How We Decide (20 page)

A few years later, Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, decided to replicate this taste test with his undergraduate students. Would the students have the same preferences as the experts? Did everybody agree on which strawberry jams tasted the best?

Wilson's experiment was simple: he took the first, eleventh, twenty-fourth, thirty-second, and forty-fourth best-tasting jams according to
Consumer Reports
and asked the students to rank them. In general, the preferences of the college students closely mirrored the preferences of the experts. Both groups thought Knott's Berry Farm and Alpha Beta were the two best-tasting brands, with Featherweight a close third. They also agreed that the worst strawberry jams were Acme and Sorrel Ridge. When Wilson compared the preferences of the students and the
Consumer Reports
panelists, he found that they had a statistical correlation of .55, which is rather impressive. When it comes to judging jam, we are all natural experts. Our brains are able to automatically pick out the products that provide us with the most pleasure.

But that was only the first part of Wilson's experiment. He repeated the jam taste test with a separate group of college students, only this time he asked them to explain
why
they preferred one brand over another. As they tasted the jams, the students filled out written questionnaires, which forced them to analyze their first impressions, to consciously explain their impulsive preferences. All this extra analysis seriously warped their jam judgment. The students now preferred Sorrel Ridge—the worst-tasting jam, according to
Consumer Reports
—to Knott's Berry Farm, which was the experts' favorite jam. The correlation plummeted to .11, which means that there was virtually no relationship between the rankings of the experts and the opinions of these introspective students.

Wilson argues that "thinking too much" about strawberry jam causes us to focus on all sorts of variables that don't actually matter. Instead of just listening to our instinctive preferences—the best jam is associated with the most positive feelings—our rational brains search for reasons to prefer one jam over another. For example, someone might notice that the Acme brand is particularly easy to spread, and so he'll give it a high ranking, even if he doesn't actually care about the spreadability of jam. Or a person might notice that Knott's Berry Farm jam has a chunky texture, which seems like a bad thing, even if she's never really thought about the texture of jam before. But having a chunky texture
sounds
like a plausible reason to dislike a jam, and so she revises her preferences to reflect this convoluted logic. People talk themselves into liking Acme jam more than the Knott's Berry Farm's product.

This experiment illuminates the danger of always relying on the rational brain. There is such a thing as too much analysis.

When you overthink at the wrong moment, you cut yourself off from the wisdom of your emotions, which are much better at assessing actual preferences. You lose the ability to know what you really want. And then you choose the worst strawberry jam.

WILSON WAS INTRIGUED
by the strawberry-jam experiment. It seemed to contradict one of the basic tenets of Western thought, which is that careful self-analysis leads to wisdom. As Socrates famously said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates clearly didn't know about strawberry jam.

But perhaps food products are unique, since people are notoriously bad at explaining their own preferences. So Wilson came up with another experiment. This time he asked female college students to select their favorite poster. He gave them five options: a Monet landscape, a van Gogh painting of some purple lilies, and three humorous cat posters. Before making their choices, the subjects were divided into two groups. The first was the nonthinking group: they were instructed to simply rate each poster on a scale from 1 to 9. The second group had a tougher task: before they rated the posters, they were given questionnaires that asked them
why
they liked or disliked each of the five posters. At the end of the experiment, each of the subjects took her favorite poster home.

The two groups of women made very different choices. Ninety-five percent of the non-thinkers chose either the Monet or the van Gogh. They instinctively preferred the fine art. However, subjects who thought about their poster decisions first were almost equally split between the paintings and the humorous cat posters. What accounted for the difference? "When looking at a painting by Monet," Wilson writes, "most people generally have a positive reaction. When thinking about why they feel the way they do, however, what comes to mind and is easiest to verbalize might be that some of the colors are not very pleasing, and that the subject matter, a haystack, is rather boring." As a result, the women ended up selecting the funny feline posters, if only because those posters gave them more grist for their explanatory mill.

Wilson conducted follow-up interviews with the women a few weeks later to see which group had made the better decision. Sure enough, the members of the non-thinking group were much more satisfied with their choice of posters. While 75 percent of the people who had chosen cat posters regretted their selection, nobody regretted selecting the artistic poster. The women who listened to their emotions ended up making much better decisions than the women who relied on their reasoning powers. The more people thought about which posters they wanted, the more misleading their thoughts became. Self-analysis resulted in
less
self-awareness.

This isn't just a problem for insignificant decisions like choosing jam for a sandwich or selecting a cheap poster. People can also think too much about more important choices, like buying a home. As Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, notes, when people are shopping for real estate, they often fall victim to a version of the strawberry-jam error, or what he calls a "weighting mistake." Consider two housing options: a three-bedroom apartment located in the middle of a city that would give you a ten-minute commute, and a five-bedroom McMansion in the suburbs that would result in a forty-five-minute commute. "People will think about this tradeoff for a long time," Dijksterhuis says, "and most of them will eventually choose the large house. After all, a third bathroom or extra bedroom is very important for when Grandma and Grandpa come over for Christmas, whereas driving two hours each day is really not that bad." What's interesting is the more time people spend deliberating, the more important that extra space becomes. They'll imagine all sorts of scenarios (a big birthday party, Thanksgiving dinner, another child) that turns the suburban house into a necessity. The lengthy commute, meanwhile, will seem less and less significant, at least when it's compared to the lure of an extra bathroom. But as Dijksterhuis points out, the reasoning is backward: "The additional bathroom is a completely superfluous asset for at least 362 or 363 days each year, whereas a long commute
does
become a burden after a while." For instance, a recent study found that when a person travels more than one hour in each direction, he or she has to make 40 percent more money in order to be as "satisfied with life" as a person with a short commute. Another study, led by Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, surveyed nine hundred workingwomen in Texas and found that commuting was, by far, the least pleasurable part of their day. And yet, despite these gloomy statistics, nearly 20 percent of American workers commute more than forty-five minutes each way. (More than 3.5 million Americans spend more than three hours each day traveling to and from work, and they're the fastest-growing category of commuter.) According to Dijksterhuis, all these people are making themselves miserable because they failed to properly weigh the relevant variables when they were choosing where to live. Just as strawberry-jam tasters who consciously analyzed their preferences were persuaded by irrelevant factors like spread ability and texture, the deliberative homeowners focused on less important details like square footage and number of bathrooms. (It's easier to consider quantifiable facts than future emotions, such as how you'll feel when you're stuck in a rush-hour traffic jam.) The prospective homeowners assumed a bigger house in the suburbs would make them happy, even if it meant spending an extra hour in the car every day. But they were wrong.

THE BEST WINDOW
into this mental process—what's actually happening inside the brain when you talk yourself into choosing the wrong strawberry jam—comes from studies of the placebo effect. It's long been recognized that the placebo effect is extremely powerful; anywhere between 35 and 75 percent of people get better after receiving pretend medical treatments, such as sugar pills. A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electric shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. (The subjects were well compensated, at least by undergraduate standards.) Half of the people were then supplied with a fake pain-relieving cream. Even though the cream had no analgesic properties—it was just a hand moisturizer—people given the pretend cream said the shocks were significantly less painful. The placebo effect eased their suffering. Wager then imaged the specific parts of the brain that controlled this psychological process. He discovered that the placebo effect depended entirely on the prefrontal cortex, the center of reflective, deliberate thought. When people were told that they'd just received pain-relieving cream, their frontal lobes responded by inhibiting the activity of their emotional brain areas (like the insula) that normally respond to pain. Because people
expected
to experience less pain, they ended up experiencing less pain. Their predictions became self-fulfilling prophecies.

The placebo effect is a potent source of self-help. It demonstrates the power of the prefrontal cortex to modulate even the most basic bodily signals. Once this brain area comes up with reasons to experience less pain—the cream is supposed to provide pain relief—those reasons become powerful distortions. Unfortunately, the same rational brain areas responsible for temporarily reducing suffering also mislead us about many daily decisions. The prefrontal cortex can turn off pain signals, but it can also cause a person to ignore the feelings that lead to choosing the best poster. In these situations, conscious thoughts interfere with good decision-making.

Look, for example, at this witty little experiment. Baba Shiv, a neuroeconomist at Stanford, supplied a group of people with Sobe Adrenaline Rush, an "energy" drink that was supposed to make them feel more alert and energetic. (The drink contained a potent brew of sugar and caffeine that, the bottle promised, would impart "superior functionality.") Some participants paid full price for the drinks, while others were offered a discount. After drinking the product, participants were asked to solve a series of word puzzles. Shiv found that people who'd paid discounted prices consistently solved about 30 percent fewer puzzles than the people who'd paid full price for the drinks. The subjects were convinced that the stuff on sale was much less potent, even though all the drinks were identical. "We ran the study again and again, not sure if what we got had happened by chance or fluke," Shiv says. "But every time we ran it, we got the same results."

Why did the cheaper energy drink prove less effective? According to Shiv, consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since they
expect
cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally
are
less effective, even if the goods are identical to more expensive products. This is why brand-name aspirin works better than generic aspirin and why Coke tastes better than cheaper colas, even if most consumers can't tell the difference in blind taste tests. "We have these general beliefs about the world—for example, that cheaper products are of lower quality—and they translate into specific expectations about specific products," said Shiv. "Then, once these expectations are activated, they start to really impact our behavior." The rational brain distorts the sense of reality, so the ability to properly assess the alternatives is lost. Instead of listening to the trustworthy opinions generated by our emotional brains, we follow our own false assumptions.

Researchers at Caltech and Stanford recently lifted the veil on this strange process. Their experiment was organized like a wine-tasting. Twenty people sampled five cabernet sauvignons that were distinguished solely by their retail prices, with bottles ranging in cost from five dollars to ninety dollars. Although the people were told that all five wines were different, the scientists weren't telling the truth: there were only three different wines. This meant that the same wines often reappeared, but with different price labels. For example, the first wine offered during the tasting—it was a bottle of a cheap California cabernet—was labeled both as a five-dollar wine (its actual retail price) and as a forty-five-dollar wine, a 900 percent markup. All of the red wines were sipped by each subject inside an fMRI machine.

Not surprisingly, the subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better. They preferred the ninety-dollar bottle to the ten-dollar bottle and thought the forty-five-dollar cabernet was far superior to the five-dollar plonk. By conducting the winetasting inside an fMRI machine—the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes—the scientists could see how the brains of the subjects responded to the different wines. While a variety of brain regions were activated during the experiment, only one brain region seemed to respond to the
price
of the wine rather than the wine itself: the prefrontal cortex. In general, more expensive wines made parts of the prefrontal cortex more excited. The scientists argue that the activity of this brain region shifted the preferences of the winetasters, so that the ninety-dollar cabernet seemed to taste better than the thirty-five-dollar cabernet, even though they were actually the same wine.