to use the sliding trick.

Finally, large-forebrained animals can create social complexity in the form of larger

average group sizes and more complex rules for social hierarchy and interaction. The

literal “pecking order” of small-forebrained chickens is an example of a relatively simple

social structure. In contrast, large-forebrained animals, like ravens and chimpanzees, live

in constantly shifting social groups. We recognize this complexity in our names for animal

groups: a parliament of rooks, a congress of baboons.