Our Brains and Decision Making
I recently read David Eagleman’s book “The Brain. A Story of You.” I also watched the associated PBS documentary. The book and documentary follow each other very closely and the documentary allows you to see some of the people and experiments referred to in the book. A couple of points made by David Eagleman made me think again about the common use of the terms “data-driven decision making” and “data-informed decision making,” the extent to which our decisions are made based on evidence presented to us, and what evidence exactly do we make decisions based on.
I will leave a more detailed review of the use of the terms “data-driven,” “data-informed” or “evidence-based,” for another post. But these terms are typically used without a recognition of how much we impose on our analysis of data our prior beliefs and assumptions. From the moment we ask ourselves a question, we are choosing what interests us. When we decide what data we need to look at, we are making assumptions about what data matters, based on our experience, reasoning and assumed knowledge of the world. When we actually obtain data, our analysis is now constrained by data availability and what they represent: how the data were defined and collected. The recognition of this dependency on prior beliefs and “learned” experiences should make the use of the term “data-driven” highly problematic. But it should also make us question what exactly we mean by “data-informed” or “evidence-based” decision making. What evidence exactly are we talking about and how exactly are we using it?
With this in mind, I found a couple of points made by Eagleman to be illuminating.
One of the points is that decisions often (perhaps most often) require connecting the analytical parts/networks of the brain to the emotional ones. Without the connections to our emotions, we are often unable to make decisions. The book provides a couple of examples, such as a woman who, due to a motorcycle accident, had these brain connections weakened and found herself unable to make daily decisions, such as what to wear, eat or to do during the day. Another example was an experiment where decisions were reverted when emotional factors were brought into play even though the choices were, analytically speaking, unaltered. The insight is that choices often involve many factors offering trade-offs and that our logical brain cannot often assign values to those trade-offs to make a decision. The values are assigned based on bodily/emotional signatures built from past experience. Without those, decisions are often not possible. These signals are often embodied in the release or suppression of hormones affecting transmission of stimuli between neurons. Hormones such as dopamine or oxytocin. As we acquire new experiences, the stimuli that these neurotransmitters produce in our brains are often adjusted based on the confirmation or frustration of past experiences (differences between expectations and reality). That is how we learn.
Another point made in Eagleman’s book is that our brains are primed for social interaction. We are wired to see social intention where it does not exist. This is exemplified by an experiment where a short film of geometrical objects moving around a screen tends to induce subjects to interpret the movements as if telling a story, where the objects would move intentionally as if they represented humans or animals. Further, in the same way as we tend to humanize objects, we also sometimes dehumanize other people, presumably when seeing them as humans creates a burden we consider too much to bear (e.g. experiments show this often happens when we are faced with the homeless).
The first point means that, we typically will not make decisions based on data or evidence presented to us alone. No matter how much we may want to make data and evidence based decisions, when factoring options we will likely bring to bear, consciously or unconsciously, our lifetime experiences, transmitted to our brain through chemical stimuli.
The second point means that, in interpreting events, occurrences, phenomena of all kinds, from social phenomena to purely physical ones, we tend to attribute intentionality to those events, we tend to attribute human characteristics to phenomena that may not have it or not be able to be reduced to such. Eagleman sees in this tendency, evidence of the importance of human interactions for our brains and for who we are. But it can also be seen as a potential factor in our tendency to see organizations, firms, governments behaving as if they were individual decision-making units rather than composed of people themselves. Perhaps this attribution of human intentionality to anything but a person could help explain conspiratory theories, where large networks are assumed to work in unison towards a common goal; and perhaps it could help explain situations where we see cause and effect where there is none, simply because we attributed agency to entities that do not have it.
Both points made by Eagleman, the role of emotions in decision-making and our tendency to attribute human intentionality to entities other than a person, should make us question the extent to which our minds are pre-conditioned to make decisions largely based on factors beyond the data and evidence put in front of us on any given decision-making occasion. They should make us think of ways to build into decision-making processes awareness of how our brain works and the possible implications for the decisions we end up making.
References
Eagleman, David. 2017. The Brain. The Story of You. Vintage Books.
