… but now I’m not so sure. This fascinating feature from BBC online gives a little flavor of the things we do when we make decisions, and they are at once surprising, and things we instinctively knew already.
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I, Editor by Henry Gee
This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
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I used to be indecisive ...
- Date:
- Monday, 23 Feb ruary 2009 - 16:32 UTC
The Platonic view of decision making – on which all social policy and economic theory has since been based – is that decisions are made by rational human beings, who will not make up their minds unless they are in possession of all the facts. The reality, however, is different. The decisions we make are influenced by our emotional state, so much so that people who are unable to express their emotions are unable to make a decision at all.
Consider the fraught business of buying a car, a relatively large financial outlay that implies a great deal of investment in the future. In which case, you’d think that people wouldn’t buy a car until they’d invested a great deal of thought first. But is this really the case? Do people buy the car after extensive market research, price comparison, assessment of performance figures, crash tests and emissions ratings? Or do they buy the car because they liked the one they saw a friend drive, or even because they liked the dress worn by the model in the TV advert? (I know the last one to be true in one case I know personally). Think about the last time you bought a car … and be honest.
My trade involves making decisions, several times a day, that materially affect peoples’ livelihoods. I am paid to make decisions about the suitability or otherwise of scientific papers for Nature. Each year I make several hundred such decisions, and only forty or so end up as papers in Nature. I also receive hundreds of submissions a year for the Futures SF column in Nature, of which I can choose fifty-one.
Now, whereas I do my best to ensure that all decisions I make are made on an entirely rational basis, I have to admit that most preliminary decisions are made largely on instinct. I can tell if a paper feels right, or not – that’s the easy part. The hard part comes when I have to put such decisions into words. Initial decisions are very often refined by discussion with colleagues, who will tell me of competing papers or earlier work of which I had not been aware, or useful referees I might try. This is all good, because it helps me acquire more information on which to make a decision – and gathering reports from referees will provide yet more information. But in the end, a decision – if one is honest – contains a large measure of instinct, a feeling that the decision is right.
One might rationalize my own decision-making process by saying that, yes, well, I’ve been doing it for a long time, and what I am in fact doing is condensing or streamlining a lot of more explicitly rational processes into the mental equivalent of a spinal reflex – just as one drives a car without thinking about all the various second-by-second decisions one makes, or I can improvise a blistering blues riff on a piano without transcribing each note and learning it.
Having read the article above, I now realize that this view is largely bunk – little more than a rearguard action to protect the sanctity of rational thought – the illusion of control that it gives us. Every decision that I make – every decision that you make – is weighted and freighted with a load of emotional baggage rather greater than we’d perhaps care to admit.
I can find a parallel to this, and that’s in statistics. No matter how great our data set, no matter how fancy-schmancy our algorithms, distributions and tests, all statistical tests come out, in the end, with a P value – and then you are on your own. It is your decision, based on nothing but experience, or the experience of others, whether that P value constitutes some new and significant deviation from an expected hypothesis – or just another result to run with the rest of the herd.
Your decision.
Your decision,
… made with as much rationality as it is with your mood and whether or not the egg sandwich you ate at lunchtime left an unpleasant aftertaste or whether your girlfriend is going to leave you and/or announce she’s pregnant or your worry that you won’t be able to get away before the stores close and pick up the dry cleaning or your anxiety that you really really must get your dog’s nasty cough checked out at the vet or the degree to which something someone wrote on the internet was wrong or how discomfited you were by a dream you had last night whose details you can’t quite remember but which departed with an odd aura that left you at sixes and sevens.
The fact is, and it’s a very human fact, a very tragic fact, is that all the decisions we make come from an internal struggle – real enough for all that it is rarely externalized except by a soliloquizing Hamlet – between the chaotic forces of emotion and the crystalline edges of rational thought.
None of this – the fact that we our decisions are laden with emotions and made without sufficient information – should really come as a surprise.
After all, such things have been the stock in trade of writers of all fiction, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Star Trek. Oedipus’ ill-fated decisions might have seemed prefectly rational to him (likewise Romeo’s) even though we knew better. And, boldly going to where camels have violent winds, Mr Spock might be the super-rational being who is never swayed by his emotions – but it’s Kirk, who is so often prey to his lusts and rages, and who acts on his hunches, who got to be Captain. It is he who makes the decisions, and his decisions count.
‘Captain, I’m picking up a strange message on the sub-galactic inter-etheric warp-drive relay…’
‘What does it say, Mr. Spock?’
‘Captain … I can’t believe my ears’
‘I can’t believe your ears either, Mr Spock’Last updated: Monday, 23 Feb 2009 - 16:32 UTC
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Comments
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In case you’re wondering, I’m leaving a comment on my own blog because it looks lonely, amid the Richard and
JudyJenny show. So there.I think Henry needs a hug.
Hugs are nice.
Generally, yes – but it depends to some extent on the intrinsic compatability of the hugger and huggee…
And, I guess, the relative physical dimensions and enthusiasm of hugger and huggee. I’m sure that some statistician at the University of Rural England is busily working this out as we speak.
Nice post, HG. It shows that Editors are only
klingonhuman. Next time I get a crappy rejection letter, instead of thinking “Wanker!”, I shall think “Ahhh, poor sod’s only human. Shame that doesn’t stop them being a wanker though.”Apologies for the crudity. At least I actually commented on the post though.
Thank you, Mike. Deep beneath our cruel, heartless exteriors, we editors just want to be loved.
Send me an appeal, and I’ll send you another page of iambic pentameter. So there.
Henry, the field work associated with deducing the relative benefits of hugging to hugger and huggee would be deeply amusing – especially at the esteemed University of Rural England…
Not least since, rather oddly, that particular seat of learning doesn’t seem to include a line item regarding “gross moral turpitude” in its contract of employment…
Richard and Jenny show! Ha! That’s excellent.
This article from The Times (HT Dave Lull)