What the brain wants

TL;DR

• When making decisions, our brain chooses the option that it is more comfortable with (after taking into consideration its consequences).
• When making decisions, our brain focuses on maximizing expected emotional outcome.
• Once we start to measure the outcome of decisions in emotional results, rather than material results, they all start to make sense.
• (I suspect that the emotional criterion is more fitting to ensure that we desire what we need, respect to the material criterion. I also suspect that trying to override the emotional criterion with the material criterion will often produce decisions that will ultimately lead to unhappiness.)

What the brain wants

The brain wants to be comfortable. This statement sounds obvious (I know!) but is much more complex than it looks like and has far-reaching implications. (I promise it is going to be clearer from the third paragraph.)

First, let’s examine the meaning of being comfortable. Being comfortable is a relative concept. The same action might have different level of comfort for different people, but also for the same person, depending on the context. Staying in bed long after you woke up, under warm blankets, feels comfortable only if you are not late for work. If one day your alarm will not ring and will wake up realizing that you will be late at work and your boss will be angry, you will not perceive the blankets as comfortable. In that moment, you will feel deeply uncomfortable, perhaps even ashamed for having overslept. The only way to get rid of the shame and fear of having enraged your boss is to do your best to get to work as fast as possible (or to call in sick, to hide your fault).

The reason most days of the week most people get up early to get to work is because going to work is more comfortable than oversleeping. Of course, the action itself of staying under warm blankets is more comfortable than driving to work half asleep in a cold winter weather, but once you factor in that your boss will make you feel very uncomfortable for having arrived late, plus the risk of losing the job, plus the uncomfortable shame for not doing the effort to gain the wage, it becomes clear that in most cases going to work is more comfortable than the alternative.

Likewise, let’s examine the action of eating an ice cream. It is a comfortable action: eating ice cream feels good. Someone who consistently passes on opportunities to eat it does not do so because he thinks that ice cream tastes bad (I don’t know anyone who thinks so). Neither he is using willpower to renounce the treat (it would work only once). Most probably, he feels uncomfortable with eating the ice cream (and thus producing evidence that he is not that fit/healthy kind of person he identifies with). For him, not eating the ice cream is the comfortable choice.

In this chapter, I argue that, when making decisions, our brain chooses the option that it is more comfortable with (after taking into consideration its consequences).

You can get confirmation of this phenomenon by thinking about all the decisions you took: you will realize that you always chose the most comfortable option (remember to consider not only the comfort level of the action itself, but also that of its consequences, especially those that would provide evidence that you are not living up to your standards). Some examples taken out of my personal life: I make my hair before going out because spending a few minutes working on it is more comfortable than having people stare at my messy hairstyle; I run daily even thought I do not like running because I am not comfortable with being out of shape; I decided to go to university because I was more comfortable studying than working.

The Expected Emotional Outcome

When making decisions, our brain focuses on maximizing Expected Emotional Outcome. In other words, it chooses the option that is expected to maximize the comfortable feeling of being in control of our own life. It completely disregards the Expected Material Outcome of our actions (but considers the emotional outcome derived by the material outcome). For example, in deciding whether to take a bet in which the participant has 75% probability of winning 200$ and 25% probability of losing $500, our brain does not engage in any mathematical consideration of the Expected Material Outcome (or it does, but does not consider the outcome as significant). The brain does not care that the Expected Material Outcome is positive $25. It only cares about the Expected Emotional Outcome: how much would it feel comfortable to win $200? How much would it feel uncomfortable to lose $500? How much would it feel comfortable to defend his choice based on the mathematical calculation?

As Nassim Taleb noted[1], the fact that more suicides are caused by shame than by medical diagnoses is indicative of human preference for emotional outcome over physical one. We should not be surprised, then, that feeling in control is preferred to being in control and that avoidance of psychological harm is preferred to avoidance of physical harm.

As another example, smoking a cigarette is an action whose Expected Material Outcome is clearly negative. Smoking costs a lot, both in terms of health and money. Smokers know this fact very well, and yet they ignore it in their decisions. They smoke anyway, because for them smoking is more comfortable than not smoking. Smoking makes them feel back control (not smoking makes them feel out of control). Therefore, for a smoker, smoking a cigarette is perceived as a good decision: it leads to a positive Expected Emotional Outcome.

Once we start to measure the outcome of decisions in emotional results, rather than material results, they all start to make sense.

(I suspect that the emotional criterion is more fitting than the material criterion to ensure that we desire what we need. I also suspect that trying to override the emotional criterion with the material criterion will often produce decisions that will ultimately lead to unhappiness.)

Do all decisions really make sense, though? One might argue that individuals who favor Expected Emotional Outcome over Expected Material Outcome would, in the long run, end up poorer than their more materialistic counterparts, and therefore find themselves with a lower socioeconomic status and less chances to reproduce. I disagree. Human society is highly social. Individuals following a pure materialistic strategy end up isolated. Humans are known to team up against those who are perceived to be too selfish (such as dictators or bullies). Cooperation happens because decisions are taken considering emotional consequences. A group of humans whose brains does not follow the Expected Emotional Outcome criterion would quickly find itself unable to compete with more cooperative groups, and its components would find themselves erased from the gene pool.

Comfort is subjective

Whether one finds an activity comfortable is highly subjective. For example, go to a job interview might be an uncomfortable experience for some and a comfortable one for others. Its success matters only relatively: two people might both be rejected, and one of them might still have perceived it as a comfortable experience, where he learned a lot, whereas the other felt the opposite. In deciding whether an activity will have a positive emotional outcome we only consider how we will feel; we might consider how we will feel in case of success and in case of failure, but we do not consider the material results of the success or failure. One might succeed and still feel bad because of the success. All my university classmates of mine dreaded the final exam. Some dreaded the exam itself (it required hours of hard study), some dreaded the failure (they would have to explain it to their parents), but some dreaded the success (they would have to quit university life and start getting real responsibilities). Some of them even failed the exam on purpose to avoid the emotional consequences of passing it.

Success does not always bring comfort; but being comfortable with an activity often causes success in it. Successful entrepreneurs are comfortable with the concept that the venture might fail, because they will feel comfortable anyway with having tried (if they did not try, they would have felt discomfort and regret instead).

This does not mean that success does not increase confidence (it does) or that failure does not increase frustration (it does). But I noticed that, invariably, those who consistently succeed were comfortable with the activity and its consequences before and those who consistently fail uncomfortable with the activity itself or with its results. These two statements sound obvious, until you realize that he is quite hard to know what we actually find comfortable and what we find uncomfortable. A quick rule of thumb: any activity which you procrastinate or do not do as well as you wish is an activity is an activity you are uncomfortable with (or with its results). Any activity which you do even though it does not make sense to invest that much resources (energy, time, money) into, is an activity you are comfortable with.

Notes:

[1] Nassim Taleb, “The Bed of Procustes”

End of the excerpt

This is the second excerpt from my book “The Control Heuristic​: Explaining Irrational Behavior and Behavioral Change”. It will be available starting from April the 15th, 2017. You can preorder your Kindle copy here or follow me on Medium or on Twitter (@DellAnnaLuca) to be notified of the publication date of the paperback edition.