Choice

You're in listening to Radio Lab from public radio WNYC and NPR. Today's show is about choice and we thought we would start things off in a parking lot in sunny Berkeley, California with a psychologist. I'm Barry Schwartz. I'm a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College where I have been teaching since 1971. The only job I ever applied for, so I think deep down in my past I appreciated the value of simplifying one's options. He even wrote a book about it called "Paradox of Choice" and to illustrate that paradox he brought us to, well, you'll see. Barry will you give us a visualist of what we're doing? So we're about to walk into Berkeley's very famous Berkeley Bowl, which is a super market. Very unusual when it comes to fresh fruits and vegetables. Wow, it has a selection unlike any I've ever seen in my life. Yet could you just try and guess first? I mean, I see just fields of oranges. So we've got naval orange, Valencia juice orange, Texas Valencia juice orange, organic naval, Neola tangel, Daisy tangy drinks, Montano bananas, they have large naval long-tailed bananas, small foam, red bananas, murros, sub-abinanas, large gale aromonds, Washington Pacific Road, and a lion-planted gold delicious rice bowl, but what are any cities like the Georgia of the Dalton, Georgia of the Dalton. We have freedom of choice with respect to every yellow one, and you see it in every area of life. In romantic relationships, when I was growing up, the answer to the question should I get married was obvious, the answer to the question when was ours, which was, of course, of course, and as soon as possible. Well, now there are no defaults, every imaginable lifestyle is available. You can be gay, straight, bi, look at the seedless grapes, oh wait, wait, more apples. The sense that there are a million opportunities for you, you can make your own rules. Counseling centers, psych services centers, and universities are bursting at the seams. Why? These are the most privileged kids ever, the schools are giving them everything they could possibly want, and they are banging down the doors because they are so screwed up. Why? And answer is people don't know what to do, they don't know how to choose, they can't face a world in which everything is available. And I see this in the college, it's heartbreaking to see these incredibly talented college seniors who we have given every opportunity to do whatever they want, terrified at graduation. They know that this is a stage in life where walking through one door means they're going to hear a lot of the doors slam shut, they can't bear the thought that they may walk through the wrong door. It's choice angst. It is. It's the disease of modernity. This is very. What? Sorry, sorry. Well, just come on. Go ahead and let's do the show, but I say come on in reservation. What do you wife? Well, because like people from Swarthmore College get to pay like $45,000 a year for the privilege of, you know, that's a very, very rare slice of America, but you're right, you're right. Thank you. Come on, you have this too. I mean, how many speeds on your bike do you really need? Well, that's a different thing. I mean, I don't need 22 speeds. I happen to make two with five. There you go. So there are some real questions here and on this hour we're going to look at choice. Choice and decision making. When do we choose? How do we choose? Where do we choose? The limits of choice. Of choice. On video lab. I've jet up and ride. I've rubber cold. Stay with us. Bitches. Okay, to begin, are you ready? Yep. This is only just as the basic question, a basic question, which is, okay, so a lot of choice can be bad, but clearly we need some choice. So what's the right amount? Actually, how much can you really handle? Hmm. Well, there's a classic study in psychology from 50 years ago called the magic number seven. The magical number seven plus or minus two. That's Jonah Lairr, author of the book, Proust was a neuroscientist in the new book called How We Decide. In the 50s, he says, a guy named George Miller wondered about this. How much can a human brain really hold? So he conducted a series of memory tests, asked people to memorize different sets of numbers, letters, musical notes. And what Miller found out is that the average human could hold about seven digits plus or minus two at any given moment in working memory. When you say working memory, you mean like what we can keep in our top of mind memory, right? Not like memory memory, but like RAM. Exactly. Random digits. You can hold about seven plus or minus two, and with practice, people can, you know, really bump it up a bit. With practice, Robert. With practice. I'm still struggling with six, six, six, six, six, six and I think, no, I think I got the first four. Well, I mean, it's not an accident that so many of these random digits we have to memorize from phone numbers to such security numbers are seven plus or minus two. Now, the interesting thing is what happens to our decision-making powers when you try and get more than seven in your head? What? You want me to shut the door? Yes, I do. What if I can? Well, let me introduce you to someone. I'm Baba Cher, I'm an professor here at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Marketing, a lot of my research has to do with the brain. And tricking people? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So, Robert, I want to tell you about one particular experiment that he did. So, the experiment is pretty straightforward. Goes like this. He got a bunch of subjects together. He said, "Okay, I'm going to give you all a number." Give you your number. On a little card, you're going to read the number and I want you to commit that number to memory. Take as much time as you want to memorize the number. Then he says, "You're not going to walk to the next room and recall the number." And that's what subjects think, that subjects think that they're going to be doing. So, they know they're going to be in one place, getting a number, going to another place, and reciting that number. That's right. That's all they know. But they don't know. Is it not everybody is getting the same kind of number? So, some people get a seven digit number, some people get a two digit number. That I can do, by the way. I think I can do two digits. No, I doubt it. All the subjects have to do is they've got to memorize a number, walk out of room one, down the hall, room two, then recite their number. Now, just imagine. You and me. The person with a two digit number in their head was walking out of room one. One, two is my number. I can definitely remember this. Down the hall. Same time. And with seven digits in their head. One, two, two, eight, nine, three, six. Walks down the hall. Now, here's where the trickery comes in. As they're walking down the hall, mid memorizing all of a sudden, excuse me. They pass the lady in the hallway. And she's holding something. So I changed it up to you. But would you like a snack? I sure can. And here have a snack, just as our way of saying thanks for participating in the study. You can have one of two snacks you choose. You can choose between either a, a big fat slice of chocolate cake, or a b, a nice bowl of fruit salad. Meanwhile, they've both got these numbers still in their head. Now, here's the weird thing. When they finally make their choice. What would you like? Some yummy cake or some healthy fruit. The people, this is crazy. The people with two digits in their head? You know, I love cake, but I think I'll take the fruit. It's always choose the fruit. Whereas the people with seven digits in their head almost always choose the cake. You know, the cake. I want the cake. And we're talking by huge margins here. It was significant. I mean, this was like in some cases a 20, 25, 30 point difference. Huh. So what? The. Meaning if you have seven digits in your head, you are twice as likely to choose cake than fruit. Twice. So. Let's go with this. So the people with the seven digits get the cake. I get that part. I don't know why. Exactly. That doesn't interest you as to why they would choose. Well, yeah. Why? Okay. Good. I know that I've got your interest. I'll tell you the theory. Okay. Okay. And this is where it gets interesting. It seems that the brain is anatomically organized into different systems. Dual systems is what they're called. According to Jonah, you have a rational deliberative system, which is sort of more to the front of the brain. And then deeper in the brain, you have an emotional, unconscious system. According to Jonah, these two systems are often at war. I mean, there's constant competition between the rational brain and the emotional brain. They're always competing for attention and to guide and direct your behavior. Especially when you have a tough choice like boba shifts cake versus fruit. There, the competition is fierce. The emotional automatic system is pushing them towards the cake. The emotional brain loves sweet and gooey chocolate cake. Frosting, that's really what you want. On the other hand, the deliberate system on the hand comes and says, wait a second. Are you thinking about this choice carefully? This probably is not good for you because. Calories, sugar. I fat content. Think about your waistlines. I'm going to make you a choppy. Think about your cholesterol. It is not good for your health. It is not good for your self-esteem. And that acts as a check. But if you give that rational deliberative system seven numbers, just seven to memorize. 1-2-2-8-9-3-6, 1-2-0-sh, 1-2-2-8-5, 1-2-2-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1-2-sh, 1 Suddenly, to the rational range, as you can't get too much to keep track of, it's getting tired. It can't put up as much of a fight, which means greater likelihood that the emotions will drive their choices. The astounding thing here says, Joan, is not simply that sometimes emotion wins over reason. It's how easily it wins. Seven numbers is all it takes to screw up reason. Just think about how astonishingly limited that is. Yeah, I mean, compared to emotion, team reason is well. Pretty feeble, and there's nowhere around it, and we can kind of rage against the machine. But the brute fact is it's just one microchip in a big computer. And when we always rely on it, all the advice you have in decision-making is stop and think, slow down, take your time. And yet, when you actually look at the brain, that can lead you to rely on a feeble piece of machinery. All right, let me just offer an admittedly inconsequential case and point. There we were at the Burpee Bowl. In the Apple aisle, there were thousands and thousands of apples to choose from. Okay, not thousands, but a lot. And Robert and I get in our heads, well, we're going to choose, let's each choose an apple. And Robert, yeah, being Robert, decides like in six seconds. All right, because it had this really cool name. Washington Pacific Road. Zach, Zach, I'm going to get a Zach. Me, I deliberate, I'm thinking, get the, maybe I should give it, let's go to the organic. Yeah, we're running out of time. I lined up about 12 apples compared them by rice, size, color, anything I could think of. And eventually, decided on a giant Korean apple pair, which was the only logical choice because it was bigger than his. This is a nine-pound apple. Check. It is large. It was more expensive to 89. Check. Definitely way more original. It's an apple. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, and I figure as we're checking out. Game over. I am the winner. But, a couple hours later, we get to the airport. We have some time before our flight. I grab a plastic knife, we cut the apples and we do a taste test. Okay, very, very, here we go. Choose, three. And guess who's apple is the best? I'm guessing the Zazz apple. Oh, my, better apple. Yes. Oh, it's so good. The apple wins it all. Oh, it's the very good. My apple. I don't even want to talk about my apple. This doesn't taste like an apple at all. It has a surprise. Is that a worm? That's a gigantic core. Is that a core or is that an animal living there? Anyhow, according to Jonah, where I went wrong? Yeah, you've, you've, you've, you've, short circled your prefrontal cortex there. The prefrontal cortex is the, my right here in your forehead. And that's where the irrational brain lives. And I just had given it too many things to keep track of. You know, all these apples, you can only hold so much data at one, you know, any given moment. So, so you can fix it on seven apples, but only one piece of information for each apple, how red they are or how shiny they are. So you can't do seven apples with seven variables because then you've got 49. 49, that's way past what? Exactly. But there is a bigger problem than brain fatigue if you ask very short, and it happens after you choose. You're plagued with the possibility that you didn't do as well as you could. Yeah, I'm, I'm regret. I'm lamenting what could have been, which I definitely felt at the airport. And chances are you didn't do as well as you could have. Well, that's therein lies the rub in a place like Berkeley Bowl. You get seduced by an 11 pound apple that turns out to be a fake watermelon with an anus. All right, so we now understand the problem that Barry proposes. He says that if you have to make a choice too often, the choice is the wrong one, because your brain is too full of fat hurts your head or because if you make the choice, you didn't think, oh, damn, I should have chosen otherwise the regret problem. Right. There are ways to handle this. Our friend Oliver Sacks, Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neuroscientist, is a regular on this program. We were talking and I told him about this issue and he said, oh, I don't have the problem. I was wondering if you don't have the problem as well. I make, he says, a willful choice that certain things I care about a lot and I worry over and then all this all whole swath of my life that I just don't choose. Yes, my housekeeper actually comes tomorrow and she will get half a gallon of soy milk, half a gallon of prune juice. She will make a gallon or so of orange jello. She will make a large bowl of tabooly. She will get six or seven tins of sardines because I eat sardines with tabooly every evening. She will get seven apples and seven oranges, seven apples, why seven apples and seven apples? Okay. Well, because I'm also very greedy and impulsive and therefore I have to have a rule that I'm permitted to eat an apple a day and a pair a day. If I had 70 apples, I would eat them all. So you have worked it out so that you are regulating yourself and somehow your appetite has become regulated in the meantime. Yes, I never get bored with my food. Why not? That seems so boring. I don't find it boring. I enjoy it equally and with equal relish every time. If I were to sit down with you and describe to you a new candy, I don't know, almond, M&M's and I would do it with all the talent that I could possibly bring to description. So you would see the nice outer candy shell, it would listen, it would be sugary, it would have this most delicious nut inside. Would you not feel at all tempted to break the habit of years, whatever your suite is and just venture over to almond M&M? I would certainly try the almond M&M, but since you mention it with chocolate, there is a shop close to me which has broken 72% chocolate. I go there each day. Indeed, I have as you see with me a single dollar in my pocket. I put it down and I say a dollar's worth of 72. Every day. Every day neither more nor less. Can you recall the moment when you somehow leaped from whatever your predecessor chocolate routine was to the 72% cocoa content. Something wonderful must have happened on that day where you got yanked from the deep rut that you were in into the next deep rut. I'm just curious, what happened on the day of change? I don't clearly recollect but I can tell you a day of negative change. This again goes back to my carnivorous days when I got a thing about kidneys. For some reason, you mean the organ or the pee. No, no, no, the organ. It was when I was a resident at UCLA and as I now have sardines every time for dinner, at that time living in Topanga Canyon, I would have kidneys and I would go to the farm's market and I would buy my weekly kidneys. But on one occasion, a strange mistake happened, whether I made the mistake or whether I was misheard, instead of my usual two pounds of kidneys, I was given 22 pounds of kidneys. And if a mistake is made, I'm too shy to say anything. Aren't you embarrassed to be such a wimp, both of routine and of shyness? I mean, it's a double it's a double duty there. Yes, well, what the hell. Anyhow, with these, I should of course, have thrown away this monstrous, palpitating bag of kidneys. But in the event, I took it back to my little house in Topanga and then followed an increasingly nightmare-ish period in which I had kidneys for breakfast, for lunch, kidneys, stewed, cares, sweet kidneys. And finally, after about 10 days, by which time I died in about 15 pounds, an uncontrollable nausea and vomiting took a hold of me, I literally are just at the mind. I think it was literally as well because I'm missing bits of kidney in the vomit. And I then threw out the rest of the kidneys and I've never had a kidney since. What did he call us, kidneys? Just rungion. What is that? That's French for kidney. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No kidding. What's French for? Let's go to break. No, but that's that's goodbye for good. Meaning we'll be right back. Okay, coming up, we have a story you will not believe about what happens behind the scenes at a casino when you are trying not to lose, but nonetheless, we're getting gouged. That's coming up on Radio Lab. I'm Jada Bumrod. I've never called it. Stay with us. Message one. Hi, this is Barry Schwartz. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Offered Peace Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by National Public Radio. Bye. End of message. From viral moments to cultural revolutions, celebrity deep dives to social commentary, basement open mics to comedy legends spilling the tea. Amazon Music's got something for everyone, with millions of podcast episodes, just download the Amazon Music app and start listening. Hello, I'm Jada Bumrod. And I'm Robert Crowley. This is Radio Lab. Today's program is about choice, how we choose why and what's his choice. And I'm going to choose, I'm actually going to dream of the possibility one day of walking into a store and instead of being obsessed and turned on by the beauty of an object or by the promise of an object or price price of an object or the status that would be conferred upon me if I should or not conferred upon me. All those messy emotions, what would happen if I could be like, I'm a half balkanian. Balkanians do not speculate. I speak from pure logic. Hello. Hi. Hi. Hi, Jada and Robert. We actually put the spot question to an neurologist, Dr. Antoine Bashara, who works at the University of Southern California. If I could say abracadabra and go all logic, would I be a happy chooser? I would say no, based on our work with neurological patients. Then he told us about a patient he once had. He's changed the name of the patient. He was, he will call him Elliott. Could you describe him, what was he like? Well, he's about five feet 10, you know, 170 pounds, I would say. And was that kind of decree? It looks very normal, like a normal person. He wasn't accountant. That's Jonah Larer again. For a large corporation. Successful accountant. Upper management and active in his local church. And he was married at the time. Yes. A very conservative family, very religious. House in the suburbs. Good money savings. Smart, successful man. Kind of the American dream. And then, you know, the tumor happened. This is in 1982. Doctors discovered a small knot in the front of Elliott's head in a part of the brain called the Orpofrontal Cortex. And where is that? That's just behind the eyes. Detector's removed the tumor. Yeah, he had the surgery. The tumor was removed. And the doctors sent him home. Well, at first glance, it seems like a tremendous success. No language impairment, no movement disorders. He still scores 97 percent title on the intelligence test. Um, he's, he seems fine. Like good old Elliott. Does good old Elliott go back to the good old job? He starts going back to the good old job, the good old family. And that's when things got really weird. At first, it's just subtle things. These very minor decisions that he suddenly couldn't make. Like he'd be at the office. He'd want to sign a contract you need to have in front of him a blue pen and a black pen. And he would think, well, type on this contract is black. So maybe I should use a blue pen. Maybe a blue pen sticks out more. On the other hand, maybe it sticks out too much and will become too distracting. Then again, black pen is lower on ink. So we want to save that for later. And this would go on and on says Jonah, for half an hour. And if it takes about half an hour to decide which pen to choose, imagine Elliott in the cereal aisle in the grocery store. I mean, the cereal allows particularly tough because there, you know, there must be 200 varieties of cereal. This is a sugary cereal. This is a not sugary cereal. Standing there, I think about, you know, what would I prefer tomorrow? The one with extra protein. I've got these other cereals at home. Are they also honey nut theme? Do I want something to break up the honey nut monotony? Is there one cereal on sale? With Elliott, it will take forever to decide. According to Dr. Bashar, he would just keep on analyzing. Analyzing. Well, this one's 14 ounces. Analyzing. It's 15 ounces. Analyzing. Analyzing. They also analyze. Analyzing. Analyzing. Analyzing. Analyzing. All day long. The question was, what exactly had happened to Elliott to make him that way? Like, what exactly did that tumor do? And the breakthrough came when Elliott went to see a neurologist named Antonio DiMazio. And DiMazio immediately noticed something. Even though Elliott was perfectly thoughtful, perfectly articulate. Always controlled, always relaxed. When he spoke, he seemed kind of numb. No sign of anger or rage or self-pity. No feeling at all. So DiMazio had an idea. He put Elliott in a chair, hooked him up to all these measuring devices, and then showed Elliott a series of really charged pictures. A severed foot, a naked woman, a house on fire. Pictures at a normal people trigger an automatic emotional response. You can't help it, but your blood pressure increases, your pulse increases, your hands start to sweat. But with Elliott, these pictures triggered nothing. And that's what it became clear what had happened to Elliott. What his tumor had really done was cut him off from his emotional mind. He'd become, in effect. Some kind of like Spock-like Vulcan. The conventional theory would be that a person without emotions would be perfectly rational. That emotion somehow interfered with rationality, that they got in the way. And yet here's this guy who couldn't experience emotions and he would pathologically and decisively. So then the answer to my question, my first question, wouldn't we all be better off if we could be completely rational? You know, have the answer. It's no. When you've got all these options to consider and they're more or less the same, the only way to weel your way to a choice is to stop thinking and go with, go with a feeling. Right. And so the the the logic of yes, no yes, no yes, no leaves you nowhere. But the feelings of yes, no yes, no, that does leave you somewhere. That's right. Feeling says the answer I'm going to show it. That's the key without feeling. You're stuck. So what ended up happening to Elliott? He ended up in a divorce, ended up losing his job, losing all his savings. He got involved with the con artist. We had to move back in with his parents. Elliott was stuck, his his his life fell apart, which makes you kind of reevaluate the doctor's spark advantage. So called because if we really were keeping company with a flock of sparks and we brought them to the grocery store, they're there. They'd be 55 sparks staring at the Cheerios, they're doing at the high cut. They're the Cheerios. Not to mention that they're divorced and broke. So I mean, obviously we have some advantage over these welcomes because we have these feelings that can push us to a solution. But what I still get is, is it just the roar of feeling that does it? Or is there something about having a feeling that's more subtle than that? Is there some, is there some, what is the power of the feeling? That's an interesting question. Let me, let me, let me, let me walk this story in from a writer, Stephen Johnson. He's written a whole bunch of books, Emergence, Mind Wide Open. Cool. And he tells this story that can we press record? Really gets it what you're asking. My wife and I had moved into this new wonderful apartment that overlooked the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan. I had these vast windows. It was one kind of window in this room, but it was huge. And we would sit there and stare out at the river all times the day. And at one point, the first time where we were there, the storm started to come in. They were to kind of build up over Jersey and come rolling in. And we thought, oh, this is great. We can look at the white caps on and see the lightning over the Jersey city and all this stuff. And one late June day, we're sitting out there in our apartment. We can see the sky is getting darker and darker. And we immediately say to each other, oh, this is going to be a great show. So we both go over the window. And we were standing at the window. My wife literally with her hands pressed against the glass. And I'm standing right next to it just to the side of it, kind of looking out. And the storm starts really kicking up. There's a lot of lightning. And you can see the window actually kind of flexed just a tiny little bit, which you noticed this. Yeah, we noticed that there was a little bit of give. And you know, window that size it has to have a little bit of give. Otherwise, it's not stable. So we could tell it was really windy. And and there are a couple of pretty powerful gusts. And then all of a sudden, there's this very strange sharp kind of click sound. My wife instantly jumps back from the window, jumps back, you know, kind of four or five feet and says, what was that? I say, being an incredibly perceptive person, I say, I'm pretty sure it was the study door slamming with the wind around the corner in the in the other part of the apartment. So she goes back around the corner to check on whether it was, in fact, the study door slamming. And at that moment, as I'm standing two inches from the frame in the window, the entire thing blows it. It makes insane noise. It shatters glass. And all of a sudden, there's a, you know, 60 mile an hour storm like blowing through our apartment. So we both run into the bathroom and close the door. And all of a sudden, you know, I suddenly think, like, oh my god, you were standing in front of that window three seconds before. If I hadn't stupidly told you that I thought that clicking sound was the door slamming, that thing would have landed on you. I think it's entirely possible that it would have killed her. Okay, so that that happened. His wife, by the way, was fine. Good. They installed a new window. They cleaned up the apartment. They did because I am covered with imaginary glass. I mean, I sound to fix it. So I believe, I believe. Thank you very much. What's illuminating and what gets it the question you asked is actually what happened next? It's the post script of that event. For literally years, every time I heard the sound of wind blowing through a window in that apartment and really pretty much anywhere else, I had an involuntary fear reflex. The sound of any wind, there's a specific kind of wind sound. It was the sound of wind associated with the window. So, you know, it's the, you know, I would go to my parents' house who live on the ground floor in the house in suburban Washington. But I would just hear wind kind of going through the window there, and I would think, ah, something's not right. And this was not a rational feeling? It was certainly not a rational thought. I could look empirically and say, it's 30 miles an hour. This wind, the window is clearly not going to blow in. It's not that big a window. And I'm standing nowhere near. But you still somehow couldn't shake the dread? I couldn't get rid of that feeling. And it's one of those moments where you really, you really ask yourself, I think, you know, who's in charge? You know, who's driving the ship? You know, because some part of me is looking at this situation empirically and saying rationally, this window is no threat to me. It's not going to blow in. And yet, some other part of me is unable to shake this emotional state of dread and fear and alertness and threat. All right. Now to get back to your question, Robert. Where do feelings come from? Yeah. Why do I say yes to wheat checks with power? Right. Well, consider the story we just heard from the perspective of Stephen Johnson's brain. Okay. So what a brain wants to do most of all is keep the organism safe, right? And it does that by looking for patterns. Like, here's an explosion. Wife almost died. It gets entirely possible that it would have killed her. In that moment, brain soaks it all in. Takes kind of a snapshot. What have we got here? Wind, window, glass, shot. So later, wind blows. The brain thinks, wait a second. Wind, window, glass. You've seen this before. Worn the organism. Be afraid. Be afraid. Be afraid. My point is that feeling of dread and fear and alertness and threat. That's just an alarm signal. The brain is just trying to help Steve make the right decision. Okay. Now to the cereal out. There you are. You're looking at all the boxes. And as your eyes fall on the rice crispy box. Rice crispy. Just like Steve Johnson with the wind, somewhere way deep down your brain is calling up all the experiences you've ever had with rice crispy. The good rice crispy experience is the bad ones. Maybe in the college you got dumped by that girl who likes rice crispy treats. I don't know. I remember her. Thousands of little memory fragments down there. Royal about. A lot of information. Right. Too much. So what ends up happening is that it all gets summed somehow in your subconscious and then it bubbles up. As a feeling. So one way to look at a gut feeling is that it's a kind of shorthand average of all of this past wisdom. So you have this tremendous sermon drawing of feelings in the sermon. Whoa, that's German. But there is a scientist one feeling the humans have that seems to trump all the others and that is the feeling of loss. People eat to lose. You can actually put a number on it. How much they hate to lose versus winning. And it's a really cool experiment that was done. It's been done everywhere but our experiment will be done by National Public Radio's wonderful reporter Mike Pesca. Are you a bit of a gambler or would you rather just keep your money and not risk it? I mean I wouldn't mind risking a few dollars but I just don't want to go overboard. Would you say you're a gambling woman? You're like gambling? No, I don't. I don't really gamble. I'm very cautious at finicky whether eating or taking chances. Yeah, the risk of losing something isn't worth the gambling of it. I wouldn't take a risk. Let's play that one. We were to play heads or tails. Would you want to do it? If you won, you won a dollar but if I won, I won a dollar? Probably not. No, no, no. No, thanks. If you knew the game was on the up and up and I were to flip a coin and I said oh look I'll pay you you know a dollar 25 if you win. You only have to pay me a dollar. No, I ain't doing it with you. No, I don't know. That just doesn't seem worth it. But I said look I'll give you a dollar 50 and you only have to put up a dollar. Would you do it then? No. Not really. 50 cents is not worth it. If I won't forgive a dollar 75 if you won. That's a possibility. Maybe. Like at that point you maybe start thinking about fine I'll give you two dollars. You only have to put up a dollar. Would you be interested? Sure. Yeah. I would do that. I would do that. Yes, sure. Wow, so everyone seems to converge around two bucks two to one? Yes, so that means that like loss is twice is painful. Yeah, you could say loss hurts twice as much as gain feels good. Why do you think that is? It must have something to do with you know when we're all running away from lions on the savanna. Yeah, it always seems to come back to that doesn't it? I guess a will to beast in the brushes worth a lion on the heels or something. No, no, that means. Were there any people that you doctor who went way past two to one? Sure. Okay, 100 to one. No. Come on, you're crazy. 100 to one on a coin. No, no, I'm just not a gambler. Is this a religious thing? No, I'm just not a gambler. So here's the question. Get us to our next thing. Right. Given that human beings hate to lose, what do you do if your entire business is getting people to lose money? You're talking about casinos. Are you not? Indeed, I am. We're going to Las Vegas, are we? Atlantic City. No, Atlantic City then. All right. Now normally what a casino will do, they will try to distract you with you know, fountains of jelly beans and, you know, statues that move, but there's one casino in particular called Harris. It's a chain that doesn't do any of that. Yeah, they offer slots and they offer a blackjack, but there's no exploding volcano. There's no Picasso on the wall. Yeah, according to Mike, Harris jumps out at you. They are the success story in the casino biz. And Gary Loveman has a lot to do with that. Yeah, any minute you're not drunk or depressed. I'd like you in the casino. He's the CEO of Harris Casinos and he's developed a really brilliant technique for slaying the beast that is a loss of version. That's one way to put it. What's this technique? Loyalty cards. What's a loyalty card? What does that mean? Well, basically, I mean, you know how back in the day, if you wanted to play the slots, you just stuck a quarter in. Mm-hmm. Can't do that anymore. Right. You're like, I'd like to, I'd like to throw a quarter in the one-on bandit, turns out there are no quarters. Okay, I'll slide a dollar bill in. Turns out before you have to do it, you have to sign up for a card. Well, why would I want to sign up for a card? Well, hey, you have to, but be the first time you play will give you a couple extra dollars. Everyone wants to sign up for that card. It's free money. Now, just to be clear, at Harris, it's actually not obligatory to sign up for this card, but most people do to get the rewards, and so there you are. You've got this little loyalty thing, and you're sticking it in every slot or machine that you play, and that offers them certain, well, they've got this new pilot program where they basically watch every move you make. Check it out. Okay. Let's say you're playing the slots. Okay. You stick your card in the slot machine. Right. My card is in. At that very moment, let's try that. The information is transmitted, downstairs, in the case of this casino we were at, it goes downstairs. Deep in the bowels of the casino. I need to take a photo, Julie. There's a dispatcher sitting there in front of a monitor. This computer sees that you've put your card into slot machine number 42, from the computer begins taking notes. Every game that you play, they're logged in, adding, adding, dividing, graphing, graphics, whatever. It's able to crunch those numbers, and over many visits, the casino begins to know you. They know your game is slots. They know you like to play for an average of six hours, and they know that generally you have a limit, say $89. Wow, they can know that I usually leave after losing 89 bucks. Yeah. And they know on this particular visit, you're not doing so well. You've lost more than you're winning. In fact, you've lost 72 bucks, which is really close to your personal limit. And this is a crucial moment. You're starting to get that sinking feeling, and you might just pack it in. I walk out of the casino. Yes, the casino doesn't want you to do that. They want to keep you there. So, as your losses are increasing from 72 to 77 to 85, and you're getting closer and closer to that point. In the back room, there's a computer going off the dispatcher, seeing it. The dispatcher knows to call the slot attendant up on the floor. Tango for Willie, I have a DCL1 at Gal1401 for Karen Massa. Willie, DCL1 for Karen Massa. Captain, the slot attendant walks out, taps you on the shoulder. Hello, how you doing, man? Mr. Karen Massa? Yeah. Everything going okay for you today? I'm losing. Of course, we know that's the case because our system's allowed us to monitor that. And so, the attendant offers you something you might like. The visit to the stay-couse, the visit to our coffee shop. They could offer new tickets to a show, Celine Dion's playing the big room, or they could just offer cold hard cash. Once a money today, just by playing what you call, you're looking to work hard. Oh, really? Yes, I got $15 DCL1 for you. Will you accept it? Yes, sure. Oh, all right. And all of a sudden, you're happy that you won 15 bucks. You're not fixated on the fact that you've lost 72. So, you come back again and again and again. I think it's great. It's something to do. I've always always had $300 of the diet. I would think their boys don't know how much. Now, here is the amazing part. For all the different thousands of people who come through the doors of Harris, Casinos, they could figure out their own individual pain points. So, you're telling me that if you walk into a casino, I walk in right after you, Robert Crowwich, right after us. Yeah. And we do that enough times after a while, they can know that you like to gamble until you're about $700 down. Me, I usually leave around 11 bucks. And money backs Crowwich over there. Money backs Crowwich usually holds out until he's four grand in the hall. Right. And they can know that about each of us. Yeah, they can. What do you think about this? Deathway. This strikes you as a good business proposition. Or does it strike you as a creepy example of big brotherism? Obviously, this works out well for Harris. So, does it work out well for me, you and Robert Crowwich? I think it does. What do you mean? Well, they can ever change the odds. So, when we go into a casino by state law, they'll never be able to change the odds of the game. All that Harris can do is kind of manage the feeling that we get. They leave a lot happier than if they had simply had a bad gaming experience, put their wallet back in their pocket and go on home unhappy. And everything about going to a casino is a poor decision. An irrational decision. And if there was a way, they can make me walking out of there, feeling like a million bucks when I spend two million. Well, then I say more power to them. And I would add, of course, that almost any business could try something similar, assuming they had appealing sorts of things to do for customers that had bad experiences. What's your pain point, by the way? You know what it is? If I'm done 300 bucks, I'm really pissed off. I'm not going to get there. Yeah. There's only one thing that would keep me at the table. That's it. Solane Dale. Not not take us to her concert if she was actually in the game. She's a terrible poker player. What we call dead money. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. We'll be back in a moment. Hey, by the way, Mike works at NPR News. Thank you to them for letting us borrow them. I am Candice Crottie, calling from St. Paul, Minnesota. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.Sloan.org. Hey, I'm Molly Webster and this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. We get it February. It's flowers. It's candy. It's stuffed animals. And of course, it's lots of talk about relationships and dating and it can seem like all those people they have love figured out. But no one does. Love is confusing. Sometimes it's hard to know how do you state your needs in a way that doesn't sound like an attack or when should we all just give each other a hug and move on? It would be great to have someone kind of in the corner helping you through these situations. Therapy can be that someone. BetterHelp is the perfect place to find a therapist who can help you navigate your relationships. Just fill out a short questionnaire that helps identify your needs and preferences and BetterHelp will match you with a therapist. If you don't like your match, you just switch to a different therapist at any time. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/RadioLab and see if talking to someone about your struggles and finding that special someone and keeping them is just the thing you need. That's BetterHELP.com/RadioLab. Amazon Music's got something for everyone, with millions of podcast episodes. Just download the Amazon Music app and start listening. Hello, this is RadioLab. I'm Chad Abumron. I'm Robert Kilwich. And today we are talking about decision making. How we make decisions. I want to just stop you on that pronoun. You just happen to use it. You say we make decisions. So when you decide to choose a pen black over blue, if you decide to choose a cereal, Cheerio is over a special case. Cheerio is definitely. I'm assuming that you feel very much in charge of that choice. If someone said, "Hey, who chose?" You'd say. This feels like a trick question. It's going to be a trick question. I chose to Cheerio's. Well, you think you chose. Would you please welcome the studly Malcolm Gladwell. But, I'm talking with Malcolm Gladwell, the writer of the tipping point, and he at the time, he just written the book Blink. We were at the 92nd Street Y in New York. He raised an interesting question. We began the discussion by talking about a dangerous element in decision making, which he calls. You call this the perils of introspection, and you tell the story of a poster contest. It involves hanging cats versus impressionists. Do you recall this? Yes. This is a famous study by Tim Wilson, who's one of my favorite psychologists at UVA, and the guy named John Schooler, who's absolutely brilliant. They have a whole bunch of posters, and they bring students in and they say, "Take anyone you want." It's yours. And then they bring another group, and they say, "Take anyone you want." But, by the way, before you go home with it, just explain, write out a paragraph about why you're taking it home, why you like it. And then they call up the students six months later, and they say, "That poster you got for free six months ago? Do you like it? Are you still happy with it?" And the ones who didn't have to explain themselves still love their poster, and the ones who did hate their poster. And, furthermore, the ones who had to explain themselves, it turns out, only took the posters of the hanging cats of the little kittens, hanging their babies. What does mean hanging cats? It doesn't mean like you know those posters? You surely saw them, or maybe you have lived in the upper kind of intellectual precincts for so long that you lost contact with the rest of us. But, you know, don't you never see them, the little kitten hanging on a bar, and it says, "Hang in there, baby." You know? Oh, yeah. All right. I don't think of it as hanging. I think it is sort of, you're faking it. You're just saying. No, no, you're right. You're right, I am faking it. Actually, when I first saw that, I thought the kitten was having to do a chin-up. And so, it didn't have the desired effect. I thought, "Why are they torturing us kittens?" Right? Why do kittens have to work? Is it, you know, is it not enough that human beings have to go to the gym? Anyway. But you had those, then you had impressionist posters. And the kids who had to explain their preferences overwhelmingly chose the kittens. And those who didn't have to explain themselves chose the impressionist posters. So, what that says is, the act of making you explain your preferences, not only biased you in favor of something, but you didn't actually want. It also made you change your preference away from something that was sophisticated and in favor of something that was unsophisticated. If you think about the whole universe of focus group testing and something, it determines all of the cultural products that get into our society. That makes you really stop and worry. Right? We're putting people through a process that alienates them from their true needs and that biases them in favor of the unsophisticated. An overwhelming majority of the greatest and most successful movies or sitcoms or television shows of all time tested badly. Almost by definition, the really breakthrough shows will test badly in focus groups. I actually saw the focus group results for Mary Tyler Moore show, which were devastating. We hate it. Mary was abrasive, roto was, you know, obnoxious, you know, in the focus group testing of all the family, which got one of the lowest scores of any pilot tested CBS. The overwhelming majority of people who watched the shows said that the only way to fix it was to turn Archie into a kind of cuddly sensitive. You know, it's crazy, it's crazy. The only reason these shows didn't make it on the air is that somebody at some point just says, you know what? Ignore that stuff. I like it. So the suggestion here is that because these snap judgments are a mysterious, overexplained, therefore corrected in the wrong direction, frankly, capitalism should have no cutting edge excitement, except that there are these occasional people take the risk, but the system, so that's one consequence. The other, though, is very, very more interesting to me. If you can't know why you have a feeling in your gut, and you can't explain why you have a feeling in your gut, and to some extent you can't control what's the feeling in your gut, you wonder who's in charge of the choices that you make. And there's a whole section of this book, which is maybe the scariest, which is about something called priming, where external clues, things that you see, trigger biases inside. So let me run you through some of those. There's a game you ask your readers to play, where you play, there are words in the game, and in one of the games you play, the words wrinkle, bingo, and florida appear, matter of factly. What happens to people who see while doing something else wrinkle, bingo, and florida? They walk out of the room after the test is over more slowly than they walked into the room. You ask people to play a game of trivial pursuit. Some of them you say, "First, before we play this game, let's think about professors for a moment, and now we'll play trivial pursuit." Another group you say, "Let's play trivial pursuit, but now let's think about sucker hooligans, and then we'll play trivial pursuit." What's the difference? If I make you think about professors first, your scores are substantially superior. You win, basically. If I make you think about hooligans, you lose. Just thinking about them. Yes. Can we step away from the 96th Street Y for just a moment? Here? Because this priming thing that you and Malcolm are discussing gets kind of eerie when you go actually beyond words. Like here, why don't you have a sip of this coffee? This coffee here? Yeah. Right now? Yeah. Let's go ahead and have a sip. Why are you looking at me like that? Because I've just primed you. What do you mean? You just what? Primed you. I'll explain. Hi. I'm John. We talked to a psychologist. My name is John Barge and I'm a professor at Yale University in psychology department. John did an interesting experiment. Hey, check one too. He a grad student by the name of Lawrence Williams. Here's what they did. Lawrence went out into the world. He had a bunch of stuff with him. A briefcase, some coffee, some papers, so much stuff that he could barely carry at all. He went out. Went out into the, in front of the library or in town and he would approach somebody. And he'd say, excuse me, sir, ma'am, would you mind taking this survey? It's just a minute of your time. They'd give their agreement to be in the study. Great. It's a pretty simple survey. What kind of survey? Well, it's had a picture of a guy on it and a description of the guy's guy's name was Joe. So here's Joe. Joe is these six traits. There's a little description of Joe right there on the paper. All I want you to do, he would say. All I want you to do for this survey is just tell me gut feeling. What do you think of Joe? Do you like him? That's it. That's it. Do I like? How much do you like Joe? That's the whole question? Yeah. You mean like, rate it. One to ten. One to ten. And everyone saw the same person described the same way. Everyone sees the same description. But there's one thing I haven't told you yet. What? Somewhere in this process toward the beginning, you would ever so casually ask them, can you just do me a favor? My hands are full. Can you hold this cup of coffee? You're holding this just for a second. Thanks. And they just take it for a second. It's all very natural. So it's not even seen as part of the experiment. Because it was just a second. Well, I should say. Yeah. Not everybody got the same cup of coffee. In fact, he would hand half the people a cup of hot coffee and he would hand the other half a cup of iced coffee like I gave you. And it was always really fast. They only hold the cup for maybe a second at most. But that second, whether it was hot or cold, seems to have made a difference. Because the hot coffee people, people who had touched the or held the hot coffee, when they were asked, do you like Joe? The majority said, yeah. Exactly. They liked Joe. Whereas the cold coffee people, by and large, they didn't like him. Oh, cold. Is that right? I just like very, very, very good. I kid you not. They have repeated the study many, many times. Always the same result. People who hold the hot coffee are more pro-Joe than the people who hold the iced coffee. In other words, something happens in that second when they hold the cup. Some sort of mistranslation in their brain where warm cup becomes warm Joe. Real warm. This physical sensation gets confused with the metaphor. People are all the same temperature, usually 98.6 degrees. We're not different in warmth than cold. Physically, but we talk about people that way. It's very important to us. If you hear somebody who is warm, you immediately like them. If you hear a person's cold, you know, you don't want to be their friend. You don't want to hire them. Warmth and coldness psychologically is all about trust. It's all about, are you a friend or a foe? Why wouldn't it, why would, if that, but if that's true, why is it true? Why, why the confusion? Yeah, why does it boil down to something as dumb as that? Well, John Vargin is a team of actually been asking that question, doing some neuroscience to see if maybe the inside the brain they can see something they would explain it? And it seems that the area of the brain that records temperature, that's responsive to actual physical temperature is also the same area of the brain that is the location of where trust. The same little part of the brain is got both of those things going on. And he thinks that there is a good reason for that. Temperature and trust are in fact linked, particularly when you're a little baby. As infants, our first learning about the world is usually in terms of what we can see and what we can touch. We don't have much memory and we can't think very well. So it's all about our immediate experience. Well, a huge important area of experience for a little baby is to keep close to the caretaker and to stay warm. This is something that's so critical when they're so tiny and helpless. If they don't maintain closeness, if they don't maintain warmth, they don't survive. So I guess the point is if you're hiring somebody and you really want to hire the right person, don't have any coffee around. But the first step is to accept the possibility and very few people believe me. I try to explain to my family and my friends what I do and they never believe any of these things are really true of them. Because we don't have any awareness of them, I can't remember one time that ever happened to me. Well, yeah, you won't remember one time because it's never going to be in your memory. It's never going to be in your awareness. Yeah, no, it's time, why is it so hard for us to to to concede that a huge part of our own motivations are mysterious? We are back now at the 90s. Again, with Malcolm Gladwell, I have to say there was a part of our conversation where this whole thing got a little scary to me. It had to in part with race because instead of using hot and cold as the metaphor, suppose you use black or white, right? And he said very flatly, there are stereotypes that we have that seem to be beyond our ability to control. In fact, he took a test to measure the unconscious feelings that he had in him about black and white people. I score on an unconscious, it turns out I have a moderate preference for whites on an unconscious level. And he is, by the way, half black. Yeah, which is not unusual for black people, by the way. Nor is it unusual for, you know, Jews to have a moderate unconscious preference for Gentiles over Jews or for any kind of, with blacks it's most striking. My unconscious attitudes towards blacks are a function of the society in which I live. My unconscious, basically, is just basically collecting impressions and thoughts and biases and stuff from the world I live in and massing this massive database. And in a very kind of unfiltered way, right? Well, my unconscious database about race has more negative things about blacks and it than positive things, right? I live in, you know, the United States. Of course it does. And so, it's not going to not affect me, you know. Well, but yeah, it's just, it's horrible, or maybe just this way, that you can't really purge yourself of things that would bother you if you could spy on them. And that you are in some sense a prisoner of your culture in a way that makes you, in some way, ungovernable. You can't quite get on top of yourself. No, the more you push, I mean, I don't push this issue that far in the book because it gets really troubling really quickly. Yeah, it does. The more you push it, you're right, it's deeply disturbing. And there's a book written by a guy named Daniel Wagner at Harvard called The Illusion of Conscious Will. Which, it's a very difficult book. But if you're, he pushes this as far as you go. And you know, at the end, if you go through all of this research, it's been done recently in psychology, you do end up with the position that the notion of conscious will is an illusion. It's just, we make up stories that make it make us feel good about the decisions we make, but in fact, we're not really as, nearly as in charge as we think we are. That was Malcolm Gladwell talking with me at the 92nd Street Y. His new book is called Outliers. Anything you heard this hour, you can hear again on our website radiolab.org. While you're there, send us an email, [email protected] as the address. I'm Chad Abramrod. I'm Robert Crowewich. Thanks for listening. Radiolab is produced by Soren Wheeler and Chad Abramrod. Our staff includes Lilo Miller, Jonathan Mitchell, Alan Horn, Amanda Aaronchake, and Jessica Benco with help from Anna Boykawera and Ike Stiskenda. And Ike Stiskenda. Roger. Good to do it again. Thanks to Mike Peska, Dan Erioli, John O'Leary, and the 92nd Street Y. This will be Tyler. And semi-okay. This is NPR National Public Radio. Okay, that was actually pretty thrilling to do. [Music]