Daniel Gardner - The Science of Fear

Even the most cerebral actions can undergo this shift from Head to Gut. Neophyte doctors faced with a common ailment consciously and carefully think about the checklist of symptoms before making a diagnosis, but old hands “feel” the answer in an instant. Art historians whose job is to authenticate antiquities make the same transition. In the now-famous anecdote that opens Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink , a Greek statue that had supposedly been authenticated by a battery of scientific tests was nonetheless instantly dismissed as a fraud by several art historians. Why? The experts couldn’t say. They just felt that something was wrong—one called it “intuitive repulsion.” Testing later confirmed that the statue was indeed a fraud, a truth the experts were able to feel in an instant because they had studied and analyzed Greek statues for so long that their knowledge and skills had been absorbed into the unconscious operations of Gut.

Figuring out how those unconscious operations work is the job of cognitive psychologists. Over the last several decades, they’ve made enormous advances and learned many things that will forever change the way we think about thinking.

“Heuristics and biases” is the rather opaque name for one of the most exciting efforts to tease out the secrets of thinking. In this case, “bias” isn’t meant to be an insult. It’s a tendency, nothing more. If you read a shopping list on which one of the items is written in green ink while all the rest are blue, you will tend to remember the one green item. That’s the Von Restorff effect—a bias in favor of remembering the unusual. It’s only one of a long list of biases uncovered by psychologists. Some—like the Von Restorff effect—are pretty obvious. Others are more surprising, as we will see.

As for “heuristics,” they’re rules of thumb. One we’ve already encountered is the appearance-equals-reality rule. If it looks like a lion, it is a lion. Nice and simple. Instead of getting bogged down in information, Gut uses just a few observations and a handy rule to instantly conclude that the large catlike animal walking this way is indeed a lion, and perhaps it would be best if you were to depart forthwith. That’s the kind of quick thinking that can keep you alive. Unfortunately, the same rule can also lead to the conclusionthat the snapshot in your wallet is much more than a mere piece of paper and must be found even if that means wandering around an African slum after midnight. That’s the kind of thinking that can get you killed. So Gut is good, but not perfect.

Fortunately, Gut isn’t the only one trying to make decisions and get us to act accordingly. There’s also Head. It monitors Gut’s decisions and it can at least try to adjust or overrule them when it thinks Gut is wrong. Gut decides, Head reviews: This process is how most of our thoughts and decisions are made. “One of psychology’s fundamental insights,” writes Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, “is that judgments are generally the products of nonconscious systems that operate quickly, on the basis of scant evidence, and in a routine manner, and then pass their hurried approximations to consciousness, which slowly and deliberately adjusts them.”

Standing on a wide plain and looking at a mountain in the distance—to use an illustration devised by Daniel Kahneman—you will have an intuitive sense of how far away the mountain is. Where did that intuition come from? What is it based on? You won’t know. You probably won’t even know that you have an intuition, at least you won’t think about it that way. You’ll just look at the mountain and you’ll have a rough sense of how far away the mountain is. As long as you don’t have other information that suggests the intuition is completely out of whack, you’ll accept it as a good measure of reality and act on it.

Unknown to you, that estimate came from the unconscious operation of Gut. It used a simple rule of thumb to come up with it: Objects appear increasingly blurry the farther away they are, so if the mountain looks very blurry, it is very far away. It’s a good rule that generally provides reliable information in an instant. If it weren’t, natural selection wouldn’t have hardwired it into our brains.

And yet, it can go wrong. What if the day happens to be particularly hot and humid? That will make the air hazy and all objects will appear more blurred than they would on a clear day. To get an accurate estimate of the distance, we have to adjust for that. But Gut doesn’t adjust. It just applies the rule of thumb. And in this case, that will result in an error. So Head has to step in and tweak Gut’s estimate to account for the hazy air.

But will it? Unfortunately, there’s a good chance it won’t.

Consider the following question: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Almost everyone who reads this question will have an immediate impulse to answer “10 cents.” It just looks and feels right. And yet it’s wrong. In fact, it’s clearly wrong—if you give it some careful thought—and yet it is perfectly normal to stumble on this test. “Almost everyone we ask reports an initial tendency to answer ‘ten cents,’ ” write psychologists Kahneman and Shane Frederick. “Many people yield to this immediate impulse. The surprisingly high rate of errors in this easy problem illustrates how lightly System Two [Head] monitors the output of System One [Gut]: people are not accustomed to thinking hard, and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that quickly comes to mind.”

Head can be amazingly lax. Psychologists have repeatedly shown, for example, that when people are asked about their own sense of well-being, the weather makes a major difference: Sunny skies push the reported sense of well-being up, while rain drives it down. That’s Gut talking. Everyone knows weather affects mood. But there’s obviously far more to the question of one’s well-being than a temporary mood caused by foul or fair weather. Head should step in and adjust Gut’s answer accordingly. And yet it often doesn’t. Numerous studies have even found that the weather is strongly correlated with gains or losses in stock markets. It’s ludicrous that sunshine should have any bearing on the financial calculations of Wall Street stockbrokers, and yet it clearly does. Head is like a bright but lazy teenager: capable of great things, if he would just get out of bed.

And that’s how things work under normal conditions. Psychologists have demonstrated that when people are in a rush, Head’s monitoring of Gut’s judgments becomes even looser and more mistakes get through. “Morning people” are sloppier in the evening, while evening people are at their worst in the morning. Distraction and exhaustion also reduce Head’s focus. So does stress. And it’s pretty obvious what happens after drinking a beer or three.

Now, if you happen to be in a stressful spot like an African slum after midnight, exhausted from a long day of work, a little woozy from drinking a few pints of Guinness, and upset by the theft of your wallet and the pictures inside—well, Head really isn’t going to be at his best.

Summarizing the relationship between Head and Gut, Kahneman wrote that they “compete for the control of overt responses.” One might say—with a touch less precision but a little more color—that each of us is a car racing along a freeway and inside each car is a caveman who wants to drive and a bright-but-lazy teenager who knows he should keep a hand on the wheel but, well, that’s kind of a hassle and he’d really rather listen to his iPod and stare out the window.

That night in Nigeria, the caveman drove while the teen curled up in the backseat and went to sleep. I was lucky to get out alive.