Radiolab - Choice

Episode Date: November 17, 2008

Logic and emotion aren't the only forces that guide our decisions. This hour of Radiolab, we turn up the volume on the voices in our heads, and try to make sense of the babble. Forget free will, some important decisions could come down to a steaming cup of coffee.   UPDATE: The Williams & Bargh Yale coffee study "Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth" was replicated in 2014 by researchers at three different universities, Kenyon College, Michigan State University, and University of Manchester. They did not observe the same results as in the original study. They conclude that the difference between the original and the replications may have been due to some issues with the methods of the original study ("The effect observed by Williams and Bargh may have been due, in part, to unconscious cues given by the researcher") or may simply have been due to chance. They are very careful in their language to not discredit the original study but they advise that future researchers be more cautious "when considering whether exposure to hot or cold temperatures impacts prosocial behavior." In sum: the original Yale study mostly still stands, but researchers now look the methods and results with slight skepticism (not outright disbelief though). You can check out the replications here:  http://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/1864-9335/a000187  

You're listening to Radio Lab from Public Radio, W-N-Y-C, and NPR. Today's show is about choice. I don't know what to expect. I believe you're about to see. A miracle. And we thought we would start things off in a parking lot in Sunny Berkeley, California with a psychologist. I'm Barry Schwartz. I'm a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, where I have been teaching.

teaching since 1971. The only job I ever applied for, so I think deep down in my past, I appreciated the value of simplifying one's options. He even wrote a book about it called The Paradox of Choice. And to illustrate that paradox, he brought us to, well, you'll see. Barry, will you give us a visual as to what we're doing? So we're about to walk into Berkeley's very famous Berkeley Bowl, which is a supermarket. Very unusual when it comes to fresh fruits and vegetables. Wow. It has a selection unlike any I've ever seen in my life.

Dad, could you describe your first view of the produce? I see just fields of oranges. So we've got navel orange, Valencia juice orange, Texas Valencia juice orange, organic naval arming, Niola tangeloysi tangerines. Matano bananas. We have large naval aryan bananas. Small little.

Red bananas, burrosaba banana. Large gala, airwove, Washington Pacific Road. Hawaiian plantings. Gold and delicious. Rockal, Blood, Redmond, Redmond, Georgia Vidalia. Orange is great.

We have freedom of choice with respect to everything. Yellow onion. And you see it in every area of life. Pearl onions. In romantic relationships. Georgia Vidalia, sweet. When I was growing up, the answer to the question should I get married was obvious.

The answer to the question, when was obvious. Which was, of course. Of course, and as soon as possible. Well, now there are no defaults. Every imaginable lifestyle is available. You can be gay straight by... Exactly. Oh, boy.

Look at the seedless grapes. Yeah, seedless grapes. Oh, wait, wait, more apples. The sense that there are a million opportunities for you, you can make your own rules. Just overwhelming. Overwhelming. Counseling centers, psych services centers,

and universities are bursting at the seams. Why? These are the most privileged kids ever. The schools are giving them everything they could possibly want, and they're banging down the doors because they're so screwed up. Why? What's going on? An answer is people don't know what to do.

They don't know how to choose. They can't face a world in which everything is available. And I see this in the college. It's heartbreaking to see these incredibly talented college seniors who we have given every opportunity to do whatever they want, terrified at graduate. They know that this is a stage in life where walking through one door means they're going to hear a lot of other doors slam shut. They can't bear the thought that they may walk through the wrong door. It's choice angst.

It is. It's the disease of modernity. This is very... What? Sorry, sorry. Well, just come on. Go ahead and just do the show, but I say, come on in reservation. Why? Well, because, like, people from Swarthmore College get to pay, like, $45,000.

A year for the privilege of the... You know, that's a very, very rare slice of America. Yeah, fine. You're right. You're right. Thank you. But come on, you have this, too. I mean, how many speeds on your bike do you really need?

Well, that's a different thing. I mean, I don't need 22 speeds. I happen to make two with five. There you go. So there are some real questions here. And on this hour, we're going to look at choice. Choice and decision making. When do we choose?

How do we choose? Where do we choose? The limits of choice. Of choice. Of choice. Of choose. The limits of choose. The limits of choose.

on Radio Lab. I'm Jedd Evin Ryan. I'm Robert Crillwood. Stay with us. Biches. Okay, to begin, are you ready? Yep. Let me just ask the basic question, a basic question, which is, okay, so a lot of choice can be bad, but clearly we need some choice.

So what's the right amount? Actually, how much can you really handle? I asked that question to Barry Schwartz. Well, there's a classic study in psychology from 50 years ago. called the magic number seven. The magical number seven plus or minus two. That's Jonah Lair, author of the book, Proust was a neuroscientist in the new book called How We Decide.

In the 50s, he says. I don't think like 1956. A guy named George Miller wondered about this. How much can a human brain really hold? So, he conducted a series of memory tests, ask people to memorize different sets of numbers, letters, musical notes. And what Miller found out, is it the average human?

Could hold about seven digits plus or minus two at any given moment in working memory. When you say working memory, you mean like what we can keep in our top of mind memory, right? Not like memory memory, but like RAM. Exactly. Random digits. You can hold about seven plus or minus two. And with practice, people can, you know, really bump it up a bit.

With practice, Robert, with practice. I'm still struggling with 66666. I think, to myself, I think I got the first four. I mean, it's not an accident that so many of these random digits we have to memorize from phone numbers to social security numbers are. seven plus or minus two. Now, the interesting thing is what happens to our decision-making powers when you try and get more than seven in your head? What? You want to make Shadadol? Yes. Sorry. Well, let me introduce you to someone. I'm a Baba Shev. I'm a professor here at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in marketing. A lot of my research has to do with

the brain. And tricking people. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So Robert, I want to tell you about one particular experiment that he did. So the experiment is pretty straightforward. It goes like this. He got a bunch of subjects together. He said, okay, I'm going to give you all a number. On a little card, you're going to read the number, and I want you to commit that number to memory.

Take as much time as you want to memorize the number. And then he says, you're now going to walk to the next room and recall the number. And that's what subjects think. Test subjects think that they're going to be doing. So they know they're going to be in one place, getting a number, going to another place reciting that number. That's right. That's all they know.

That's all they know. What they don't know is it not every. everybody is getting the same kind of number. So some people get a seven-digit number, some people get a two-digit number. That I can do, by the way. I think I can do two digits. No, I doubt it. All the subjects have to do is they've got to memorize a number, walk out of room one, down the hall, room two, then recite their number.

Now just imagine, you with me? Mm-hmm. Person with a two-digit number in their head was walking out of room one. One-two is my number. I can definitely remember this. Down the hall. The same time, someone with seven digits in their head. One, two, two, eight, nine, three, six.

walks down the hall. Now, here is where the trickery comes in. As they're walking down the hall, mid-memorizing all of a sudden, excuse me. They pass a lady in the hallway, and she's holding something. Sorry to interrupt you, but would you like a snack? She says, here, have a snack. Just as our way of saying thanks for participating in this study,

you can have one of two snacks you choose. You can choose between either A, a big fat slice of chocolate cake, or B, a nice bowl of fruit salad. Meanwhile, they've both got these numbers still in their head. Now, here's the weird thing. When they finally make their choice. What would you like? Some yummy cake or some healthy fruit.

The people, this is crazy, the people with two digits in their head? You know, I love cake, but I think I'll take the fruit. Almost always choose the fruit. It's healthy. Whereas the people with seven digits in their head, almost always choose the cake. You know, the cake. I want the cake. And we're talking by huge margins here.

It was significant. I mean, this was like in some cases, a 20, 25. a 30 point difference. Huh. So what? Meaning if you have seven digits in your head, you are twice as likely to choose cake, then fruit. Twice.

So, let's get on with this. So the people with the seven digits get the cake, I get that part. I don't know why. Exactly. That doesn't interest you as to why they would choose. Well, a little, yeah. Why? Okay, good.

Now that I've got your interest, I'll tell you the theory. Okay. And this is where it gets interesting. It seems that the brain is anatomically organized into different systems. Dual systems is what they're called. According to Jonah, you have a rational deliberative system, which is sort of more to the front of the brain. And then deeper in the brain, you have an emotional, unconscious system. And according to Jonah, these two systems are often at war.

I mean, there's constant competition between the rational brain and the emotional brain. They're always competing for attention and to guide and direct your behavior. Especially when you have a tough choice like Babashiv's cake versus fruit. There, the competition is fierce. emotional automatic system is pushing them towards the cake. The emotional brain loves sweet, gooey chocolate cake. That's really what you want. Me, me, need chocolate.

No. On the other hand, the deliberative system, on the hand, comes and says, wait a second. Are you thinking about this choice carefully? This probably is not good for you because... Calories, sugar, high fat content. Think about your waistline. It's going to make you chubby. Think about your cholesterol.

It is not good for your health. It is not good for yourself. And that acts as a check. But if you give that rational deliberative system seven numbers, just seven to memorize. 1228936. One two, no, shh. One two to eight five. One two two.

Take it. Shh. One. So too. Suddenly, with a rational brain, has too much to keep track of. Oh, you know you want to. It's getting tired. It can't put up as much of a fight.

Which means greater likelihood that the emotions will drive their choices. The astounding thing here, says Jonah, is not simply that, you know, sometimes emotion wins over reason. It's how easily it wins. Seven numbers is all it takes to screw up reason. Just think about how astonishingly limited that is. Yeah, I mean, compared to emotion, team reason is well. Pretty feeble. And there's no way around it.

And we can kind of rage against the machine. But the brute fact is it's just one might. microchip and a big computer. And when we always rely on it, all the advice you get in decision making is stop and think, slow down, take your time. And yet, when you actually look at the brain, that can lead you to rely on a feeble piece of machinery. All right, let me just offer an admittedly inconsequential case and point. There we were at the Berkeley Bowl. In the apple aisle, there were thousands and thousands of apples to choose from. Okay, not thousands, but a lot. And Robert and I get in our heads, well, we're going to choose, let's each choose an apple.

And Robert, being Robert, decides, like, in six seconds. Because it had this really cool name. Washington Pacific Roe. Zazz. Zazz? I'm going to get a Zaz. Me, I deliberated. I'm going to get the...

Maybe I should give it. Let's go to the organic. We're running out of time. I lined up about 12 apples compared them by price, size, color, and everything I can think of. And eventually decided on a giant Korean apple pair, which was the only logical choice because it was bigger than his. This is a 9-pound apples. Check.

It is large. It was more expensive to 89. Check. Definitely way more original. This is an apple. Check. And I figure, as we're checking out. Paper bag or plastic?

Paper, please. Game over. I am the winner. But a couple hours later, we get to the airport. We have some time before our flight. I grab a plastic knife. We cut the apples and we do a taste test. Okay, ready?

Ready? Ready? Two, three. And guess whose apple is the best? I'm guessing this ass apple. Oh, this is a much better apple. Yes. Oh, it's so good.

The apple wins in almost every department. My apple, I don't even want to talk about my apple. This doesn't taste like an apple at all. It has a surprise. Is that a worm? That's a worm. That's a worm. Is that a core or is that an animal living there?

Anyhow, according to Jonah, where I went, Wrong? Oh, you've short-circuited your prefrontal cortex there. The prefrontal cortex is the right here in your forehead. And that's where the irrational brain lives. And I just had given it too many things to keep track of. All these apples, you can only hold so much data at any given moment. So you can fix it on seven apples, but only one piece of information for each apple,

how red they are or how shiny they are. So you can't do seven apples with seven variables because then you've got 49. That's way pastful. Exactly. But there is a bigger problem than brain fatigue. if you ask Barry Schwartz, and it happens after you choose. You're plagued with the possibility that you didn't do as well as you could have. Regret.

I'm lamenting what could have been. I definitely felt at the airport. And chances are you didn't do as well as you could have. Well, therein lies the rub of a place like Berkeley Bowl. You get seduced by an 11-pound apple that turns out to be a fake watermelon with an anus. All right, so we now understand the problem that Barry proposes. He says that if you have to make a choice, too often the choice is the wrong one because your brain is too full of facts. It hurts your head.

Or because if you make the choice, you then think, oh, damn, I should have chosen otherwise, the regret problem. Right. There are ways to handle this. Our friend Oliver Sacks, Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neuroscientist, is a regular on this program. We were talking, and I told him about this issue, and he said, oh, I don't have the problem. It's what do you mean you don't have the problem? He said, well, I make, he says, a willful choice that certain things I care about a lot and I worry over, and then there's a whole swath of my life that I just don't choose.

Yes, my housekeeper actually comes tomorrow, and she will get half a gallon of soy milk, half a gallon of prune juice. she will make a gallon or so of orange jello. She will make a large bowl of tabooly. She will get six or seven tins of sardines, because I eat sardines with tabooly every evening. She will get seven apples and seven oranges. Seven apples.

Why seven apples and seven? Okay. Well, because I'm also very greedy and impulsive, and therefore I have to have a rule that I'm permitted to eat an apple a day and a pair a day. If I had 70 apples, I would eat them all. So you have worked it out so that you are regulating yourself, and somehow your appetite has become regulated in the meantime.

Yes, I never get bored with my food. Why not? That seems so boring. Well, I don't find it boring. I enjoy it equally with equal relish every time. If I were to sit down with you and describe to you a new candy, I don't know, almond M&Ms, and I were to do it with all the talent that I could possibly bring to description. So you would see the nice outer candy shell, it would glisten, it would be sugary, it would have this most delicious nut inside, would you not feel at all tempted to break the habit of years

whatever your sweet is and just venture over to almond M&M? I would certainly try the almond M&M, but since you mention it, with chocolate, there is a shop close to me which has broken 72% chocolate. I go there each day, indeed, I have as you see with me

a single dollar in my pocket. I'll put it down and I say a dollar's worth of 72. Every day. Every day. Neither more nor less. Can you recall the moment when you somehow leaped from whatever your predecessor

chocolate routine was to the 72% cocoa content. Something wonderful must have happened on that day. You got yanked from the deep rut that you were in into the next deep rut. But I'm just curious, what happened on the day of change?

I don't clearly recollect, but I can tell you a day of negative change. This again goes back to my carnivorous days when I got a thing about kidneys. For some reason... You mean the organ or the pee? No, no.

The organ, Rognon, Rognon. Rognon. It was when I was a resident at UCLA, and I, as I now have sardines every time for dinner, at that time living at Tampanga Canyon, I would have kidneys,

and I would go to the farms market, and I would buy my weekly kidneys. But on one occasion, a strange mistake happened, whether I made the mistake or whether I was misheard, instead of my usual two pounds of kidneys, I was given 22 pounds of kidneys.

And if a mistake is made, I'm too shy to say anything. Aren't you embarrassed to be such a wimp, both of routine and of shyness? I mean, it's like it's a double duty there. Yes, I am. Well, what the hell? Anyhow, with these, I should, of course, have thrown away this monstrous, palpitating bag of kidneys. But in the event, I took it back to my little house and to Pang.

and the then followed an increasingly nightmarish period in which I had kidneys for breakfast, for lunch, kidneys stewed, sweet kidneys, and finally, after about 10 days, by which time I'd eaten about 50, an uncontrollable nausea and vomiting took hold of me. Literally or just the mind? I think it was literally as well

because I remember seeing bits of kidney in the vomit. And I then threw out. the rest of the kidneys, and I've never had a kidney since. Oliver Sacks, author of most musically, the book Musicophilia. Hey, what did he call those kidneys? A reunion. What is that? That's French for kidney.

Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, really. No kidding. What's French for Let's Go to Break? O'Revoire. No, but that's goodbye for good. Meaning, we'll be right back. Okay.

Coming up, we have a story you will not believe about what happens behind the scenes at a casino when you are trying not to lose, but nonetheless, we're getting gouged. That's coming up on Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Curlwitz. Stay with us. Message 1. Hi, this is Barry Schwartz.

Radio Lab is funded in part by the Offord P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by National Public Radio. Bye. End of message. Hello. Chad Abumran. And I'm Robert Crowley.

This is Radio Lab. Today's program is about choice, how we choose, why, and one's just choice. And I'm going to choose, I'm actually going to dream of the possibility one day of walking into a store. And instead of being obsessed and turned on by the beauty of an object or by the promise of an object or price, price of an object or the status that would be conferred upon me if I chose or not conferred upon me, all those messy emotions. what would happen if I could be like a spot? I am half a volcano. Volcanians do not speculate. I speak from pure logic.

Hello. Hi. Hi, Jed and Robert. We actually put the spot question to a neurologist, Dr. Antoine Bishara, who works at the University of Southern California. If I could say abracadabra and go all logic, would I be a happy chooser? I would say no, based on our work with neurological patients. Then he told us about a patient he once had.

He's changed the name of the patient. He would call him Elliot. Can you describe him? What was he like? Well, he's about 5 feet 10, you know, 170 pounds, I would say. It looks very normal, like a normal person. He was an accountant. That's Joan Aller again.

of large corporation. A successful accountant. Upper management, active in his local church. And he was married at the time? Yes. A very conservative family, very religious. House in the suburbs.

Good money saving. Smart, successful man. Kind of the American dream. And then, you know, the tumor happened. This was in 1982. Doctors discovered a small knot in the front of Elliot's head. In a part of the brain called the Orblophrontocortal cortex. And where is that?

That's just behind the eye. Did doctors remove the tumor? Yeah, he had the surgery, the tumor was removed. And then the doctors send him home. Well, at first glance, it seems like a tremendous success. No language impairment, no movement disorders. He still scores 97 percentile on the intelligence test. He seems fine, like good old Elliot.

Does good old Elliot go back to the good old job? He starts going back to the good old job, the good old family. And that's when things got really weird. At first it's just subtle things, these very minor decisions. That he suddenly couldn't make. Like, he'd be at the office, he'd want to sign a contract, and he'd have in front of him a blue pen and a black pen. And he would think, well, the type on this contract is black,

so maybe I should use a blue pen. Maybe a blue pen sticks out more. On the other hand, maybe it sticks out too much and will become too distracting. Then again, black pen is lower on ink, so you want to save that for later. And this would go on and on, says Jonah. For half an hour. And if it takes him a half an hour to decide which pen to choose, imagine Elliot in the cereal aisle in the grocery store.

I mean, the cereal is particularly tough because there must be 200 varieties of cereal. This is a sugary cereal. This is a not sugary cereal. Standing there, I think about, you know, what would I prefer tomorrow? The one with extra protein? I've got these other cereals at home. Are they also a honey nut themed? Do I want something to break up the honey nut monotony? Is there one cereal on sale?

That's a better deal. With Elliot. It'll take forever to decide. According to Dr. Bashar, he would just keep on air. analyzing. Analyzing. Well, this one's 14 ounces. Analyzing.

It's 15 ounces, but they're the same prices. Analyzing. Analyzing. Is there one zero. Analyzing. All day long. The question was, what exactly had happened to Elliot to make him that way? What exactly did that tumor do?

And the breakthrough came when Elliot went to see a neurologist named Antonio Demosio. And Demosu immediately noticed something. Even though Elliot was perfectly thoughtful, perfectly articulate. Always controlled, always relaxed. When he spoke, he seemed kind of numb. No sign of anger or rage or self-pity. No feeling at all. So DiMazio had an idea.

He put Elliot in a chair, hooked him up to all these measuring devices, and then showed Elliot a series of really charged pictures. A severed foot, a naked woman, a house on fire. Pictures that are normal people trigger an automatic emotional response. You can't help it, but your blood pressure increases, your pulse increases, your hands start to sweat. But with Elliot, these pictures triggered nothing. And that's when it became clear. What had happened to Elliot,

what his tumor had really done, was cut him off from his emotional mind. He'd become, in effect. Some kind of like Spock-like Vulcan. The conventional theory would be that a person without emotions would be perfectly rational, that emotions somehow interfered with rationality,

that they got in the way. And yet here was this guy who couldn't experience emotions and he was pathologically indecisive. So then the answer to my question, my first question, wouldn't we all be better off if we could be completely rational? We now have the answer. It's no. When you've got all these options to consider and they're more or less the same,

the only way to wheedle your way to a choice is to stop thinking and go with a feeling. Right. And so the logic of yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, leaves you nowhere, but the feelings of yes, no, that does leave you somewhere. That's right. Feeling, says Antoine Boucherre, that's the key. Without feeling, you're stuck. So what ended up happening to Elliot? He ended up in a divorce, ended up losing his job, losing all his savings. He got involved with the con artist. He had to move back in with his parents.

Elliot was stuck. His life fell apart. Which makes you kind of reevaluate the Dr. Spock advantage, so-called, because if we really we're keeping company with a flock of Spocks and we brought them to the grocery store. There they'd be. 55 Spock staring at the Cheerios staring at the Honeycutt, daring at the Cheerios. Not to mention that they're divorced and broke.

So I mean, obviously we have some advantage over these Velcons because we have these feelings that can push us to a solution. Yeah. But what I still don't get is, is it just the roar of feeling that does it? Or is there something about having a feeling that's more subtle than that? Is there some, what is the power of the feeling?

That's an interesting question. Let me walk this story in from a writer, Stephen Johnson. He's written a whole bunch of books, Emergence, Mind Wide Open. And he tells this story that... Can we press record? Really gets it what you're asking. My wife and I had moved into this new wonderful apartment that overlooked the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan. It had this vast window.

It was one kind of window in this room, but it was huge. and we would sit there and stare out at the river all times the day. And at one point, the first summer we were there, the storms started to come in. And they were to kind of build up over Jersey and come rolling in. And we thought, oh, this is great. We can look at the white caps on them and see the lightning over Jersey City and all this stuff. And one late June day, we're sitting out there in our apartment. We can see the skies getting darker and darker.

And we immediately say to each other, oh, this is going to be a great show. So we both come over to the window. And we were standing at the window. My wife literally with her hands pressed against a glass. And I'm standing right next to it, just to the side of it, kind of looking out. And a storm starts really kicking up. There's a lot of lightning. And you can see the window actually kind of flex just a tiny little bit.

So you noticed this? Yeah, we noticed that there was a little bit of give. In a window, that size, it has to have a little bit of give. Otherwise, it's not stable. So we could tell it was really windy. and there are a couple of pretty powerful Gus, and then all of a sudden there's this very strange, sharp kind of click sound. My wife instantly jumps back from the window,

jumps back kind of four or five feet and says, what was that? I'd say, being the incredibly perceptive person that I am, I say, I'm pretty sure it was the study door slamming with the wind around the corner in the other part of the apartment. So she goes back around the corner to check on whether it was in fact the study door slamming. And at that moment, as I'm standing two inches from the frame in the window, the entire thing blows in. It makes insane noise, it shatters glass. And all of a sudden, there's a, you know, 60 mile an hour storm like blowing through our apartment.

So we both run into the bathroom and close the door. And all of a sudden, you know, I suddenly. I think, like, oh my God, you were standing in front of that window three seconds before. If I hadn't stupidly told you that I thought that clicking sound was the door slamming, that thing would have landed on you. I think it's entirely possible that it would have killed her. Okay, so that happened. His wife, by the way, was fine.

Good. They installed a new window. They cleaned up the apartment. They did? Because I am covered with imaginary glass. I mean, our sound defects are so unbelievably real. Thank you very much. But what's illuminating and what gets at the question you asked?

Yes. Is actually what happened next? It's the post script of that event. For literally years, every time I heard the sound of wind blowing through a window in that apartment and really pretty much anywhere else, I had an involuntary fear reflex. The sound of any wind? Or is it a specific kind of wind sound? It was the sound of wind associated with the window. So, you know, it's the...

You know, I would go to my parents' house who live on the ground. floor in a house in suburban Washington. But I would just hear wind kind of going through the window there and I would think, something's not right. And this was not a rational feeling. It was certainly not a rational thought. I could look empirically and say it's 30 miles an hour, this wind. The window is clearly not going to blow and it's not that big a window. And I'm standing nowhere near it. But you still somehow couldn't shake the dread? I couldn't get rid of that feeling. And it's one of those moments where you really, you really ask yourself, I think, you know, who's in charge? You know, who's driving the ship?

You know, because some part of me is looking at this situation empirically and saying rationally, this window is no threat to me. Right. It's not going to blow in. And yet some other part of me is unable to shake this emotional state of dread and fear and alertness and threat. All right. Now to get back to your question, Robert, where do feelings come from? Yeah, why do I say yes to weed checks with power? Right.

Well, consider the story we just heard from the perspective of Stephen Johnson's brain. Okay. So what a brain wants to do most of all is keep the organism safe, right? And it does that by looking for patterns. Like, here's an explosion. Wife almost died. I think it's entirely possible that it would have killed her. In that moment, brain soaks it all in.

Takes kind of a snapshot. Like, what have we got here? Wind, window, glass, shock. So later, wind blows. The brain thinks, wait a second. Wind, window, glass. We've seen this before. War in the organism.

Be afraid. Be afraid. Be afraid. The point is, that feeling of dread? Dread and fear and alertness and threat. That's just an alarm signal. The brain is just trying to help Steve make the right decision. Oh.

Okay, now to the cereal aisle. I don't hear me at home. There you are. You're looking at all the boxes. Cereo's. Captain Crunch. And as your eyes fall on the Rice Krispy box. Rice Krispies, Rice Krisp. Just like Steve Johnson with the wind, somewhere way deep down, your brain is calling up all the experiences you've ever had with Rice Krispies.

The good Rice Krispy experience is the bad. Maybe in college you got dumped by that girl who likes Rice Krispy Treats. I don't know. I remember her. Thousands of little memory fragments down there, royle about. A lot of information. Right, too much. So what ends up happening is that it all gets summed somehow in your subconscious, and then it bubbles up as a feeling.

Nice Krispies. All right. So one way to look at a gut feeling is that it's a kind of shorthand average of all of this past wisdom. So you have this tremendous stern and drang of feelings inside. Sturman, whoa. That's amazing. That's amazing. That's nice.

That's nice. But there is, say, scientists, one feeling that humans have that seems to trump all the others, and that is the feeling of loss. People hate to lose. You can actually put a number on it. How much they hate to lose versus winning. And it's a really cool experiment that was done. It's been done everywhere, but our experiment will be done by National Public Radio's wonderful reporter.

Mike Peska. Are you a bit of a gambler or would you rather just keep your money and not risk it? I mean, I wouldn't mind risking a few dollars, but I just don't want to go overboard, you know. Would you say you're a gambling woman? Do you like gambling? No, I don't. I don't really gamble. I'm very cautious and finicky, whether it's eating or taking chances. Yeah, the risk of losing something isn't worth the gambling of it, I guess. I wouldn't take a risk, let's put it that one. If we were to play heads or tails, would you want to do it if you won, you won a dollar,

but if I won, I won a dollar? Probably not, no. No, no, thanks. If you knew the game was on the up-and-up, and I were to flip a coin, and I said, oh, look, I'll pay you, you know, $1.25 if you win, you only have to pay me a dollar. No. I ain't doing it with you. No. I don't know. That just doesn't seem worth it. I said, look, I'll give you $1.50.

And you only have to put up a dollar. Would you do it then? No. Not really. 50 cents is not worth. What if I offered you a $1.75 if you want? That's a possibility. Maybe. Like at that point you maybe start thinking, fine, I'll give you $2,000, you only have to put up a dollar.

Would you be interesting? Sure, yeah. I would do that. I would do that. Yes, sure. Wow, so everyone seems to converge around two bucks, two to one? Yes. So that means that, like, loss is twice as painful.

Yeah, you could say loss hurts twice as much as gain feels good. Why do you think that is? It must have something to do with, you know, when we were all running away from lions on the Savannah. Yeah, it always seems to come back to that, doesn't it? I guess a wildebeest in the breast. rush is worth a lion on the heels or something. I don't know what that means.

Were there any people that you talked to who went way past two to one? Sure. Okay, 100 to 1. No. Come on, you're crazy. 100 to 1 on a coin foot. No, no, I'm just not a gambler. Is this a religious thing?

Nope, I'm just not a gambler. So here's the question to get us to our next thing. Given that human beings hate to lose, what do you do if your entire business is getting people to lose money? You're talking about casinos. Are you not? Indeed I am. We're going to Las Vegas.

Are we? Atlantic City, yeah. No, Atlantic City then? All right. Now, normally what a casino will do, they will try to distract you with, you know, fountains of jelly beans and, you know. Greek statues that move. But there's one casino in particular called Haras, it's a chain, that doesn't do any of that. Yeah, they offer slots and they offer a blackjack, but there's no exploding volcano.

There's no Picasso on the wall. And yet, according to Mike, Harris jumps out at you. They are the success story in the casino biz. And Gary Loveman is a lot of. to do with that. Yeah, any minute you're not drunk or depressed, I'd like you in the casino. He's the CEO of Harris Casinos. Oh, we're in the casino business. And he's developed a really brilliant technique for slaying the beast that is loss aversion. That's one way to put it. What's this technique? Loyalty cards. What's a loyalty card? What does that mean?

Well, basically, I mean, you know how back in the day, if you wanted to play the slots, you just stuck a quarter in? Can't do that anymore. Right. I'd like to throw a quarter in the one-armed bandit, turns out there are no quarters. Okay, I'll slide a dollar bill in. Turns out before you have to do it, you have to sign up for a card. Well, why would I want to sign up for a card? Well, A, you have to. But B, the first time you play will give you a couple extra dollars. Everyone wants to sign up for that card. It's free money. Now, just to be clear, at Harris, it's actually not obligatory to sign up for this card, but most people do to get the rewards. And so there you are. You've got this little loyalty thing, and you're sticking it in every slot or machine that you play.

And that offers them certain, well, they've got this new pilot program where they basically watch every move you make. Check it out. Okay. Let's say you're playing the slots. Okay. You stick your card in the slot machine. All right. My card is in.

At that very moment, the information is transmitted. Downstairs, in the case of this casino we were at, it goes downstairs deep in the bowels of the casino. I need a take a four to Julia. There's a dispatcher sitting there in front of a monitor. This computer sees that you've put your card into slot machine number 42, and the computer begins taking notes. Every game that you play, they're logging, adding, dividing, graphing, whatever. It's able to crunch those numbers.

And over many visits, the casino begins to know you. They know your game is slots. They know you like to play for an average of six hours. And they know that generally you have a limit. say $89. Wow, they can know that I usually leave after losing $89? Yeah. And they know on this particular visit, you're not doing so well.

Why didn't I win? You've lost more than you're winning. In fact, you've lost $72, which is really close to your personal limit. And this is a crucial moment. You're starting to get that sinking feeling, and you might just pack it in. I walk out of the casino. Yes, and the casino doesn't want you to do that. They want to keep you there.

So... As your losses are increasing from 72 to 77 to 85. and you're getting closer and closer to that point. In a back room, there's a computer going off, the dispatcher is seeing it. Juliet, 3703. The dispatcher knows to call the slot attendant up on the floor. Tangle 4. Willie, I have a DCL1 at Gulf 1401 for Karen Masset. Copy that.

Takeoff for Willie, DCL1 for Karen Massey, copy. And the slot attendant walks out, taps you on the shoulder. Hello, how you doing, ma'am? Ms. Karen Masson? Yes. Everything going okay for you today? I'm losing. Of course, we know that's the case because our systems allow us to monitor that.

And so the attendant offers you something you might like. A visit to the steakhouse, a visit to our coffee shop. They could offer you tickets to a show, Celine Dion's playing the big room. Or they could just offer cold hard cash. You want some money today, just by playing with your car. You're lucky to war a car. Oh, really? Yes, I got $15 DCL one for you.

Will you accept it? Yeah, sure. All right, all of a sudden, you're happy that you won $15. You're not fixated on the fact that you've lost $72. So you come back again and again and again. I think it's great. It's something to do. I've always over.

I lose $300 all the day. Good thing our boys don't know how much. Now here is the amazing part. For all the different thousands of people who come through the doors of Harris casinos, they could figure out their own individual pain points. So you're telling me that if you walk into a casino, I walk in right after you, Robert Krobich, right after us. Yeah. And we do that enough times.

After a while, they can know that you. You like to gamble until you're about $700 down. Me, I usually leave around $11. And Moneybacks Krollwich over there. Moneybacks Krollwich usually holds out until he's $4,000 in the hole. And they can know that about each of us? Yeah, they can. What do you think about this?

This strikes you as a good business proposition, or does it strike you as a creepy example of big brotherism? Obviously, this works out well for Harris. So does it work out well for me, you and Robert Krollwich? I think it does. What do you mean? Well, they can't ever change the odds. So when we go into a casino, by state law, they'll never be able to change the odds of the game.

All that Harris can do is kind of manage the feeling that we get. They leave a lot happier than if they had simply had a bad gaming experience, put their wallet back in their pocket and gone home unhappy. And everything about going to a casino is a poor decision, an irrational decision. And if there was a way, they can make me walking out of there feeling like a million bucks when I spent two million, well, then I say more power to him. And I would add, of course, that almost any business could, try something similar, assuming they had

appealing sorts of things to do for customers that had bad experiences. What's your pain point, by the way? You know what it is? If I'm down 300 bucks, I'm really pissed off. I'm not going to get there. Yeah. There's only one thing that would keep me at the table. What's that? Saline Daylon. Not tickets to her concert

if she was actually in the game. She's a terrible poker player, what we call dead money. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. We'll be back in a moment. Hey, by the way, Mike works at NPR News. Thank you to them for let us borrow him. I am Candice Crotty, calling from St. Paul, Minnesota. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation

and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. sloan.org Hello, this is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krellwitch. And today we are talking about decision making. How we make decisions. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I want to just stop you on that pronoun you just

happen to use. You say we make decisions. Now, so when you Jeddabumra, when you decide to choose a pen black over blue, if you decide to choose a cereal, Cheerios over Special K. Cheerios, definitely. I'm assuming that you feel very much in charge of that choice. If someone said, hey, who chose? You'd say... This feels like a trick question.

It's going to be a trick question. I chose. It's a cheerios. Well, you think you chose. Would you please welcome the studly Malcolm Gladwell? But in talking with Malcolm Gladwell, the writer of The Tipping Point, and at the time he'd just written into the book, Blink, we were at the 90 Second Street, Y, in New York. He raised an interesting question. We began the discussion by talking about a dangerous element in decision-making, which he calls.

call this the perils of introspection, and you tell the story of a poster contest. It involves hanging cats versus impressionists. Do you recall this? Yes. Yes. Actually, I have no memory. The, um, yeah, this is a famous study by, um, Tim Wilson, who's one of my favorite psychologists at UVA and a guy named John Schuller, who's absolutely brilliant. They, uh, they have a whole bunch of posters, and they bring students in and they say, Take anyone you want. It's yours. And then they bring in another group and they say, take anyone you want, but by the way, before you

go home with it, just explain right out of paragraph about why you're taking it home, why you like it. And then they call up a student six months later and they say that poster you got for free six months ago, do you like it? Are you still happy with it? And the ones who didn't have to explain themselves still love their poster, and the ones who did hate their

poster. And furthermore, the ones who had to explain themselves, it turns out, only took the posters of the hanging cats, of the little kittens, you know, hanging their baby. What does mean hanging cats? It doesn't mean like, eh, right? No, no, no, no.

You know those posters? Surely you saw them, or maybe you have lived in the upper kind of intellectual precincts for so long that you've lost contact with the rest of us. But, you know, have you never seen them?

The little kitten hanging on a bar and it says, hang in their baby, you know? Oh, yeah. All right. I don't think of it as hanging. I think it is sort of... You're faking it. You're just saying.

Yeah. No, no, you're right. You're right. I am faking it. Yeah. Actually, when I first saw that, I thought the kitten was having to do a chin up. And so it didn't have the desired effect.

I thought, why are they torturing this kitten? Why do kittens have to work? Is it not enough that human beings have to go to the gym? Anyway, but you had those, then you had impressionist posters. And the kids who had to explain their preferences overwhelmingly chose the kittens. And those who didn't have to explain themselves chose the impressionist posters. So what that says is the act of making you explain your preferences not only biased you in favor of something that you didn't actually want.

It also made you change your preference away from something that was sophisticated and in favor of something that was unsophisticated. If you think about the whole universe of focus group testing and something, it determines all the cultural products that get into our society. That makes you really stop and worry, right? We're putting people through a process that alienates them from their true needs and that biases them in favor of the unsophisticated. An overwhelming majority of the greatest and most successful movies or sitcoms

or television shows of all time tested badly. Almost by definition, the really breakthrough shows will test badly in focus groups. I actually saw the focus group results for Mary Tyler Moore show, which were devastating. We hate it. Mary was abrasive. Roto was obnoxious. you know, in the focus group testing of All in the Family, which got one of the lowest

scores of any pilot tested CBS, the overwhelming majority of people who watch the show said that the only way to fix it was to turn Archie into a kind of cuddly, sensitive. You know, it's crazy. It's crazy. The only reason these shows ever make it on the air is that somebody at some point just says, you know what,

ignore that stuff. I like it. So the suggestion here is that because these snap judgments are a mysterious, over-explained, therefore corrected in the wrong direction. Frankly, capitalism should have no cutting-edge excitement, except that there are these occasional people who take the risk. But the system...

So that's one consequence. The other, though, is very, very more interesting to me. If you can't know why you have a feeling in your gut, and you can't explain why you have a feeling in your gut, and to some extent you can't control what's the feeling in your gut, you wonder who's in charge of the choices that you make. And there's a whole section of this book, which is maybe the scariest, which is about something called priming,

where external clues, things that you see, trigger biases inside. Let me run you through some of those. There's a game you ask your readers to play, there are words in the game, and in one of the games you play, the words wrinkle, bingo, and Florida appear. Matter of factly, what happens to people? who see while doing something else wrinkle bingo and Florida they walk out of the room after the test is over

more slowly than they walked into the room you ask people to play a game of trivial pursuit some of them you say first before we play this game let's think about professors for a moment and now we'll play trivial pursuit another group you say let's play trivial pursuit but now let's think about soccer hooligans and then we'll play trivial pursuit what's the difference I make you think about professors first, your scores are substantially superior. You win, basically. If I make you think about hooligans, you lose. Just thinking about them. Yes. Can we step away from the 96th Street Y for just a moment? Sure. Because this priming thing that you and Malcolm are discussing gets kind of eerie when you go actually beyondwards. Like here, why don't you have a sip of this coffee? This coffee here? Yeah. Right now? Yeah, let's go ahead and have a sip.

Why are you looking at me like? that because I've just primed you what do you mean because I've just primed you you just what primed you what you mean I'll explain hi I'm John we we talked to a psychologist my name is John Varge and I'm a professor at Yale University in psychology department and John did an interesting experiment okay check one two ungrad student by the name of Lawrence Williams here's what they did Lawrence went out into the world he had a bunch of stuff with him a briefcase some coffee some papers so much stuff that he could barely carry it all and he went out Went out into the, in front of the library or in town, and he would approach somebody.

And he'd say, excuse me, sir, ma'am, would you mind taking this survey? It's just a minute of your time. They'd give their agreement to be in the study. Great. It's a pretty simple survey. What kind of survey? Well, it had a picture of a guy on it and a description of the guy. The guy's name was Joe.

So here's Joe. Joe is these six traits. There's a little description of Joe right there on the paper. All I want you to do, he would say. All I want you to do for this survey is just tell me, Gut feeling. What do you think of Joe? Do you like him?

That's it? That's it. Do I like it? How much do you like Joe? That's the whole question? Yeah. You mean like, rate it? One to ten.

And everyone saw the same person described the same way. Everyone sees the same description. But there's one thing I haven't told you yet. What? Somewhere in this process toward the beginning, he would ever so casually ask them, can you just do me a favor of my hands are full? Can you hold this cup of coffee? Here, hold this just for a second.

Thanks. And they just take it for a second. They were... It's all very natural. So it's not even seen as part of the experiment. Because it was just a second. Well, I should say it. Yeah.

Not everybody got the same cup of coffee. In fact, he would hand half the people a cup of hot coffee, and he would hand the other half a cup of iced coffee, like I gave you. And it was always really fast. They only hold the cup for maybe a second, at most. But that second, whether it was hot or cold, seems to have made a difference. Because the hot coffee people... People who had held the hot coffee...

When they were asked, do you like Joe, the majority said, yeah. Exactly. They liked Joe. Whereas the cold coffee people, by and large. They didn't like him. Oh, come on. Is that right? Just like, baby.

I kid you not. They have repeated this study many, many times, always the same result. People who hold the hot coffee are more pro-Joe than the people who hold the ice coffee. In other words, something happens in that second when they hold the cups. some sort of mistranslation in their brain where warm cup becomes warm Joe. Real warm. This physical sensation gets confused with the metaphor. People are all the same temperature usually, 98.6 degrees.

We're not different in warmth and cold physically, but we talk about people that way. It's very important to us. If you hear somebody is warm, you immediately like them. If you hear a person's cold, you know, you don't want to be their friend. You don't want to hire them. Warmth and coldness psychologically is all about trust. it's all about are you a friend or a foe so why would

but if that's true why is it true why why the confusion yeah why does it boil down to something as dumb as that well John Barge and his team have actually been asking that question doing some neuroscience to see if maybe inside the brain they can see something they would explain it and it seems that the area of the brain that records temperature that's responsive to actual physical temperature

is also the same area of the brain that is the location of where trust. The same little part of the brain has got both of those things going on. And he thinks that there is a good reason for that. Temperature and trust are in fact linked, particularly when you're a little baby. As infants, our first learning about the world is usually in terms of what we can see and what we can touch. We don't have much memory and we can't think very well. So it's all about our immediate experience. Well, a huge, important area of experience for a little baby

is to keep close to the caretaker and to stay warm. I mean, this is something that's so critical when they're so tiny and helpless that they don't maintain closeness, if they don't maintain warmth, they don't survive. So I guess the point is, if you're hiring somebody and you really want to hire the right person, don't have any coffee around.

But the first step is to accept the possibility. And very few people, believe me. I try to explain to my family and my friends what I do, and they never believe any of these things are really true of them. Because we don't have any awareness of them. I can't remember one time that ever happened to me. Well, yeah, you won't remember one time because it's never going to be in your memory.

It's never going to be in your awareness. Yeah, I know. It's time. Why is it so hard for us to concede that a huge part of our own motivations are mysterious. We are back now at the 90 seconds, G.I. Again with Malcolm Gladwell, I have to say there was a part of our conversation

where this whole thing got a little scary to me. It had to do in part with race. Because instead of using hot and cold as the metaphor, suppose you use black or white. Right. And he said, very flatly, there are stereotypes that we have that seem to be beyond our ability to control.

In fact, he took a test to measure the unconscious feelings that he had in him, about black and white people. I score on an unconscious... It turns out I have a moderate preference for whites on an unconscious level. And he is, by the way, half black.

Yeah, which is not unusual for black people, by the way. Nor is it unusual for, you know, Jews to have a moderate, unconscious preference for Gentiles over Jews or for any kind of... With blacks, it's most striking. My unconscious attitudes towards blacks

are a function of the society in which I live. My unconscious is basically is just basically collecting impressions and thoughts and biases and stuff from the world I live in amassing this massive database in a very kind of unfiltered way, right? Well, my data, my unconscious database about race has more negative things about blacks in it than positive things, right?

I live in, you know, the United States. Of course it does. And so... Of course... How can that not affect me, you know? Well, but, yeah, it's just... It's horrible. Or maybe just view it this way, that you can't really purge yourself of things that would bother you if you could spy on them

and that you are in some sense a prisoner of your culture in a way that makes you in some way ungovernable. You can't quite get on top of yourself. No, the more you push, I mean, I don't push this issue that far in the book, because it gets really troubling really quickly. Yeah, it does. The more you push it, you're right, it's deeply disturbing. And there's a book written by a guy named Daniel Wagner at Harvard called The Illusion of Conscious Will, and it's a very difficult book. But he pushes this as far as you go.

And, you know, at the end, if you go through all of this research, it's been out recently in psychology, you do end up with the position that the notion of conscious will is an illusion. It's just we make up stories that make us feel good about the decisions we make, but in fact we're not really as nearly as in charge as we think we are. That was Malcolm Gladwell talking with me at the 92nd Street-Wye. His new book is called Outliers. Anything you heard this hour, you can hear again on our website, radiolab.org. While you're there, send us an email.

RadioLab at WNYC.org is the address. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab is produced by Soren Wheeler and Jad Abamrad. Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horn, Amanda Arancheck, and Jessica Benko, with help from Anna Boyko Weirah and Ike's discondar. Oops, and Ike Zriskanderaja.

Gonna do it again. Thanks to Mike Pesker, Dan Aereally, John Allera, and the 92nd Streetwide. This is Walt Tyler. And semi-OK. This is NPR National Public Radio. Okay, that was actually pretty thrilling to do.