How We Decide (19 page)

This faith in the power of reason is easy to understand. Ever since Plato, we've been assured that a perfectly rational world would be a perfect world, a Shangri-la ruled by statistical equations and empirical evidence. People wouldn't run up credit card debt or take out subprime loans. There would be no biases or prejudices, just cold, hard facts. This is the utopia dreamed of by philosophers and economists.

However, this new science of decision-making (a science rooted in the material details of the brain) is most interesting when the data turns out to contradict the conventional wisdom. Ancient assumptions are revealed as just that: assumptions. Untested theories. Unsubstantiated speculation. Plato, after all, didn't do experiments. He had no way of knowing that the rational brain couldn't solve every problem, or that the prefrontal cortex had severe limitations. The reality of the brain is that, sometimes, rationality can lead us astray.

FOR RENEE FLEMING
, the opera superstar, the first sign of trouble came during a routine performance of Mozart's
The Marriage of Figaro
at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Fleming was singing the "Dove sono" aria from act 3, one of the most beloved songs in all of opera. At first, Fleming sang Mozart's plaintive melody with her typical perfection. She made the high notes sound effortless, her voice capturing the intensity of emotion while maintaining her near perfect pitch. Most sopranos struggle with Mozart's tendency to compose in the
passaggio,
or the awkward part of the vocal range between registers. But not Fleming. Her performance the night before had earned her a long standing ovation.

But then, just as she neared the most difficult section of the aria—a crescendo of fluttering pitches, in which her voice has to echo the violins—Fleming felt a sudden stab of self-doubt. She couldn't stop thinking that she was about to make a mistake. "It caught me by surprise," she later wrote in her memoir. "That aria was never an easy piece, but it was certainly one with which I had had an enormous amount of experience." In fact, Fleming had performed this piece hundreds of times before. Her first big operatic break had been singing the role of the Countess at the Houston Opera, more than a decade earlier. The tragic "Dove sono" aria, in which the Countess questions the loss of her happiness, had been featured on Fleming's first album and became a standard part of her repertoire. It was, Fleming said, her "signature piece."

And yet now, she could barely breathe. She felt her diaphragm constrict, sucking the power from her voice. Her throat tightened and her pulse started to race. Although Fleming fought her way through the rest of the song, stealing breaths wherever possible—she still managed to get a standing ovation—she was deeply shaken. What had happened to her self-confidence? Why did her favorite aria suddenly make her so nervous?

Before long, Fleming's performance problems became chronic. The songs that used to be second nature were suddenly impossible to sing. Every performance was a struggle against anxiety, against that monologue in her head telling her not to make a mistake. "I had been undermined by a very negative inner voice," she wrote, "a little nattering in my ear that said, 'Don't do that ... Don't do this ... Your breath is tight ... Your tongue has gone back ... Your palate is down ... The top is spread ... Relax your shoulders!'" Eventually, it got so bad that Fleming planned to quit opera altogether. She was one of the most talented performers in the world, and yet she could no longer perform.

Performers call such failures "choking," because a person so frayed by pressure might as well not have any oxygen. What makes choking so morbidly fascinating is that the only thing incapacitating the performer is his or her own thoughts. Fleming, for example, was so worried about hitting the high notes of Mozart's opera that she failed to hit them. The inner debate over proper technique made her voice seize up, and it became impossible to sing with the necessary speed and virtuosity. Her mind was sabotaging itself.

What causes choking? Although it might seem like an amorphous category of failure, or even a case of excess emotion, choking is actually triggered by a specific mental mistake:
thinking too much.
The sequence of events typically goes like this: When a person gets nervous about performing, he naturally becomes extra self-conscious. He starts to focus on himself, trying to make sure that he doesn't make any mistakes. He begins scrutinizing actions that are best performed on autopilot. Fleming started to think about aspects of singing that she hadn't thought about since she was a beginner, such as where to position her tongue and how to shape her mouth for different pitches. This kind of deliberation can be lethal for a performer. The opera singer forgets how to sing. The pitcher concentrates too much on his motion and loses control of his fastball. The actor gets anxious about his lines and seizes up onstage. In each of these instances, the natural fluidity of performance is lost. The grace of talent disappears.

Consider one of the most famous chokes in sports history: the collapse of Jean Van de Velde on the last hole of the 1999 British Open. Until that point in the tournament, Van de Velde had been playing nearly flawless golf. He had a three-stroke lead entering the eighteenth hole, which meant that he could double-bogey (that is, be two strokes over par) and still win. On his previous two rounds, he'd birdied (been one stroke under par) this very hole.

Now Van de Velde was the only player on the course. He knew that the next few shots could change his life forever, turning a PGA journeyman into an elite golfer. All he had to do was play it safe. During his warm-up swings on the eighteenth, Van de Velde looked nervous. It was a blustery Scotland day, but beads of sweat were glistening on his face. After repeatedly wiping away the perspiration, he stepped up to the tee, planted his feet, and jerked back his club. His swing looked awkward. His hips spun out ahead of his body, so that the face of his driver wasn't straight on the ball. Van de Velde watched the white speck sail away and then bowed his head. He had bent the ball badly to the right, and it ended up twenty yards from the fairway, buried in the rough. On his next shot, he made the same mistake, but this time he sent the ball so far right that it bounced off the grandstands and ended up in a patch of knee-high grass. His third shot was even worse. By this point, his swing was so out of sync that he almost missed the ball; it was launched into the air along with a thick patch of grass. As a result, his shot came up far short and plunged into the water hazard just before the green. Van de Velde grimaced and turned away, as if he couldn't bear to watch his own collapse. After taking a penalty, he was still sixty yards short of the hole. Once again, his tentative swing was too weak, and the ball ended up exactly where he didn't want it: in a sandy bunker. From there, he managed to chip onto the green and, after
seven
errant shots, finish the round. But it was too late. Van de Velde had lost the British Open.

The pressure of the eighteenth hole was Van de Velde's undoing. When he started thinking about the details of his swing, his swing broke down. On the last seven shots, Van de Velde seemed like a different golfer. He had lost his easy confidence. Instead of playing like a pro on the PGA tour, he started swinging with the cautious deliberation of a beginner with a big handicap. He was suddenly focusing on the mechanics of his stroke, making sure that he didn't torque his wrist or open his hips. He was literally regressing before the crowd, reverting to a mode of explicit thought that he hadn't used on the golf green since he was a child learning how to swing.

Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has helped illuminate the anatomy of choking. She uses putting on the golf green as her experimental paradigm. When people are first learning how to putt, the activity can seem daunting. There are just so many things to think about. A golfer needs to assess the lay of the green, calculate the line of the ball, and get a feel for the grain of the turf. Then the player has to monitor the putting motion and make sure the ball is hit with a smooth, straight stroke. For an inexperienced player, a golf putt can seem impossibly hard, like a life-size trigonometry problem.

But the mental exertion pays off, at least at first. Beilock has shown that novice putters hit better shots when they consciously reflect on their actions. The more time the beginner spends thinking about the putt, the more likely he is to sink the ball in the hole. By concentrating on the golf game, by paying attention to the mechanics of the stroke, the novice can avoid beginners' mistakes.

A little experience, however, changes everything. After a golfer has learned how to putt—once he or she has memorized the necessary movements—analyzing the stroke is a waste of time. The brain already knows what to do. It automatically computes the slope of the green, settles on the best putting angle, and decides how hard to hit the ball. In fact, Beilock found that when experienced golfers are forced to think about their putts, they hit significantly
worse
shots. "We bring expert golfers into our lab, and we tell them to pay attention to a particular part of their swing, and they just screw up," Beilock says. "When you are at a high level, your skills become somewhat automated. You don't need to pay attention to every step in what you're doing."

Beilock believes that this is what happens when people "choke." The part of the brain that monitors behavior—a network centered in the prefrontal cortex—starts to interfere with decisions that are normally made without thinking. It begins second-guessing the skills that have been honed through years of diligent practice. The worst part about choking is that it tends to be a downward spiral. The failures build on one another, and a stressful situation is made even more stressful. After Van de Velde lost the British Open, his career hit the skids. Since 1999, he has failed to finish in the top ten in a major tournament.
^*

Choking is merely a vivid example of the havoc that can be caused by too much thought. It's an illustration of rationality gone awry, of what happens when we rely on the wrong brain areas. For opera singers and golf players, such deliberate thought processes interfere with the trained movements of their muscles, so that their own bodies betray them.

But the problem of thinking too much isn't limited to physical performers. Claude Steele, a professor of psychology at Stanford, studies the effects of performance anxiety on standardized-test scores. When Steele gave a large group of Stanford sophomores a set of questions from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and told the students that it would measure their innate intellectual ability, he found that the white students performed significantly better than their black counterparts. This discrepancy—commonly known as the achievement gap—conformed to a large body of data showing that minority students tend to score lower on a wide variety of standardized tests, from the SAT to the IQ test.

However, when Steele gave a separate group of students the same test but stressed that it was
not
a measure of intelligence—he told them it was merely a preparatory drill—the scores of the white and black students were virtually identical. The achievement gap had been closed. According to Steele, the disparity in test scores was caused by an effect that he calls stereotype threat. When black students are told that they are taking a test to measure their intelligence, it brings to mind, rather forcefully, the ugly and untrue stereotype that blacks are less intelligent than whites. (Steele conducted his experiments soon after
The Bell Curve
was published, but the same effect also exists when women take a math test that supposedly measures "cognitive differences between the genders" or when white males are exposed to a stereotype about the academic superiority of Asians.) The Stanford sophomores were so worried about being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype that they performed far below their abilities. "What you tend to see [during stereotype threat] is carefulness and second-guessing," Steele said. "When you go and interview them, you have the sense that when they are in the stereotype-threat condition they say to themselves, 'Look, I'm going to be careful here. I'm not going to mess things up.' Then, after having decided to take that strategy, they calm down and go through the test. But that's not the way to succeed on a standardized test. The more you do that, the more you will get away from the intuitions that help you, the quick processing. They think they did well, and they are trying to do well. But they are not."

The lesson of Renee Fleming, Jean Van de Velde, and these Stanford students is that rational thought can backfire. While reason is a powerful cognitive tool, it's dangerous to rely
exclusively
on the deliberations of the prefrontal cortex. When the rational brain hijacks the mind, people tend to make all sorts of decision-making mistakes. They hit bad golf shots and choose wrong answers on standardized tests. They ignore the wisdom of their emotions—the knowledge embedded in their dopamine neurons—and start reaching for things that they can explain. (One of the problems with feelings is that even when they are accurate, they can still be hard to articulate.) Instead of going with the option that feels the best, a person starts going with the option that
sounds
the best, even if it's a very bad idea.

When
Consumer Reports
tests a product, it follows a strict protocol. First, the magazine's staff assembles a field of experts. If they're testing family sedans, they rely on automotive experts; if audio speakers are being scrutinized, the staff members bring in people trained in acoustics. Then the magazine's staff gather all the relevant products in that category and try to hide the brand names. (This often requires lots of masking tape.) The magazine aspires to objectivity.

Back in the mid-1980s,
Consumer Reports
decided to conduct a taste test for strawberry jam. As usual, the editors invited several food experts, all of whom were "trained sensory panelists." These experts blindly sampled forty-five different jams, scoring each on sixteen different characteristics, such as sweetness, fruitiness, texture, and spreadability. The scores were then totaled, and the jams were ranked.