Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. My name is Olaf Krigolson and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So this is our second episode on human decision making, and I'm. I'm almost treating this like a class, like if you were taking a class with me. So we're going to do a run of 10 to 12 episodes. I'm still planning it out. We're going to intersperse them with some. Some stuff about the neuroscience of daily life and a couple of interviews, including one with yours truly. And hopefully you like the format for this season. So let's get on with it. Human decision making lesson two. So in the first episode in this series, I talked about the concept of human value, and I just want to review it very quickly. Remember that value is not the financial worth of something, but it can be tied to that. All right? It's just how much something is inherently worth to you. And I used a lot of examples. You know, one I think of is I've got this hoodie I love. It's really old. It's probably not worth that much in terms of dollars and cents, but I've got a strong emotional attachment to it. So it's this idea that something is. It's just what something is worth to you. And I used a lot of food examples because frankly, I like food. And I'll shout out a quick, quick apology. Jen from the. The team said what? Tofu. I love tofu. So I'm sorry if I offended all of the tofu lovers out there. It's not just my thing. Okay, Sorry. And in addition to value, I established the concept of expected value. And an expected value is just the value of something times the probability of getting something. All right? So for some decisions, this, you know, value and expected value are almost identical. Like if you go to buy a slice of pizza and yep, we're back to pizza. The value is whatever it's worth to you. And the expected value is 100% because you're going to get the slice of pizza. But for other choices, the concept of expected value makes more sense because let's say you decide to major in law. Well, there's a value of being a lawyer to you. Maybe you've watched a lot of shows on TV or you had a relative that was a lawyer, but what's the probability that you're going to be happy being a lawyer or that it's going to work out for you? So in some situations, Value is hard to assess. An expected value is hard to assess as a result, because of probabilities. And we have to do the best we can do. So that leads us to our first model of decision making. And we. We are going to have lots of models of decision making. Actually, that's not entirely true. They're always going to come back to this basic idea. But what's going to happen is we're going to add to these models of decision making, making them more and more complex. So the simplest model of decision making is very straightforward. When faced with a decision, choose the highest expected value or choose the highest value. It's that simple. So you assess the choices in front of you and you take the highest expected value. So let's just stick with food because to be fair, I'm hungry. Let's say you go to a mall food court and there's a variety of food choices in front of you. You know, there might be Subway, there might be a sushi place, there might be A and W hamburgers. That's kind of a Canadian thing. So Burger King, for those of you that know, know that. So you've got these three ch. Basically what you do is you just go, well, what is the highest value of these to me personally at this point in time? And you just choose that. So if you really like Subway, that's what you go with. And you always choose the highest value. Now, we know that that's not what happens in real life, and we're going to get to that. But for today, we're just going to focus on this very simple model where you always choose the highest value, all right? And that's your model of decision making. So when you decide what you're going to eat for your next meal, you're choosing the highest value. Now, let's just talk about a few things that come up. I'm going to deal with a lot of them over the next couple of episodes. But an obvious one is what about those situations when you're having trouble choosing? Well, basically what that means is you have two values that are very similar, all right? And if two values are similar, then it's harder to choose because you're not sure which is better, A or B. And another concept to wrap your head around is the fact that value isn't constant. They change over time. You know, think of the foods that you used to love when you were younger, and you might not love those same foods now because their value has changed you. So values can change over a long period of time, but they can Also change over a very short time frame, all right? As you're sitting there going, sushi, Subway, you might be going, oh, Subway. Oh, man, that'll taste so good. But then you think to yourself, well, so the value for Subway goes up. And then you might think to yourself, well, I am trying to eat healthier, and sushi's probably a bit healthier. So the value for sushi goes up. So values change over time. And that's how you explain these kind of deliberation points. And at some point, you're forced to make a decision and you choose the highest value. So back to that model. So why is it hard to make decisions? Well, that's a complex topic, but hopefully you've just learned one now, which is it's sometimes it's very hard to assess value. You know, for some simple decisions, you know what you want, all right, and you just take the highest value. But for the more complex decisions in life, you know, I know one that my son's thinking about right now is, you know, what. What should my major be at University? Like, what degree program should I go into? Assessing the value of degree programs is incredibly hard. You know, you might be thinking about, would I be happy with that degree? You might be thinking about, what. What path does that degree take me on? All right? You might be thinking, how much money will I earn with that degree? And it's hard to assess those values because you don't really know. And as I mentioned yesterday, it's hard to assess probability. So when you're following this simple model of decision making, choose the highest value. It's actually incredibly challenging because you have trouble assessing value, you have trouble assessing probability. Therefore, your expected values might not be 100% accurate, which makes it hard to make a decision. And that's why this system sometimes fails, all right? It's that simple. The system can fail, literally, because your value estimates are off. I remember once talking to a friend who owned a restaurant, and I asked him what the most popular items on the menu were. And he said, these are our top three things. And I said, well, do you have data to support that? And he goes, no, no, it's just what I've observed. You know, I'm here every day and this is what I see. And I said, you know, what you should do is you should go through your sales records and see what are the most popular items, all right? Because where you put them on the menu and what you actually serve, this is a decision that you have to make. And sure enough, when he went through his Records, he found out he had a misperception, he had incorrect. Correctly assessed value. All right. Incorrectly assessed probability. So when people sort of say, hey, Dr. K, you know, can you give me some advice on how to make better decisions? This is what you, you do for a living. I actually go kind of old school with this and say, write it down. Step number one, write it down. I remember when I was in this course called Consumer Ed 10 a long time ago, and they talked about decision making. They literally said, you know, put down decision A, put down decision B and write down all the pluses and minuses. So, you know, I just went through this. I was thinking about, where am I going to go on my Christmas vacation? And my choice was sun or snow. I wanted to either sit on a beach and surf or go snowboarding up in the mountains. And I actually did. I'm that, I'm that nerdy. I wrote it down. I went, sun, snow, and I wrote the pluses and minuses of both. All right. And that's a great way to try to get better at assessing value and probability. All right. Is just to write it down. Another thing to do is, and this is sort of encapsulated in what I just said, is to think about it. Actually spend a bit of time thinking about your decision. You know, we're going to get to gut hunch decision making. We've talked about it in the past, but at the end of the day, when you make a gut hunch decision, you generally are going with the highest value option, but you might not be. So take some time to assess value and make sure you are making the best choice possible. Really important to do. All right? And the other thing that makes kind of common sense if you, you think within this model is you need to gather information. You know, the example I like to use here is I just moved to Portland. I told you that last episode. And the very first night here, I went out for Pizza Shock. And it's this place called the Life of PI. It's on 23rd Avenue in Portland. If you're ever in Portland, go to the Life of PI. It's unbelievable. But every time I got pizza, I got it from there. And that's actually, you know, there's the decision making expert making a critical mistake because what if there's another good pizza place out there? And it turns out there's a lot of good pizza places still think Life of Pie is the best. But you have to gather information. In this case, you try a lot of pizza from different pizza places because that way you have a better assessment of value, because maybe that life of pie place wasn't the best pizza in Portland. There's better pizza out there. But unless you gather information, you don't know. So how do you make better decisions? With a simple model. Write it down, think about it, try and come up with accurate assessments of value and accurate assessments of probability so you can better compute expected values. And as a part of that, you're gathering information. You need to figure out how the world works. So there you have it. It's a quick one, but I just want to get this fundamental model down. And we'll call this our base model of decision making. And it's very straightforward. Always choose the highest expected value. Or that's what you do is you choose the highest expected value. On our next episode, we'll start talking about, well, why shouldn't you always choose the highest value? Because we're going to cover something called the Explore Exploit dilemma. All right, that's all I've got on decision making. Second episode in the series. Don't forget the website that Neuroscience Guy.com links to our Etsy store and Patreon Etsy. We've got all sorts of merch up now, thanks to Jen Patreon. Remember, you can donate some money to us. I'm sorry to those of you that donated and we didn't have episodes for a while, but if you can support the podcast. None of the money goes to me. It goes to the graduate students who help make this podcast work. You just sign up a couple dollars a week, couple dollars a month. It makes a big difference. And of course, social media, Instagram X and threads at that Neurosci guy. We are going to do some targeted episodes on things that you want to know about. So we do want to know what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life. And of course, we're dropping some cool content on Instagram to support the episodes and some other stuff. So keep an eye on that. And last but not least, the podcast. Thank you so much for subscribing. My name is Olaf Kriegolsson and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another full episode of the podcast.