Está en la página 1de 23

01

02
03
04
05
06
07
08
On S e c o n d Thought 09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
S31
N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 1 7/28/10 3:45 PM


01
02
03
04
05
06
07

On S e c o n d Thought
08
09
10
11
Ou t smarting Your Mi nd ’s Hard-Wired Habits 12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
W r ay 20
21
Herbert
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
crown publishers S31
new york N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 3 7/28/10 3:45 PM


01
02
03
04
05 Copyright © 2010 by Wray Herbert

06 All rights reserved.


07 Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
08 an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
09
www.crownpublishing.com
10
11 Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks
12 of Random House, Inc.
13
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
14 Herbert, Wray.
15 On second thought : outsmarting your mind’s hard-wired
16 habits / Wray Herbert.—1st ed.
p.  cm.
17
Includes index.
18 1. Thought and thinking.  I. Title.
19 BF441.H46  2010
20 153.4 — dc22     2010003073

21 isbn 978-0-307-46163-6
22
23 Printed in the United States of America
24
2  4  6  8  10  9  7  5  3  1
25
26 First Edition
27
28
29
30
31S
32N

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 4 7/28/10 3:45 PM


01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
To S usi e 09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
S31
N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 5 7/28/10 3:45 PM


01
02
03
04
Co n t e n ts 05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
Introduction 1
15
16
Part One: The Body in the World 17
18
1. The Visceral Heuristic: Cold Shoulders and Clean Hands 17
19
2. The Visionary Heuristic: Hills and Home Runs 29 20
3. The Momentum Heuristic: Intuitive Physics 41 21
4. The Fluency Heuristic: The Power of Penmanship 53 22
23
5. The Mimicry Heuristic: Feeling Your Inner Ape 65
24
6. The Mapmaker Heuristic: Getting Away from It All 79 25
26
Part Two: Numbers in Our Neurons 27
28
7. The Arithmetic Heuristic: “For Just Pennies a Day” 93 29
8. The Scarcity Heuristic: Supply and Desire 105 30
9. The Anchor Heuristic: Why Things Cost $19.95 117 S31
N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 7 7/28/10 3:45 PM


01 10. The Calorie Heuristic: “Will Work for Food” 131
02 11. The Decoy Heuristic: Please Don’t Make Me Choose 141
03
12. The Futuristic Heuristic: A Wrinkle in Time 151
04
05
06 Part Three: How the Mind Makes Meaning

07
13. The Design Heuristic: Simplicity and Purpose 165
08
09 14. The Foraging Heuristic: Exploring and Exploiting 179
10 15. The Caricature Heuristic: Engineering Prejudice 193
11 16. The Cooties Heuristic: Contagion and Magical Thinking 207
12
17. The Naturalist Heuristic: Back to the Garden 217
13
14 18. The Whodunit Heuristic: Murder and Morality 229
15 19. The Grim Reaper Heuristic: Loneliness and Zealotry 243
16 20. The Default Heuristic: Not to Decide Is . . . 255
17
18
Selected Further Reading 265
19
20
Acknowledgments 277
21 Index 281
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31S
32N

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 8 7/28/10 3:45 PM


01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
On S e c o n d Thought 09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
S31
N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 9 7/28/10 3:45 PM


01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
Introduction 09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

O n February 12, 1995, a party of three seasoned ­backcountry


skiers set out for a day on the pristine slopes of Utah’s ­Wasatch
Mountain Range. Steve Carruthers, thirty-seven years old, was the
18
19
20
most experienced of the group, though they were all skilled skiers 21
and mountaineers. Carruthers had skied these hills many times and 22
was intimately familiar with the terrain. Their plan was to trek over 23
the divide from Big Cottonwood Canyon to Porter Fork, the next 24
canyon to the north. 25
Two hours out, they met another skiing party. A storm had 26
dropped almost two feet of new snow on the range the day before, 27
and the two groups stood together for about five minutes, chatting 28
about the best routes through the mountains. A couple of skiers in 29
the other party were a bit spooked by the foggy conditions, but they 30
all decided that they would be okay if they chose a prudent route S31
N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 1 7/28/10 3:45 PM


2  |  On Second Thought

01 across the lower slopes. Carruthers’ party broke trail through the
02 sparse woods of Gobbler’s Knob.
03 Within the hour, Carruthers was dead. As the skiers headed
04 across a shallow, treed expanse, they triggered an avalanche. More
05 than a hundred metric tons of snow roared down the mountainside
06 at fifty miles an hour, blanketing the slope and pinning Carruthers
07 against an aspen. The other party heard the avalanche and rushed to
08 the rescue, but by the time they dug Carruthers out, he was uncon-
09 scious. He never regained awareness.
10 The other two skiers in Carruthers’ group survived, but they
11 faced some serious criticism back home. What were they thinking?
12 This pass was well known as avalanche terrain, and February was
13 considered high hazard season. The chatter in the tight-knit skiing
14 community was that Carruthers had been reckless, that despite his
15 experience he had ignored obvious signs of danger and tempted fate.
16 None of this rang true to Ian McCammon. McCammon had
17 known Carruthers for years, and the two had been climbing buddies
18 at one time. Sure, Carruthers may have been a risk taker when he
19 was younger, but he had matured. Just recently, while the two men
20 were riding a local ski lift together, Carruthers had talked adoringly
21 about his lovely wife, Nancy, and his four-year-old daughter, Lucia.
22 His days of derring-do were over, he had told McCammon. It was
23 time to settle down.
24 So what happened on that fateful afternoon? What skewed this
25 experienced backcountry skier’s judgment that he would put himself
26 and his party in harm’s way? Did he perish in an avoidable accident?
27 Saddened and perplexed by his friend’s death, McCammon deter-
28 mined to figure out what went wrong.
29 McCammon is an experienced backcountry skier in his own
30 right, and a wilderness instructor, but he is also a scientist. He has a
31S Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, and as a researcher at the Univer-
32N sity of Utah, he once worked on robotics and aerospace systems for

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 2 7/28/10 3:45 PM


Introduction  |  3

NASA and the Defense Department. He already knew snow science 01


pretty well, so he began reading everything he could on the science of 02
risk and decision making. He ended up studying the details of more 03
than seven hundred deadly avalanches that took place between 1972 04
and 2003, to see if he could find any commonalities that might ex- 05
plain his friend’s untimely death. 06
With the rigor of an engineer, he systematically categorized all 07
the avalanches according to several factors well known to backcoun- 08
try skiers as risks: recent snowfall or windstorm, terrain features like 09
cliffs and gullies, thawing and other signs of instability, and so forth. 10
He computed an “exposure score” to rate the risk that preceded every 11
accident. 12
Then he gathered as much information as he could on the ill-fated 13
skiers themselves, all 1,355 of them: the makeup and dynamics of the 14
skiing party, the expertise of the group leader as well as the others, 15
plus anything that was known about the hours and minutes leading 16
up to the fatal moment. Then he crunched all the data together. 17
His published results were intriguing. He found many patterns 18
in the accidents, including several poor choices that should not have 19
been made by experienced skiers. He concluded that these foolish de- 20
cisions could be explained by six common thinking lapses, and he 21
wrote up the work in a paper titled “Evidence of Heuristic Traps in 22
Recreational Avalanche Accidents.” The paper has become a staple of 23
modern backcountry training and has no doubt saved many lives. 24
Heuristics are cognitive rules of thumb, hard-wired mental 25
short­cuts that everyone uses every day in routine decision making 26
and judgment. The study of heuristics is one of the most robust areas 27
of scientific research today, producing hundreds of academic articles 28
a year, yet the concept is little known outside the labs and offices of 29
academia. This book is an attempt to remedy that. 30
Heuristics are normally helpful—indeed, they are crucial to S31
getting through the myriad of decisions we face every day without N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 3 7/28/10 3:45 PM


4  |  On Second Thought

01 overthinking every choice. But they’re imperfect and often irrational.


02 They can be traps, as they were in the frozen mountain pass where
03 Carruthers perished. Much has been written in the past couple of
04 years about the wonders of the rapid, automatic human mind and
05 gut-level decision making. And indeed the unconscious mind is a
06 wonder. But it is also perilous. The shortcuts that allow us to navi-
07 gate each day with ease are the same ones that can potentially trip
08 us up in our ordinary judgments and choices, in everything from
09 health to finance to romance.
10 Most of us are not backcountry skiers, and we will probably
11 never face the exact choices that Carruthers and his friends faced at
12 Gobbler’s Knob. But just because the traps are not life threatening
13 does not mean they aren’t life changing. Here are a few of the heu-
14 ristics that shaped the backcountry skiers’ poor choices—and may be
15 shaping yours in ways you don’t even recognize.
16 Consider the “familiarity heuristic.” This is one of the cogni-
17 tive shortcuts that McCammon identified as a contributing factor in
18 many of the avalanche incidents he studied. The familiarity heuris-
19 tic is one of the most robust heuristics known, and indeed one of
20 the original heuristics identified and studied by pioneers in cogni-
21 tive science. It is a potent mental tool that we draw on every day for
22 hundreds of decisions, and basically what it says is this: if something
23 comes quickly to mind, trust it. It must be available in your memory
24 for a reason, so go with it. The basic rule of thumb is that familiar
25 equals better equals safer.
26 That’s a very useful rule for, say, grocery shopping. There are
27 potentially thousands and thousands of choices that must be made
28 every time you enter your local supermarket. But what if you actually
29 had to make every one of those judgments, comparing every kind of
30 yogurt and every couscous brand before making a selection? You’d
31S be paralyzed. So instead you spot the brand of yogurt or couscous
32N

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 4 7/28/10 3:45 PM


Introduction  |  5

you’ve bought dozens of times before; you grab it, you pay for it, and 01
you’re out of there. No need to study every item on the shelf. It’s also 02
a useful rule for ER physicians, airline pilots, and soccer ­players— 03
people who have to make rapid-fire decisions and are trained to 04
quickly identify familiar patterns and react. 05
Heuristics are amazing time savers, which makes them essential 06
to our busy lives. Many, like the familiarity heuristic, are an amalgam 07
of habit and experience. We don’t want to deliberate every minor 08
choice we make every day, and we don’t need to. But there are always 09
risks when we stop deliberating. McCammon’s avalanche victims, for 10
example, were almost all experienced backcountry skiers, and indeed 11
almost half had had some formal training in avalanche awareness. 12
This expertise didn’t guarantee that they would make the smartest 13
choices. Paradoxically, their expertise may have hurt them. They were 14
so familiar with the terrain that it seemed safe—simply because it al- 15
ways had been safe before. It was familiar, and thus unthreatening. 16
The skiers let down their guard because they all remembered suc- 17
cessful outings that looked pretty much the same as the treacherous 18
one. In fact, McCammon found in his research that there were sig- 19
nificantly more avalanche accidents when the skiers knew the specific 20
locale, compared to ski parties exploring novel terrain. 21
Most of the avalanches in our modern lives have nothing to do 22
with snow. The familiarity heuristic (including the related fluency 23
heuristic, discussed in Chapter 4) has been widely studied in the area 24
of consumer choice and personal finance—and not just how we buy 25
groceries. Princeton psychologists have shown that people are more 26
apt to buy shares in new companies if the names of the companies 27
are easy to read and say, which actually affects the performance of 28
the stock in the short run. University of Michigan psychologists have 29
shown that language (and even the typeface in which something is 30
printed) can affect all sorts of perceptions: whether a roller coaster S31
N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 5 7/28/10 3:45 PM


6  |  On Second Thought

01 seems too risky or a job seems too demanding to take on. Even
02 very subtle manipulations of cognitive familiarity are shaping your
03 choices, big and small, every day.
04 So familiarity and comfort can be traps. But the fact is, Car-
05 ruthers’ decision making really started to go wrong long before he
06 even started waxing his skis. It started back in the warmth of the
07 living room, when he or one of his buddies said, “Hey, let’s take a
08 run out to Gobbler’s Knob tomorrow.” At that point, they triggered
09 another powerful cognitive tool, known as the “default heuristic” or
10 “consistency heuristic.” At that point, with their adventure still an ab-
11 stract notion, they no doubt discussed the conditions, the pros and
12 cons, and made a deliberate assessment of the risks of going out. But
13 once they made that initial decision, the cold calculation stopped.
14 They made a mental commitment, and that thought took on power.
15 We have a powerful bias for sticking with what we already have,
16 not switching course. Unless there is some compelling reason not to,
17 we let our minds default to what’s given or what has already been
18 decided. We rely on stay-the-course impulses all the time, often with
19 good results. Constant switching can be perilous, in everything from
20 financial matters to romantic judgments, so we have become averse
21 to hopping around.
22 But this powerful urge for steadiness can also lock us into a bad
23 choice. Just imagine Carruthers’ ski party standing out there on the
24 slope, chatting with the members of the other ski party. At this point,
25 they could have made the decision to turn around and go home. Per-
26 haps the snowpack seemed too unstable, or a certain gully looked
27 worrisome. The skiers were no doubt taking in all this information,
28 but they were not deliberating the pros and cons with their full men-
29 tal powers because they had really already made their choice. The
30 heuristic mind doesn’t like to second-guess itself once it has momen-
31S tum, and these skiers already had two hours of trekking invested in
32N

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 6 7/28/10 3:45 PM


Introduction  |  7

this decision. It would have taken a lot of mental effort to process all 01
the logical arguments for turning around and going home. 02
So they didn’t. They stuck to their plan because they were cog- 03
nitively biased toward going ahead rather than switching gears. They 04
were stubborn, but not in the way we commonly use the word to 05
mean an obstinate attitude. Their brains were being stubborn, in the 06
most fundamental way, right down in the neurons. We default hun- 07
dreds of times a day, simply because it’s effortful to switch plans. We 08
stay in relationships that are going nowhere simply because it’s easier 09
than getting out. We buy the same brand of car our father did and 10
hesitate to rearrange our stock portfolio. And we uncritically defer to 11
others who make decisions for us—policy makers, who make rules 12
and laws based on the assumption that we will act consistently rather 13
than question. Similarly, it’s safer to need an organ transplant in Paris 14
than in New York City. You’ll find out why in Chapter 20, but the 15
short answer is that it’s the default heuristic at work. 16
There were other heuristics reinforcing the ill-fated skiers’ com- 17
mitment. They probably got some additional mental nudging from 18
what McCammon calls the “acceptance heuristic.” Also known as 19
the “mimicry heuristic,” it is basically the strong tendency to make 20
choices that we believe will get us noticed—and more important, 21
­approved—by others. It’s deep-wired, likely derived from our ancient 22
need for belonging and safety. It can be seen in the satisfaction we get 23
from clubs and other social rituals, like precision military formations 24
and choral singing. It’s a crucial element in group cohesion, but we 25
often apply it in social situations where it’s inappropriate—or even 26
harmful, as it was in many of the accidents that McCammon studied. 27
His analysis showed a much higher rate of risky decision making in 28
groups of six or more skiers, where there was a larger “audience” to 29
please. 30
Then the snow itself can make skiers do senseless things. Every S31
N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 7 7/28/10 3:45 PM


8  |  On Second Thought

01 skier knows the phrase “powder fever,” which means the unreason-
02 able desire to put down the first tracks in freshly fallen snow. Powder
03 fever begins with the first flakes of a long-awaited snowstorm and
04 peaks as soon as conditions permit the first treks out. The virgin
05 powder won’t last long; everyone knows that. So for a few hours it’s
06 like gold, valuable simply because of its scarcity.
07 Psychologists think this “scarcity heuristic” derives from our fun-
08 damental need for personal freedom. We have a visceral reaction to
09 any restriction on our prerogatives as individuals, and one way this
10 manifests itself is in distorted notions about scarcity and value. Hu-
11 mans have made gold valuable because there is not all that much of it
12 to go around, not because it’s a particularly useful metal. So it is with
13 new powder, and so it is with anything else we might perceive as rare,
14 from land to free time. Scarcity can even skew our choices of lovers
15 and partners, if we’re not careful.
16 These are just a few of the heuristics you will learn about in the
17 chapters ahead. This book is not intended to be exhaustive. Some psy-
18 chologists estimate that there are hundreds of powerful heuristics at
19 work in the human brain, some working in tandem with others, some-
20 times reinforcing and sometimes undermining one another. As read-
21 ers will see in the chapters ahead, aspects of the arithmetic heuristic
22 overlap with the futuristic heuristic; the cooties heuristic sometimes
23 resembles certain visceral heuristics; and so forth. The intertwining of
24 these powerful impulses in the mind is in fact very messy, and these
25 tidy chapters are meant as guideposts through the messiness.
26 So where do these potent heuristics come from? And why, if they
27 can be so troublesome, are they seemingly universal? Presumably these
28 cognitive shortcuts are deep-wired into our basic neurology, although
29 their locations in the brain are as yet unknown. What is known is that
30 eons ago, when humans were evolving on the savannas of eastern
31S ­Africa, the brain was going through all sorts of changes to help the
32N species adapt to a shifting environment. Because that world was so full

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 8 7/28/10 3:45 PM


Introduction  |  9

of risks, the primitive brain wired itself for action, including the abil- 01
ity to make very rapid choices and judgments. Many of these power- 02
ful, evolved tendencies remain in the modern mind as heuristics. They 03
remain as potent as ever, though many are no longer adaptive to our 04
current way of life—and lead to faulty thinking. 05
Here’s an example of a powerful heuristic with evolutionary roots. 06
I have a young friend who recently applied to medical school. He re- 07
ally wanted to go to a particular school in Chicago, for a variety of rea- 08
sons, both academic and personal. But knowing that this school was 09
one of the most competitive med schools in the country, he applied to 10
six schools. They were all excellent schools, but he had a clear favorite. 11
He got accepted to his number one pick. But, surprisingly, he 12
was rejected by all of the others. How did he feel? Well, logically, he 13
should feel deliriously happy. He just got into one of the top-notch 14
med schools in the nation; more important, it was the very one he 15
wanted most. The rejections should be totally irrelevant to him at this 16
point. But he wasn’t deliriously happy. He was disappointed and hurt. 17
Even though he knew the rejections were meaningless, even though 18
his reasonable mind wanted to focus on his success and celebrate, he 19
couldn’t shake the feelings of disappointment and resentment. 20
Psychologists talk about our negativity bias, which is another per- 21
ilous form of heuristic thinking. Over eons of human evolution, we 22
as a species learned to focus on the negative, because if we didn’t, we 23
died. It was essential to stay alert to the dangers and threats in our 24
world—predators, poisons, competitors in the tribe. This tendency 25
became deeply ingrained in our psyche, where it remains. But nega- 26
tivity isn’t always effective in our lives today—at least not in the life­ 27
saving manner it once was. Indeed, the opposite is often true. We often 28
get hung up on meaningless negative events and details of life, and 29
that distracts us from the real business of life, including being happy. 30
So some heuristics are the legacy from our ancient past. Oth- S31
ers are products of our culture, which get passed on, learned and N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 9 7/28/10 3:45 PM


10  |  On Second Thought

01 relearned from generation to generation. Others are rooted in our


02 earliest experiences—the fears and needs of infancy—but shape our
03 thinking as adults. Consider the visceral heuristic that links the phys-
04 ical sensation of cold and the emotion called loneliness. Infants come
05 into the world with very primitive needs and desires. They seek com-
06 fort and safety. These needs become a basic, internal “idea,” a kind
07 of heuristic foundation onto which others are added with time and
08 experience.
09 Psychologists call this “cognitive scaffolding.” We layer more
10 complex social behavior and thought on top of the more primitive
11 systems the body already has in place for survival. So, for example,
12 the infant who seeks comfort from the cold, clinging to its mother’s
13 body for warmth, gradually comes to associate cold with being alone,
14 exposed, lacking support—in short, with loneliness. Eventually the
15 concepts of cold and loneliness are so tightly entwined that the body
16 and mind no longer distinguish the two kinds of experience.
17 You’ll read more about visceral heuristics and scaffolding in
18 Chapter 1. Many of these basic bodily heuristics are so powerful that
19 they get embodied in the metaphors of our poetry and passed on in
20 maxims, slogans, and fables. Recall the consistency heuristic that put
21 the backcountry skiers in harm’s way. Strip away the academic jargon
22 and it might be phrased: “Don’t change horses in midstream.” This
23 powerful bias probably emerged because it was cognitively easier and
24 less risky to stay the course, but today it’s universal and pervasive in
25 our lives.
26 So are heuristics a good thing or a bad thing? There is an ener-
27 getic debate going on right now within the halls of academe on just
28 this question. One camp argues that heuristics are the best tools in
29 our cognitive toolbox for many complex life decisions, precisely be-
30 cause they are so fleet and efficient. According to this view, it is sim-
31S ply impossible to calculate the best answers all the time, to use what’s
32N called “balance sheet reasoning” with columns of plusses and mi-

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 10 7/28/10 3:45 PM


Introduction  |  11

nuses totaling up. The opposing camp views heuristics as traps and 01
biases, outdated and maladaptive rules that cause bad choices more 02
often than not in the modern world. 03
This book will not resolve that academic dispute. Instead it 04
stakes out a middle ground that other academic psychologists call 05
“ecological rationality,” which simply translates this way: Heuristics 06
are ­neither good nor bad all the time. What’s good or bad is the fit. 07
Sometimes life demands heuristic thinking, and other times it can 08
be perilous. The trick of modern living is in knowing what kind of 09
thinking best matches the challenge at hand. It’s all about getting the 10
balance right, and this book is a guide to achieving that balance. 11
Heuristics are one of the major ideas to come out of cognitive psy- 12
chology in the past decades, and the idea goes hand in hand with an- 13
other: the dual-processor brain. This is not the split brain you learned 14
about in high school, with its left and right hemispheres dedicated to 15
different tasks. The exact anatomy of the dual-processor brain is still 16
being worked out, and won’t be discussed much in this book. What’s 17
important to know is that the human mind has two very different 18
­operating systems. One is logical, slow, deliberate, effortful, and cau- 19
tious. The other—much older and more primitive—is fast and im- 20
pressionistic, sometimes irrational. That’s the heuristic mind. 21
We constantly switch back and forth between rational thought 22
and rash judgment. Sometimes we have no control over our thinking. 23
If we are overtired, mentally depleted, our brain switches automati- 24
cally to its less effortful mode; it’s just too difficult to crunch a lot 25
of information and sort it intelligently if we—literally—lack the fuel 26
for thinking. We also default to our heuristic brain if we are under 27
stress or time pressure, or if we are trying to do too many things at 28
one time. Indeed, multitasking is the perfect example of our brain 29
toggling between rash and rational—and our tendency to make mis- 30
takes as we multitask is a good illustration of our limits in doing so. S31
Here is a metaphor that captures both the virtues and the N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 11 7/28/10 3:45 PM


12  |  On Second Thought

01 i­ mperfection of heuristic thinking: packing the car trunk for a sum-


02 mer beach vacation. You know how much stuff you need for the
03 beach: folding metal chairs, umbrellas, balls, and plastic buckets. And
04 it’s not like packing a rectangular box full of rectangular objects, like
05 books. Beach things are irregular and the trunk itself is curved and
06 oddly configured. So how do you pack it the best way? What’s the op-
07 timal strategy? Most people will rely on heuristic thinking.
08 The word heuristic comes from philosophy by way of computer
09 science. It’s based on the Greek verb that means “to find.” Computer
10 scientists realized early on that some problems are too complex even
11 for high-powered computers. These problems might have perfect so-
12 lutions, but the computers would have to crunch away for weeks or
13 months or years to figure them out. Consequently, computer scien-
14 tists used shortcut algorithms that produce good-enough solutions
15 in a reasonable time. As with those computer programs, our natural
16 heuristics offer us a trade-off: we accept some imperfection in our
17 decisions for the practicality of getting the job done.
18 So there are many, many ways to pack that car trunk, and
19 some people will spend a lot of time trying to arrive at the optimal
20 method. They’ll spread everything on the lawn, then start methodi-
21 cally arranging the contents, large items first, filling in the nooks with
22 smaller pieces. The solution will never be perfect: those folding chairs
23 will always be an annoyance to these people.
24 Psychologists call these people “optimizers.” The world is divided
25 into optimizers and the rest of us—whom psychologists call “satis-
26 ficers.” Satisficing is just a Scottish colloquialism for satisfying, but
27 it has that added sense of “good enough,” as in satisfying enough to
28 suffice. Satisficers (and I count myself here) can’t be bothered with
29 optimal solutions; they’re way too difficult and time-consuming. You
30 can’t simply toss the beach stuff in capriciously, because it won’t fit
31S that way. But you don’t fuss either, because once you slam that trunk
32N closed and start driving, you won’t even see it.

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 12 7/28/10 3:45 PM


Introduction  |  13

Obviously there are times when optimizing is essential. If you are 01


designing a skyscraper and need to know precisely how much weight 02
a beam will carry, you can’t settle for a good-enough answer. But for 03
many of life’s problems, satisficing does fine. The trick is in knowing 04
when to be deliberate and calculating and when to choose speed over 05
perfection. It’s all in the fit. 06
Think about the simple act of driving a car. I live in a big city, 07
and I have lived here for a long time, so I know my way around. As a 08
result, I don’t have to plot out my routes to most familiar places, and 09
I don’t need maps. I simply start up the engine; then I arrive at my 10
destination. I have little or no recollection of making any deliberate 11
choices in between. I didn’t have to think about turning right here, 12
negotiating a traffic circle, using my indicator light, shifting gears, 13
braking. I may even have switched radio stations and carried on a 14
conversation during the drive. It was all automatic and unconscious. 15
That’s good. More than good—absolutely necessary. What a drag 16
life would be if you had to think about every minor step in driving 17
your car to the grocery store. But what if a four-year-old child darts 18
out into traffic, right in front of the car? If I’m lucky, I switch instan- 19
taneously back to the here and now. I am fully alert, and my focused, 20
attentive mind trumps all those heuristic processes that add up to 21
what we call cruise control. This is the brain toggling, but it’s more of 22
a jolt than a toggle. It’s an emergency brain switch, and people who 23
have experienced such incidents report having a flood of memories, 24
many totally irrelevant. That’s because when we’re on automatic, we 25
disengage not only our attention but our memory and just cruise. 26
The sudden reengagement of those conscious processes floods the 27
brain with detail—the stuff of focused decisions. 28
Now think of another kind of driving that’s a completely different 29
cognitive experience: snow driving. I learned to drive in northeast- 30
ern Pennsylvania, where driving implicitly acknowledges the dual- S31
processor brain. Learning to handle a car is a two-step ordeal in that N32

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 13 7/28/10 3:45 PM


14  |  On Second Thought

01 region. In the late spring or summer, when the weather is fair, you
02 learn to drive the usual way, steering and braking and working the
03 clutch and gears and so forth. Then, when winter sets in, you learn
04 snow driving. The state gives you a license for learning the regular
05 stuff, but being a skillful snow driver carries infinitely more weight
06 in the community: being unable to handle yourself and your car in
07 nasty weather is a moral failure.
08 I learned the fundamentals of snow driving in the parking lot of
09 the Acme supermarket on a cold Sunday. My father took me there
10 after three or four inches of snow had fallen, when the macadam sur-
11 face was slick, and told me to drive recklessly: accelerate and brake
12 hard, make sharp turns, left then right. It was all to get the feel for a
13 car on snow, sliding and correcting, sliding again. “What you’ve got
14 to learn,” he said, “is to turn into the skid.”
15 I did learn it, but it’s not intuitive. When your back wheels hit a
16 slick patch and skid—to the right, let’s say—most people’s gut reac-
17 tion is to correct by turning hard left, away from the skid. It’s wired
18 into our neurons, and we do it automatically, without thinking—
19 heuristically. But it’s wrong. Doing that just makes the skid worse. As
20 my father said, you need to turn into the skid, which means turning
21 right when it feels wrong.
22 Turning into the skid means trumping our heuristic impulses.
23 Inept snow driving can land you in the body shop, or worse. But
24 many of our everyday decisions and choices and judgments have
25 profound and lasting consequences. This book is about defusing our
26 misguided heuristic impulses, and in that sense it’s a how-to book.
27 The best way to rein in bad thinking is to recognize it, because once
28 we recognize faulty thinking, we are capable of talking ourselves into
29 better thinking. We have the power to engage the more deliberate and
30 effortful part of our brain, and that process starts with understand-
31S ing the heuristic brain in action. Let’s begin.
32N

Herb_9780307461636_3p_all_r3.indd 14 7/28/10 3:45 PM


To purchase a copy of
On Second Thought
visit one of these online retailers:

file:///T|/Lyman_Emily/Retailer%20Pages/on%20second%20thought%20buyonline.html[9/20/2010 1:35:38 PM]

También podría gustarte