by Bruce Hood
Analysis Paralysis
Much of the time our risk analysis is based on the perception of choice – can we get out of a sticky situation? It is often assumed that choice is good – that decision-making makes us happier if we are allowed to exercise some self-control. Most of us feel safer when we drive. When faced with the prospect of not being able to help our selves out of a situation we become despondent, depressed and helpless. Information on this reaction to the lack of control is based on experiments during the 1960s in which animals were put through stressful situations.14 In one study two sets of dogs were given electric shocks. One set of dogs could terminate the pain by learning to press a lever. The other set of dogs were yoked to the first group, but did not have the option to press a lever and so received the same amount of shocks. To them, there was nothing they could do to stop the pain because they had no choice.
After these initial experiences, both sets of dogs were then placed in a shuttle box with two sides separated by a short barrier. Again electric shocks were applied to the floor of the cage, but this time both sets of animals could avoid the pain by leaping the barrier to the other safe side of the box. What they discovered was very disturbing. Dogs that had experienced control in the first study with the lever readily learned to avoid the pain, but dogs that had not been able to avoid the electric shocks in the first study failed to jump the barrier to avoid punishment. They simply lay down on the cage floor whimpering and were resigned to their torture. According to Martin Seligman, the psychologist who conducted this research, the animals had ‘learned helplessness’.
It is not easy to read about this sort of animal experimentation in a detached way. I am not a great animal lover, but I think I would have found such research difficult to conduct. Nevertheless, these studies on inducing learned helplessness have proved invaluable in understanding factors that contribute to human misery and depression.15 Depression is probably one of the most common debilitating mental disorders. We have all had some experience of feeling low, but clinical depression is a pervasive illness that prevents people from leading a normal life. It can vary in its intensity, with behavioural and psychological symptoms usually related to feelings of worthlessness and despondency. It is commonly associated with other problems, most notably stressful life events such as bereavement, unemployment and addiction, though there is much individual variation. Some of us are more predisposed to depression because it is a complex disorder that has genetic, biological, psychological and social components.
Not all depression is the same in its origins, but it is statistically more common among the poor and deprived in our society.16 One theory is that it is not so much that poverty is the root cause but rather the circumstances that having no wealth entails – the inability of individuals to do anything about their lives. Like the inescapable shock of the dogs, people learn helplessness, which leads to the negative fatalism that things can never get better. The obvious solution is to empower people with choices. Some would argue that this is what wealth really brings – the opportunity to make choices and not be shackled to a life you can’t escape. If nothing changes no matter what you do, you have the basics for despair. The need for control appears to be fairly important for both physical and mental health.
Simply believing that you have the power to change your life makes it more bearable.17 This is one reason why Liz Murray’s “Homeless to Harvard” story offers such hope. We also saw this with free will when we learned that people develop rituals and routines because these behaviours give the illusion of control when in fact there is none. Giving people choices, or at least the perception of control, empowers them to tolerate more adversity. For example, people will tolerate more pain if they think they can turn it off at any moment even when they have no control over the stimulus. Perceived control attenuates the pain centres of the brain.18 We even enjoy our meal more if is there is choice on the menu.19 These sorts of findings support a generally held view that choice is good, and the more choices you have, the better. It’s a principle that modern societies exhibit through conspicuous consumerism. However, this is only true up to a point. Sometimes you can have too much choice that can overwhelm the self.
Once again, Aesop knew this in his fable of the fox and the cat. Faced with the impending pack of savage hunting dogs bearing down on them, the fox and the cat had to escape. For the cat, this was a very easy decision to make as she bolted up a tree. However, the fox, with all his cunning know-how of the many ways he could escape, became paralysed by indecision and fell prey to the savage hounds. Faced with too many choices, the fox had analysis paralysis.
The same problem confronts us every day. The paradox of choice, as the psychologist Barry Schwartz calls it, is that the more choices we are given the less free we become because we procrastinate in trying to make the best decision.20 The whole modern world has gone choice crazy! For example, in his supermarket, Schwartz counted 285 different varieties of cookies, seventy-five iced teas, 230 soups, 175 salad dressings and forty different toothpastes. Any modern electrical appliance store is packed to the brim with so many different models with different features and functionality that we become swamped by indecision.
How many times have you gone to buy something from a large supplier only to leave empty-handed because you could not make a decision? We are so worried that we may make the wrong choice that we try to compare the different products along dimensions that we have not even considered relevant before we entered the store. Do I need it bluetooth enabled? What about the RAM? What about wi-fi? The majority of us who are not nerds find this overload of choice too much. Presented with so many options, we are unable to process the decisions efficiently. This leads to the sort of procrastination that makes us put off things that we really should do now.
Every spring, I have students who come to me to make a decision about what to undertake in their final-year research project, and they always say that they will make a start and get the bulk of it done over the summer. Certainly they all believe that they will have it ready by Christmas before the deadline in March. And yet, not one student has ever achieved this. There is always a catalogue of reasons why they never got round to do the work until the last moment, despite all their best intentions. As the English poet Edward Young (1683–1765) observed, ‘Procrastination is the thief of time.’ With all the choices available and other temptations that present themselves, we put off what we should do now until it is too late.
All this work on decision-making should clearly tell you that our self is at the mercy of the choices with which we are presented. Our capacity for decision-making is dependent on the context. If there are too many choices, then the alternatives cancel each other out and we are left with indecision. Even when we do make a decision, we are less happy because we dwell on whether we made the right choice. If we had no choice, then there is no problem and the world is to blame. But then we get depressed. However, if we chose something that does not turn out to be ideal, then that is our fault for not choosing wisely. It’s often a no-win situation.
Relativity in the Brain
Dan Ariely is a behavioural economist from Duke University who makes the argument that humans are not only poor at risk analysis but they are, in fact, predictably irrational.21 This occurred to him when he was browsing the web and found an advert for magazine subscriptions to the Economist, which had three yearly options: one, online only at $59; two, print only at $125; and, three, online and print for $125.
Clearly, the best offer was option three where you get both online and print versions for the same price as just the print alone. When he tested this offer on his students, he found that 84 per cent said they would choose option three and 16 per cent would choose option one. No one chose option two. You’d have to be crazy to choose only the print version when you could also have the online version for no extra cost. But this was a deliberate strategy by the Economist to make option three look more attractive by comparing it with a decoy. When Ariely removed option
two and gave them the choice again, this time 68 per cent choose option one and only 32 per cent went with option three. The decoy had distorted the student’s sense of value. Notice how easy the decision was swayed by the context.
Ariely points out that this is the problem of relativity – humans do not make judgements in absolute values but rather in relative terms. We are always weighing up the costs and benefits of different choices and estimate values accordingly. This also explains why people tend not to choose the cheapest or most expensive option, but the one in the middle. The top price is really a decoy. This strategy is sometimes known as the Goldilocks effect, after the fairytale of the little girl who discovers that she prefers the porridge that is not too hot and not too cold. The preference for the midrange price is why retailers often have an expensive option to increase the likelihood of customers choosing a product that costs less but is not the cheapest. Relativity in decision-making reveals that we do not have an internal value-meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, our decisions are shaped by the external context.
Relativity does not just apply in economic decision-making but is, in fact, a fundamental principle of how our brains operate. Everything we experience is a relative process. When something seems hotter, louder, brighter, smellier or sweeter, that experience is one of relative judgement. Every change in the environment registers as a change in neural activity. At the very basic level of neural connections, this is registered as the relative change in the rate of impulses firing. In the early experiments in which scientists recorded the electrical activity of a single neuron, they inserted an electrode to measure the electrical impulses of the cell and played it through loudspeakers. When inactive, one could hear the occasional click of the background activity of the neuron as the occasional impulse was triggered. However, as soon as some stimulus was presented that excited the neuron, the clicks would register like the rapid fire of a Gatling gun.
This is how our brains interpret the world. When a change in the environment occurs, there is a relative increase or decrease in the rate at which the neurons fire, which is how intensity is coded. Furthermore, relativity operates to calibrate our sensations. For example, if you place one hand in hot water and the other in iced water for some time before immersing them both into lukewarm water, you will experience conflicting sensations of temperature because of the relative change in the receptors registering hot and cold. Although both hands are now in the same water, one feels that it is colder and the other feels warmer because of the relative change from prior experience. This process, called ‘adaptation’, is one of the organizing principles operating throughout the central nervous system. It explains why you can’t see well inside a dark room if you have come in from a sunny day. Your eyes have to become accustomed to the new level of luminance. Adaptation explains why apples taste sour after eating sweet chocolate and why traffic seems louder in the city if you normally live in the country. In short, all of the experiences we have are relative.
In fact, your sense of happiness and achievement is based on how you compare your self to others. Ariely cites the observation by the American satirist H. L. Mencken that a man is satisfied so long as he is earning more than his brother-in-law. I expect this holds true for sister-in-laws as well because relatives are the closest individuals with whom we can compare our fortunes. Relativity also explains why people become discontented when they learn that their colleagues earn a higher salary. Industrial disputes are less about wages and more about what others in the company are earning in comparison. When we discovered what the bankers were earning during the recent financial crisis, the general public was outraged. The bankers could not see the problem with their high salaries and bonuses because they were comparing themselves to other bankers who were prospering.
Remembered Selves
If relativity is all that we can ever know, then this means that our self is defined by the values against which it is matched. Even our remembered self – what we were like in the past – is a relative decision. Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman similarly draws the distinction between two different versions of the self, the experiencing self and the remembered self.22 The experiencing self is the subjective experience of conscious awareness living in the present. Kahneman thinks that we all have such moments of the experiencing self that last on average for about three seconds. He estimates that we have about 600,000 such moments in a month and 600 million in a lifetime, but once these moments have passed, they are lost forever.
In contrast, the remembered self is our memory of our past experiencing self. These moments are integrated into a story that we keep in memory. However, as discussed, human memory is not etched in stone but rather is actively constructed as a story that is retold. This story is a relative one. For example, in a series of studies looking at the pain associated with colonoscopy, Kahneman and colleagues asked patients to report their experiences every sixty seconds. This was the experiencing self – the moments of self-awareness that constitute the conscious moments of everyday experience. Kahneman was interested in how patients would recall unpleasant experiences that either ended abruptly in pain or mild discomfort. In half of the group, the tip of the colonoscope was left in their rectum for three minutes, which lengthened the duration of the procedure but meant that the final moments were less painful. After the colonoscopy, patients were asked to rate their experiences. The group who had the longer procedure that ended in less pain rated their experiences more positively than the group who had a shorter procedure. The relatively painless ending left a lasting impression of the whole experience.23
It would appear that we are more sensitive to the beginnings and endings of experience, and remember them rather than what goes on in between. This has been shown in hundreds of memory experiments in which individuals are asked to remember long lists of items. It turns out that we are more likely to remember items at the beginning of the list, called the primacy effect, and items at the end, called the recency effect. It’s not that we get bored in between but rather items at the start have the relative advantage of novelty. Items at the end are less likely to be forgotten because subsequent items do not overwrite them in memory. In short, the beginning and end demarcate the duration of the experience, which is what we note. This is why it is always better to be either the first or the last to be interviewed for a job because the first and the last candidate benefit from primacy and recency effects. These effects of being at the beginning or the end of an experience show that we are more sensitive to the relative changes in our lives. Kahneman argues that these effects explain why we are so poor at evaluating our selves during periods of stability in our lives. For example, we think that we are happier on holidays but, in reality, most of us are happier at work. Because everything is relative, we focus on transitions in life rather than the continuities where there is little change.
Hot Heads
External events influence our choices in ways that seem to be somewhat out of our control. But what of the internal conflicts inside our heads? The self is a constructed web of interacting influences competing for control. To live our lives in society, we need to inhibit or suppress disruptive impulses, thoughts and urges. The drives of fleeing, fighting, feeding and fornicating are constantly vying for attention in situations when they are not appropriate. What of our reasoning and control when we submit to these urges? It turns out that the self-story we tell our selves can become radically distorted.
In what must be one of the most controversial studies of late, Dan Ariely, wanted to investigate how our attitudes change when we are sexually aroused.24 First, he asked male students to rate their attitudes to a variety of issues related to sex. For example, would they engage in unprotected sex, spanking, group sex and sex with animals? Would they have sex with someone they did not like or a woman over sixty? He even asked them whether they would consider spiking a woman’s drink with drugs so that she would have sex with them.
In the cold light of day, these men answe
red absolutely no way would they engage in these immoral acts. These were upstanding males who valued women and had standards of behaviour. Ariely then gave them $10, a copy of Playboy magazine and a computer laptop protectively wrapped so that they could answer the same questions again with one hand, while they masturbated with the other in the privacy of their dorm rooms. When they were sexually aroused something monstrous happened. These men were turned into animals by their passion. Ariely discovered these student Dr Jekylls turned into veritable Mr Hydes when left alone to pleasure themselves. They were twice as likely to say that they would engage in dubious sexual activities when they were sexually aroused. More worrying, there was a fourfold increase in the likelihood that they would drug a woman for sex! Clearly when males are thinking with their ‘little brain’, they tumble from their moral high ground, which they can usually maintain when they are in a non-aroused state. As Ariely put it, ‘Prevention, protection, conservatism and morality disappeared completely from their radar screen.’ It was if they were a different person.
We Are What We Have
It’s not just our natural drives that are susceptible to impulsivity. To that list we need to add the modern pastime of shopping. Shopping has no obvious evolutionary imperative and yet, in the West, it is often reported as an addictive behaviour. There are even Shopaholics Anonymous groups, similar to the more established Alcoholics Anonymous, to help people overcome their psychological need to buy things. I am not personally a shopaholic but I have occasionally made that impulsive purchase that I would not normally make – very often egged on by others. In my case, these have been esoteric objects or art that I think I should own. But why? What is it about owning possessions that gives us a psychological buzz?