It seems that the more we know about the way humans make decisions the less we know, says Kent Greenfield, author of The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility In A World Of Limits.
Ever since Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, the reading public has been fascinated with the science of the brain and of human cognition. Gladwell popularized the notion that we should trust our snap judgments (though the book was actually much more nuanced than that). Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and Imagine has also cast his lot on the side of quick judgments, saying recently in an essay for The New Yorker, that ‘introspection can actually compound the error’ of cognitive bias. On the other side of the aisle we find Frank Partnoy, author of the just-released Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, who argues that we should identify the appropriate time frame for decision and then wait as long as possible before acting, whether we are hitting a cricket ball or apologizing to our spouses.
Regardless of the disagreement over what we should do about it, all of these authors agree that how the brain works poses real obstacles to good decision making. Most of these books, even Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, focus on the limits posed by our brains.
If we add to the mix, as I do in my own The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits, the difficulties posed by cultural constraints, the power of authority, and the crushing power of so-called “free” markets, the limits on human choice are daunting indeed.
So what to do? Should we make quick judgments or slow ones? My friend Fabrizio di Piazza, who edits the excellent website GoverningWorks, made a good point to me yesterday, when I raised this question to him. He proposed the common sense answer that, well, it depends on what we are doing. In monasticism, introspection is crucial. It may have less meaning if we are trying to decide whether to purchase a nominal item. From a public perspective, we should design our governing institutions too with an expectation that people will be biased and mistaken. (This means that we should applaud the British government’s recent efforts to design public policies based on the way people actually behave than on idealized versions of human behavior.)
As I suggest in The Myth of Choice, we should try to recognize our limitations as best we can, whether they are arise at the level of brain science or at the level of cultural norm that imposes limits we see only in glimpses.
But we should also understand that we are bound to make mistakes, as are others around us. So a dose of humility wouldn’t hurt.