Dealing with Life’s Decisions – (1) Blinded by Science

This piece is the first in two on the question of how to make decisions in life.

Some decisions we simply take too hastily, using cognitive shortcuts pre-programmed in our brains, and we would benefit from slowing down, thinking them through, applying a structured decision framework to them, and so on. A good example of this class of decision problem is investment. Provided you can frame the problem narrowly enough – i.e. that logically prior issues have been solved – investment decisions will be improved by thinking them through, because they will be freed from several cognitive errors which typically characterize them. This type of problem is simple and much has been written on it, so I will put it aside.

I also want to put temporarily aside the “big decisions” of life – whether and whom to marry, whether to have children and how many, and so on. These decisions will have consequences which, obviously, you cannot compute when taking them. I will reincorporate this type of decision in the second piece in this series.

In this article I want to look at decisions which are more everyday, which obviously may also have uncomputable effects (you sign up for the art class, at which you meet someone who changes your life) but which are usually designed to have more prosaic ones. For example: which classes to take at school; which sports to practice; dietary regime and so on. These are decisions in relation to which a certain amount of “evidence” exists, but where this evidence is not conclusive. Those are most decisions in life, and there is a reason why we have evolved cognitive short cuts to deal with them. It is not my intention to argue that there is nothing to be gained from applying more structured thinking to this type of decision (or other decision heuristics which go beyond “gut feeling”). What I do wish to do is to show that, almost inevitably, we think about this sort of decision in the wrong way. In short, we are so conditioned to acknowledge the supremacy of “rational” reasoning over our instincts that in fact we allow ourselves to be swayed by arguments which have the appearance of rationality but suffer from shortcomings which are so pervasive and fundamental that we would almost always do better to ignore these arguments altogether.

I am going to take an entirely typical example, of the kind we encounter many times on a daily basis, at least if we try to keep ourselves abreast of the news. Let us say we read a journalistic article, purported itself to be based on a scientific article, reporting on certain alleged health benefits of yoga. Those benefits speak to some issues or concerns we have with our own health, and so the idea has been put in our minds of giving yoga a go. Should we?

Please note that this example is just that. The media disseminates claims like this all the time. For example, we might read that playing a musical instrument is associated with higher intelligence. Or that bilingualism is negatively correlated with Alzheimer’s. Or that a diet rich in proteins results in more durable weight loss. And so on, and so on (I made all those examples up just to give the flavour of the type of truth claims we are dealing with and the problem which they pose).

Now, let us suppose that the underlying scientific study is at least correctly carried out and that the journalist has not entirely misrepresented its conclusions. Those are already two hefty assumptions which may or may not apply, but the context may give us an indication as to the confidence we can have that they indeed hold (for example, this is, ceteris paribus, more likely to be true of an article on the BBC than in the Daily Mail). What errors may we still make if, on this basis, we allow the article to modify our behavior?

A whole host.

Changing behavior has costs. There are the obvious direct costs, which may be greater or less depending on the case: in the yoga example they are likely to be fairly limited (yoga subscription, transit to the class, kit….). But then, there are also the sizeable opportunity costs. Yes, this may be a good use of my time, but is it the best use? Do I need to pre-commit resources up front?

This question cannot be answered unless you know what your priorities are: those outcomes which will make the biggest difference in your life. Ideally, that would be a pre-existing exercise. But even if you know you need to address a particular issue – say high blood pressure – and the evidence presented in the article actually shows some efficacy for the course of action in question (yoga), you can still go very wrong. By plumping for yoga, you go with the availability heuristic, which privileges the course of action you just heard of over what you might need to do more work to identify. By taking action, you lessen cognitive dissonance, and therefore the nagging feeling inside which might have prompted you to do more serious research or thinking customized to your own situation. Yoga will work on some cellular pathways, but those are certainly not the only factors involved in giving rise to your condition. There may be much more important ones, but ones which you are much more resistant to addressing – say your work, your relationships or where you live.

Even if the information is accurate, it has neither been produced, nor has it reached you, by chance. Someone decided to test a particular yoga program (which may have nothing to do with what is on offer in your locality). They did so because they have a predisposition to finding a favourable effect from yoga. But the same favourable effect might be produced in any of a number of other, unresearched ways – a problem which is particularly acute if the mechanism of action is not elucidated or hypothesized subject to a great degree of speculation. So there is a selection bias. This cannot be ruled out on the part of the media either, and if you got the article second hand, say through Facebook, your friend has also selected it in preference to others – with what reason?

In addition, the study may very well be partly or entirely attributable to the placebo effect (which is a great effect, but could be produced in other ways), with remaining variation explained by factors which yoga shares with other forms of exercise and/or other spiritual practices. The participants in the study may have self-selected, and therefore share attributes which differ from those of the population in general, and perhaps also from you. For example, imagine that those who do yoga are twice as likely to be vegetarian. Correlation is not causation: it could be their diet that explains all or part of the variation observed. You, in any case, are not Ms or Mr Average – you are older or younger, fitter or less fit. Yoga may be a fit for your other activities, or it may duplicate the benefit of them.

Now, I am certainly not saying you shouldn’t do yoga, nor that it doesn’t have benefits. I am saying that it’s almost worthless to read the article, and it may be worse than worthless to produce or distribute it. This article has in all likelihood not given you any new information at all. All it has done is make an incremental contribution to the “brand” of yoga as perceived by you. This, by itself, is not the core of the problem, however. The core is the idea you have that science should be your main tool to solve the problem you started out with. Although you have this idea, you have not in fact been scientific at all. You could have been more scientific – for example, read a book that discusses a series of approaches to your problem. That would probably have been a good idea (the article you read was not some kind of breaking news, so no need to be afraid that the book would be out of date). But even if you had done this, the problem would still have been orders of magnitude too complex for you to decide it on the basis of science alone. You not only will decide it on the basis of factors which you cannot really rationalize. But this is the only way to decide it. All the research you can possibly do is merely preparation, hopefully valuable preparation to make a better decision (there is, of course, a trade-off with the time you invested), but it will never provide an algorithm which decides on your behalf. Some people will choose to view this irreducible subjectivity as a lamentable concession to human nature. But, as I will explore in part two, it seems to me that all of the alchemy which turns research into outcomes is there, in the giddying sovereignty of the moment of decision.

Science, just like the mind, is a tool; something else – you – must be in the driving seat. Positivism is unscientific. Science makes a contribution, and yet if you have the belief that your decisions should be guided by science, it is very likely that, in combination with cognitive and selective biases, you in fact are led into decisions which are worse than those you would have made had you not had this belief at all.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act…
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response…

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men