It's one of those tired cliches: Bush makes decisions with his irrational "gut instincts," instead of relying on "careful analysis". Paul Krugman, in today's Times, end his columns by repeating this cliche:
Luckily, we've got good leadership for the coming storm: the White House is occupied by a man who's ideologically flexible, listens to a wide variety of views, and understands that policy has to be based on careful analysis, not gut instincts. Oh, wait.
That's what an economist would say. Classic economics assumes that everybody - even George Bush - is capable of rationally analyzing a situation, and coming up with the best alternative. Alas, from the perspective of psychology, the diagnosis isn't quite so clear. After all, decades of decision-making research have exposed the fact that our "rationality" is overrated. When it comes to make difficult decisions - like choosing whether or not to invade foreign countries - our gut instincts are often the best way to go.
Here's an example. In the early 1990's Timothy Wilson asked a few dozen female college students to select their favorite poster. He gave them five options: a Monet landscape, a Van Gogh painting of some purple lilies, and three humorous cat posters. Before making their choices, the subjects were divided into two groups. The first group was the "non-thinking" group: they were simply instructed to rate each poster on a scale from 1 to 9, with 9 being best. The second group had a tougher task: before they rated the posters, they were given a questionnaire which asked them why they liked or disliked each of the five posters. At the end of the experiment, each of the subjects was given her favorite poster to take home.
The two groups of women made very different choices. Ninety-five percent of the "non-thinkers" chose either the Monet or the Van Gogh. Their feelings preferred the fine art. However, subjects who thought about their poster decision first were almost equally split between the impressionist paintings and the humorous cat posters. What accounted for the difference? "When looking at a painting by Monet," Wilson says, "most people generally have a positive reaction. When thinking about why they feel the way they do, however, what comes to mind and is easiest to verbalize might be that some of the colors are not very pleasing, and that the subject matter, a haystack, is rather boring." As a result, the women end up selecting the funny feline posters, if only because those posters gave them more grist for their explanatory mill.
In order to see which group made better decisions, Wilson conducted a follow up interview with the women a few weeks later. He asked them whether or not they still liked their poster, and how much money it would take to buy the poster from them. Sure enough, the "non-thinking" group was much more satisfied. While 75 percent of the people who chose the cat posters now regretted their selection, nobody regretted selecting the impressionists. In other words, the women who listened to their immediate emotions ended up making much better decisions than the women who relied on their powers of reasoning. The more people thought about which poster they wanted the more misleading their thoughts became. Introspection and analysis resulted in a worse decision.
But if our instincts are normally pretty trustworthy, then why did Bush make so many bad decisions? For one thing, a President's decisions are a bit more complicated than choosing a favorite poster. You can't just invade a foreign country because you want to. Policy decisions require considering various alternatives, and weighing the various risks of each scenario.
Now, normally our emotional instincts are pretty good at this sort of thing. Antonio Damasio has repeatedly demonstrated that our feelings can often size up a situation before our "rational" cortex can. The amygdala is normally a reliable guide.
So why did Bush's instincts make such bad decisions? Because he relied on bad information. As Mark Danner notes in an authoratative article in the NY Review of Books, Bush has created a West Wing culture that filters the information before he even sees it. Facts are cherry-picked by Cheney, Rice provides him with an optimistic spin on events, and he systematically ignores the National Security Council, an "interagency" that is supposed to provide
Sober due diligence, with an eye for the way previous administrations have thought through a standard array of challenges facing the United States, creates, in fact, a kind of check on executive power and prerogative.
As a result, Bush never got a reliable assessment of the risks involved with each possible scenario. His decisions were biased by his own bias for optimistic information. Internal memos that warned about the possibility of an Iraqi Civil War never reached Bush's desk because he didn't want them to, and his advisors knew that. The West Wing suffered from a collective delusion.
So this was Bush's mistake: not his instinct to trust his gut instincts, but his instinct to not want more dissenting opinions. If you've been given bad information, all the careful analysis in the world won't be able to make a good decision. If Bush had used his instincts to make a decision based upon a more realistic assessment of the various alternatives, his emotional impulses might have made the right decision. But Bush wasn't interested in pessimistic facts, or sober warnings, or dissenting opinions. This is why he's such a bad president. It's time we stop blaming his gut instincts: given the faulty information they were being fed, Bush's instincts never even had a chance.
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This is way overblown. An important decision like invading a country, however it's reached, must be argued over, attacked and defended and put down in print so that next generations can learn from it. That's one thing you can't do with your amygdala.
I completely agree. And Bush's failure was to not encourage precisely this kind of debate and dissension. But when all that debate is over, the best presidents will still use their gut instincts to make the decision. When it comes to making a "judgment under uncertainty," our gut instincts are often more effective than all the analysis in the world. Of course, in order to work, the amygdala still needs to know about the risks. If the risks are hidden, as they were for Bush, then the amygdala can't do its job.
Jonah,
Do you have a link or a citation for that study. The way you describe it I do not see how it really measures gut instinct over thoughtful decision making. I would think that questionnaire would influence the subjects decision and is not in any way related to studying an issue well before making a decision.
Also, if he only asked women his study would be limited as well.
Jonah, when you say "when all that debate is over", you actually mean "when all that debate goes nowhere and the president is entitled to pull one from his hat." I don't think that's what's supposed to happen because we're not talking about the thought process of just an individual.
The uncertainty is never about the reasoning. It's about the data. The president cannot produce new data by his gut instincts because it's not the president's job to produce data in the first place.
Maybe the head of CIA can (based on his experience), and the president can reason from that data. What history should record is the president's reasoning based on the (possibly inaccurate ) data, not what he thought that the Iraqis were up to.
This is the point of having subordinates. You can't expect the president to develop such a gut that allows him to assess likelihoods to diverse events from global warming to anti-terror intelligence.
The study has a fundamental flaw. To summarize, half the women were asked to choose the posters based on subjective impressions, half on the questionaire, and then all were asked to evaluate their decision based on...subjective impressions. Can we really be surprised at the result?
Let's see the same sort of experiment done where the result is more objective, say with a medical treatment, or a selection of a stock. I suspect the results would be markedly different, because I've never seen evidence one that our instincts are very accurate sizing up anything that is the slightest bit modern or technical. In my field of statistics, the first rule you learn is "ignore your instincts, they suck".
Pinker has a lot of interesting things to say about instincts that jibe well with my experience. His view is that our instincts do well with subjects that humans have been around a long time because they evolved to do so. However with anything far removed from our experience, such as macro economics, quantum mechnics, relativity, or higher mathematics, our instincts perform poorly. You 'll find few mathematicians that swear by their gut, but lots of salesmen that do.
Thanks for all your comments. Here is a citation:
Wilson, T., et. al., "Introspection about reasons can reduce post-choice satisfaction," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19: 331-339 (1993)
You might also be interested in this paper:
Wilson, T et.al Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60: 181-192 (1991), in which Wilson makes a similar point about strawberry jam.
To respond to Mark's skepticism...Both groups were asked to makle subjective appraisals of the posters. The only difference was that one group was asked to reflect on their subjective appraisals. (This was the point of the questionaire.) What I find interesting is that the self-analysis resulted in worse decisions. Wilson begins the paper with an epitaph from Goethe: He who deliberates lengthily will not always choose the best. I think that's true. Bush wouldn't have made better decisions if he'd deliberated for longer. What he needed was a better, more open system for gathering information and conflicting views, not necessarily a penchant for introspection.
"So this was Bush's mistake: not his instinct to trust his gut instincts, but his instinct to not want more dissenting opinions."
Change "instinct" to "hubris" and I'd be forced to agree with you.
Jonah,
I agree with you that our "gut instincts" or "tacit dimension" or "personal knowledge" or "unarticulable background" has a lot more to do with our decisions than we think.
But that said, there's a circularity in your arguments (or in this blog-post, rather). You start off by saying that Bush made decisions based on instinct. As all the literature that has come up since the Iraq War indicates (including Danner's latest) that's been pretty much the case with all of Bush's decisions. But then you say this:
But if our instincts are normally pretty trustworthy, then why did Bush make so many bad decisions? Because he relied on bad information.
Instinctual decisions, as a rule-of-thumb, aren't based on information at all -- if by information we mean (as you clearly do) something that can be described or something one can articulate linguistically. Rather they're based on something more tacit, what Polanyi called "personal knowledge".
Here's my point: Bush wasn't right to rely on his instincts because his instincts, on Iraq, were unformed. There were people however, in the administration, who simply by immersing themselves in these matters for a long long time, had accumulated a kind of personal knowledge about the subject. If Bush really had to rely on instincts, he should have relied on their instincts, not his own.
I see your point: you're clearly irritated by people who talk about Bush's instincts in a pejorative way, since, like you say, psychology tells us that a lot of our own decisions are instinctual. But by that same token, Bush's instinctual decisions are what need to be criticized, not just the fact that he relied on bad information (which seems to arisen from his instinct to trust few people). Simply because Bush was wrong about his instincts -- every single one of them. Perhaps when it comes to making decisions to wage war, cost-benefit analysis is more useful than gut feelings.
Thanks for the very astute comment. When I blamed "bad information" for corrupting Bush's instincts, I was referring to the information that allowed his unconscious instincts to evaluate the alternatives (to invade or not to invade). While Bush might not have had conscious access to the way in which this information was influencing his decision - in other words, he didn't consciously analyze the cost and benefits of war - his gut was still reacting to some sort of information. After all, our instincts don't take place in a vacuum. Instead, our instincts and emotions are often able quickly and unconsciously sift through the information and see what's important. As George Loewenstein notes, "They [our instincts] are like a software code that has been honed by hundreds of millions of years of evolution to only focus on the essential bits of data." Of course, in order for our instincts to work they need to be given accurate information.
It does not mean the shorter choice is better, it only means they were more satisfied with the shorter choice. The shorter choices are actually worse, but they do make people happier.
see the explanation:
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=b_schwartz
I think the fundamental flaw in this discussion is the assumption that Bush made the decision to attack Iraq based on the conditions that existed in early 2003. The decision was made in the first weeks of the administration that Saddam was a menace and had to go, then 9/11 provided all the opportunity needed to pursue a full-scale attack. Just look at the administration's behavior from late 2002/early 2003, after the problems with the UN weapons inspectors, Bush compelled Saddam into giving the inspectors free-range and US intelligence was providing information of likely weapons sites. When no weapons were found (in >60 days of searching), most rational people would conclude that no WMD's were present in Iraq. But the US, after forcing Saddam into allowing full access to the UN, claimed that the UN was incompetent/ineffective (remember the incredibly shabby treatment given Hans Blix by the US press), and that an invasion was necessary. Thus, the Bush administration leveraged the Iraqi government into a sure catch-22. If the UN inspectors find WMDs, Saddam is in violation and must be removed. If they do not, he still has WMDs, but they're well hidden, and thus he's a very dangerous adversary (and did we mention he must have WMDs)..
These actions are not consistent with rational decision making, they are consistent with utilizing available information to allow an irrational decision that has already been made appear rational.
btw, has anyone read P. Read Montague's new book ("Why choose this book? How we make decisions")? I picked it up and was tempted to buy it, but a little horrified by the $26 price tag for a 250 page book that looked like it was writted in double-spaced 18 point Arial font. Just curious..