How Do We Really Make Decisions?

Pt 1

Every day we are all bombarded by a constant stream of high powered messages in the media trying to get us to buy this or that product, or support this policy or that, or believe this politician or that. All of which got me to thinking: How do we really decide which candidate to vote for or which product to buy? Do we carefully compare the features and ratings of products by consumer organizations or rationally analyze the positions of the candidates on important issues? Or do we instead rely more often than not on reputation, or images, or recommendations by friends or people we admire, or even just plain gut instinct?

A lot of research has been conducted on this subject over the years, mainly by marketing companies but also by academics. I've read a number of best selling books published in the last few years on how we decide and the message from all of them is consistent. Despite the value our society places on reason and rationality the truth is that emotion plays a lot bigger role in our decision making than we might think.

It is also true however that the more we understand how marketeers and salesmen try to manipulate us the better we can resist.

Let's start with an example by Arizona State University professor Robert Cialdini taken from his best selling book “Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion”.

Cialdini relates how a woman opened an Indian jewelry store in an area popular with tourists. She had been trying to sell some average quality turquoise stones without much success so one day she left a message for her assistant to mark down the stones to half price. But the assistant misunderstood the message and doubled the price instead. When the owner came in a few days later she was astonished to find that most of the turquoise stones had been sold.

At first this seems about as counter intuitive as it gets but Cialdini says it makes perfect sense if you understand the principle of 'expensive equals good'. Our natural inclination when we don't know much about a product is to assume that a higher price means it's better. How many times have you heard – or said - “You get what you pay for.”

Now no one deliberately deceived the customers. If they had taken the time to do a little research on turquoise stones they probably would not have paid such a high price. But when your knowledge is limited, 'expensive equals good' works most of the time. The moral, another time honored but true cliché: time is money. Want to save money? Take the time to do your homework.

Let's move on to another example of decision-making but instead of one from Arizona we're going all the way to Vietnam. I'm sure most everyone has heard of Save the Children, the international organization that helps children around the world. In 1990 the government of Vietnam invited Save the Children to open an office there and come up with a program to reduce malnutrition.

Jerry Sternin, Save the Children's man on the ground had very little money to work with and he understood clearly the dimensions of the problem. Clean water was not available, sanitation was poor, poverty was everywhere, and village people had almost no knowledge of nutrition. To most people the situation would look hopeless. But not Jerry Sternin because he had an idea.

He went into villages, met with local mothers, and divided them into teams. The teams would measure and weigh every child in the village and afterwards he and the mothers would go over the data together.

Here's the key question that Sternin asked that made all the difference: Did you find any very, very poor children who were bigger and healthier than the typical child? The mothers responded in Vietnamese with a strong 'Yes!' Sternin replied, “You mean it's possible in this village for a poor child to be well nourished?” Again the response was a resounding 'Yes!'

“Well then,” said Jerry Sternin, “let's go see what they're doing.”

It turns out that the mothers of the poor but healthy kids were doing several things that together made a big difference. Unlike the usual village practice of two meals a day these kids got the same amount of food but spread out as four meals. In retrospect this makes a lot of sense because malnourished kids have small stomachs and can't absorb such large amounts of food in only two sittings.

Another key difference was the fact that the mothers of the poor but healthy kids fed their children tiny shrimps and crabs from the rice paddies and also sweet potato greens, considered a low class food in the local culture. All of these seemingly small differences in diet raised significantly the amount of protein and vitamins these kids were getting each day and the impact on their health was dramatic for all to see.

Now your average western trained 'expert' would want to go out and trumpet to the world his wonderful five steps for fighting malnutrition. But Jerry Sternin was smarter than that. He realized that just because you've got a solution doesn't automatically mean people will change their customary behavior and adopt it. So instead he organized cooking workshops where mothers would come together to jointly cook meals with the new ingredients.

It wasn't long before all the mothers accepted the new diet as part of 'village wisdom' and within several years it had spread to 265 villages with a combined population of over two million people.

Remember our topic today is How Do We Really Make Decisions. The example I just related is from the best selling book “Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard” by Chip and Dan Heath. The key to Sternin's success was his use of what the Heaths call bright spots. Rather than be overwhelmed by all the impossible-to-solve aspects of a problem like malnutrition in an impoverished nation, Sternin made the decision to look beyond the obvious to see if, buried in this apparently hopeless situation, there might be a bright spot, a element of success that might be emulated and multiplied.

Then, once he had found it he made yet another decision, this one reflecting deep insight into human nature. If you want people to change you need to allow them to believe that they are the originators of the change. An outsider might have helped the community analyze the problem but in the end the villagers believed that themselves had arrived at the solution. And that was fine with Jerry Sternin.

Here's another fascinating example of human decision making, this one with far reaching consequences for all of us. It's taken from the book “How We Decide” by best selling science writer Jonah Lehrer.

Back in the 1970s Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel wanted to test the self control of young children, specifically their ability to delay gratification in return for a larger reward later. So he brought in a group of four-year-olds and asked if they liked marshmallows.

Not surprisingly they all said yes. Mischel told them they could each have one marshmallow if they ate it immediately but if they waited a few minutes while he went on an errand, when he returned and they had not eaten the first marshmallow as a reward they would get a second one.

What happened? Most of the kids could only hold out for a minute or two after he left the room and ate their marshmallow. But a few were more successful and resisted the urge for immediate gratification.

How did they do it? They engaged in behaviors to divert their attention away from the marshmallow in front of them, such as covering their eyes or getting up and going to another part of the room.

Any one who has tried to give up an addiction such as smoking for example will recognize this strategy. Think about something else for a few minutes and usually a neuro-chemically based urge such as sugar or nicotine will subside. One of the things that makes this experiment so interesting is that some of these young children understood instinctively what to do to hold out against immediate gratification.

But as Mischel would find out years later this study has much more far reaching implications. Mischel gathered data on the same group of children when they were high school seniors and the results were striking. The youngsters who couldn't resist eating the marshmallow right away were much more likely as teenagers to have disciplinary problems and do drugs. Their grades were lower and their tempers shorter.

On average their SAT scores were 210 points lower than the kids who had demonstrated as young as preschool a high degree of self discipline. In fact the marshmallow test proved to be a better predictor of future SAT scores than IQ tests administered to the four-year-olds!

Now here is where my conclusions diverge somewhat from Mischel's. He believes that the kids who could delay gratification were better at using their reason to control their impulses. The same cognitive skills that helped them resist temptation also helped them concentrate on their homework and get better grades.

I look at it a little differently. Maybe it is true that some people are naturally better at exercising self restraint and focusing their attention on math and history, just like some people seem to have more innate natural talent at playing the piano or throwing a football. But just about all of us can learn all of these skills to one degree or another. And with practice and coaching we can improve our performance even if we never perform at Carnegie Hall or play in the NFL or teach theoretical physics at Cal Tech.

It comes down to what you believe. One of the most important decisions we can make as parents, friends, neighbors, employers, and citizens of our community is to reach out to those who lack faith in their talents and abilities, and help them believe in themselves and their capacity to build a better world.

©2013 by Allen B. Hundley

Books cited or researched for this article:

Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D., Harper- Collins, 2007.

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009

Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, Random House, 2010.

The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, Simon Schuster, 2005