How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

I've been reading a book called How We Decide. It's not a how-to book with instructions about decision-making; it's a book about the neurological aspects of decisions--what goes on in the brain when we make decisions and the neuroscience behind good and bad decision-making. The author, Jonah Lehrer, makes the typical mistake of so many scientists and science writers of mixing up and interchanging the terms 'mind' and 'brain'. But if you can forgive him for that, it's a good read.

Here are some of my favorite parts.

Regarding a study by a researcher named Philip Tetlock on the performance of so-called pundits:

"Although they were paid for their keen insights into world affairs, they tended to perfrom worse than random chance. Most of Tetlock's questions had three possible answers; on average, the pundits had selected the right answer less then 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals. Tetlock also found that the most famous pundits in his study tended to be the least accurate, consistently churning out overblown and overconfident forecasts. Eminence was a handicap.

"Why were these pundits (especially the prominent ones) so bad at forecasting the future? The central error diagnosed by Tetlock was the sin of certainty, which led the 'experts' to mistakenly impose a top-down solution on their decision-making processes."

And later, reflecting on a breakdown in Israeli military intelligence leading to the Yom Kippur War:

"The only way to counteract the bias for certainty is to encourage some inner dissonance. We must force ourselves to think about the information we don't want to think about, to pay attention to the data that disturbs our entrenched beliefs."

Lehrer has some fascinating things to say about how emotions can be useful advisers, giving us access to unconscious insight and experience--things we know, but we don't know we know. But we must supervise these various parts of the mind, not letting either the rational or the emotional mind take over completely.

Lehrer says,

"The best way to make sure that you are using your brain properly is to study your brain at work, to listen to the argument inside your head.

"Why is thinking about thinking so important? First it helps us steer clear of stupid errors. You can't avoid loss aversion unless you know that the mind treats losses differently than gains. And you'll probably think too much about buying a house unless you know that such a strategy will lead you to buy the wrong property. The mind is full of flaws, but they can be outsmarted."

And to give us hope:

"... the best decision-makers don't despair. Instead, they become students of error, determined to learn from what went wrong. They think about what they could have done differently so that the next time their neurons will know what to do. This is the most astonishing thing about the human brain: it can always improve itself. Tomorrow, we can make better decisions."