Thinking and Choking

Big Frank is reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer - a book on understanding human decision-making. He makes use of recent findings in neuroscience in showing how it is that we make decisions. One of the interesting aspects of this is the interplay between emotional and rational choices. Sometimes the emotional comes quickly (the intuitive option) but often our rational side mistrusts that and begins to analyze us into error. As Lehrer puts it: "(One of the problems with feelings is that even when they are accurate they can still be hard to articulate.) Instead of going with the option of what feels best, a persons starts going with the option that sounds the best, even if it's a very bad idea."

In the mid 1980s Consumer Reports rated over 40 strawberry jams and ranked their results from 1 to 40. A California psychologist then tried a similar experiment with his graduate students. He chose four jams that had been rated 1st, 11th, 24th, 32nd, and 44th by the experts and asked his students to rank them. His students ranked the jams in the exact same order as the experts. Then he asked a different group of students to write out criteria to be used in ranking the jams and then to rank them. These students ended up ranking the jams in the exact reverse order - the worst as best and vice-versa.

What's going on here? The psychologist explained it this way: "that 'thinking too much' about strawberry jam causes us to focus on all sorts of variables that don't really matter. Instead of just listening to our instinctive preferences - the best jam is associated with the most positive feelings - our rational brain search for reasons to prefer one jam to another." People talk themselves in to liking the the worst over the best - they trip over their own minds: they choke. They relied too much on their rational brain, proving that there is such a thing as too much analysis, and this cuts one off from the wisdom of the emotions, "which are actually much better at assessing actual preferences."