Overwhelmed
In How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, hidden in the chapter titled “The Poker Hand” is a study about the most common pitfall of house buying: overwhelm. Halfway through the chapter, we meet Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist who realized that buying a car overwhelmed his rational mind.
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you are a research psychologist, everything looks like an experimental paradigm. Dr. Dijksterhuis’s experiment went as follows:
Shoppers were given four pieces of information on four used cars. The information included things like poor leg room and shoddy transmission. One of the cars was objectively better. Subjects had a few minutes of conscious thought, then Dijksterhuis asked the shoppers to pick the best car. In the sixteen information-bits exercise, 50 percent chose the objectively best car. A second group was told about the sixteen bits of information, then distracted by word games and puzzles to keep them from thinking it through. It is no surprise that they did worse at picking the best car.
So, the rational brain works better than guesswork and feel. If you want to pick the best car, pay attention to the facts, right? Wrong.
Dijksterhuis’s next set-up had twelve bits of information about each car, making for forty-eight data-points to juggle. The additional information included things like trunk size and the number of cup holders. The subjects who had time to think chose the best car only 25 percent of the time. The distracted group, who were thinking on the emotional level, found the best car 60 percent of the time.
Then Dijksterhuis took the study out of the lab.
He studied people who bought cooking accessories, like vegetable peelers and those who bought complicated consumer items, like furniture. The peeler buyers who studied the few variables were happiest with their purchase. (Peelers have only a couple of factors.) Dijksterhuis then looked at furniture buyers. Furniture considerations include use, size, color, fabric, and so on. The longer they took rationally weighing options the less happy they were with their choice. They were happier if they relied on their emotional minds.. Lehrer writes:
The problem is that the pre-frontal cortex can’t handle this much information by itself. As a result, it tends to fix on one variable that may or may not be relevant, such as the color of the leather. The rational brain is forced to oversimplify the situation.
Dijksterhuis’s conclusion is that for the complicated decision in life, we need to study the options, but then decide using our emotional brains. In other words, sleep on it!
He writes:
The moral of this research is clear. Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision. But don’t try to analyze the information with your conscious mind. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.
The smarter my clients are, more likely they will over-analyze the houses they see. Even the brilliant ones cannot sort through the pile of information thrown at a house buyer on a given house-hunting trip. They need to sleep on it, then pay attention to their emotional mind.
Lehrer concludes:
..conventional wisdom about decision-making has got it exactly backward. It is the easy problems – the mundane math problems of daily life – that are best suited to the conscious brain. These simple decisions won’t overwhelm the prefrontal cortex… Complex problems, on the other hand, require the processing powers of the emotional brain…That doesn’t mean you can just blink and know what to do – even the unconscious takes a little time to process information – but it does suggest that there’s a better way to make difficult decisions. When choosing a couch… always listen to your feelings. They know more than you do.
When buying a house, you need to be out of your rational mind.
