As even the newest member of the office team can tell you, almost all jobs involve making decisions. Quality decision-making and doing well in business are nearly one in the same thing, but exactly how do we make good decisions? School can teach you to handle metrics and data, as well as different methods for sifting trough numbers to find what’s relevant, but this rational approach to decision-making leaves out one important factor: the human brain.
Turns out (and this is no surprise) we’re not 100 percent dispassionate animals, at least according to Jonah Lehrer’s new book How to Decide discussed at length recently on blog Boing Boing. But the book — which aims to make the latest neuroscience on decision-making accessible and useful — does offer more startling insights, including that our feelings are not simply the enemy of sound decision-making:
Lehrer is interested in the historic dichotomy between “emotional” decision-making and “rational” decision-making and what modern neuroscience can tell us about these two modes of thinking. One surprising and compelling conclusion is that people who experience damage to the parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to decide, because their rational mind dithers endlessly over the possible rational reasons for each course of action…. But overly emotional decisions are also likely to lead us into trouble. There is clearly a sweet-spot between white-hot emotional thinking and ice-cold reason, and Lehrer is trying to find it.
The lengthy and interesting post by details a number of experiments explained in the book which show various biases such as loss-aversion (we fear loss more than we value an equivalent gain) in human decision-making, how too much information regularly leads us astray, and how introspection can actually confuse rather than clarify. Fascinating and well-worth a read, but what’s the practical takeaway? Doctorow sums it up:
By the end of the book, Lehrer is ready to draw some conclusions from all this fascinating material. What he comes up with, basically, is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy…. CBT consists, basically, of introspectively interrogating your emotional response to events, to see where and how emotion is influencing reason and vice-versa. CBT requires that you write things down (at first, anyway) so that your brain can’t pull a fast one by selectively recalling your track record. It’s the Goldilocks of introspection: not too much, not too little, just enough.
(Brain scan by Patrick Denker, CC 2.0)
