Your Two Brains, Making Decisions
It’s Thursday Night. A handful of friends and I are meeting up to celebrate a birthday, and the birthday boy has decided to drag everyone to a local bar for Karaoke Night. The bar is empty, save for a few regulars and a tipsy softball team. We each grab a drink at the bar before a few friends make their way to the karaoke sign up sheet. Others hang back to watch the spectacle.
Then, it’s my turn to decide: To karaoke or not to karaoke?
Look, whoever said karaoke is supposed to be fun is nuts. The idea of singing to an empty bar with a few scattered drunks is enough to give me a nervous breakdown. Sure, part of me has some drive to get up there and become the next drunk American Idol, but another part of me thinks that faking a bathroom break to get out of this situation is a fantastic alternative. Whenever I find myself in situations like these, it seems that the right choice is to fight the discomfort and try something new. So why do I still want to chicken out?
As it turns out, there’s a lot going on in our brains when we make seemingly simple decisions like this. If we take a deeper look at this mental process, we can identify and address certain aspects of it in order to make better decisions. Let’s give it a shot.
Nature Brain and High Order Brain
Every brain is really divided into two brains. I call them Nature Brain and High Order Brain. Each day, they work together to help us make decisions.
Nature Brain (NB) thrives on instinct, intuition, and what it can take in from the immediate environment. If you need to make a quick, on-the-spot decision, NB will help you go with your gut. If you’re betting on a coin toss, deciding where to go for lunch, or picking who will win the Bachelorette, you can likely credit NB for your choice.
High Order Brain (HOB), on the other hand, practices critical thinking. It is analytical, can draw complex connections between concepts, gets A’s in math class and has several competing theories about who shot JFK. HOB is so smart that, if we were to gave it a voice, it would probably have a British accent.
The concept of two separate modes of thinking is described in detail in Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. He refers to Nature Brain and High Order Brain as System 1 and System 2, respectively.
System 1 (Nature Brain)
“Operates automatically and quickly, with little or not effort or sense of voluntary control.”System 2 (High Order Brain)
“Allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.”
Every day, NB and HOB work together to help you make decisions.
How Your Two Brains Make Decisions Together…
When you need to make a decision, NB will kick things off by gathering all of the information that is readily available and presenting a quick, coherent choice. This includes what you see, heuristics, generalizations, recent memories, feelings, and any other information that can be gathered involuntarily. HOB can either approve of this choice and put the decision into action, or kick off it’s own, more difficult process of critical thinking.
If we take another look at the karaoke decision, here’s how NB might respond:
Nature Brain
This freaks me out… a lot. I probably have the worst singing voice in this bar, and I once saw a movie where a kid got booed off stage at his 8th grade talent show. That could happen to me! I say we pass on karaoke. What do you think, High Order Brain?
Next, HOB reviews NB’s logic to determine wether it needs to start thinking critically. But HOB has a problem: its process of critical thinking requires far more mental effort than NB’s heuristic process. Experiencing mental strain is not something humans like, so HOB will only work if it absolutely needs to. In other words, HOB is lazy. So, if NB’s story seems coherent, HOB approves the decision and saves itself the effort. This happens around the clock and, more often than not, HOB agrees with NB.
The karaoke case is no different. Nature Brain’s worst case scenario isn’t complete nonsense, so High Order Brain responds:
High Order Brain
Makes sense to me.
So, the decision is made: we will not be making an appearance on stage. But, even though the decision isn’t necessarily incorrect, the way that NB reached the conclusion is clearly flawed. Let’s look at several components of NB’s process to illustrate how it ultimately reached an irrational conclusion.
Nature Brain’s Flawed Logic
In short, the information NB involuntary incorporated into its decision lacks the consideration needed for rational decision making. In the karaoke argument, NB coupled risk aversion with a recent memory of a rare event to create a doomsday scenario. This scenario has an almost no chance of actually occurring, but probability is a complex computation that NB isn’t going to take into account.
This habit of using readily available information in favor critical thinking is how NB is able to make a convincing, yet ultimately irrational argument. NB’s model of the world is filled with flaws like these, including:
- exaggeration of rare events
- exaggeration of bad events
- anchoring
- framing
- incorrect assumptions
- confirmation bias
- stereotyping
- the endowment effect
- overconfidence
- the law of small numbers
The list goes on, resulting in a cognitive bias that constantly makes decisions with a faulty sense of intuition. However, we continue to use this inadequate framework because it’s easy and takes little effort. HOB is always around to step in and circumvent the flaws of NB, but it rarely does because it is oblivious to the errors in NB’s process.
Nature Brain’s Fear of Death
The last, most crucial component of NB’s mode of thinking is emotion. In the karaoke case, the emotion is fear, and fear has come to play a large role in NB’s decisions over time. Back when the human race was busy evolving from apes, Nature Brain spent most Saturday afternoons running from dangerous predators, trying not to eat poisonous berries, and looking for a place to sleep where it wouldn’t freeze to death. Fear was a survival instinct that indicated a life and death situation.
Nowadays, our fears come in many forms that aren’t nearly as dangerous, but NB continues to react as if survival is at stake. We can trace each and every very fear we experience back to a fear of death which triggers an innate “fight or flight” response in our brain. In other words, if NB is afraid of karaoke, then it has somehow confused itself into thinking it will die if things go wrong on stage. That might seem absolutely insane, but not too long ago fear meant survival. So, NB couples this fear with the readily available information mentioned earlier and constructs a doomsday scenario.
Sticking with NB’s choice means making a decision based in flawed logic and irrational fear. Even worse, this is one of countless situations where NB’s decision gets put into action without second thought. Time after time, we let NB call the shots and, as a result, we make bad decisions. But what if we didn’t?
Avoiding Irrational Decisions
Knowing what we know about NB’s process, we can make a more conscious effort to avoid the irrational thinking NB produces and give HOB a chance to weigh in with a far more logical argument. Here are some steps we can take to review NB’s choice:
- Consider if NB’s logic is a victim of cognitive bias, including the heuristics mentioned earlier.
- Replace cognitive bias with more logical arguments that consider probability and the effects of different biases.
- Recognize the role that emotion plays in your decision making. Identify emotions such as fear, excitement, anger, etc. which could make NB’s argument appear more convincing.
- Use the improved logic you’ve established to combat the negative impact that emotion may be having on your decision. Emotion’s adverse influence may not disappear entirely, but reasoning through it can help prevent it from impacting rational decision making.
Out of the thousands of decisions you make each and every day, NB is going to be there to help you knock out the easy ones without a second thought. But when it comes to decisions that really matter, make sure you get HOB off of its lazy butt so that ensure your decisions follow proper rationale.
Now that we’ve worked out a plan for avoiding the irrational thinking that NB produces, let’s revisit the karaoke decision.
The Karaoke Decision
So here I am, watching a few of my friends fill out the karaoke sign up sheet while the rest hang back. It’s my turn to make a decision. Let’s give HOB a chance to weigh in with a far more logical argument than what NB came up with.
High Order Brain
Look, Nature Brain, I know you’re scared. But the truth is, that fear you’re feeling right now is completely irrational. Getting booed off stage during Thursday Night Karaoke is never going to happen. Ever. You’re not the worst singer in the world, and even if you are, nobody cares. All of our friends are still going to be our friends by the time we step off stage. We’re not going to die up there.So let’s get up there, cue up Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” and sing, baby.
So, I did. I got up there and sang.
A few minutes later, it was all over. I didn’t get booed off stage and I didn’t die. I walked off that stage to a few high fives and a friend handing me another round of beer. As it turns out, karaoke actually is pretty fun. The only part that wasn’t fun was making the choice to get up there.
Everyone gets scared from time to time. Bungee jumpers get a little freaked out when they go to the dentist, just as dentists get freaked out when they go bungee jumping. But what if each decision we make in the face of fear is somehow the same decision, regardless of wether it’s fear of karaoke, dentists, heights, career changes, new challenges, or anything? If we can stand up to one fear, then what other fears will we be able stand up to? What new experiences wait for us on the other side of apprehension? I can’t say for sure, but I’m willing to find out.
Now, I get to sit back and relax while I watch the rest of my friends make their choice. To karaoke or not to karaoke?
