How does our brain make decisions?

Nowadays we are aware that our behaviour is much more complex than it was considered to be in the past. We are conscious of what we want and what we plan to do, but conscious thinking is only part of the plethora of processes that take place in the brain at any given moment.

Psychologists, neuroscientists and even economists have understood the decisive role played by emotions and desires that are activated unconsciously when it comes to making decisions.

The imprint of these irrational factors is noticeable every time you perceive, crave, think or try to understand what surrounds us. Sometimes, this leads you to a quick and effective solution, but in some cases, it can lead you to an error, as a result of rash and ‘unconscious’  decision making.

An understanding of how our subconscious works will help to comprehend why we sometimes make choices which do not comply with our plans or why we stop acting on something that could have potentially benefited us. 

The false sense of security that often accompanies our actions is, as experts point out, one of the symptoms, as we are allowing ourselves to be driven by the flow of ‘uncontrollable automatisms’.

On the other hand, doubt causes great dissatisfaction, but it is the signal that reason has grabbed the reins over automatic action. Let’s try to break down what is currently known with regard to the neurological gears involved in decision-making.

The future is unpredictable

British psychologist Richard Wiseman invited a group of people to participate in an experiment; including an astrologist specialising in finance, an analyst and a four-year-old little girl. The psychologist then offered them money to invest in the stock market as they wanted. After an agreed period of time, it would be verified who had been able to achieve the most amount of profit or who the highest rate of losses.

While the astrologist based his choices on the day the companies were founded, the investor turned to his extensive experience. Ignorant about the business world, the girl had chosen random market values. It was the random selection that the four-year-old girl made that proved to be the most successful. After winning the challenge, the girl became a celebrity, giving interviews in financial newspapers and receiving proposals to appear on television shows.

The girl won because her choices were random and lacked bias.

Adults prefer to think that it is possible to anticipate what will come in the future and that everything can be controlled. However, as the Lebanese essayist, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains in his book ‘The Black Swan’, the most unexpected events are those that, when they occur, end up having the greatest impact on our lives.

To recognise the existence of such ‘black swans’ is to accept that our knowledge has limits and that there are irreducible events to our understanding. As Taleb points out, it is imperative that we assume the great power of the unpredictable. 

“Let's think about our own existence,” he states.

“We need to take into account important events, the technological changes and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since we were born, and compare them with what was expected before their appearance.

“How many were produced following a predefined programme?

“Let's reflect on our own lives, for example, our choice of profession, or when we met our partner, how often did these things occur with an established plan?”

Although experts have been unable to predict the unexpected, they are always able to find countless explanations.

“We are superb causal-hypothesis generators,” explains Richard E. Nisbett in his book Mindware.

“The compulsion to explain is particularly strong when we habitually see that one event typically occurs in conjunction with another.”

Strategic vision

Your actions do not always reflect your best interests. As human beings, we behave based on the behaviour of others, either by responding to what they have done or by anticipating what we believe they intend to do.

Considering what could be other people’s the reaction often prevents recklessness. A president may wish to launch a missile against the capital of an enemy state with the sole purpose of showing his military power, but to foresee that such an action would trigger a war will surely deter him from fulfilling his will. On the other hand, ignorance about what others do often leads to poor decision making.

How do we manage such ignorance?

If a city implements a recycling system and a selective collection of rubbish, some neighbours may willingly accept the municipal orders. Others, however, may follow fellow citizens who decide to stay idle and not recycle.

Adopting the perspective of imagining the result most people want, instead of imagining what they are going to do, can help people make the right choices.

The absorbing task of being attentive

Since mental resources are limited, fixing attention means that you often neglect what is going on around you and make the wrong choices. As the Nobel economist Daniel Kahneman explains in his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, “all variants of voluntary effort - cognitive, emotional, or physical - draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy.”

As Kahneman explains, our brain can be like a house with limited electrical power. Some appliances, when launched, will require almost all the available energy. This explains that when we are absorbed in a task, things that happen around us can go unnoticed. This is demonstrated by the well-known experiment in which a group of volunteers are asked to watch a video and count the times that some children pass a ball.

Absorbed in the task, few realise that an individual dressed as a gorilla crosses the screen.

According to Kahneman, “Orienting attention and responding quickly to more serious dangers and to the most promising opportunities increases the survival capacity.”

The American expert also cites an investigation in which some judges were examined while deliberating, during long work sessions, whether they would grant parole to prisoners. At the beginning of the day, they studied each case meticulously to come up with a decision as fair as possible.

However, when asked towards the end of the day, judges chose to deny granting parole almost systematically.

"Exhausted and hungry judges tend to choose the easiest and most common choice to reject requests for provisional release," says Kahneman.

When the brain is tired, it tends to abandon deliberative processes, which involve a greater energy investment and starts to rely on automatic reactions that require less effort. Although it is the organ that consumes the most energy in the body, the grey matter of the brain chooses to disconnect from the stubbornest tasks which require more effort.

It is common to prioritise the ‘urgent’ before the ‘important’

The effort required to concentrate on a specific job means that our capacity for self-control can also be reduced when there are lots of things going on.

"People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations,” points out Kahneman.

This happens because self-control requires energy. This energy is however usually being used up by other tasks. This is why new year resolutions get forgotten and replaced by known automated tasks. The brain naturally prioritises the present over long-term importance. 

Like drops of water in a relentless storm, sensitive big data goes through a piece of neural machinery capable of performing ten billion operations per second, much more than any current computer.

It is a fleeting work that takes into account every last detail, for example, that auditory data requires fewer operations than visuals, so they need to slow down to synchronise with visual data.

You would get scared when we hear a plate break before you see it break on the ground, but that’s what would happen if the perceptual process did not do its makeup work.

All these calculations and adjustments are automatic, and only a very small part is absorbed into consciousness. As American neuroscientist David Eagleman explains in his book Incognito, “we have no access to the rapid and automatic machinery that gathers and estimates the statistics of the world.”

“We are merely the beneficiaries riding on top of the machinery, enjoying the play of light and shadow.”

Perception machinery fails in optical illusions

This mechanism takes into account numerous factors, which include what others think. When an opinion prevails in a group of people, it is very likely that there are dissidents who end up communicating with it.

In a classic experiment, a group of people were asked to identify which of the three lines was the same size as another that was presented as a model. Although the answer was easy and obvious, most responded in the wrong way.

When it was the turn of the person who was the true subject of the experiment, he - who had previously heard the rest of the opinions - ended up almost always pointing out the wrong answer. This acquiescence occurs mostly to avoid attracting attention.

However, as psychologist Gregory Berns demonstrated, by means of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), some participants chose a false solution but were not lying.

According to the surprising finding, these people’s brains were able to adjust the perception data to be able to be consistent with what was manifested by the group.

“Conformity might arise at an executive level of decision making, or it might arise because the social setting alters the individual's perception of the world,” Berns explained.

Our brain tries to eliminate all traces of possible incongruities and dissonances, even at the cost of making us see a non-existent reality.

Many times our thinking organ is compared to that of the computers. However, if we focus on capacity such as memory, we should forget about this metaphor. The task of remembering is one of the most amazing faculties of the human being, as it allows us to perform feats such as recognising a former schoolmate despite the fact that twenty years have already passed.

However, it could also be disappointing if we are unable to remember where we left our house keys. Our memorial capacity is ridiculous when compared to the power of computers.

According to neuroscientist Dean Burnett, author of ‘The Idiot Brain’, human memory is nonsense.

“Imagine a computer that decided some information in its memory was more important than other information, for reasons that were never made clear,” he explains.

“Or a computer that filed the information in a manner that didn’t make any logical sense, meaning you had to search through random folders and drives trying to find the most basic data.

“Or a computer that decided that it didn’t really like the information you’ve stored, so altered it for you to suit its preferences.”

We could easily consider a machine with these characteristics to be defective.

Our reaction to the hope of improvement

Our body reacts to deception as if it were a truth not to be doubted. Due to the so-called placebo effect, pseudo-pharmaceuticals could be considered necessary despite being rather irrelevant.

False medication could trigger reactions capable of leading to the healing of the patient, despite the absence of therapeutic compounds. Similar to the way our brain predicts what will happen, what are we going to see or what word are we going to hear next, it is thus prepared for any contingency. The body would anticipate that they will take care of their ailments thanks to the placebo effect.

The mere expectation would promote the production of substances such as endorphins, natural painkillers manufactured by our body to reinforce the benefit of treatments.

When a group of people is told that the pills they are going to take do not contain active ingredients, the placebo continues to work.

If it were the result of the brain’s power of the mind, with the unveiling of the trap, beneficial results should evaporate. However, this is not the case and therefore it is implied that mechanisms are activated automatically and unconsciously.

Other studies have also shown that the same routes as the actual medication are activated, but this only occurs when the patient has previously taken the medication.

As explained by the American doctor Harriet A. Hall, the feeling of well-being is subjective and can cover the fact that no disease is being cured. It could be compared to a magic trick that appears as something real and a product of fantastic power. Thus, Hall warns that this may delay the search for effective treatments.

Uncompromising purchases

If we acted rationally in order to choose an appliance, we should be very clear about how we intend to use it and about the money we have available. Then it would be time to compare the features and benefits of each model, as well as their respective prices until we choose the one that best fits us.

However, this is an effort very few of us are willing to make.

"Thinking is painful," explains Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Economics at Duke University, in his book ‘Predictably Irrational’.

“Most people don't know what they want unless they see it in context.”

When we don’t have a definite desire the objective of the perfect purchase is doomed to failure. What usually happens is that a customer not only returns home with his new TV or refrigerator, but is also convinced that he has chosen the best model, and at a good price.

How does this happen? Thanks to very well developed marketing techniques, many stores take into account the constraints in which the potential consumer can be found and propose their solutions.

One of the usual tricks is to provide a context. Three products are available: one is simple and cheap; another seems better, but it costs more, and a third is similar to the second but at a lower price.

There is also the variant that the latter has better features at the same price. The majority of the customers will rule out the first two alternatives without giving it a lot of thought, and they will focus on the third option. The main function of the two items that are likely to be excluded is to help the consumer to compare and deduce which is the best choice.

"As a pilot who lands in the dark, we want to have beacons on both sides that guide us to the place where we can land," Ariely indicates.

In this way, the buyer discovers what he wants, without realising that it is an implanted preference, and returns home satisfied with his acquisition.

The force of habit

A good part of the actions that we carry out is not the result of conscious and thoughtful decisions, but of habits that usually start from initial resolutions and then become routines. These habits can shape our lives and can have an extraordinary influence, positively and negatively, as explained by Charles Duhigg, a reporter for The New York Times, in his book ‘The Power of Habit’. 

“Though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to our kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise, and the way we organize our thoughts and work routine have enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security and happiness,” points out Duhigg.

Moreover, as Gary Marcus explains in his book ‘Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind’, the human brain is a result of an authentic mix of patches and evolutionary shortcuts.

“Though the systems that underlie our capacity for belief are powerful, they are also subject to superstition, manipulation, and fallacy,” he explains.

According to Marcus the brain’s grey matter is not that “objective machine to discover and decode the truth.”

On the contrary, it is subject to the constant swing of emotions, desires or interests.

When judging, for example, the capabilities of a worker or physical attractiveness ends up being a decisive factor, although objectively it has nothing to do with it. It is known as the ‘halo effect’ and it is our tendency to judge a beautiful person positively than the rest. The less fortunate, on the other hand, have to fight against irrational prejudices that constitute a burden when they aspire to a job promotion.

It is also proven that less-attractive people also receive tougher penalties in case they are tried for a crime. Another example is that the simple presence of small information, such as a word that is currently floating in our conscience, can modify the perception of reality to the point that we change our first impression on a person.

Thus, we reach a certain conclusion depending on the way in which a situation presents itself. This phenomenon, known focus illusion, as illustrated in the British series ‘Yes Minister’, when the protagonist's secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, explained to another character how to use surveys to yield a result.

For example, if you need the public to be in favour of military service you just need to use the right questions.

“Are you worried about the number of jobless young people? How about the increase in crime amongst teenagers? Do you think young people value authority and leadership in their lives?”

If you intend to get a negative result, you just need to alternate your questions.

“Are you worried about war? Do you find it dangerous to give weapons to young people and to teach them how to kill?”

The focus illusion, corroborated by numerous experiments, demonstrates how easily our opinion can be manipulated.

"As a species we are too predisposed to be deceived," states Marcus.

"Beliefs, and the imperfect neural tools we use to evaluate them, can lead to family conflicts, religious disputes and even war."

It is not necessary to read all the letters in a sentence to understand its meaning. Our brain only needs slight clues to guess what comes next, with a great probability of success. This anticipatory capacity is only possible because the human being is an animal that learns, memorises what has been learned and, finally, is able to transfer that knowledge to new situations. When such learning is applied to guidelines, the first signs lead to the whole object.

The law of the smartest

Computer engineer Jeff Hawkins defines intelligence as "the capacity to remember and predict patterns in the world, including mathematics, language, social situations, and the properties of objects.” Undoubtedly, the power of anticipation is a fundamental adaptation factor. Individuals able to read danger signals better had more options to survive and reproduce.

A manager of an association that recruited volunteers - mainly retirees and art lovers - to sell items to tourists was worried about the high number of thefts that occurred in his organisation. He hired a private detective, who discovered an employee who was stealing money and he fired him immediately. This decision, however, did not solve the underlying problem. A series of robberies continued to occur and this at the end of the year resulted in considerable losses. The person in charge finally surrendered to the evidence. There was not a single culprit, but the majority had become accustomed to committing small and seemingly inconsequential thefts.

As explained by the American psychologist Dan Ariely in his article ‘Why We Lie’, when there is the possibility of doing something wrong, we are seized by two antagonistic impulses.

On the one hand, there is a calculation of the expected benefit and on the other, the desire to maintain a positive image of ourselves; what psychologists call ego motivation. That’s when we reach a kind of moral compromise to avoid getting your image harmed.

“Our sense of our own mortality is connected to the amount of cheating we feel comfortable with,” Ariely explains.

“Essentially, we cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonably honest individuals.”

Taking into account both impulses, it is not contradictory that the same taxi driver who takes advantage of a tourist taking him through the longest route, then stops the counter before arriving at the destination when transporting a blind man.

As much as you want to earn more, there is a limit to what is unacceptable, such as taking advantage of a disabled person.

We do not take into account the impact of our actions as a whole

In this mental pact that leads us to turn a blind eye to small infractions, the impact of our actions as a whole is never taken into account. We don’t think about it, for example, when we take a packet of paper from the office or bandages from the hospital.

As Ariely explains the mere reminder of a moral norm or the simple signing of a code of conduct in situations where individuals may be tempted to commit a crime, can have preventive effects.

"The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it is able to gather examples," says Pinker.

In conclusion, we prefer to rely on small samples of information rather than handle a much larger amount.

Do the math

Our mind is not designed for statistical thinking, which allows evaluations from a broader and more objective perspective.

Evolution has not endowed our brains with the ability to elaborate complex statistics, but rather getting carried away by the impact of isolated impressions. This limitation leads us to fall into all kinds of illusions and misconceptions, such as thinking that our era is much more violent than past ones or that it is easier to die from a terrorist attack than in a car accident.

Statistical information does not solve all problems without proper interpretations. Pinker places himself as an example by explaining that he was one of the first people to have his genome sequenced, which led him to discover that he possessed an allele, the version of a gene, related to a fatal disease.

Instead of deciding that his premature death was inevitable and allowing himself to become depressed, the psychologist was aware that this disturbing fact was based on probabilities within a field of research still to be explored. As Pinker later discovered, the correlation between the gene and the life-limiting disease proved wrong.

The proliferation of information involving probability calculation requires that it is increasingly essential to know the fundamental tools and concepts of statistics - to ensure decisions are not made in a hurry.