JAD ABUMRAD: Today's show ...

ROBERT KRULWICH: You ever heard of this, Jad?

JAD: ... is about choice. 

JAD: I don't know what to expect.

ROBERT: I believe you are about to see your miracle.

JAD: And we thought we would start things off in a parking lot in sunny Berkeley, California, with a psychologist.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: I'm Barry Schwartz. I'm a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, where I have been teaching since 1971. The only job I ever applied for. So I think deep down in my past, I appreciated the value of simplifying one's options.

JAD: He even wrote a book about it called The Paradox of Choice. And to illustrate that paradox, he brought us to—well, you'll see.

JAD: Barry, will you give us a visual as to what we're doing?

BARRY SCHWARTZ: So we're about to walk into Berkeley's very famous Berkeley Bowl, which is a supermarket. Very unusual when it comes to fresh fruits and vegetables.

JAD: Oh, wow.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: It has a selection unlike anything I've ever seen in my life.

ROBERT: Jad, could you describe your first view of the produce section?

JAD: I see just fields of oranges.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: So we've got navel orange. Valencia juice orange. Texas Valencia juice orange.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Organic navel orange. Minneola tangelos. Daisy tangerines.

ROBERT: Manzano bananas.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: We have large naval oranges.

ROBERT: Plantain bananas. Red bananas. Burro Saba bananas.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Large Gailans. Heirloom. Washington Pacific rose.

ROBERT: Hawaiian plantains.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Golden delicious fresh-O-licious. Morocco blood orange. Granny Smith. Georgia Vidalia.

ROBERT: Georgia Vidalia.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: And we have freedom of choice with respect to every ... 

BARRY SCHWARTZ: ... yellow onions. 

BARRY SCHWARTZ: ... And you see it in every area of life ...

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Pearl onions.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: ... in romantic relationships. 

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Georgia Vidalia. 

BARRY SCHWARTZ: When I was growing up, the answer to the question, "Should I get married," was obvious. The answer to the question, "When," was obvious.

JAD: Which was, "Of course."

BARRY SCHWARTZ: "Of course. And as soon as possible." Well, now there are no defaults. the low hanging fruit going to every imaginable lifestyle is available.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Hmm. Now we eat sweet yellow ...

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Every imaginable lifestyle is available.

JAD: You can be gay, straight, bi.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Exactly.

ROBERT: Oh, boy. Look at those seedless grapes.

JAD: Yeah. Seedless grapes. Oh, wait, wait. More apples.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: The sense that there are a million opportunities for you. You can make your own rules.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: I'm just overwhelmed. Overwhelmed!

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Counseling centers, psych services centers and universities are bursting at the seams. Why? These are the most privileged kids ever. The schools are giving them everything they could possibly want, and they're banging down the doors because they're so screwed up. Why? What's going on? An answer is: people don't know what to do. They don't know how to choose. They can't face a world in which everything is available.   And I see this in the college. It's—it's—it's heartbreaking to see these incredibly talented college seniors who we have given every opportunity to do whatever they want terrified at graduation. They know that this is a stage in life where walking through one door means they're gonna hear a lot of other doors slammed shut. They can't bear the thought that they may walk through the wrong door.

JAD: It's choice angst.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: It is. It's the disease of modernity.

JAD: This is very—what?

ROBERT: Sorry, sorry. Just, come on. Go—go ahead. Just do the show. But I say come on, in reservation.

JAD: What are you—why?

ROBERT: Why? Well, because, like, people from Swarthmore College get to pay, like, $45,000 a year for the privilege of—you know, that's a very, very rare slice of America.

JAD: Yeah, fine. You're right. You're right.

ROBERT: Thank you.

JAD: But, come on. You have this, too. I mean, how many speeds on your bike do you really need?

ROBERT: Well, that's a different thing. I mean, I don't need—I don't need 22 speeds. I happen to make do with five.

JAD: [laughs] There you go. So there are some real questions here. And on this hour, we're gonna look at choice.

ROBERT: Choice and decision making. When do we choose ...

JAD: How do we choose?

ROBERT: Where do we choose?

JAD: The limits of choose ...

ROBERT: The limits of choice.

JAD: Of choice. Of choose.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: The limits of choose.

ROBERT: The Limits of Choose on Radiolab.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Stay with us, bitches.

JAD: Okay, to begin. Are you ready?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: So let me just ask the basic question. A basic question, which is, okay, so a lot of choice can be bad, but clearly we need some choice. So what's the right amount? Actually, how much can you really handle?

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: I asked that question to Barry Schwartz.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Well, there's a classic study in psychology from 50 years ago called the Magic Number Seven.

JONAH LEHRER: The magical number seven plus or minus two.

JAD: That's Jonah Lehrer, author of the book Proust Was a Neuroscientist and a new book called How We Decide. In the '50s, he says ...

JONAH LEHRER: I think, like 1956 ...

JAD: ... a guy named George Miller wondered about this: How much can a human brain really hold? So he conducted a series of memory tests, asked people to memorize different sets of numbers, letters, musical notes. And what Miller found out is that the average human ...

JONAH LEHRER: ... could hold about seven digits, plus or minus two at any given moment in working memory.

JAD: When you say working memory, you mean like—like, what we can keep in our top of mind memory, right? Not like memory, memory, but doing like RAM. 

JONAH LEHRER: Exactly. Random digits. You can hold about seven plus or minus two. And with practice, people can—can, you know, really bump it up a bit.

JAD: With practice, Robert. With practice.

ROBERT: I'm still struggling with six, six, six, six, six, six, six. And I think to myself, I think I got the first four.

JONAH LEHRER: I mean, it's not an accident that—that so many of these random digits we have to memorize from phone numbers to Social Security numbers are seven plus or minus two.

JAD: Now the interesting thing is what happens to our decision making powers when you try and get more than seven in your head.

ROBERT: Mmm. What?

BABA SHIV: You want me to shut the door?

PRODUCER: Yeah. Do it. Wonderful.

JAD: Well, let me introduce you to someone.

BABA SHIV: I'm Baba Shiv. I'm a professor here at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Marketing. A lot of my research has to do with the brain.

JAD: And tricking people.

BABA SHIV: Oh, yeah, absolutely. [laughs]

JAD: So, Robert, I want to tell you about one particular experiment that he did.

ROBERT: Okay.

BABA SHIV: So the experiment is pretty straightforward.

JAD: Goes like this. He got a bunch of subjects together. He said, "Okay, I'm going to give you all a number ..."

BABA SHIV: It's going to be a number.

JAD: "... on a little card. You're going to read the number. And I want you to commit that number to memory."

BABA SHIV: Take as much time as you want to memorize the number.

JAD: And then he says ...

BABA SHIV: You're now going to walk to the next room and recall the number. And that's what subjects think, that subjects think that they're going to be doing.

JAD: So they—they know they're going to be in one place, getting a number of going to another place and reciting that number.

BABA SHIV: That's right.

JAD: That's all they know.

BABA SHIV: That's all they know.

JAD: What they don't know, is it that not everybody is getting the same kind of number.

BABA SHIV: Some people get a seven digit number. Some people get a two digit number.

ROBERT: That I can do, by the way, I think I can do two digits.

JAD: No, I doubt it. All the subjects have to do is they've got to memorize a number, walk out of room one down the hall to room two, then recite their number. Now just imagine, you with me? 

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Person with the two digit number in their head who is walking out of room one.

SUBJECT #1: One, two is my number, I can definitely remember this.

JAD: Down the hall. At the same time, someone with seven digits in their head walks down the hall. Now, here's where the trickery comes in as they're walking down the hall, mid-memorizing all of a sudden ...

WOMAN: Excuse me.

JAD: ... they pass a lady in the hallway and she's holding something.

WOMAN: Sorry—sorry to interrupt you. But would you like a snack?

JAD: She says, here, have a—have a snack. Just as I as—as our way of saying thanks for participating in the study. You can have one of two snacks. You choose.

WOMAN: You can choose between either A) a big fat slice of chocolate cake, or, B) a nice bowl of fruit salad.

JAD: Meanwhile, they've both got these numbers still in their head. Now here's the weird thing. When they finally make their choice ...

WOMAN: What would you like, some yummy cake or some healthy fruit?

JAD: The people, this is crazy, the people with two digits in their head ...

SUBJECT #1: You know, I love cake, but I think I'll take the fruit.

JAD: ... almost always choose the fruit. Whereas the people with seven digits in their head almost always choose the cake.

SUBJECT #2: You know what, I—the cake. I want the cake.

JAD: And we're talking by huge margins here.

BABA SHIV: It was significant. I mean, this was like in some cases a 20, 25, 30-point difference.

ROBERT: Huh. So what, the ...

JAD: Meaning if you have seven digits in your head, you are twice as likely to choose cake than fruit. Twice!

ROBERT: So let's get on with this. So the people with the seven, they just get the cake. I get that part. I don't know why.

JAD: Exact—that doesn't interest you, as to why they would choose ...

ROBERT: Well, a little, yeah. Why?

JAD: Okay, good. Now that I've got your interest, I'll tell you the theory.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Okay. And this is where it gets interesting. It seems that the brain is anatomically organized into different systems.

JONAH LEHRER: Dual systems is what they're called.

JAD: According to Jonah. You have a rational, deliberative system, which is sort of more to the front of the brain. And then deeper in the brain, you have an emotional, unconscious system.

And according to Jonah, these two systems are often at war.

JONAH: I mean, there's—there's constant competition between the rational brain and the emotional brain. They're always competing for attention and to guide and direct your behavior.

JAD: Especially when you have a tough choice like Baba Shiv's cake versus fruit. There, the competition is fierce.

BABA SHIV: The emotional automatic system is pushing them towards the cake.

AUTOMATIC SYSTEM: Take, bake the cake.

JONAH LEHRER: The emotional brain ...

AUTOMATIC SYSTEM: Yummy.

JONAH LEHRER: ... loves sweet gooey chocolate cake.

AUTOMATIC SYSTEM: Look at that frosting.

JONAH LEHRER: That's really what you want.

AUTOMATIC SYSTEM: Me need chocolate, now!

JAD: On the other hand ... 

BABA SHIV: The deliberative system, on the other hand, comes and says, "wait a second ..."

DELIBERATIVE SYSTEM: Are you thinking about this choice carefully?

BABA SHIV: "This probably is not good for you because ..."

DELIBERATIVE SYSTEM: ... calories, sugar, high fat content.

JONAH LEHRER: Think about your waistline.

DELIBERATIVE SYSTEM: It's going to make you chubby.

JONAH LEHRER: Think about your cholesterol.

DELIBERATIVE SYSTEM: It is not good for your health. It is not good for your self-esteem.

BABA SHIV: And that acts as a check.

JAD: But, if you give that rational, deliberative system seven numbers to—seven numbers, just seven to memorize ...

DELIBERATIVE SYSTEM: One, two, two, eight, nine, three, six.

AUTOMATIC SYSTEM: Cake.

DELIBERATIVE SYSTEM: One, two—no. Shh! One, two, two, eight, five ...

AUTOMATIC SYSTEM: Eat cake. [laughs] Take it.

DELIBERATIVE SYSTEM: One, two, two—shh! One ...

AUTOMATIC SYSTEM: So delicious.

DELIBERATIVE SYSTEM: Eat—cholest—one ...

JAD: Suddenly the rational brain has too much to keep track of.

AUTOMATIC SYSTEM: Oh, you know, you want to.

JAD: It's getting tired. It can't put up as much of a fight.

BABA SHIV: Which means greater likelihood that the emotions will drive their choices.

JAD: The astounding thing here, says Jonah, is not simply that sometimes emotion wins over reason, it's how easily it wins. Seven numbers is all it takes to screw up reason.

JONAH LEHRER: Just—just think about how astonishingly limited that is.

JAD: Yeah. I mean, compared to emotion, team reason is, well ...

JONAH LEHRER: Pretty feeble and there's no way around it. And we can kind of rage against the machine, but the brute fact is it's just one microchip in a big computer. And when we always rely on it all the advice you get in decision making is, "Stop and think, slow down, take your time." And yet when you actually look at the brain, that can lead you to rely on a feeble piece of machinery.

JAD: All right. Let me just offer an admittedly inconsequential case in point. There we were at the Berkeley Bowl. In the apple aisle. There were thousands and thousands of apples to choose from. Okay, not thousands, but a lot. And Robert and I get it in our heads, we're going to choose—let's each choose an apple. And Robert ...

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: ... being Robert, decides like in six seconds.

ROBERT: Because it had this really cool name.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: Washington Pacific rose. Za…

ROBERT: Zazz. I'm gonna get a zazz. [laughs]

JAD: Me, I deliberated.

JAD: I'm gonna get the—maybe I should—let's just go to the organic.

PRODUCER: We're—we're running out of time.

JAD: I lined up about 12 apples, compared them by price, size, color and everything I could think of and eventually decided on a giant Korean apple pear, which was the only logical choice because it was bigger than his.

JAD: This is a—this is a nine pound apple.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: It is large.

JAD: It was more expensive.

JAD: $2.89.

PRODUCER: Check.

JAD: Definitely way more original.

ROBERT: But this isn't an apple. It's a—it's a ...

PRODUCER: Check.

JAD: And I figure as we're checking out.

CASHIER: Paper bag or a plastic?

JAD: Paper, please.

JAD: Game over, I am the winner. But a couple hours later we get to the airport. We have some time before our flight. I grab a plastic knife, we cut the apples and we do a tasting test.

ROBERT: Okay, ready? Here we go.

JAD: One, two, three.

JAD: And guess who's apple is the best?

JONAH LEHRER: I'm guessing the Zazz apple.

ROBERT: Oh, this is a much better apple.

JAD: Yes!

ROBERT: Oh, so good.

JAD: The apple wins in almost every department.

JAD: My apple? I don't even want to talk about my apple.

JAD: This doesn't taste like an apple at all.

ROBERT: Ooh! It has a surprise. Is that a worm?

JAD: That's a gigantic core.

ROBERT: Is that a core or is it an animal living there?

JAD: Anyhow, according to Jonah, where I went wrong ...

JONAH LEHRER: Oh, you've just completely—you've short circuited your prefrontal cortex there.

JAD: The prefrontal cortex is the—right here in your forehead, and that's where the rational brain lives. And I had given it too many things to keep track of ...

JONAH LEHRER: All these apples. You can only hold so much data at once, you know, any given moment. So you can fixate on seven apples, but only one piece of information for each apple, how red they are or how shiny they are.

JAD: So you can't do seven apples with seven variables because then you've got 49. That's way past what ...

JONAH LEHRER: Exactly.

JAD: But there is a bigger problem than brain fatigue, if you ask Barry Schwartz. And it happens after you choose.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: You're plagued with the possibility that you didn't do as well as you could have.

JAD: I'm—I'm—I'm ...

JAD: Regret.

JAD: I'm lamenting what could have been.

JAD: Which I definitely felt at the airport.

BARRY SCHWARTZ: And chances are you didn't do as well as you could have.

JAD: Well that's—therein lies the rub of a place like Berkeley Bowl. You get seduced by an 11-pound apple that turns out to be a fake watermelon with an anus.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ROBERT: All right. So we now understand the problem that Barry proposes. He says that if you have to make a choice, too often the choice is the wrong one because your brain is too full of fat.

JAD: It hurts your head.

ROBERT: It hurts your head, or because if you make the choice, you then think, "Oh, damn, I should have chosen otherwise." The regret problem.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: There are ways to handle this. Our friend Oliver Sacks, Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neuroscientist, who is a regular on this program, we were talking and I told him about this issue and he said, "Oh, I don't have the problem." "What do you mean, you don't have the problem?" "Well, I make," he says, "a willful choice, that certain things I care about a lot and I worry over and then, oh, there's a whole swath of my life that I just don't choose."

OLIVER SACKS: Yes. My housekeeper actually comes tomorrow and she will get half a gallon of soy milk, half a gallon of prune juice. She will make a gallon or so of orange Jell-O. She will make a large bowl of tabbouleh. She will get six or seven tins of sardines because I eat sardines with tabbouleh every evening she will get seven apples and seven oranges.

ROBERT: Seven apples? Why seven apples and seven ...

OLIVER SACKS: Okay, well, because I'm also very greedy and impulsive, and therefore I have to have a rule that I am permitted to eat an apple a day and a pear a day. If I had 70 apples, I would—I would—I would eat them all.

ROBERT: So you have worked it out so that you are regulating yourself and somehow your appetite has become regulated in the meantime?

OLIVER SACKS: Yes. I never get bored with my food.

ROBERT: Why not? That seems so boring.

OLIVER SACKS: Well, it—I don't find it boring. I enjoy it equally and with equal relish every time.

ROBERT: If I were to sit down with you and describe to you a new candy, I don't know, almond M&Ms, and I would do it with all the talent that I could possibly bring to description. So you would see the nice outer candy shell. It would glisten, it would be sugary, it would have this most delicious nut inside. Would you not feel at all tempted to break the habit of years, whatever your sweet is, and just venture over to almond M&Ms?

OLIVER SACKS: And I would certainly try the almond M&M, but since you mention it with chocolate, there is a shop close to me which has broken 72 percent chocolate. I go there each day. Indeed I have, as you see with me, a single dollar in my pocket. I put it down and I say "A dollar's worth of 72."

ROBERT: Every day?

OLIVER SACKS: Every day, neither more nor less.

ROBERT: Can you recall the moment when you somehow leaped from whatever your predecessor chocolate routine was to the 72 percent cocoa content? Something wonderful must have happened on that day where you got yanked from the deep rut that you were in into the next deep rut. I'm just curious what happened on the day of change?

OLIVER SACKS: I don't—I don't clearly recollect, but I can tell you a day of negative change. This again goes back to my carnivorous days when I got a thing about kidneys. For some reason ...

ROBERT: You mean the organ or the pea?

OLIVER SACKS: No, no, the organ. Rognon. Rognon. It was when I was a resident at UCLA. And I, as I now have, sardines every time for dinner. At that time, living in Topanga Canyon, I would have kidneys and I would go to the farmer's market and I would buy my weekly kidneys. But on one occasion, a strange mistake happened. Whether I made the mistake or whether I was misheard, by all, instead of my usual two pounds of kidneys, I was given 22 pounds of kidneys.

ROBERT: [laughs]

OLIVER SACKS: And if a mistake is made, I'm too shy to say anything.

ROBERT: Aren't you embarrassed to be such a wimp? Both of routine and of shyness? I mean, I think it's a double—it's a double duty there.

OLIVER SACKS: Yes, I am. Well, what the hell? Anyhow, with these I should, of course, have thrown away this monstrous palpitating bag of kidneys.

ROBERT: [laughs]

OLIVER SACKS:  But anyway, I took it back to my little house in Topanga and then followed an increasingly nightmarish period in which I had kidneys for breakfast, for lunch, kidneys stewed, sweet kidneys. And finally, after about 10 days, by which time I'd seen about 50, an uncontrollable nausea and vomiting took hold of me.

ROBERT: Literally, or just of the mind?

OLIVER SACKS: I think it was literally as well because I remember seeing bits of kidney in the vomit, and I then threw out the rest of the kidneys. And I never had a kidney since.

ROBERT: Oliver Sacks, author of most recently the book Musicophilia.

JAD: Hey, what did he call those kidneys just now?

ROBERT: Rognon.

JAD: Oh, what is that?

ROBERT: That's French for kidney.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JAD: No kidding. What's French for let's go to break?

ROBERT: Au revoir. Au revoir.

JAD: Well, no, but that's—that's goodbye for good.

ROBERT: Meaning, we'll be right back.

JAD: Okay. Coming up, we have a story you will not believe about what happens behind the scenes at a casino when you are trying not to lose, but nonetheless are getting gouged. That's coming up on Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Stay with us.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message one.]

[BARRY SCHWARTZ: Hi, this is Barry Schwartz. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by National Public Radio. Bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

JAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich. 

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today's program is about choice, how we choose, why and what is choice.

ROBERT: And I'm going to choose—I'm actually going to dream of the possibility one day of walking into a store and instead of being obsessed and turned on by the beauty of an object or by the promise of an object, the price, or the status that would be conferred upon me if I choose, or not conferred upon me. All those messy emotions. What would happen if I could be like Spock?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Star Trek: I am half-Vulcanian. Vulcanians do not speculate. I speak from pure logic.]

ANTOINE BECHARA: Hello?

JAD: Hi.

ROBERT: Hi.

ANTOINE BECHARA: Hi, Jad and Robert.

JAD: We actually put the Spock question to neurologist Dr. Antoine Bechara, who works at the University of Southern California.

ROBERT: If I could say abracadabra and go all logic, would I be a happy chooser?

ANTOINE BECHARA: I would say no. Based on our work with neurological patients ...

ROBERT: Then he told us about a patient he once had. He's changed the name of the patient. He was—we'll call him Elliot.

JAD: Could you—can you describe him? What was he like?

ANTOINE BECHARA: Well, he's about five feet ten. You know, 170 pounds, I would say. He's at that kind of—he looks very normal, like a normal person.

JONAH LEHRER: He—he was an accountant.

JAD: That's Jonah Lehrer again.

JONAH LEHRER: For a large corporation.

ANTOINE BECHARA: A successful accountant.

JONAH LEHRER: Upper management, active in his local church.

JAD: And he was married at the time?

ANTOINE BECHARA: Yes. Very conservative family. Very religious.

JONAH LEHRER: House in the suburbs.

ANTOINE BECHARA: Good money saving.

JONAH LEHRER: Smart, successful man. Kind of the American dream.

ANTOINE BECHARA: And then, you know, the tumor happened.

JAD: This was in 1982. Doctors discovered a small knot in the front of Elliot's head.

JONAH LEHRER: In a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex.

JAD: And where's that?

JONAH LEHRER: That's just behind the eyes.

JAD: Did the doctors remove the tumor?

ANTOINE BECHARA: Yeah, he had the surgery. The tumor was removed.

JAD: And then the doctors sent him home.

JONAH LEHRER: Well, at first glance, it seems like a tremendous success. No language impairment. No movement disorders. He still scores 97th percentile on the intelligence test. He's—he's—he seems fine. Like good old Elliott.

ROBERT: Does good old Elliot go back to the good old job?

JONAH LEHRER: He—he starts going back to the good old job, the good old family.

JAD: And that's when things got really weird.

JONAH LEHRER: At first, it's just subtle things, these very minor decisions.

JAD: That he suddenly couldn't make. Like he'd be at the office, he'd want to sign a contract, and he'd have in front of him a blue pen and a black pen. And he would think, Well, the type on this contract is black, so maybe I should use a blue pen.

JONAH LEHRER: Maybe a blue pen sticks out more. On the other hand, maybe it sticks out too much and will become too distracting.

JAD: Then again ...

JONAH LEHRER: Black pen is lower on ink. So you want to save that for later.

JAD: This would go on and on, says Jonah.

JONAH LEHRER: For a half an hour.

ROBERT: And if it takes him a half an hour to decide which pen to choose, imagine Elliot in the cereal aisle in the grocery store.

JONAH LEHRER: I mean, the cereal is particularly tough because there—you know, there must be 200 varieties of cereal.

ROBERT: This is a sugary cereal. This is a not sugary cereal.

JONAH LEHRER: Standing there, I think about, you know, what would I prefer tomorrow?

ROBERT: The one with extra protein ...

JONAH LEHRER: I've got these other cereals at home. Are they also honey nut themed? Do I want something to break up the honey nut monotony? Is there one that's on sale that is a better deal?

JAD: With Elliot ...

ANTOINE BECHARA: It will take forever to decide.

JAD: According to Dr. Bechara, he would just keep on analyzing.

ANTOINE BECHARA: Analyzing ...

JONAH LEHRER: Well, this one's 14 ounces.

ANTOINE BECHARA: ... analyzing ... 

JONAH LEHRER: 15 ounces, but they're the same price.

ANTOINE BECHARA: ... analyzing.

JONAH LEHRER: Are they also honey ...

ANTOINE BECHARA: Analyzing.

JONAH LEHRER: All day long.

JAD: The question was what exactly had happened to Elliott to make him that way? Like, what exactly did that tumor do? And the breakthrough came when Elliott went to see a neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio immediately noticed something, even though Elliott was perfectly thoughtful, perfectly articulate ...

JONAH LEHRER: Always controlled, always relaxed.

JAD: ... when he spoke, he seemed kind of numb.

JONAH LEHRER: No sign of anger or rage or self-pity.

JAD: No feeling at all. So Damasio had an idea. He put Elliott in a chair, hooked him up to all these measuring devices, and then showed Elliott a series of really charged pictures.

JONAH LEHRER: A severed foot, a naked woman, a house on fire. Pictures that in normal people trigger an automatic emotional response. You can't help it, but your blood pressure increases. Your pulse increases, your hands start to sweat. 

JAD: But with Elliott ...

JONAH LEHRER: These pictures triggered nothing.

JAD: And that's when it became clear what had happened to Elliott. What his tumor had really done was cut him off from his emotional mind. He'd become, in effect ...

JONAH LEHRER: Some kind of, like, Spock-like Vulcan. The conventional theory would be that a person without emotions would be perfectly rational. That emotions somehow interfered with rationality, that they got in the way. Yet here was this guy who couldn't experience emotions, and he was pathologically indecisive.

ROBERT: So then the answer to my question, my first question, wouldn't we all be better off if we could be completely rational? You now have the answer. It's no. When you've got all these options to consider and they're more or less the same, the only way to wheedle your way to a choice is to stop thinking and go with—go with the feeling. 

ANTOINE BECHARA: Right.

ROBERT: And so the—the logic of yes, no, yes, no, yes, o leaves you nowhere, but the feelings of yes! No! yes! No! That does leave you somewhere.

ANTOINE BECHARA: That's right.

ROBERT: Feeling, says Antoine Bechara. That's the key. Without feeling, you're stuck.

JAD: So what—what ended up happening to Elliot?

ANTOINE BECHARA: Ended up in a divorce, ended up losing his job, losing all his savings.

JONAH LEHRER: He got involved with a con artist. He had to move back in with his parents. Elliot was stuck. His—his—his life fell apart.

ROBERT: Which makes you kind of re-evaluate the Dr. Spock advantage, so-called, because if we really were keeping company with a flock of Spocks and we brought them to the grocery store, there they'd be, 55 Spocks, staring at the Cheerios, staring at the Honey-Comb, staring at the Cheerios ...

JAD: Not to mention that they're divorced and broke.

ROBERT: So I mean, obviously, we have some advantage over these Vulcans because we have these feelings that can push us to a solution.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But what—what I still don't get is: Is it just the roar of feeling that does it? Or is there something about having a feeling that's more subtle than that? There is some—is there some—what is the power of the feeling?

JAD: That's an interesting question. Let me—let me—let me get—let me walk this story in from a writer, Steven Johnson. He's written a whole bunch of books, Emergence, Mind Wide Open.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Cool.

JAD: And he tells this story that ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: Can we press record?

JAD: ... really gets at what you're asking.

STEVEN JOHNSON: My wife and I had moved into this new, wonderful apartment that overlooks the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan. It had this vast window. It was one kind of window in this room, but it was huge. And we would sit there and stare out at the river all times a day. And at one point, the first summer we were there, the storms started to come in and they would kind of build up over Jersey and come rolling in and we thought, Oh, this is great. We can look at the whitecaps on and see the lightning over Jersey City and all this stuff. And one late June day, we're sitting out there in our apartment. We can see the sky is getting darker and darker, and we immediately say to each other "Wow, this is gonna be a great show!" So we both go over to the window and we were standing at the window, my wife literally with her hands pressed against the glass. And I'm standing right next to it, just to the side of it, kind of looking out and the storm starts really kicking up. There's a lot of lightning and you can see the window actually kind of flex just a tiny little bit, which ...

JAD: So you noticed this.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah, we noticed that there was a little bit of giving a window that says it has to have a little bit of give, but otherwise it's not stable. So we could tell it was really—it was really windy. And—and there are a couple of pretty powerful gusts. And then all of a sudden there's this very strange, sharp kind of clicking sound. My wife instantly jumps back from the window, jumps back, you know, kind of four or five feet and says, "What was that?" I say, being the incredibly perceptive person that I am, I say, "I'm pretty sure it was the study door slamming with the wind around the corner in the other part of the apartment." So she goes back around the corner to check on whether it was, in fact, the study door slamming. And at that moment, as I'm standing two inches from the frame in the window, the entire thing blows in. It makes an insane noise, it shatters glass.

JAD: Whoa!

STEVEN JOHNSON: And all of a sudden there's a, you know, 60 mile an hour storm like blowing through our apartment. So we both run into the bathroom and close the door. And all of a sudden, you know, I suddenly think, like, "Oh, my God, you were standing in front of that window three seconds before. If—if I hadn't stupidly told you that I thought that clicking sound was the door slamming that thing would have landed on you." I think it's entirely possible that it would have killed her.

JAD: Okay. So that—that happened. His wife, by the way, was fine.

ROBERT: Good.

JAD: They installed a new window. They cleaned up the apartment.

ROBERT: They did, because I am covered with imaginary glass. I mean, our sound effects are so unbelievably real. [laughs]

JAD: Thank you very much. But what's illuminating and what gets at the question you asked? ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: Is actually what happened next. It's the postscript to that event.

STEVEN JOHNSON: For literally years, every time I heard the sound of wind blowing through a window in that apartment and really pretty much anywhere else, I had an involuntary fear reflex.

JAD: The sound of any wind, or was it a specific kind of wind sound?

STEVEN JOHNSON: It was the sound of wind associated with the window. So, you know, it's the "whoosh" you know, I would go to my parents house who live on the ground floor in a house in suburban Washington. And I would just hear wind kind of going through the window there. And I would think something's not right.

JAD: And this was not a rational feeling?

STEVEN JOHNSON:  It was certainly not a rational thought. I could look empirically and say, it's 30 miles an hour, this wind, the window is clearly not gonna blow in. It's not that big a window, and I'm standing nowhere near it.

JAD: But you still somehow couldn't shake the dread?

STEVEN JOHNSON: I couldn't get rid of that feeling. And it's one of those moments where you really—you really ask yourself, I think, you know, "Who's in charge?" [laughs] You know who's driving this ship, you know, because some part of me is looking at this situation empirically and saying rationally, "This window is no threat to me."

JAD: Right.

STEVEN JOHNSON: It's not gonna blow in. And yet some other part of me is unable to shake this emotional state of—of dread and fear and alertness and threat.

JAD: All right. Now to get back to your question, Robert, where do feelings come from?

ROBERT: Yeah, why do I say yes to Wheat Chex, with a—with power?

JAD: Right. Well, consider the story we just heard from the perspective of Steven Johnson's brain.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: So what a brain wants to do most of all is keep the organism safe. Right?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And it does that by looking for patterns like, here's an explosion. Wife almost died.

STEVEN JOHNSON: I think it's entirely possible that it would have killed her.

JAD: In that moment, brain soaks it all in. It takes kind of a snapshot, like, what have we got here? STEVEN JOHNSON: Wind. Window. Glass. Shock.

JAD: So that later, wind blows, the brain thinks, "Wait a second."

STEVEN JOHNSON: Wind. Window. Glass.

JAD: "We've seen this before. Warn the organism."

STEVEN JOHNSON: Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid. 

JAD: My point is that feeling of dread ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: Dread and fear and alertness and threat.

JAD: That's just an alarm signal. The brain is just trying to help Steve make the right decision.

ROBERT: Huh?

JAD: Okay. Now to the cereal aisle.

CHILD: I got Cheerios at home!

JAD: There you are, you're looking at all the boxes.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Cheerios. Captain Crunch.

JAD: And as your eyes fall on the Rice Krispie box.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Rice Krispies, Rice Krispies.

JAD: Just like Steve Johnson with the wind, somewhere way deep down your brain is calling up all the experiences you've ever had with Rice Krispies. The good Rice Krispie experiences, the bad ones. Maybe in college you got dumped by that girl who likes Rice Krispie treats. I don't know.

ROBERT: I remember her.

JAD: Thousands of little memory fragments down there roil about ...

ROBERT: A lot of information.

JAD: Too much! So what ends up happening is that it all gets summed somehow in your subconscious, and then it bubbles up as a feeling.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Rice Krispies. All right.

JAD: So one way to look at a gut feeling is that it's a kind of shorthand average of all of this past wisdom.

ROBERT: So you have this tremendous sturm und drang of feelings inside.

JAD: Sturm und what? Ooh, that's a nice ...

ROBERT: That's German. I can do a little German.

JAD: That's very nice.

ROBERT: But there is, say scientists, one feeling that humans have that seems to trump all the others, and that is the feeling of loss. People hate to lose.

JAD: You can actually put a number on it, how much they hate to lose versus winning.

ROBERT: And it's a really cool experiment that was done. It's been done everywhere, but our experiment will be done by National Public Radio's wonderful reporter Mike Pesca.

MIKE PESCA: Are you a bit of a gambler, or would you rather just keep your money and not risk it?

MAN 1: I mean, I wouldn't mind risking a few dollars, but I just don't want to go overboard, you know?

MIKE PESCA: Would you say you're a—you're a gambling woman? Do you like gambling?

WOMAN 1: No, I don't.

WOMAN 2: I don't really gamble.

MAN 2: I'm very cautious and finicky, whether it's eating or taking chances.

WOMAN 3: Yeah, the risk of losing something isn't worth the gambling. I mean, I guess ...

WOMAN 2: I wouldn't take a risk. Let's put it that way.

MIKE PESCA: If we were to play heads or tails. Would you want to do it? If you won, you won a dollar. But if I won, I won a dollar?

MAN 4: Probably not. No, no, no, thanks.

MIKE PESCA: If you knew the game was on the up and up and I were to flip a coin and I said, "Oh, look, I'll pay you, you know, $1.25 if you win. You only have to pay a dollar."

MAN: 5: No, I ain't doing it with you.

WOMAN 2: No.

WOMAN 4: I don't know. That just doesn't seem worth it.

MIKE PESCA: If I said, Look, I'll give you a $1.50 and you only have to put up a dollar. Would you do it then?

MAN 5: No.

WOMAN 2: Not really. $0.50 is not worth ...

MIKE PESCA: What if I offered you $1.75 if you want?

MAN 5: That's a possibility ...

MAN 6: Maybe ...

WOMAN 4: I would do that. I would do that.

MAN 7: Yes, sure.

JAD: Wow, so everyone seems to converge around two bucks? Two to one?

MIKE PESCA: Yes.

JAD: So that means that, like loss is twice is painful.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah, you could say loss hurts twice as much as gain feels good.

JAD: Why do you think that is?

MIKE PESCA: It must have something to do with,you know, when we were all running away from lions on the savannah.

JAD:Yeah, it always seems to come back to that, doesn't it?

MIKE PESCA: I guess a wildebeest in the brush is worth a lion on the heels or something.

JAD: I don't know what that means, but were there any people that you talked to who went way past two to one?

MIKE PESCA: Sure.

MIKE PESCA: Okay. A hundred to one.

MAN: No.

MIKE PESCA: Come on. You're crazy. A hundred to one on a coin flip.

MAN: A hundred to one. No, no. I'm just not a gambler.

MIKE PESCA: Is this a religious thing?

MAN: Nope. I'm just not a gambler.

JAD: So here's the question. Let's get us to our next thing. Well, given that human beings hate to lose, what do you do if your entire business is getting people to lose money?

ROBERT: You're talking about casinos, are you not?

JAD: Indeed I am!

ROBERT: We're going to Las Vegas, are we?

JAD: Atlantic City.

ROBERT: Atlantic City then? All right.

JAD: Now normally what a casino will do, they will try to distract you with, you know, fountains of jellybeans and, you know ...

ROBERT: Greek statues that move.

JAD: But there is one casino in particular called Harrah's, it's a chain, that doesn't do any of that.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah, they offer slots and they offer blackjack, but there's no exploding volcano. There's no Picasso on the wall.

JAD: And yet, according to Mike ...

MIKE PESCA: Harrah's jumps out at you.

JAD: They are the success story in the casino biz.

MIKE PESCA: And Gary Loveman has a lot to do with that.

GARY LOVEMAN: Yeah, any minute you're not drunk or depressed, I'd like you in the casino.

MIKE PESCA: He's the CEO of Harrah's Casinos, and he's developed a really brilliant technique for slaying the beast that is loss aversion.

GARY LOVEMAN: That's one way to put it.

JAD: What's his technique?

MIKE PESCA: Loyalty cards.

ROBERT: What's a loyalty card? What does that mean?

JAD: Well, basically, I mean, you know how back in the day if you wanted to play the slots you just stuck a quarter in?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Can't do it anymore.

MIKE PESCA: Right. You're like, I'd like to—I'd like throw a quarter in the one-armed bandit. It turns out there are no quarters. Okay, I'll slide a dollar bill in. Turns out before you have to do it, you have to sign up for a card. Well, why would I want to sign up for a card? Well, A) you have to, but B) the first time you play we'll give you a couple extra dollars. Everyone wants to sign up for that card. It's free money.

JAD: Now, just to be clear, at Harrah's, it's actually not obligatory to sign up for this card, but most people do get the rewards. And so there you are. You've got this little loyalty thing and you're sticking it in every slot or machine that you play and that offers them certain—well, they've got this new pilot program where they basically watch every move you make. Check it out.

MIKE PESCA: Okay. Let's say you're playing the slots.

JAD: Okay.

MIKE PESCA: You stick your card in the slot machine.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Player: All right, my card is in.]

MIKE PESCA: At that very moment ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Player: Let's try this.]

MIKE PESCA: The information is transmitted downstairs. In the case of this casino we were at, it goes downstairs deep in the bowels of the casino. There's a dispatcher sitting there in front of a monitor. This computer sees that you've put your card into slot machine number 42 and the computer begins taking notes. Every game that you play, they're logging, adding, dividing, graphing, whatever. It's able to crunch those numbers. And over many visits, the casino begins to know you. They know your game is slots.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Player: Come on.]

MIKE PESCA: They know you like to play for an average of six hours, and they know that generally you have a limit, say $89.

JAD: Wow. They can know that I usually leave after losing 89 bucks?

MIKE PESCA: Yeah. And they know on this particular visit you're not doing so well.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Player: Why didn't I win?] 

MIKE PESCA: You've lost more than you're winning. In fact, you've lost 72 bucks, which is really close to your personal limit.

JAD: And this is a crucial moment. You're starting to get that sinking feeling. You might just pack it in.

ROBERT: I walk out of the casino.

JAD: Yes, and the casino does want you to do that.

MIKE PESCA: They want to keep you there. So ...

JAD: As your losses are increasing from 72 to 77 to 85, and you're getting closer and closer to that point ...

MIKE PESCA: In a back room, there's a computer going off, the dispatcher is seeing it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Julia, 3703.]

MIKE PESCA: The dispatcher knows to call the slot attendant up on the floor.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Tango, Four, Willie I have a DCL at GOL 1401 for Karen Massa.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant in over radio: Copy that, Tango Four ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant in room: ... Willie, DCL one for Karen Massa.]

MIKE PESCA: The slot attendant walks out, taps you on the shoulder ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant: Hello, how you doing, ma'am? Miss Karen Massa?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Karen Massa: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant: Everything going okay for you today?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Karen Massa: I'm losing.]

GARY LOVEMAN: And of course, we know that's the case because our systems allow us to monitor that.

MIKE PESCA: And so the attendant offers her something you might like.

GARY LOVEMAN: A visit to the steakhouse. A visit to our coffee shop.

MIKE PESCA: They could offer you tickets to a show. Celine Dion's playing the big room.

JAD: Ooh!

MIKE PESCA: Or, they could just offer cold, hard cash.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant: You won some money today, just by playing with your card, your lucky reward card.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Karen Massa: Oh really?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant: Yes, I got $15, DCL 1 for you. Will you accept it?]

MIKE PESCA: And all of a sudden, you're happy that you want 15 bucks. You're not fixated on the fact that you've lost $72. So you come back again and again and again.

CASINO PLAYER 1: I think it's great. It's something to do.

CASINO PLAYER 2: I'm always over.

CASINO PLAYER 3: I lose $300 all the time. Good thing our boys don't know how much. [laughs]

JAD: Now here is the amazing part.

MIKE PESCA: For all the different thousands of people who come through the doors of Harrah's casinos, they could figure out their own individual pain points.

JAD: So you're telling me that if you walk into a casino, I walk in right after you, Robert Krulwich, right after us ...

MIKE PESCA: Yeah. 

JAD: And we do that enough times. After a while, they can know that you like to gamble until you're about $700 down, me I'd usually leave around 11 bucks.

MIKE PESCA: And moneybags Krulwich over there ...

JAD: Moneybags Krulwich usually holds out until he's four grand in the hole. And they can know that about each of us?

MIKE PESCA: Yeah, they can.

JAD: What—what do you think about this? It strikes you as a good business proposition, or does it strike you as a creepy example of Big Brother-ism?

MIKE PESCA: Obviously this works out well for Harrah's, so does it work out well for me, you and Robert Krulwich? I think it does.

JAD: What do you mean?

MIKE PESCA: Well, they can't ever change the odds. So when we go into a casino by state law, they'll never be able to change the odds of the game. All that Harrah's can do is kind of manage the feeling that we get.

JAD: Hmm.

GARY LOVEMAN: They leave a lot happier than if they had simply had a bad gaming experience, put their wallet back in their pocket and gone home unhappy.

MIKE PESCA: And everything about going to the—to a casino is a poor decision, an irrational decision. And if there was a way they can make me walking out of there feeling like a million bucks when I spent 2 million, well, then I say more power to them.

GARY LOVEMAN: And I would add, of course, that almost any business could try something similar, assuming they had appealing sorts of things to do for customers that had bad experiences.

JAD: What's your pain point, by the way?

MIKE PESCA: You know what it is? If I'm down 300 bucks, I'm really pissed off. I'm not gonna get there.

JAD: Yeah.

MIKE PESCA: There's only one thing that would keep me at the table.

JAD: What's that?

MIKE PESCA: Celine Dion.

JAD: [laughs]

MIKE PESCA: Not—not tickets to her concert, if she was actually in the game. She's a terrible poker player, what we call dead money.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Celine Dion: [singing] All by myself!]

JAD: Thanks, Mike.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah.

ROBERT: We'll be back in a moment.

JAD: Hey, by the way, Mike works at NPR News. Thank you to them for letting us borrow them.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Candace Grotty, calling from St. Paul, Minnesota. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hello this is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today we are talking about decision making, how we make decisions.

ROBERT: Whoa, whoa, whoa,whoa,whoa. I want to just stop you in that pronoun you just happened to use. You say "we" make decisions.

JAD: We. Yeah.

ROBERT: So when you, Jad Abumrad, when you decide to choose a pen black over blue, if you decide to choose a cereal, Cheerios over Special K.

JAD: Cheerios, definitely.

ROBERT: I'm assuming that you feel very much in charge of that choice. If someone said, "Hey, who chose?" You'd say ...

JAD: This feels like a trick question.

ROBERT: It's gonna be a trick question.

JAD: I chose the Cheerios.

ROBERT: Well, you think you chose.

ROBERT: Would you please welcome the studly Malcolm Gladwell?

ROBERT: But in talking with Malcolm Gladwell, the writer of The Tipping Point, and he at the time he'd just written the book Blink. We were at the 92nd Street Y in New York. He raised an interesting question. We began the discussion by talking about a dangerous element in decision making, which he calls ...

ROBERT: You called this The Perils of Introspection. And you tell the story of a poster contest. It involves hanging cats versus impressionists. Do you recall this?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes, yes. Actually I have no memory. Yeah. This is a famous study by Tim Wilson, who's one of my favorite psychologists at UVA and a guy named John Schooler, who's absolutely brilliant. They—they have a whole bunch of posters and they bring students in and they say, "Take any one you want. It's yours." And then they bring in another group and they say, "Take anyone you want. But by the way, before you go home with it, just explain, write out a paragraph about why you're taking it home, why you like it." And then they call up a student six months later and they say "That poster you got for free six months ago, do you like it? Are you still happy with it?" And ones who didn't have to explain themselves still love their poster, and the ones who did hate their poster. And furthermore, the ones who had to explain themselves, it turns out, only took the posters of the hanging cats, of little kittens. You know, hanging their babies.

ROBERT: What do you mean hanging cats? It doesn't mean like [gag sound]?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, no, no. You know those posters. Surely you saw them. Or maybe you have lived in the upper kind of intellectual precincts for so long that you've lost contact with the rest of us but, you know, if you've never seen them, the little kitten hanging on a bar and it says, 'Hang in there, baby,' you know? Oh, yeah.

ROBERT: Oh, oh yeah. All right. Yes. I don't think of it as hanging. I think it is sort of ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: You're just faking it, you're just saying it.

ROBERT: Yeah. Yeah. No, no, you're right. You're right. I am faking it.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. My—actually, when I first saw that, I thought the kitten was having to do a chin up and so it didn't have the desired effect. I thought, "Why are they torturing this kitten?" Right? "Why do kittens have to work? Is it, you know, is it not enough that human beings have to go to the gym?" Anyways, but—but you had those, then you had Impressionist posters, and the kids who had to explain their preferences overwhelmingly chose the kittens and those who didn't have to explain themselves chose the impressionist posters. So what that says is the act of making you explain your preferences, not only biased you in favor of something that you didn't actually want, it also made you change your preference away from something that was sophisticated and in favor of something that was unsophisticated. If you think about the whole universe of focus group testing in something that determines all of the cultural products that get into our society, that makes you really stop and worry, right? We're putting people through a process that alienates them from their true needs and that biases them in favor of the unsophisticated, an overwhelming majority of the greatest and most successful movies or sitcoms or television shows of all time tested badly. Almost by definition, the really breakthrough shows will test badly in focus groups. I actually saw the focus group results for Mary Tyler Moore Show, which were devastating. They hated it! Mary was abrasive, Rhoda was, you know, obnoxious, you know the—in the focus group testing of All In the Family which got one of the lowest scores of any pilot that tested CBS, the overwhelming majority of people who watched the show said that the only way to fix it was to turn Archie into a kind of cuddly, sensitive ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

MALCOLM GLADWELL: You know, it's crazy. It's crazy. The only reason these shows ever make it on the air is that somebody at some point just says, "You know what, ignore that stuff. I like it."

ROBERT: And so the suggestion here is that because these snap judgments are—are a—mysterious, over-explained, therefore corrected in the wrong direction, frankly, capitalist—capitalism should have no cutting edge excitement, except that there are these occasional people that take the risk with the system. So that's one consequence. The other, though, is very, very more interesting to me. If you can't know why you have a feeling in your gut and you can't explain why you have a feeling in your gut and to some extent you can't control what's the feeling in your gut you wonder who's in charge of the choices that you make. And there's a whole section of this book which is maybe the scariest, which is about something called priming, where external clues, things that you see, trigger biases inside you. So let me run you through some of those. There's a game you asked your readers to play, where you play—there are words in the game, and in one of the games you play the words 'wrinkle,' 'bingo' and 'Florida' appear matter of factly. What happens to people who see while doing something else, 'wrinkle,' 'bingo' and 'Florida?'

MALCOLM GLADWELL: They walk out of the room after the test is over more slowly than they walked into them.

ROBERT: You asked people to play a game of Trivial Pursuit. Some of them say, "First, before we play this game, let's think about professors for a moment and now we'll play Trivial Pursuit." Another group, you say, "Let's play Trivial Pursuit, but now let's think about soccer hooligans, and then we'll play Trivial Pursuit." What's the difference?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: If I make you think about professors first, your scores are substantially superior. You win. Basically, if I make you think about hooligans, you lose.

ROBERT: Just thinking about them?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes.

JAD: Can we step away from the 92nd Street Y for just a moment?

ROBERT: Sure.

JAD: Because this priming thing that you and Malcolm are discussing gets kind of eerie when you go actually beyond words. Like, here, why don't you have a sip of this coffee?

ROBERT: This coffee here?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Right now?

JAD: Yeah. Just go ahead and have a sip

ROBERT: [slurps] Why are you looking at me like that?

JAD: Because I've just primed you.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: [laughs] Because I just primed you.

ROBERT: You just what?

JAD: Primed you.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: I'm going to explain.

JOHN BIRGE: Hi, I'm John.

JAD: We—we talked to a psychologist.

JOHN BIRGE: My name is John Birge, and I'm a professor at Yale University, in the Psychology Department.

JAD: And John did an interesting experiment. 

PRODUCER: Hey, check one two.

JAD: He and a grad student by the name of Lawrence Williams. Here's what they did. Lawrence went out into the world. He had a bunch of stuff with him, a briefcase, some coffee, some papers, so much stuff that he could barely carry it all. And he went out ...

JOHN BIRGE: Went out into the front of the library or in town, and he would approach somebody.

JAD: And he'd say, Excuse me, sir, ma'am, would you mind taking this survey? Just a minute of your time?

JOHN BIRGE: They'd give their agreement to be in the study. Great.

JAD: It's a pretty simple survey.

ROBERT: What kind of survey?

JAD: Well, it had a picture of a guy on it, and a—and a description of the guy. It's got—the guy's name was Joe.

JOHN BIRGE: So here's Joe.

ROBERT: Joe?

JOHN BIRGE: Joe has these six traits.

JAD: There's a little description of Joe right there on the paper. "All I want you to do," he would say, "All I want you to do for this survey is just tell me, gut feeling, what do you think of Joe? Do you like him?"

ROBERT: That's it?

JAD: That's it.

ROBERT: Do I like ...

JOHN BIRGE: "How much do you like Joe?"

ROBERT: That's—that's the whole question?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You mean, like ...

JAD: Rate him.

JOHN BIRGE: One to ten.

ROBERT: One to ten, oh I see.

JOHN BIRGE: And everyone saw the same person described the same way, everyone sees the same description.

JAD: But there's one thing I haven't told you yet.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Somewhere in this process, toward the beginning, he would ever so casually ask them, "Can you just do me a favor, my hands are full, can you hold this cup of coffee."

JOHN BIRGE: "Here, hold this just for a second. Thanks." And they'd just take it for a second.

JAD: [laughs] They were.

JOHN BIRGE: It's all very natural.

ROBERT: Now I see.

JOHN BIRGE: So it's not even seen as part of the experiment.

JAD: Because it was just a second. Or, I should say, not everybody got the same cup of coffee. In fact, he would hand half the people a cup of hot coffee, and he would hand the other half a cup of iced coffee, like I gave you.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And it was always really fast.

JOHN BIRGE: They only hold the cup for maybe a second at most.

JAD: But that second, whether it was hot or cold, seems to have made a difference, because the hot coffee people ...

JOHN BIRGE: People who saw—who had touched or held the hot coffee ...

JAD: When they were asked, "Do you like Joe?" the majority said, "Yeah."

JOHN BIRGE: Exactly.

JAD: They liked Joe, whereas the cold coffee people, by and large ...

JOHN BIRGE: They didn't like him.

ROBERT: Oh, come on. Is that right?

JAD: I ...

ROBERT: Just by ...

JAD: I kid you not, they have repeated this study many, many times. Always the same result. People who hold the hot coffee are more pro-Joe than the people who hold the iced coffee. In other words, something happens in that second when they hold the cup, some sort of mistranslation in their brain where warm cup becomes warm Joe, real warm.

JOHN BIRGE: This physical sensation ...

JAD: Gets confused with the metaphor.

JOHN BIRGE: People are all the same temperature, usually. 98.6 degrees. We're not different in warmth and cold physically, but we talk about people that way. It's very important to us. You hear somebody is warm, you immediately like them. If you hear a person is cold, you don't want to be their friend, you don't want to hire them. Warmth and coldness, psychologically, is all about trust. It's all about, "Are you a friend or a foe?"
ROBERT: Wait, wait, wait. If that—but if that's true why is it true? Like ...

JAD: Why—why the confusion?

ROBERT: Yeah. Why does it boil down to something as dumb as that?

JAD: [laughs] Well, John Birge and his team have actually been asking that question, doing some neuroscience to see if maybe inside the brain they can see something that would explain it.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JOHN BIRGE: And it seems that the—the area of the brain that records temperature, that's responsive to actual, physical temperature is also the same area of the brain that is the location of where—trust, the same little part of the brain has got both of those things going on.

JAD: And he thinks that there is a good reason for that. Temperature and trust are, in fact, linked. Particularly when you are a little baby.

JOHN BIRGE: As infants, our first learning about the world is usually in terms of what we can see, and what we can touch. We don't have much memory, and we can't think very well. So it's all about our immediate experience. Well, a huge, important area of experience for a little baby is to keep close to the caretaker, and to stay warm.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caretaker: Hi.]

JOHN BIRGE: I mean, this—this is something that's so critical when they're so tiny and helpless that if they don't maintain closeness, if they don't maintain warmth they don't survive. So I guess the—the point is, if you're hiring somebody, and it—and you really want to hire the right person, don't have any coffee around. But the first step is to accept the possibility. And very few people—believe me, I try to explain to my family and my friends what I do and they never believe any of these things are really true of them because we don't have any awareness of them. "I can't remember one time that ever happened to me." Well yeah, you won't remember one time because it's never gonna be in your memory. It's never gonna be in your awareness.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah, no it's time—why is it so hard for us to—to concede that a huge part of our own motivations are mysterious?

ROBERT: We're back now at the 92nd Street Y, again with Malcolm Gladwell. I have to say there was a part of our conversation where this whole thing got a little scary to me. It had to do in part with race, because instead of using hot and cold as the metaphor, suppose you used black or white?
JAD: Right.

ROBERT: And he said, very flatly, there are stereotypes that we have that seem to be beyond our ability to control. In fact, he took a test, to measure the unconscious feelings that he had in him about Black and white people.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: I score, on an unconscious level, it turns out I have a moderate preference for whites on an unconscious level.

ROBERT: And he is, by the way, half-Black. 

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. Which is not unusual for Black people, by the way. Nor, is it unusual for, you know, Jews to have a moderate unconscious preference for Gentiles over Jews, or for any kind of—for Blacks it's most striking. My unconscious attitudes towards Blacks are a function of the society in which I live. My unconscious basically, is collecting impressions and thoughts and biases and stuff from the world I live in. Amassing this massive database. And if—in a very, kind of, unfiltered kind of way, right? Well, my data—my unconscious database about race has more negative things about Blacks than positive things, right? I live in, you know, the United States, of course it does. And so ...

ROBERT: I don't know about the, "of course."

MALCOLM GLADWELL: How can that not affect me, you know?

ROBERT: Well, but yeah. It's just—it's horrible. Or, maybe just put it this way, that—that you can't really purge yourself of things that would bother you if you could spy on them, and that you are, in some sense, a prisoner of your culture in a way that makes you in some way ungovernable. You can't quite get on top of yourself.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, the more you push—I mean, I don't push this issue that far in the book, because it gets really troubling ...

ROBERT: Yeah, it does.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: The more you push it, the—the—you're right, it's deeply disturbing. And there's a book written by a guy named Daniel Wegner at Harvard, called the Illusion of Conscious Will, and it's a very difficult book. But if you're—he pushes this as far as you could go. And, you know, at the end, if you go through all of this research that's come out recently in psychology, you do end up in the position that the notion of conscious will is an illusion. It's just we make up stories that make—make us feel good about the decisions we make, but, in fact, we are not really as nearly as in charge as we think we are.

ROBERT: That was Malcolm Gladwell talking with me at the 92nd Street Y. His new book is called Outliers.

JAD: Anything you heard this hour you can hear again on our website Radiolab.org. While you are there send us an email, radiolab(@)wnyc.org is the address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Radiolab is produced by Soren Wheeler and Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horne, Amanda Aronczyk and Jessica Benco. With help from Anna Rascouët and Ike—oops! Ike Sriskandarajah. Gotta do it again.]

[LISTENER: Thanks to Mike Pesca. Dan Ariely, Jonah Lehrer, and the 92nd Street Y. Heathwalk Tyler ...]

[LISTENER: And Sammy O'Kaye.]
[LISTENER: This is NPR, National Public Radio. Okay, that was actually pretty thrilling to do.]

 

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