That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Why We Do Dumb Things

Episode Date: December 18, 2022

Have you ever made a decision you utterly regret and are left wondering why on earth you would do that? We all make mistakes, it's part of being human, but what's going on in the brain when this happens? In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind making bad decisions. 

Hi, my name is Ola Kregolson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. A lot of people ask me about how people make decisions. And people also ask me about how they can make better decisions. But, you know, we've all made bad decisions. If I look back at my life, you know, I can't even count the number of dumb decisions that I've made. Decisions, when I look back at them, I'm just kicking myself and I'm going, why? Why would I do that? So today, let's look at the other side of decision making. I'm going to talk all about the neuroscience of making bad decisions. In other words, why we do the dumb things that we do. So we've talked about decision making quite a bit throughout

the podcast. And if you think about the basic principles of decision making, it's pretty straightforward. To make a decision, a very simple decision, we assess value. There's a value for choice A and there's a value for choice B. Now, more correctly, there is an expected value for choice A, an expected value for choice B. expected value for choice A and expected value for choice B. Now what's an expected value? Really quickly as a reminder, an expected value is the actual value of the choice. And value is its inherent worth to you. It may not be a financial value because your favorite sweater might not have any financial value, but it's got value, if you get what I mean. financial value, but it's got value, if you get what I mean. And the expected value is that true value times by the probability of getting that choice. And when I talked about this the first

time, this is why you should never play the lottery, because the expected value of keeping your money that you'd spend on the ticket is 100% times by the $5 the ticket costs has an expected value of five. Well, the lottery might be worth, you know, $38 million, but the probability of winning it is so small that the expected value is less than fractions of a penny. So one of the reasons that people make poor decisions is they can't assess expected values correctly. They fail to correctly ascertain the value of a choice. So let's say that, you know, you want to drive across town to get your favorite slice of pizza. You're not truly assessing the value of that choice option. You're missing out the fact it's going to cost you gas, it's going

to take time, and you're just making a choice where the value assessment is poor. And this is true of any number of things. Like let's say you decide to go out for the night as opposed to stay in and study for an exam. Well, again, that's a failure to assess the value correctly in some instances and people are hopeless at probability. You know this is why people play lotteries and they gamble. The reality is Las Vegas shouldn't exist because all of those games the probabilities are rigged against you so you will lose all of your money in the end. So one of the reasons people make poor decisions, and perhaps the most common one, is this failure to assess expected values correctly. So, they're not assessing value correctly, and they're not assessing the probabilities correctly. And because you're computing the wrong or an inaccurate expected value, when it comes to choosing between two expected values, you're making a choice based on incorrect

information. Now, when we talked about decision-making, we also talked about the explore-exploit dilemma. What's that? Well, the explore dilemma is basically, should I choose something I've never chosen before versus the exploit portion, which is choose what you know. And people have a tendency to either explore too much, so they know what the best thing is and they should choose that. Instead, they're going to explore and try something new when they probably shouldn't, or they exploit too much. You always pick the same thing on the menu. You always drive the same way home, and you refuse to think that there might be other options out there. So this failure to assess the explore-exploit dilemma correctly is another reason why people make poor decisions. And think about it. What you should be

doing is you should be exploiting most of the time, going with what the best choice is, and exploring occasionally. But most of us tend to explore too much or exploit too much. And I'll let you decide where you fit on that spectrum. So, so far, you know, the idea of decision making is you choose the highest expected value of among a series of options. But if you're failing to assess value correctly, you're failing to assess probabilities and you're not exploring or exploiting correctly, you're going to make poor choices. Now, what's the answer to this? Well, the answer is learn how to assess values correctly. Think about what the real value is to you. Learn how to better estimate probabilities.

And also learn when you should explore versus when you should exploit. Now, that's easy to say sitting here in front of my computer. And I've made these failures myself. But in principle, that's what we should do. Now, of course, our poor choices go way beyond this. Another aspect of decision-making that we've talked about is gut hunches versus analytical decisions, what Daniel Kahneman called system one versus system two. System one is our gut hunch decision, called system one versus system two. System one is our gut hunch decision, and system two is our analytical decision. And when we make poor decisions here, it's quite literally, it's when

we go with our gut hunches when we should be analytical, and it's when we're analytical when we should go with our gut hunches. Now that might seem counterintuitive, but it's a thing. with our gut hunches. Now that might seem counterintuitive, but it's a thing. I'll give you a good example. I was reading about an airplane that was in flight for a given airline, and all of a sudden a bunch of lights started going off, and the plane was going to crash, and the pilot went with a gut hunch decision. This is what I'm going to do and acted on it. Kind of what Sully did. And the reason for that is if in that particular situation, if you're too analytical, you're going to be thinking through the problem for far too long and the plane's going to crash. Now, the flip side to this is sometimes you just

go with your gut hunch. Well, this is what I think I should do. All right. I'm going to go on vacation tomorrow because I deserve it. And you're not analytically thinking it through. So again, the problem here is sometimes your gut hunches are right. And what you need to do is when they are go with them. And sometimes you need to stop your gut hunch and switch to an analytical mode. And that's a tricky thing to do. And conversely, sometimes being analytical is the wrong choice. Sometimes you just got to go with what you think and feel is right. Now, again, I can't give you very many practical tips on how to improve this, but probably the best one is awareness.

I'll give you a medical example. A lot of the medical community, at least, you at least in terms of medical schools and medical training, is really worried about expert doctors making gut hunch decisions when they should step back and be analytical. And how do you fix that problem? Well, you can't stop an expert doctor from making a gut hunch decision, but you can make them aware that maybe they're making a lot of gut hunch decisions, and maybe perhaps they should sometimes be a bit more analytical, and vice versa, of course. Another area where we make poor decisions is the role of emotion.

And again, we talked about this in the past, but let's recap it. Most of the time we make logical decisions or we try to, and our emotional system is basically sitting there biasing choices. You know, it's adding value to choices that maybe you might not want to do. So let's say you've made a decision to lose some weight. Well, the logical choice is to not eat ice cream. But sometimes, let's say you're sad, the emotional system is going to bias the choice for eating ice cream such that the value for that choice outweighs the value for not eating ice cream. And that's what you go with. So another reason we make poor decisions

is our emotional system runs wild. So I like to call this the Star Trek dilemma. In principle, we should all be Spock. We should sit there and make these analytical decisions and compute expected values and decide whether to explore or exploit. And we shouldn't let our emotional system or Captain Kirk rule us. Now, I guess you can make a case that sometimes the emotional choice is the right one

and not the logical choice. I'll leave it for you to decide again. But again, the answer here in terms of improving your decision-making is just being aware of this. And the easiest way, the easiest way to check an emotional decision is just to take a bit of time. This goes right back to season one, episode one, impulse shopping. The easiest way to avoid impulse shopping is to literally walk away and give it five minutes. And chances are, you're not going to buy that item. And that's because you're giving the emotional system time to cool down and you're giving the logical system time to take over and say, hey, do we really need this thing? Now, there's some other factors that influence decision-making. You know, if a teenager makes a bad decision,

or I'm just going to call it a dumb decision, you can't really penalize them. And the reason you can't is because the last part of the brain to develop is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex, when it's developing, it comes in and basically it comes in a bit earlier for females as opposed to males. So young teenage males, they're the most susceptible to dumb choices. And that's because their prefrontal cortex just isn't there yet. That analytical system too, that you need to say, hey, jumping off the roof of the house, not the best idea, you need to say, hey, jumping off the roof of the house, not the best idea, just literally isn't there. So age is another reason why we make dumb choices. Young people don't have an analytical decision-making system, or it's better said, it's still developing. So you have to give the

teenagers and the young kids a bit of a break because system two is just not there for them. On that note, I'll finish with alcohol. And we've talked about this in the past again, but if you're going to talk about making dumb decisions and you're an adult, you have to factor in alcohol. And what does alcohol do? It basically shuts down the prefrontal cortex. So it's shutting down your analytical decision-making system. And as a result, your gut hunches and your emotional system is running wild. So for those of you that have made a poor decision while you've had a couple of drinks or after you've had a couple of drinks, the answer is simple. You've turned off your analytical decision-making system, and you've let your gut hunches and your emotions run wild. So there's a guide to why we make poor decisions

or why we do the dumb things that we do. I hope you enjoyed that and found it interesting. A couple of notes. We're going to take a bit of a break over Christmas. This episode's going to air on December the 18th, Sunday. And a week after that's Christmas, and you'll have to forgive Matt and I, we're not going to record on Christmas.

And we're going to give it a break till the new year. So the next episode will come out in 2023. So our apologies, but even us, we need a little bit of time for the holidays. I hope you have a great holiday season, whichever way you choose to celebrate it, and whichever the way is that you celebrate it. Matt and I will definitely be joining in Christmas, and because we're Canadians, getting some snowboarding in.

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so much. As you probably guessed, my voice is starting to go, which is a sure sign that we need a break for Christmas and the holidays. Thank you again for listening. My name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you in 2023.