Peter Leonard, “How to make Better Decisions” (2007)
At least I made one good decision to watch this BBC Horizon documentary so I’m already on the way to making better decisions. From then on, the film is a sobering look at why I am such a slouch at making decisions: I’m not rational enough, I’m lazy, I’m too emotional, I’m too proud and rationalise bad decisions as good ones, and I’m ruled by prejudices among other things. I’m not the only one: a group of computer gamers, rocket scientists and geeks whose average IQ is right off the right end of the Bell curve is also inept at making decisions about finding a real live girlfriend (as opposed to Lara Croft clones on their games). Of course, dressing badly and having long greasy hair don’t help. In comes mathematician Garth Sundem who offers to help them find a companion by using mathematics to determine their attraction potential. Three of the four geeks accept his formula and the results he gives them based on their own estimates of their attractiveness and the attractiveness of the potential mate, then they all visit their local pub to try their luck picking up girls. The men who accepted Sundem’s mathematics quickly find damsels and obtain their cellphone numbers but the lone man who refused the formula ends up drinking on his own.
The program then skips to prospect theory (which explains why people prefer to gamble and risk loss rather than simply accept an offer and walk away) to neuroscience which explores which part of the brain is involved in decision-making and what happens when people suffer brain damage in that area. A case study of a woman whose left frontal lobe is damaged after a haemorrhage is shown: daily life is an ordeal for her as she struggles with choice and motivation.
There’s another deviation into an investigation of a card trick experiment which demonstrates that people are inclined to dress up bad decisions they make as good ones: this of course is relevant in situations where people buy something which turns out to be a dud but because it costs so much money and the purchasers might have taken out loans to pay for it, the sting of the bad choice is assuaged by excuses and explaining away.
The film is entertaining as well as informative and intriguing if ultimately not really useful: it suggests that decision-making processes are more fragile and vulnerable to external situational influences than we realise and that we are not self-consistent and self-coherent beings. In one experiment, temperature is shown to influence people’s decision-making; in another experiment, the researcher looks at possible psychic phenomena such as precognition as determinants of the kinds of decisions people make. However for all the contextual factors that determine what decisions people make, the film offers little comfort and only warning for all those people hoping that watching this film might vastly improve their luck at poker or at the roulette table; nah-ah, the film only tells you what’s likely to drive you to make the decision that makes or breaks your wallet: your emotional state, your opinion of your decision-making ability, the likelihood that you’ll shrug off the effect of a previous bad decision on your next decision, and whether you can predict where that little silver ball will land.
Whatever happens to Garth Sundem and whether he is raking in thousands of bucks in trying to teach people how to make better decisions in the course of the film remains unknown. If he couldn’t persuade enough people to adopt his mathematical approach to improve their decision-making, then surely it was a bad decision on his part to even consider trying! But there is much more to good or bad decision-making than the situational factors canvassed in this documentary, and for all his success (or failure), at least Sundem learns something valuable about human nature so it was a good decision in a sense to pursue an apparently futile quest. Am I rationalising for Sundem here?