How Our Minds Decide
Thinking has usually little to do with it. You didn’t think your way into checking out this article. You felt your way into it, perhaps curiosity played a role. Why did you click this article?
So this is not an article about thinking (although it does explain its role). It is mainly about feeling and how your feelings are part of an elegant system that shapes your decisions. To understand how this works the first question is: why do we have feelings at all?
Throughout evolution animals had to survive to live and have offspring. To do this, animals (and humans) needed to make decisions like where to go to find food. Simple animals like insects just follow their impulses, smell food, fly towards the food, see a shadow, flee. It’s simple programming for a simple creature, sense this, do that.
More complex animals, like mammals, developed brains that are able to take more advanced decisions, automatically combining pros and cons to do what is best in the moment. When a dog sees a plastic bag moving in the wind, first fear takes over, it flees and then it turns and looks, approaches when curiosity wins and sniffs the bag.
However animals make decisions, the biology regulating decisions has evolved over millions of years in order to help them survive. What we and many animals experience as feelings are the messages from our system about our needs. They drive us to action. Feel hungry, seek food, feel guilt, seek amends, feel attraction, approach, feel fear, avoid.
This is the only reason we have feelings, to move us to take actions that fulfil our needs. Without feelings we wouldn’t get up in the morning. We feel hungry, thirsty, or obliged to go to work, so we get up. There is no reason to do anything without some feelings to drive us. Our whole life revolves around trying to feel better, by whatever means we have to our disposal.
Let me give you a few more examples of how feelings drive you towards survival:
- Hunger tells you your body is running low on fuel, before it’s actually a problem, so you act while there’s still time,
- Anger flares up when someone crosses your boundaries, driving you to push back, and warn there’s a cost to crossing them,
- Shame pushes you to make amends with the group when you break the group rules, to prevent being excluded,
- Attraction drives you to approach another person in order to find lasting relationships and cooperation,
- Pain forces your attention to damage happening to your body, so you stop doing whatever’s causing it,
- Curiosity pulls you toward the unknown on the chance that finding out is worth more than staying safe in what you already know.
Imagine what would happen if any of these drives were absent from your life. You would not eat, get excluded from the group or even burn yourself without noticing. You would likely not survive.
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So how do feelings influence your decisions in practice?
Unlike simple reflexes like pulling away from pain, many of our decisions are about the future. If someone asks if you want to have lunch, you need to make a decision. There are many factors that could influence your decision, where you would go, how it will feel, what the food will be like, what conversation you would have. This needs a lot of evaluation, so how does your brain provide an answer in seconds or less?
This is where the human mind shines: what happens is that your brain imagines (simulates/predicts) the lunch and checks what feelings it would evoke as if it were real. This happens quickly and mostly subconsciously. It activates the same pathways in your brain as were activated in similar experiences, including the feelings they evoked at that time. Many feelings, like friendship (how much do I like this person?), curiosity (what would he/she want to talk about?), hunger (am I hungry yet?) or time pressure (I only have half an hour) are checked in parallel. These feelings, positive and negative, are combined to give you an overall yes or no.
If you want to experience this yourself, try this: imagine biting on a slice of lemon, the color, the taste … how does that make your mouth feel? Do you contract your mouth? Does it feel good? Would you bite on a piece of lemon right now? What if you were really thirsty? Your brain simulates the experience and evokes the same feelings (but less strongly) as when you bit down on a lemon before, and tells you whether it is a good idea.
Another way this works can be called opportunistic decision making. Let’s say you are walking down the street and are a bit hungry. Not enough to be aware of. You see a hotdog stand and smell hotdogs. Your mind immediately imagines eating a hotdog and checks your hunger meter to predict the result. You would suddenly feel the hunger, either buy a hotdog (or look for other food, if you don’t like hotdogs).
What we call thinking (or rational decision making) is usually imagining multiple action scenarios (simulations) and polling our feelings to determine how desirable the effect of the action is. This will generally improve the result of our actions, but the deciding factor is still how we feel about the expected result. Note that factors like effort or chance to succeed play a major role, in the form of expected feelings of tiredness or disappointment.
After enough repetition, in similar situations and with good results, decisions can become automatic. You don’t need to imagine how to flush the toilet, you just pull. You don’t anticipate reactions when someone says “How are you?”, you just say “Great, thank you.” This is called conditioning. It increases speed and efficiency of actions, but it loses precision and flexibility in new situations. Conditioning is hard to unlearn: strengthening one response removes alternatives, so when an old response turns out wrong, there might be no alternative pathway ready to take over.
Fear conditioning happens faster than other conditioning, because danger requires quick action. When you see a lion coming, you don’t imagine being eaten, you just run. Our brains evolved to condition fastest from dangerous experiences.
If you want to understand yourself better, you can analyze your decisions by asking yourself some questions like: how did I imagine my action would turn out? What feelings popped up when I imagined the outcome? What factors contributed most to my decision?
Don’t be content with the first answer that comes to mind. Almost always multiple feelings weigh in. Stopping at one undersells how nuanced your decision-making is. Many people give one reason when asked why they did something, but that is hardly ever the full story. Often it is the result of a new simulation of what the reaction to their answer will be.
When you learn to notice your feelings, you’ll find that you start to see what drives you forward and what holds you back (noticing you are hungry in a supermarket will likely make you buy less junk food). Inevitably, over time, you improve your predictions and thereby your actions, which increases trust in your feelings, which in turn makes noticing them easier. It’s a self-reenforcing cycle.
Ignore or suppress your feelings, and they won’t go away. Try it: next time you are in pain, like a headache, don’t try to ignore, but pay attention: where does it hurt, how much, what might have caused it, what kind of pain? Just paying attention does not remove it (there is actually something going on), but it will make the pain more bearable. It shows your system the signal is received, and will be acted upon when possible.
Feelings exist to be felt; they are key to our survival. Your feelings are messengers; don’t shoot the messengers.
So … why did you click this article? What did your messengers report when you saw the title?
Although this story might sound very different from what you have heard about (rational) decision making, little of this is speculation. The story bridges separate, established findings, like System 1 and 2 thinking, evolutionary psychology, dopamine and reward-prediction, neuroplasticity and conditioning, and simulation by the brain’s default mode network.
