Decision-Making in the Blink of an Eye

As the title of this post suggests, I will be explaining your ability to make decisions.

Now this area of psychology is perhaps one of the most studied, beginning in 1848 with a case-study of a patient named Phineas Gage. This however, is not the reason I am so interested in this topic today.


The book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking was one of the first ever popular psychology books I have read in my life (which is why I am reading it again for the third time). It is also one of many prominent reasons I love human nature. To quote an excerpt from this book:

Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human. We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of hidden fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot. 

What Malcolm Gladwell writes about here is something I referred to in one of my earlier posts, but today I want to dig deeper into this idea called 'thin-slicing' (which by the way is an awesome name for a psychological concept). Thin-slicing is the ability of humans to make decisions in the blink of an eye without being consciously aware of how and why they have made the decision. In most cases, if the slices are coupled with experience, it can be a powerful and accurate tool. The trade-off however (there always is a disclaimer with everything isn't there), the accuracy of these decisions are more often than not wrong for complex choices. 

Another issue of thin-slicing raised by Malcolm Gladwell is the concept of being unawares of making these decisions. In situations, your ability to make decisions is incredibly fast and frugal with preciseness while your behavior in response to this decision acts accordingly yet you continue to lack awareness. One such situation was an experimental study done by Antonio Damasio et al. (1997). The authors describe the Iowa Gambling experimental procedure as:

In a gambling task that simulates real-life decision-making in the way it factors uncertainty, rewards, and penalties, the players are given four decks of cards, a loan of $2000 facsimile US bills, and asked to play so that they can lose the least amount of money and win the most. Turning each card carries an immediate reward ($100 in decks A and B and $50 in decks C and D). Unpredictably, however, the turning of some cards also carries a penalty (which is large in decks A and B and small in decks C and D). Playing mostly from the disadvantageous decks (A and B) leads to an overall loss. Playing from the advantageous decks (C and D) leads to an overall gain. The players have no way of predicting when a penalty will arise in a given deck, no way to calculate with precision the net gain or loss from each deck, and no knowledge of how many cards they must turn to end the game (the game is stopped after 100 card selections). After encountering a few losses, normal participants begin to generate skin conductance responses (SCRs i.e. sweating in the palms) before selecting a card from the bad decks and also begin to avoid the decks with large losses. Patients with bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortices do neither. 

What the researchers found is that in normal participants, most were able to discern the "advantageous strategy" at roughly 10 cards but were considerably unaware of this until about 50 cards where they would begin to have a 'hunch' about it. It took till 80 cards before participants were able to express knowledge about the strategy (Damasio et al., 1997). This study suggests your brain has the capacity to make blink-decisions by thin-slicing and refuses to tell you about it except through galvanic skin responses. However, even at the unconscious level, behavioral changes for beneficial strategies are likely to occur thanks in large part to your brain being able to make these decisions quickly. Like in many behavioral instances, for your daily lives to run smoothly, your brain has to have the capabilities to do immense calculations for rapid-fire decisions while your awareness is catching up. 


Other research, and particularly anatomical studies of Phineas Gage, have implicated the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (if you don't know where that is just give yourself a face-palm slap above the meeting areas of the two eyebrows). In behavior studied with Gage and other patients with prefrontal cortex lesion, they can be seen to have difficulties learning from previous mistakes which causes repeated engagement in decisions that lead to negative consequences (Sanfey et al., 2003). 

So if you've ever banged your head against a table or a wall for not making the right choices for simple questions in a quiz or multiple choice exam, you are more likely to make the same mistake again if you continue to let a hard surface damage your prefrontal cortex. And if you are the type that loves to be right, well then I guess you should learn to trust your thin-slicing abilities and pay extra notice to clues from your brain to your skin. You never know, it might get you a few more correct answers in a multiple-choice exam and that all important P. 


Talking of P's, Phineas Gage is an interesting story. View the clip below for more:

References:

Damasio, A.R., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., and Tranel, D. (1997). Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy. Science, 275, 1293-1295.

Gladwell, M. (2006). Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (eBook). Penguin Books Ltd. URL: http://books.google.com.au/ebooks?id=FiPLHNvT_NkC&dq=malcolm+gladwell+blink&as_brr=5&ei=sxjXToTGKIHUMpmW_fEI&source=webstore_onebox&redir_esc=y

Sanfey, A.G., Hastie, R., Colvin, M.K., and Grafman, J. (2003). Phineas gauged: decision-making and the human prefrontal cortex. Neuropsychologia, 41, 1218-1229.