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Episode 178: Stress of decision making, Esteem choices
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today we're going to talk about an article that I picked up and this was in a science forum and is pretty pretty a well-known are pretty well known journal called the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology so the name of the article is called feeling distress from making decisions assessors is need to be right and this is three different researchers all coordinated to put this article together but I'm going to read to you a couple of paragraphs from this article and so essentially what this article is saying is that people who are concerned with making the quote perfect choice are more stressed when they're deciding and are less satisfied when they ultimately make a choice and then when they're making low stakes decisions they may say that it's probably better just to decide quickly and then to move on so the article goes on says it's common for people to experience distress when they make decisions yet the process is underlying such such of these negative effects during decision-making are not well understood so it's these researchers are uncertain why give them the same choice set some individuals make their decisions easily whereas others go through some agonizing process that go through all these different alternatives and they revisit the previous options and they revisit the options they decided not to do after the choice has already been made so there's postulated this causes an immense amount of distress because people are afraid of making the wrong choice and then miss me out on the right choice and so the implications in today's society is they're saying is that with with so many choices in modern societies and increasing number of decisions to be made people who have these problems are likely to experiment this experience more decision fatigue which you've talked about before about World War by Mustard Roy Baumeister and also that people will suffer more from the fixation on these little tiny trivial decisions and so this can amplify their daily anxiety and then they say you know the lead to downstream consequences political consequences etc so these this article goes over five different experiments where they essentially assess how this effect is happening and it really we're going to we're going to hear from you doctor the truth of this because as I was reading this it was a little difficult to continue reading because of what I've learned here on my show with you but they essentially had five different experience experiments that were trying to figure out how this is happening and they had different people they called Assessors and then other people called Local Motors people who would just do it and people who are Assessors these are people who have to do what's right and they'd rather rather do it right than to do it any other way but what's interesting to me as well which I was looking forward to hearing your take on this is that there was the one of the first paragraphs in one of the sections just says right there there's an imbalance in the research examining the link between decision-making and stress and so most of the research has been devoted to understanding how distress influences the way people make decisions but less research has focused on conditions that make decisions more distressing for some individuals compared to others and so given the pervasiveness of this decision-making it's critical to identify when individuals are most susceptible to experiencing distress while making decisions now when I'm choosing questions for the podcast and I'm you know choosing little things that I need to do right I can be stressing and just you know foregone going on forever about which is right one which one we have to choose but I'm not so stressed I'm more of a locomotor doctor law when it comes to like put in the extra toothpaste that I bought under my bathroom sink I just throw it in there it doesn't really matter I'll figure it out later and so it just seems to me that there's something there missing and so dr. Lisle will let you take it away and fill in any of these gaps that these guys potentially missed oh my god tried to keep it under seven minutes you did you did um yeah I want to know first of all just for my own edification if you have any if you've got a you know if you've got the the article they're like where where are these who are these people affiliated with I want to know what I want to know what the university to laugh at that's what I want to know you can see the Department of Ecology at Columbia University okay we're gonna laugh at Columbia University is that also it was their collaboration without young Technological University in Singapore okay got it okay so we got some conscientious people over in Singapore what a surprise see so all right so uh yeah what we see here is somebody at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology including apparently the editors that let this thing be published somebody doesn't know anything about personality apparently yeah I I sit I apparently this game like how does this happen the the these people are living as if behavior genetics doesn't exist and it's the answer it is the explanation of the field of personality and it has been evident that this has been true for 35 years I'm 34 since Abe telogen published in 85 so yeah this is a dumb dumb study and little dumb dumbs did the study and but they got a pub so they're on their way to Kenya apparently the being promoted yeah for goodness sakes folks of course there's a differences in personality here it's called conscientiousness it's right there on the big five big fat five like you can't miss it and yeah so this is what you've got so you've got people that will be more more analytic and anxious about making decisions and you've got people that are inherently more impulsive that's called conscientiousness the there's actually been you know a fair amount of work done in this area all the way back Jesus into the 1980s Timothy will and at University of Virginia did experiments on this I was involved in some of those experiments the on what what we called reasons analysis forget what the other term was but Tim was interested in a similar kind of thing in other words post choice satisfaction depending upon how you went about your decision-making process so it's very you know basically peas in a pod here Tim didn't wasn't thinking about personality at the time fairly reasonably just because you know not much was known about personality at that time and the and and he is a social psychologist so he was more interested in studying human universals in this area so his research along with many other people that he worked with on these things involved manipulations for people to actually make decision-making in a different style so it was super messy in other words nothing really ever worked very well as you would expect and so but he did he came out away from this thinking that essentially there are probably types of decisions as these guys are suggesting types of decisions where you're better off going with your gut ie not doing a recent analysis versus things that you may be better off doing a recent analysis so he his work got more clever he got increasingly sophisticated he would have people for example analyze art and then you know have their choice to take different art posters home and then so if they were analyzing art that what they might do is disrupt their aesthetic response process to the art and then later on even though when they have to make a choice the analytic process may have disrupted their ability to go with their gut as effectively and then afterwards if we go check on them a month later how much they like their poster the people that did a reason its analysis on an art choice may I have like the their choice less than people that we just had had them sort of you know just sort of have a global field how much they appreciated the art and then rate that on a one to seven scale and then go do something else in the lab and then get to choose some art on the way home and that's that okay so this is Tim and his colleagues trying to figure out a similar you know answer similar questions without without even considering personality in the mix you've never occurred to them the now we can see clearly that these guys are more interested in personality and what's interesting is the solution to their great mystery is right in front of them and it's been there for a long time this is conscientiousness and it's obviously the case that as we get to the top of the bell curve and conscientiousness we're talking about people whose minds are inherently have greater degrees of distortion with respect to what is probably optimal for the species in across a bunch of general problem-solving domains and when it comes to sort of optimizing decision-making why do we why would we say this because the because we see that it is failed genetically across time or that gene wouldn't be so rare okay that's going to be different than something that's an unqualified good like intelligence or beauty those things are rare at the end of the bell curve because they're difficult to engineer and they're there's there's constraints on those resources that's not the same thing as extraversion disagree ability or emotional stability or conscientiousness so very high conscientiousness is coming at a price what what it is is it's the over estimation of the worst-case scenario so that that's why that gene is lower in the gene pool because it's been a less effective gene over evolutionary time than a gene that is uh that is less careful and therefore investing its time somewhat different that seems paradoxically and odd to people but it actually makes perfect sense you can you can imagine many scenarios where human beings needed to make the mind is would be constructed an attempting to actually utilize its computational energies optimally and shifting from problem to problem and analyzing enough data on the problem in order to approximate an optimal decision and then moving on to the next problem and then doing the same thing that's what the brain should be doing so instead of obsessing over whether or not your checkbook is off by ten cents you should say hey it's close enough and now it's time for me to go see if I can flirt with somebody down at the bar that's the right way to behave and that was has always been the right way to behave my my best my best friend allen's dad was a was a math teacher mr. gold hammer and mr. gold hammer would obsess for days about his checkbook being off by a dime this actually happened I'm not just making this up this is a true story I can relate you've worked around that one this is all like don't lining up pretty close so the so this is this this is the cost of high conscientiousness so it's of course no surprise that they find that people of very high conscientiousness are not as happy and the decision-making process is more stressful for them of course it is their brains are working overtime imagining the worst case scenario associated with every alternative course of action and it's not very pleasant experience welcome to the life of the hyper conscientious in that case that's what I call them HCN sees the Fiat and no surprise that people that are lower in the bell curve towards the middle of the bell curve these people have much happier lives you're now looking at the the nice happy life of the blissfully medium conscientious human this is this is the Bobby McFerrin gin you know don't worry be happy hey I forget the some of the little lines from that side the landlord says your rent is late he may have to litigate but don't worry be happy you got it that's beautiful yeah so uh yeah that's that that's the story and so that's the whole we could sum up that whole article there and finally the little tag that I saw there apparently in Psych today or whatever was about how you can you know improve yourself or may improve your decision-making strategy no you can't these are these are inherently genetic strategies what you may be able to do is in very narrow cases when there's a lot of chips on the line you know you you may be able to summon some sort of formal strategies for decision-making that may improve your abilities and that's you know that that's a whole that's a whole different kettle of fish here but yeah you're not modifying anything and and you're not you're not fixing it and all they've done is sort of rediscover the wheel so so much for a 2018 article and JPS be on decision making optimality next well yeah I mean I wonder if we can talk about that new kettle of fish because yeah the question I have and a few other listeners have sent me as well is what happens when you get into this decision paralysis where you just can't move past it like I've been in situations where you know I may be not balancing the checkbook but but some members don't add up and I just ruminate and ruminate roommate until I figure out what's wrong and then I get frustrated and I leave it leave it be but it just found my head and I know it doesn't matter what does the wrong sense matter what is a math problem matter if I can't figure it out but it ruminates when you get in this decision paralysis what what can somebody do if any the best thing that you can generally do if you're if you are let's take another little situation so let's suppose that you know I don't know you just got dumped by your girlfriend and your your ruminating about it and the the reason why you're ruminating about it is because your your mind is attempting to understand why it is that you have this loss in the same way that if you're mr. gold hammers checkbook is off by a dime he's frustrated because he's it's not so much the the dime that matters it's the fact that he may have made an error in the process and that could leave him open to similar more serious mistakes in the future so that's what's frustrating the brain okay so if you you can see that there if you can see through this if you've got you know any kind of clarity the the notion would be listen there's a certain error rate and therefore the there's a good enough decision-making strategy at which point you are protected against the worst case scenario but if you're hyper conscientious in that case it bothers you anyway and it will cause mental energy to be essentially consistent continually diverted to the problem even though it's a lousy payoff so let's suppose that you know this about yourself that you you have a hyper conscientious nutcase friend that you're going to you you're confronting a situation where something isn't quite adding up but you know that it doesn't matter because you know that the basic principles of how the procedures are being done is perfectly reasonable and you are not leaving yourself open to a bigger problem later it just so happens that there's some error variance in the process and therefore you know that what you're seeing is error variance and it's bugging your little OCD brain that you can't figure out you know where this particular error variance is is you know manifesting you know it's we've got something that isn't quite square and your brain is cycling around on this issue the best thing to do is to go find something that creates what we call flow and that is a something that requires complete and total engagement that will shift your brain off of it because you don't have any choice so for example that that that there's certain things that are super conducive to flow you know they sports interact you know sports where there's teen sports or even individual sports anything where you've got a really focus of sports are very very feedback rich so when you make a movement that movement has consequences you have feedback about whether or not you either gain an advantage or lost an advantage and so the the ultimate flow study was done on mountain climbers rock climbing because rock climbing obviously there's consequences to you that are unpleasant if you you don't have your attention focused so the brain very very quickly focuses intensively on the next movement that it's making and this draws the mind into flow so what this does is it shuts down all these other loops that are running about you know these unimportant activities and gives you a respite because when they're when those other when those other datasets aren't being run through the system they they're not having the emotional impact that they would otherwise have so if your girlfriend broke up with you and you've been ruminating about a Petrea days and you you you know the system can't quite put it together why this happened and why it is that you didn't qualify and what you should have done differently and you're chasing your tail you've already worn out all your friends trying to get an analysis done but for some strange reason you're an HCN see and you keep chasing your tail on this thing what I would tell you to do is to you know go play some sport or go play some poker or do something that is highly interactive that isn't immersing you in a situation where the brain is challenged and that there's you know a feedback system where there's consequences of for success and failure and therefore this is going to soak up your brain's energy it's going to quiet down all these uh you know the firing of emotional circuits that are coming as derivative of the problem-solving that the brain is doing because it's going to stop that problem-solving as it becomes fully engaged in something new you know something that's immediately pressing that the the sensory inputs on the system are now getting you know intense inputs and so therefore other things that are out there in the imagination like the girlfriend at that point gets quieted down so that's how we do things that's how we these are distractions and they so we plan those in order to help shut down those circuits that's probably the best we can do so you're saying that the solution to analysis paralysis is distraction action there you go that's very good yes that's exactly what I'm saying yes max Nelson I love ya action distraction yeah ya know so these are these are things of guess Here I am ruminating over this question again as if we've gone you know but so I'm just trying to answer the questions of our listeners as well as my own so yeah you know I understand about the big things where you go for sports but what about things like what would you say about things like you know oh you know I'm sitting here should I go outside to show stay and such I go outside I stay inside or should I you know like little tiny things I really have no meaning I mean I guess we would only see that for the very very highly conscientious people but in those cases we really you know you get out of it however best you can or what would you say in those cases what do you mean I'm not sure what you're asking when you say the analysis of oh uh you know Alice I want to do something and it's you know brooding over the consequences even though they might be very small consequences I uh right you know buying a $10 gift for somebody you know what I mean right right well sorry you're stuck with a can going to your grave with it so we can't do any biohacking or if you like that to change now I'm not you know what I have this is reminiscent I don't know that there might not be some strategies that might be useful from people from time to time God knows if you listen to Robert right he'll he'll you know bow at the altar of meditation the Sun however after having worked with quite a few OCD people in my career I just roll my eyeballs it's like where's the solution and the answer is you know what I don't know did these OCD symptoms wax and wane they shift categories on what happens to be capturing the person's anxiety to given point in their lives and but but they never fundamentally change which is precisely what behavior genetics tells us so yeah I don't you know are there little bitty things that I could give you a little checklist seventeen things you could do to get out of your thing there we've just always one problem with another Oh cards it way all right Sarah now let's go on all right very good okay so dear dr. Lyle the question is can we choose who we want the most esteem from for example miss listeners question I am a program coordinator at work and I coordinate a team of about 15 people I find that some people's esteem is easier to get than others as expected but sometimes I find myself working really hard to get esteem from certain people and letting things slide with the easy people their way I can care less about the esteem from some people it's exhausting sometimes exhausting to try to please everyone I also note I'm highly conscientious and agreeable aka a sucker um alright this is uh I think we read this question last week but maybe we didn't answer it that's it's familiar to me all right can we choose who we get esteem from well you can certainly in this case what I'm hearing is that the people that are difficult to get a stand from what you're probably picking up is their disagreeableness and therefore they're potentially threatening and so this is a this is you can I can smell a political dilemma here so the the problem would be that in the Stone Age what you're you know you sort of sit in a position of power as a result of a consensus or near consensus that that you are the person that it should be having the most say in the decision-making now in the modern environment you could be put there through some formal appointed process where the people under you don't really see that this is legitimate and the doesn't matter doesn't matter whether it was a good decision or poor decision it could be a very good decision you could be the the most qualified best decision-maker and best manager of that group of people but it wouldn't necessarily it since it isn't by an internal consensus of the individuals who are being governed there can be individuals there that are seriously problematic it was always true in the Stone Age as well there's going to be some some would be alpha males that are not happy with the situation and that they feel like they're you know they got a narcissistic streak they believe that they should be in charge and they feel that they're being slighted by the fact that you you have more say in the group so these are sort of the political you know challenges of human life beyond now so it sounds like this person has yeah we don't worry about the people that are sending us esteem signals that aren't giving us any evidence that they're that there's any unrest we're much more worried about the people that are disagreeable and difficult and are giving us signals that indicate that they do not have scheme us that much that's who you're gonna that's where the coup is coming from so of course that's where the person is focused on so in this kind of a case what I would have you do is to we would think through essentially you know sort of systematically reason through what are the threats of these individuals did if the disagreeable individuals you know it's hard to know sometimes sometimes the disagreeable subordinate is actually pretty seriously threatening they can have a potential lot of say they can so that they can be popular enough that they can so continue dissension in the ranks and that they can be a mess okay so I can't give you a one-size-fits-all answer to the political problem and so in this particular case it's a little bit of a tricky one so you can see that there might be times when it would be important to figure out how we're going to send two steam signals to the disagreeable people in such a way that we start to win them over and they've got more more to lose by by essentially sowing dissension that they might have to gain by essentially joining our quasi management gum entire arc even if it's under us okay so in formal management hierarchy in that case in other words you may not be in a position to appoint them any kind of minis are but we can be signaling status to them where it would be appropriate and give them more than we might give the agreeable people because in that way we are essentially feeding you know throwing some little chunks of meat to the Doberman so that it settles down okay so that that could be a way that you know that we would be managing a situation like this now I'm not exactly sure that that's what this person is asking or that's the most important question that they're trying to get asked so a wider and broader question is can we choose who it is that we are seeking esteem from now the answer is going to be well it depends upon what values are on the line so for example you can't choose to not be worried about what your boss thinks if you desperately need that specific job and you can't replace it if you lose it and you've got mouths to feed including your own and others so now you have to care what that boss thinks and that winds up being a very important consideration and how your how your mental functioning and emotional functioning works now so now we're going to introduce the concept of the position of power so the position of power takes place when you have figured out the worst case scenario and you figured out how you can manage the worst case scenario you get to a position of power when you have reasoned through the fine details and you have confidence in a strategy that you're going to be okay no matter what the heck happens okay so that's a useful thing and a lot of times people haven't done that mental work so therefore they haven't they haven't essentially inoculated themselves against the threats that may be in their social environment from people who are not giving or not pleasantly giving them esteem signals so our job is to work you know do do the homework and necessary to get ourselves to a position of power as much as we can and as quickly as we can when we when we do that to the group to the greatest degree at weight increasing degrees when we have less and less of the variance of the outcomes of our life depending upon other people with whom we may have conflicts of interest we wind up increasingly in a position of power and when we're in a position of power then then by implication what other people think of us that may be unjust unfair or just you know inherently nasty or competitive or whatever else means less and less and less because they have less and less control over outcomes that we care about we've we are essentially inoculating and surrounding ourselves with protection so we don't have to give a damn about what it is that they think okay and so we can't as so what we want to do is you want to maneuver your life essentially try to engineer your personal social ecology as much as possible towards being around people that are fair Pleasant reasonable the like you etc and that when people aren't that way that we are in a position to simply not have relationships with them of any significance not wear ourselves out mentally worrying about what it is that they're thinking if we have conflicts of interest to come up with them that are recurrent okay so a great I I would say an interesting example there are many examples but not an uncommon situation that has come across in my 30 years of practice has been let's suppose middle-aged people or older that have you know are in some degrees in compromised circumstances financially that are dealing with the disagreeable aging parent that has money so they don't really want to go to Thanksgiving and put up with their dad's nasty insulting you know behavior they don't want to have to defend their position about how it is that they want to eat while he you know grandstands his robustness and and does what they consider to be you know on at the goal self-destructive or whatever it is okay but they're worried about that fortune and they've got two or three siblings and there's a couple of million dollars on the line and they're worried about their getting their share okay so that's an example of being in a position of weakness and having to worry about what other people thinks of us and then essentially having to twist our lives into a pretzel because we're feeling that position of weakness so the position of power is achieved by thinking through okay how are we going to do without it okay and you know consciously and deliberately thinking through one's life strategy so that we can say okay all right suppose we don't have that outset are we healthy enough can we make decisions do we actually need that asset for anything specific does Suzy need a kidney that we're going to need a bunch of money for or are we actually okay and what we're really talking about you is how convenient or inconvenient life is going to be whether or not we do or don't inherit okay at that point my attitude is you know the hell with him it's like my way of thinking about this is hey you know be responsible for yourself take care of things as best you can live at the standard of living that you can personally engineer your own ability to afford and that's that okay now if it turns out you've got a really nice relationship with your parents and it turns out that winds up being a potential asset later then fine but hopefully they're worth a hell of a lot more you know alive to you than dead but this is kind of a situation that comes up that like I said I probably seen this 15 times or 10 times anyway in my career where there's a lot of cognitive dissonance about feeling like wait I you know I have to keep being nice I have to keep twisting myself into a pretzel I essentially have to not be me and I have to hang out with people that I don't like because I'm feeling a position of weakness that is the issue okay so the issue is is not can we choose people who we you know seek a steam from etc the issue is how quickly can you get to a position of power and once you feel like you are in a greater position of power you can morph your social ecology more and more assertively towards surrounding your life and your interactions of people that with people you like and that's that's really how does that we go about the process fascinating so dr. Lila I've wondered is there a subconscious inference that our minds make around disagreeable people because their esteem is so difficult to earn that it therefore the inference is that that they must be more valuable because they're it's just harder to get a steam from them oh I think you're actually tripping on something that's very interesting and there's probably little pieces of this and there's probably a whole bunch of little inferences that that give rise to this so let's look at this this is the concept of playing hard-to-get okay so which disagreeable people do kind of automatically right yeah that's correct that's kind of what it is they're doing so what's happening is there's a certain amount of there's subjectivity within a person's objective standing in the world of their relative worth on any dimension so you know how valuable is that research scientist well Yale thinks they're really valuable Harvard sees them as a little bit second-tier so they don't think that there's such a superstar so they're not going to bid that I farm okay so difference of opinion you know what one person thinks of the girl is a nine and a half the other guy thinks she's a nine difference of opinion okay so they're the differences opinion may not be large but there's always going to be some degree of differences of opinion now because of that there's swap in in the assessment of any you know any asset of any kind or threat for that matter and so as a result there's one of the ways we try to figure out how valuable somebody is is by how easy or difficult it is to get their their time attention assets etc and so I thought it was uh I I can't remember if I talked about this before but somebody to leave is telling me about warren buffett and how the great sage says that you know very you know successful people turn down most offers extremely successful people turn down almost all offers or something like this so it's as if and the implication from the quote was that in order for you to be extremely successful you have to be more judicious and turn down more things i'm not sure that that's what he was trying to say but that looked like from what i was seeing what he was trying to say which was very self aggrandizing bullshit the truth of the matter is is that if you are extremely successful you are in a position of power to reject almost all other offers so the causal direction of the dynamic is being you know one hundred and eighty degrees reversed in its analysis the God knows I have no idea what we're talking about totally lost what was our subconscious inference essentially playing hard-to-get which it turns out you know I remember you talking about this and you actually said that that women who are highly attractive they actually have to play hard to get because if they didn't all of their time would be sucked up by every male that they couldn't say no to would be taking them out on dates and trying to win their when their win their affection of course right so yes this is exactly so what's going to happen is that when we send signals of interest and we float value propositions to people on various dimensions whether it's friendship trade or romance what's going to happen is is that how receptive they are is going to be part of the data that we remember our assessment of their value is somewhat subjective and this subject the fact that we may subjectively think that and feel that someone is a great asset if they behave towards us like they're falling all over themselves to get to say yes to us that is likely to be a check on our assessment it's going to be like well now wait a second ah there's something wrong with you because I would have considered you to be at the upper limit of my ability to reach for in this domain and if you're falling all over yourself to come into my lap it must mean that there's liabilities here that I'm not seeing because I haven't shown you all of my assets and yet you're biting really hard okay so of course it's going to turn out that we have those kind of inference machineries you couldn't be an organism that has so much of their survival and reproductive variants dependent upon trade process is and not have negotiating systems inside that are very elegant and sophisticated and so one of the elegant sophisticated processes that is clearly instinctual is when they're eager or less eager okay that is a signal that they that they are in a position of weakness relative to this exchange or they wouldn't be so damn eager okay and so that is so disagreeable people are inherently signaling that they're signaling that they are of higher value and and so that's that would then put a little hook in your mouth potentially about wanting to it because you would be thinking then that they are potentially more valuable a little bit now there's limits to that and this is the joke that comes from you know the pickup artists and these kinds of people thinking they're going to use a little little tiny magic dust from BP to suddenly turn turn every six and do a casual mating Casanova okay it's not a chance in hell and that's because the the ability for human beings to analyze asset quality across all domains is very good okay how could it not be the system is designed to to essentially have its asset value estimations triangulate very closely on the consensus if it doesn't it's a screwed up machine full of mutations it's a disaster okay so so that's why playing hard to get you know a little bit is a perfectly reasonable strategy but doing it to any significant extent is not a good strategy and all its really doing is very quickly indicating that you're disagreeable that's probably about the only way that you can do that strategy anyways if you're inherently disagreeable so yes but your the question that you started with is through disagreeable people essentially activate entrances inside of other people that the disagreeable person is of higher value and I believe that the answer is yes now there finally it's an investigation worthy of somebody at Columbia University trying to get a pub in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology there you go [Laughter]
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