How Do We Decide?

Rev. Grace H. Simons

"You want fries with that?"

It's a familiar question and just one of the millions of decisions we make day in and day out. Some are pretty automatic. Yes, I do want coffee in the morning: black. And I prefer my eggs scrambled, though I'm ok with other forms. Some decisions aren't crucial. What will I wear today? Which route will I take to work or for errands? Will I even look at the dessert menu?

Then there's the whole range of increasing importance and complication - from "What school should I go to?" "Shall I change jobs?" "Which car should I buy?" - all the way to "Is this the right person to spend my life with?" "How do I cope with this unexpected life change?" "Is there something I can do in this crisis that will avert disaster?"

How can we decide? How do we decide? I'm sure that we humans have wondered about that from our earliest times. But it was Plato who set a paradigm for understanding decision making that has lasted into our own day. He saw decision making as a tension between reason and emotion, comparing them to a charioteer keeping two horses pulling in the direction of his choice. Sometimes the charioteer must sometimes resort to whip and goad to keep them under control. With this image, Plato set our understanding of reason struggling to master wild emotion. We see it in many places. In Romans 7:19, St Paul lamented that the good he wished to do went undone while the evil he wished to avoid was what he actually did. He credited that to evil rather than emotion, but it looks pretty similar to Plato's model to me.

Unitarians, and then Unitarian Universalists have been known for our embrace of the use of reason in religion and our suspicion that church teachings and traditional authority are often based elsewhere. We're pretty proud of that. It's meant that we've asked a lot of questions about the basis for traditional doctrines and rejected many of them. It's meant that we've been more open to increasing knowledge as scientific advances explained seeming mysteries. We're pretty sure that we wouldn't have put Galileo on trial for his discoveries! We have claimed that love is the doctrine of our church - and that the search for truth is its sacrament. At times, that second part looms larger than anything else.

We have scorned superstition and been skeptical about any claims for the supernatural. In this country, Unitarianism developed concurrently with the nation - and both have been heavily influenced by Enlightenment thinking, with its emphasis on reason and on individual rights and liberties. You may remember that Thomas Jefferson - a Unitarian sympathizer if not an actual member - produced his own version of the New Testament. He did it by cutting out all the miracles and any other features he thought defied natural laws. They weren't reasonable, so they had to go. And he had the right to make those changes, despite traditional Christianity. We UUs have been suspicious of emotion's wild horses and acutely aware of the dangers of group-think and its extreme, mob psychology. All this has meant that we've tried to make our decisions on rational bases and relied on reason to keep our emotions out of the process. We have talked about rational self interest and how it gives rise to logical choices.

Meanwhile, psychologists have been looking more at the ways we humans do decide and behave rather than how we're advised to decide and behave. As you probably suspect, emotion plays quite a part. Marketers have taken great advantage of this. The classic example of course, is the young, attractive woman advertising a car. But sometimes subtle factors can elicit an emotional response. It's no accident that the newest TV models are displayed near the entrance at Costco and the checkout aisles at every grocery store are stocked with snack food. A story in the Bee this week described ways that psychologists are helping school cafeterias induce students to make healthier choices about their lunches. Outright bans produce resentment. Routinely placing fruit on each plate produces waste. So now they're trying more subtle approaches. Placing fruit in baskets instead of metal bins makes them more attractive. Simply asking if the student would like a salad with their pizza increased salad consumption by 30% in one high school.

A few years ago, I came across a book called On Desire by William B. Irvine, a philosophy professor. The part of the book that impressed me was his statement that while desire is necessary to our will to live and our interest in most everything, we have little or no influence on what we want. Irvine says that desires spring forth on their own - and that all our explanations and reasonings are constructed to justify what we wanted in the first place. Hmm. Sounds pretty similar to something from Ben Franklin, "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature," he wrote, "since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." Irvine does provide a lot of evidence for the idea, along with some advice about how to recognize those desires and make decisions that are more than impulsive.

A newer book by Jonah Lehrer goes further. It's called How We Decide. Lehrer brings together studies in psychology, findings from physiological measurements and new brain imaging technologies and stories of real life decision-making that seem to defy explanation. It contains some findings that Plato would find pretty surprising. And it's a very good read.

Lehrer starts with cases of crisis - pretty extreme examples that we're unlikely to face ourselves. They turn out to be revealing of more complex processes of decision-making than we have usually considered. Lehrer's stores range from decisions made by cockpit crews when systems have failed and wartime responses through credit card use and mortgage choices to poker championships and succeeding on "Deal or No Deal" What emerges is a picture of the interplay of brain regions involved with emotion, reason and the complex interactions between them. It becomes clear that emotional reactions can indeed lead us to poor decisions but sometimes they identify the best course from a larger set of variables than our logical brains can entertain at once. Let me share some of Lehrer's stories.

One study involved having people play a card game. It goes like this: each player is given four decks of cards - two red and two black - and $2000 in play money. Each card tells if the player has won money or lost some. The player is told to turn over one card at a time and to make as much money as possible. The catch is that the decks aren't equal. Two give larger payouts and very high losses. The other two are steadier - no big rewards, but only minimal loss. Over the course of the game, they provide much greater success. Got it? One more thing: the players are wired with receptors sensitive to electrical conductance of the skin. Greater conductance signals nervousness and anxiety. OK. The game proceeds. The players make their choices. The study involves a lot of people.

On the average, it took a player about 50 cards to begin to choosing solely from the profitable decks. After all, think about the variables - two colors, four decks, no reason to suspect a difference between decks, and individual cards that tell if you've won or lost. It's a lot to consider. The sensors revealed, however, that skin conductance changed after only ten cards were turned. The emotional brain had figured out that two of the decks were too risky. The person felt nervous when reaching for a deck that gave bad results. It turns out that dopamine secreters are quick to identify a pattern.

Here's another case. We hear a lot about credit card debt these days. Lehrer reports that the average American has 8.5 credit cards and the average household owes more than $9000 on them. But why? One study organized a real life sealed bid auction for tickets to a Boston Celtics game. Half the bidders were told they would have to pay cash. The other half could use a credit card. Otherwise, everything was the same. When the bids were opened and each group's bids were averaged, the credit card group's bids were twice as high as the group that expected to pay in cash. Credit cards just don't register in the brain the same way that cash does. Cash transactions involve parts of the brain that register a sense of loss that has to be balanced with the value of the purchase. Credit cards - well they're just plastic. This is the reason that credit counselors very often collect or destroy the credit cards of those who come for help in reducing their debts.

We know that extreme situations evoke emotions that are so strong that adrenaline swamps our normal patterns of interaction in the brain. In cases like these, a person is occasionally able to hold panic at bay and come up with a novel and effective solution. Lehrer tells of a veteran firefighter named Wag Dodge, whose team was fighting a runaway grass fire when the wind shifted and a wall of flames raced toward them. Anyone's first instincts would be to run for their lives. And that's what they did.

But it became obvious that the flames were advancing too fast. Dodge stopped. He yelled at the men to quit running, but they ignored him. He took some matches from his pocket and lit the grass in front of him. The new fire raced away, driven by the terrific winds. After a few seconds, Dodge stepped into the still warm ashes left from his small fire and lay down. He soaked his handkerchief with water from his canteen, held it to his mouth and shut his eyes. He tried to breathe the thin layer of air remaining near the ground.

It worked. Dodge came out with hardly an injury, while most of his crew died when the fire engulfed them. Since then, Dodge's `escape fire' technique has been taught to wildfire crews.

Dodge's panic did not help him. Only when he was able recognize the futility of his immediate response and step beyond it, was his brain able to access the wealth of his experience and all that he knew of fire behavior - and come up with a creative new solution.

Now all of these are great stories. But what do they tell us about how we make decisions? And what insights or implications are especially relevant for us as Unitarian Universalists? I don't pretend to have all the answers to those questions , but I have been thinking about the questions a bit.

How do we make decisions? How should we make them if we want the best outcomes? Well, it depends on the situation. When the decision is relatively simple, go for logic. There's no substitute for doing the math when you're looking at loan options. When the choice isn't an important one - do what you want! How unhappy could you be if you get an ice cream flavor that you don't care for? When you're making a complicated decision, Lehre recommends looking at all the rational evidence - and then going off to do something different for a while. When your emotional brain areas have had a chance to weigh the factors, you're likely to know what you want even if you can't quite explain it. In crisis situations, you'll feel the fear. But try to get a little distance from the panic so that your more rational faculties have a chance to work. (And hope they work fast!) But the best news is that understanding both the strengths and limitations of reason and emotion means we can choose the best strategies when we make our choices.

And for us as UUs? Well, we can remember that first line over our archway: "Love is the doctrine of this Fellowship." We can give our emotions a little more credit. Maybe we can be less dismissive of those who sometimes grow impatient with convoluted logic. Surely we can honor the ability of the arts to convey deep meaning. We can look for ways to learn from others who have different approaches than our own.

One of the UUA's new efforts - Standing on the Side of Love - seems like a move in that direction. It is deliberately outward focused in the sense of seeking to work with other groups promoting love and justice in our communities. Right now it has two areas of focus - GLBTQ issues like Don't Ask Don't Tell, ENDA [ see below] and marriage equality and immigration, with all its associated issues. Both are questions of love and justice - and are complicated by history and prejudice and patchwork systems of law and law enforcement that need careful scrutiny. By reminding ourselves that these issues call us to stand on the side of love, we can avoid getting bogged down in details and complications, even though those factors have to be addressed. We can be clear that we're talking about fair and considerate treatment for real people.

UUs believe that our religious values should guide our lives and our actions - both in our congregations and outside them. That involves lots of decisions. We're happy that each of us chooses ice cream flavors however we like. And we know that each person will understand religious ideas differently. But when things get complicated and the issues are significant, we're called to use our reason and logic in the service of love.

October 17, 2010

ENDA The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is a proposed bill in the United States Congress that would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity for civilian nonreligious employers with over 15 employees.

Rev. Grace Simons left us a collection of her sermons when she retired in October, 2011. We have a brief biography of Rev. Grace, and the last edition of Grace Notes, a column she wrote for our newsletter.
We also have sermons by Rev. Joe Cherry, our Interim Minister.
Our Guests, who include visiting clergy, lay people and one rocket scientist.