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I love September, because it brings the beginning of autumn and-most exciting-football. Every fall, the members of my extended family compete in an NFL football pool. It started modestly years ago, as a paper-and-pencil affair for my three sons and me, but now nieces and cousins and in-laws all over the country participate via Internet. It's great fun.
I'm not all that good at it. I don't follow the game that closely anymore, and I am competing against some true students of the game, including a former sports writer. But I don't embarrass myself either, and I'll even win the week every so often. My method? Pure hunch. (That and blinkered loyalty to my hometown Redskins, of course.)
By hunch, I don't mean my sister's method, which is choosing her favorite uniforms and cities she'd like to visit someday. That's bush league. No, this is higher order cognition, something to do with gauzy glimpses of the past and a sense of comfort. I'd call it a gut feeling, except it definitely feels like it's in my head.
Well, it turns out it is in my head, and psychologists even have a jargony name for it: familiarity heuristic. It's a kind of algorithm for the brain's neural network, a simple, fast formula for a particular kind of decision making. With the football pool, for example, you could choose winners deliberately, weighing each team's off-season trades, performances against other teams, factoring in injuries from the past week, the weather in Minneapolis, and so forth. My brother-in-law actually does that. But you could also ignore all that information and pick the team that resonates in your neurons, the one you recognize with a sensation of sureness. That's what a lot of people do, including me, and not just for football. Psychologists have studied it, and it's not a bad system on balance--at least for football wagering. Indeed, we have to rely on such "unconscious intelligence" just to get through the day. Most decisions have lots of variables, and we just don't have time to calculate them all.
While such rules are efficient and pretty accurate, people must intuit where a particular rule is an appropriate and valid fit with whatever problem life is throwing at us at the moment. Scientists call this "ecological rationality," and it's the subject of my new book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits. Heuristics may suffice for risk-free challenges like the family pool, but the heuristic brain does more harm than good on balance. People use heuristics inappropriately or in the wrong situation-and thus make mistakes.
Consider what some psychologists call the "take-the-best" heuristic. This life rule is a fast and frugal heuristic that relies on a single reason for a complex decision-say choosing a romantic partner. When you are in take-the-best decision-making mode, you search through the available cues in order, one at a time, but you stop searching as soon as you have enough information to make a rational choice. That's called "satisficing," as in satisfying enough to suffice.
When you are picking a partner, there are a few resume details that are extremely important, followed by some more that are less important but still worth thinking about, and then a lot that are relatively unimportant. So: Intelligent? Check. Sexy? Check. Funny? Check. Successful? Check. That seems like enough to go on. You rarely get far enough down the list to weigh the unimportant things. If you do, best guess is you're single. Then again, something you're not weighing now may seem a lot more important later on. Kind? Oops. Didn't check that. And that's a big oops, because this ain't no weekend football pool.
