5

Your emotional compass: The power of self-reflection

As he hungrily ate his burger and fries, Ray had already begun to sketch out his business plan. The fifty-two-year-old salesman was not a gambling man, but when he got this intense visceral feeling in his ‘funny bone’, he knew he had to act – and he had never before felt an intuition this strong.

Those instincts hadn’t led him astray yet. He had made his way from playing jazz piano in bars and bordellos to a successful career in the paper cup industry, becoming his company’s most successful salesman. Then, soon after the Second World War, he had seen the potential in milkshake mixers, and he was now making a tidy sum selling them to diners.

But his mind was always open to new possibilities. ‘As long as you’re green you’re growing; as soon as you’re ripe you start to rot,’ he liked to say. And although his body may have been telling him otherwise – he had diabetes and the beginnings of arthritis – he still felt as green as people half his age.

So when he noticed that new clients were flocking to him on the recommendation of one particular hamburger joint, owned by two brothers in San Bernadino, California, he knew he had to take a look. What was so special about this one outlet that had inspired so many others to pay out for a better shake maker?

Entering the premises, he was struck first by the cleanliness of the operation: everyone was dressed in pristine uniforms, and unlike the typical roadside restaurant, it wasn’t swarming with flies. And although the menu was limited, the service was quick and efficient. Each step of the food production was stripped down to its essence, and by paying with the order, you could come in and go out without even having to wait around tipping waitresses. Then there was the taste of the French fries, cut from Idaho potatoes that were cooked to perfection in fresh oil, and the burgers, fried all the way through with a slice of cheese on one side. You could, the sign outside read, ‘buy ’em by the bag’.

Ray had never been to a burger joint like it; it was somewhere he would have happily taken his wife and children. And he saw that the operation could easily be upscaled. His excitement was visceral; he was ‘wound up like a pitcher with a no-hitter going’. He knew he had to buy the rights to franchise the operation and spread it across America.1

Within the next few years, Ray would risk all his savings to buy out the two brothers who owned it. He would keep the emblem of its golden arches, though, and despite the acrimonious split, the brothers’ name – McDonald – would still be emblazoned on every restaurant.

His lawyers apparently thought he was mad; his wife’s reaction was so negative that they got divorced. But Ray was never in any doubt. ‘I felt in my funny bone that it was a sure thing.’2

History may have proven Ray Kroc’s instincts correct; McDonald’s serves nearly 70 million customers every day. In light of the science of dysrationalia, however, it’s natural to feel more than a little sceptical of a man who gambled everything on the whims of his funny bone.

Surely instinctual reasoning like this is the antithesis of Franklin’s slow-and-careful moral algebra and Igor Grossmann’s study of evidence-based wisdom? We’ve seen so many examples of people who have followed their hunches to their detriment; Kroc would seem to be the exception who proves the rule. If we want to apply our intelligence more rationally, we should always try to avoid letting our emotions and gut feelings rule our actions in this way.

This would be a grave misunderstanding of the research, however. Although our gut reactions are undoubtedly unreliable, and over-confidence in those feelings will lead to dysrationalia, our emotions and intuitions can also be valuable sources of information, directing our thinking in impossibly complex decisions and alerting us to details that have been accidentally overlooked through conscious deliberation.

The problem is that most people – including those with high general intelligence, education and professional expertise – lack the adequate self-reflection to interpret the valuable signals correctly and identify the cues that are going to lead them astray. According to the research, bias doesn’t come from intuitions and emotions per se, but from an inability to recognise those feelings for what they really are and override them when necessary; we then use our intelligence and knowledge to justify erroneous judgements made on the basis of them.

Cutting-edge experiments have now identified exactly what skills are needed to analyse our intuitions more effectively, suggesting yet more abilities that are not currently recognised in our traditional definitions of intelligence, but which are essential for wise decision making. And it turns out that Kroc’s descriptions of his physical ‘funny-bone feelings’ perfectly illustrate this new understanding of the human mind.

The good news is that these reflective skills can be learnt, and when we combine them with other principles of evidence-based wisdom, the results are powerful. These strategies can improve the accuracy of your memories, boost your social sensitivity so that you become a more effective negotiator, and light the spark of your creativity.

By allowing us to de-bias our intuitions, these insights resolve many forms of the intelligence trap, including the curse of expertise that we explored in Chapter 3. And some professions are already taking notice. In medicine, for instance, these strategies are being applied by doctors who hope to reduce diagnostic errors – techniques that could potentially save tens of thousands of lives every year.

Like much of our knowledge about the brain’s inner workings, this new understanding of emotion comes from the extreme experiences of people who have sustained neurological injury to a specific part of the brain.

In this case, the area of interest is the ventromedial area of the prefrontal cortex, located just above the nasal cavity – which may be damaged through surgery, stroke, infection, or a congenital defect.

Superficially, people with damage to this area appear to emerge from these injuries with their cognition relatively unscathed: they still score well on intelligence tests, and their factual knowledge is preserved. And yet their behaviour is nevertheless extremely bizarre, veering between incessant indecision and rash impulsiveness.

They may spend hours deliberating over the exact way to file an office document, for instance, only to then invest all of their savings in a poor business venture or to marry a stranger on a whim. It’s as if they simply can’t calibrate their thinking to the importance of the decision at hand. Worse still, they appear immune to feedback, ignoring criticism when it comes their way, so they are stuck making the same errors again and again.

‘Normal and intelligent individuals of comparable education make mistakes and poor decisions, but not with such systematically dire consequences,’ the neurologist Antonio Damasio wrote of one of the first known patients, Elliot, in the early 1990s.3

Damasio was initially at a loss to explain why damage to the frontal lobe would cause this strange behaviour. It was only after months of observation with Elliot that Damasio uncovered another previously undiscovered symptom that would eventually hold the key to the puzzle: despite the fact that his whole life was unravelling in front of him, Elliot’s mood never once faltered from an eerie calmness. What Damasio had originally taken to be a stiff upper lip seemed like an almost complete lack of emotion. ‘He was not inhibiting the expression of internal emotional resonance or hushing inner turmoil’, Damasio later wrote. ‘He simply did not have any turmoil to hush.’

Those observations would ultimately lead Damasio to propose the ‘somatic marker hypothesis’ of emotion and decision making. According to this theory, any experience is immediately processed non-consciously, and this triggers a series of changes within our body – such as fluctuations in heart rate, a knot in the stomach, or build-up of sweat on the skin. The brain then senses these ‘somatic markers’ and interprets them according to the context of the situation and its knowledge of emotional states. Only then do we become conscious of how we are feeling.

This process makes evolutionary sense. By continually monitoring and modifying blood pressure, muscle tension and energy consumption, the brain can prepare the body for action, should we need to respond physically, and maintains its homeostasis. In this way, the somatic marker hypothesis offers one of the best, biologically grounded, theories of emotion. When you feel the rush of excitement flowing to the tips of your fingers, or the unbearable pressure of grief weighing on your chest, it is due to this neurological feedback loop.

Of even greater importance for our purposes, however, the somatic marker hypothesis can also explain the role of intuition during decision making. According to Damasio, somatic markers are the product of rapid non-conscious processing which creates characteristic bodily changes before our conscious reasoning has caught up. The resulting physical sensations are the intuitive feelings we call gut instinct, giving us a sense of the correct choice before we can explain the reasons why.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, Damasio proposed, is one of the central hubs that is responsible for creating bodily signals based on our previous experiences, explaining why patients like Elliot failed to feel emotions, and why they would often make bad decisions; their brain damage had cut off their access to the non-conscious information that might be guiding their choices.

Sure enough, Damasio found that people like Elliot failed to show the accompanying physiological responses – such as sweating – when viewing disturbing images (such as a photo of a horrific homicide). To further test his theory, Damasio’s team designed an elegant experiment called the Iowa Gambling Task, in which participants are presented with four decks of cards. Each card can come with a small monetary reward, or a penalty, but two of the decks are subtly stacked against the player, with slightly bigger rewards but much bigger penalties. The participants don’t initially know this, though: they just have to take a gamble.

For most healthy participants, the body starts showing characteristic changes in response to a particular choice – such as signs of stress when the participant is set to choose the disadvantageous deck – before the player is consciously aware that some decks are stacked for or against them. And the more sensitive someone is to their bodily feelings – a sense called interoception – the quicker they learn how to make the winning choices.

As Damasio expected, brain injury survivors such as Elliot were especially bad at the Iowa Gambling Task, making the wrong choices again and again long after others have started homing in on the right card decks. This was caused by their lack of the characteristic somatic changes before they made their choices. Unlike other players, they did not experience a reliable visceral response to the different decks that would normally warn people from risking huge losses.4

You don’t need to have endured a brain injury to have lost touch with your feelings, though. Even among the healthy population, there is enormous variation in the sensitivity of people’s interoception, a fact that can explain why some people are better at making intuitive decisions than others.

You can easily measure this yourself. Simply sit with your hands by your sides and ask a friend to take your pulse. At the same time, try to feel your own heart in your chest (without actually touching it) and count the number of times it beats; then, after one minute, compare the two numbers.

How did you do? Most people’s estimates are out by at least 30 per cent,5 but some reach nearly 100 per cent accuracy – and your place on this scale will indicate how you make intuitive decisions in exercises like the Iowa Gambling Task, with the higher scorers naturally gravitating to the most advantageous options.6

Your score on the heartbeat counting test can translate to real-world financial success, with one study showing that it can predict the profits made by traders in an English hedge fund, and how long they survived within the financial markets.7 Contrary to what we might have assumed, it is the people who are most sensitive to their visceral ‘gut’ feelings – those with the most accurate interoception – who made the best possible deals.

Its importance doesn’t end there. Your interoceptive accuracy will also determine your social skills: our physiology often mirrors the signals we see in others – a very basic form of empathy – and the more sensitive you are to those somatic markers, the more sensitive you will be of others’ feelings too.8

Tuning into those signals can also help you to read your memories. It is now well known that human recall is highly fallible, but somatic markers signal the confidence of what you think you know9 – whether you are certain or simply guessing. And a study from Keio University in Tokyo found they can also act as reminders when you need to remember to do something in the future – a phenomenon known as prospective memory.10

Imagine, for instance, that you are planning to call your mum in the evening to wish her a happy birthday. If you have more attuned interoception, you might feel a knot of unease in your stomach during the day, or a tingling in your limbs, that tells you there’s something you need to remember, causing you to rack your brain until you recall what it is. Someone who was less aware of those body signals would not notice those physiological reminders and would simply forget all about them.

Or consider a TV quiz show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Your success will undoubtedly depend on your intelligence and general knowledge, but your sensitivity to somatic markers will also determine whether you are willing to gamble it all on an answer you don’t really know, or whether you can correctly gauge your uncertainty and decide to use a lifeline.

In each case, our non-conscious mind is communicating, through the body, something that the conscious mind is still struggling to articulate. We talk about ‘following the heart’ when we are making important life choices – particularly in love – but Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis shows that there is a literal scientific truth to this romantic metaphor. Our bodily signals are an inescapable element of almost every decision we make, and as the experiences of people like Elliot show, we ignore them at our peril.

When Kroc described the uncanny feeling in his funny bone and the sense of being ‘wound up like a pitcher’, he was almost certainly tapping into somatic markers generated by his non-conscious mind, based on a lifetime’s sales experience.

Those feelings determined who he recruited, and who he fired. It was the cause of his decision to first buy into the McDonald’s franchise and after their relationship had turned sour, it led him to buy out the brothers. Even his choice to keep the burger bar’s original name – when he could have saved millions by starting his own brand – was put down to his gut instincts. ‘I had a strong intuitive sense that the name McDonald’s was exactly right.’11

Kroc’s descriptions offer some of the most vivid examples of this process, but he is far from alone in this. In creative industries, in particular, it’s difficult to imagine how you could judge a new idea purely analytically, without some instinctual response.

Consider Coco Chanel’s descriptions of her nose for new designs. ‘Fashion is in the air, born upon the wind. One intuits it. It is in the sky and on the road.’ Or Bob Lutz, who oversaw the construction of Chrysler’s iconic Dodge Viper that helped save the company from ruin in the 1990s. Despite having no market research to back up his choice, he knew that the sports car – way beyond the price range of Chrysler’s usual offerings – would transform the company’s somewhat dour image. ‘It was this subconscious visceral feeling . . . it just felt right,’ he says of his decision to pursue the radical new design.12

Damasio’s theory, and the broader work on interoception, gives us a strong scientific foundation to understand where those visceral feelings come from and the reasons that some people appear to have more finely tuned intuitions than others.

This cannot be the whole story, however. Everyday experience would tell us that for every Kroc, Chanel or Lutz, you will find someone whose intuitions have backfired badly, and to make better decisions we still need to learn how to recognise and override those deceptive signals. To do so, we need two additional elements to our emotional compass.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston, has led much of this work, exploring both the ways our moods and emotions can lead us astray and potential ways to escape those errors. As one example, she recalls a day at graduate school when a colleague asked her out on a date. She didn’t really feel attracted to him, but she’d been working hard and felt like a break, so she agreed to go to the local coffee shop, and as they chatted, she felt flushed and her stomach fluttered – the kinds of somatic markers that you might expect to come with physical attraction. Perhaps it really was love?

By the time she’d left the coffee shop, she had already arranged to go on another date, and it was only when she walked into her apartment and vomited that she realised the true origins of those bodily sensations: she had caught the flu.13

The unfortunate fact is that our somatic markers are messy things, and we may accidentally incorporate irrelevant feelings into our interpretations of the events at hand – particularly if they represent ‘background feelings’ that are only on the fringes of our awareness, but which may nevertheless determine our actions.

If you have a job interview, for instance, you’d better hope it’s not raining – studies show that recruiters are less likely to accept a candidate if the weather is bad when they first meet them.14 When researchers spray the smell of a fart, meanwhile, they can trigger feelings of disgust that sway people’s judgements of moral issues.15 And the joy that comes from a World Cup win can even influence a country’s stock market – despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the economy’s viability.16

In each case, the brain was interpreting those background feelings and responding as if they were relevant to the decision at hand. ‘Feeling,’ says Feldman Barrett, ‘is believing’ – a phenomenon called ‘affective realism’.17

This would seem to pour cold water on any attempts to use our intuition. But Feldman Barrett has also found that some people are consistently better able to disentangle those influences than others – and it all depends on the words they use to describe their feelings.

Perhaps the best illustration comes from a month-long investigation of investors taking part in an online stock market. Contrary to the popular belief that a ‘cooler head always prevails’ – and in agreement with the study of the traders at the London hedge fund – Feldman Barrett found that the best performers reported the most intense feelings during their investments.

Crucially, however, the biggest winners also used more precise vocabularies to describe those sensations. While some people might use the words ‘happy’ and ‘excited’ interchangeably, for example, these words represented a very specific feeling for some people – a skill that Feldman Barrett calls ‘emotion differentiation’.18

It wasn’t that the poorer performers lacked the words; they simply weren’t as careful to apply them precisely to describe the exact sensations they were feeling; ‘content’ and ‘joyful’ both just meant something pleasant; ‘angry’ or ‘nervous’ described their negative feelings. They seemed not to be noting any clear distinctions in their feelings – and that ultimately impaired their investment decisions.

This makes sense given some of the previous research on affective realism, which had found that the influence of irrelevant feelings due to the weather or a bad smell, say, only lasts as long as they linger below conscious awareness, and their power over our decisions evaporates as soon as the extraneous factors are brought to conscious attention. As a consequence, the people who find it easier to describe their emotions may be more aware of background feelings, and they are therefore more likely to discount them. By pinning a concept on a feeling, it is easier to analyse it more critically and to disregard if it is irrelevant.19

The benefits of emotion differentiation don’t end there. Besides being more equipped to disentangle the sources of their feelings, people with more precise emotional vocabularies also tend to have more sophisticated ways of regulating their feelings when they threaten to get out of hand. A stock market trader, for instance, would be better able to get back on their feet after a string of losses, rather than sinking into despair or attempting to win it all back with increasingly risky gambles.

Sensible regulation strategies include self-distancing, which we explored in the last chapter, and reappraisal, which involves reinterpreting the feelings in a new light. It could also involve humour – cracking a joke to break the tension; or a change of scene. Perhaps you simply realise that you need to get away from the table and take a deep breath. But whatever strategy you use, you can only regulate those feelings once you have already identified them.

For these reasons, people with poor interoception,20 and low emotional differentiation, are less likely to keep their feelings under wraps before they get out of hand.* Regulation is therefore the final cog in our emotional compass, and, together, those three interconnected components – interoception, differentiation and regulation – can powerfully direct the quality of our intuition and decision making.21

 

* It is risky to read too much into Kroc’s autobiography, Grinding It Out. But he certainly seems to describe some sophisticated strategies to regulate his emotions when they get out of hand, which he claimed to have picked up earlier in his career. As he put it (pp. 61-2): ‘I worked out a system that allowed me to turn off nervous tension and shut out nagging questions . . . I would think of my mind as being a blackboard full of messages, most of them urgent, and I practiced imagining a hand with an eraser wiping that blackboard clean. I made my mind completely blank. If a thought began to appear, zap! I’d wipe it out before it could form.’

I hope you are now convinced that engaging with your feelings is not a distraction from good reasoning, but an essential part of it. By bringing our emotions to the mind’s surface, and dissecting their origins and influence, we can treat them as an additional and potentially vital source of information. They are only dangerous when they go unchallenged.

Some researchers call these skills emotional intelligence, but although the description makes literal sense, I’ll avoid that term to reduce confusion with some of the more questionable EQ tests that we discussed in Part 1. Instead, I’ll describe them as reflective thinking, since they all, in some ways, involve turning your awareness inwards to recognise and dissect your thoughts and feelings.

Like the strategies that we explored in the last chapter, these abilities shouldn’t be seen as some kind of rival to traditional measures of intelligence and expertise, but as complementary behaviours that ensure we apply our reasoning in the most productive way possible, without being derailed by irrelevant feelings that would lead us off track.

Crucially – and this fact is often neglected, even in the psychological literature – these reflective skills also offer some of the best ways of dealing with the very specific cognitive biases that Kahneman and Tversky studied. They protect us from dysrationalia.

Consider the following scenario, from a study by Wändi Bruine de Bruin (who designed one of the decision-making tests that we explored in Chapter 2).

 

You have driven halfway to a vacation destination. Your goal is to spend time by yourself – but you feel sick, and you now feel that you would have a much better weekend at home. You think that it is too bad that you already drove halfway, because you would much rather spend the time at home.

 

What would you do? Stick with your plans, or cancel them?

This is a test of the sunk cost fallacy – and lots of people state that they would prefer not to waste the drive they’ve already taken. They keep on ruminating about the time they would lose, and so they try in vain to make the best of it – even though the scenario makes it pretty clear that they’ll have to spend the vacation in discomfort as a result. Bruine de Bruin, however, has found that this is not true of the people who can think more reflectively about their feelings in the ways that Feldman Barrett and others have studied.22

A Romanian study has found similar benefits with the framing effect. In games of chance, for instance, people are more likely to choose options when they are presented as a gain (i.e. 40 per cent chance of winning) compared with when they are presented as a loss (60 per cent chance of losing) – even when they mean exactly the same thing. But people with more sophisticated emotion regulation are resistant to these labelling effects and take a more rational view of the probabilities as a result.23

Being able to reappraise our emotions has also been shown to protect us against motivated reasoning in highly charged political discussions, determining a group of Israeli students’ capacity to consider the Palestinian viewpoint during a period of heightened tension.24

It should come as little surprise, then, that an emotional self-awareness should be seen as a prerequisite for the intellectually humble, open-minded thinking that we studied in the last chapter. And this is reflected in Igor Grossmann’s research on evidence-based wisdom, which has shown that the highest performers on his wise reasoning tests are indeed more attuned to their emotions, capable of distinguishing their feelings in finer detail while also regulating and balancing those emotions so that their passions do not come to rule their actions.25

This idea is, of course, no news to philosophers. Thinkers from Socrates and Plato to Confucius have argued that you cannot be wise about the world around you if you do not first know yourself. The latest scientific research shows that this is not some lofty philosophical ideal; incorporating some moments of reflection into your day will help de-bias every decision in your life.

The good news is that most people’s reflective skills naturally improve over the course of their lifetime; in ten years’ time you’ll probably be slightly better equipped to identify and command your feelings than you are today.

But are there any methods to accelerate that process?

One obvious strategy is mindfulness meditation, which trains people to listen to their body’s sensations and then reflect on them in a non-judgemental way. There is now strong evidence that besides its many, well-documented health benefits, regular practise of mindfulness can improve each element of your emotional compass – interoception, differentiation and regulation – meaning that it is the quickest and easiest way to de-bias your decision making and hone your intuitive instincts.26 (If you are sceptical, or simply tired of hearing about the benefits of mindfulness, bear with me – you will soon see that there are other ways to achieve some of the same effects.)

Andrew Hafenbrack, then at the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires in France, was one of the first to document these cognitive effects in 2014. Using Bruine de Bruin’s tests, he found that a single fifteen-minute mindfulness session can reduce the incidence of the sunk cost bias by 34 per cent. That’s a massive reduction – of a very common bias – for such a short intervention.27

By allowing us to dissect our emotions from a more detached perspective, mindfulness has also been shown to correct the myside biases that come from a threatened ego,28 meaning people are less defensive when they are faced with criticism29 and more willing to consider others’ perspectives, rather than doggedly sticking to their own views.30

Meditators are also more likely to make rational choices in an experimental task known as the ‘ultimatum game’ that tests how we respond to unfair treatment by others. You play it in pairs, and one partner is given some cash and offered the option to share as much of the money as they want with the other participant. The catch is that the receiver can choose to reject the offer if they think it’s unfair – and if that happens, both parties lose everything.

Many people do reject small offers out of sheer spite, even though it means they are ultimately worse off – making it an irrational decision. But across multiple rounds of the game, the meditators were less likely to make this choice. For example, when the opponent offered a measly $1 out of a possible $20, only 28 per cent of the non-meditators accepted the money, compared to 54 per cent of the meditators who could set their anger aside to make the rational choice. Crucially, this tolerance correlated with the meditator’s interoceptive awareness, suggesting that their more refined emotional processing had contributed to their wiser decision making.31

Commanding your feelings in this way would be particularly important during business negotiations, when you need to remain alert to subtle emotional signals from others without getting swept away by strong feelings when the discussions don’t go to plan. (Along these lines, a Turkish study has found that differences in emotion regulation can account for 43 per cent of the variation in simulated business negotiations.32)

Having started meditating to deal with the stress at INSEAD, Hafenbrack says that he has now witnessed all these benefits himself. ‘I’m able to disconnect the initial stimulus from my response – and that second or two can make a huge difference in whether you overreact to something or if you respond in a productive way,’ he told me from the Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics in Portugal, where he is now a professor of organisational science. ‘It makes it easier to think what’s really the best decision right now.’

If mindfulness really isn’t your thing, there may be other ways to hone intuitive instincts and improve your emotion regulation. A series of recent studies has shown that musicians (including string players and singers) and professional dancers have more fine-tuned interoception.33 The scientists behind these studies suspect that training in these disciplines – which all rely on precise movements guided by sensory feedback – naturally encourages greater bodily awareness.

You don’t need to actively meditate to train your emotion differentiation either. Participants in one study were shown a series of troubling images and told to describe their feelings to themselves with the most precise words possible.34 When shown a picture of a child suffering, for example, they were encouraged to question whether they were feeling sadness, pity or anger, and to consider the specific differences between those feelings.

After just six trials, the participants were already more conscious of the distinctions between different emotions, and this meant that they were subsequently less susceptible to priming during a moral reasoning task. (By improving their emotion regulation the same approach has, incidentally, also helped a group of people to overcome their arachnophobia.35)

The effects are particularly striking, since, like the mindfulness studies, these interventions are incredibly short and simple, with the benefits of a single session enduring more than a week later; even a little bit of time to think about your feelings in more detail will pay lasting dividends.

At the very basic level, you should make sure that you pick apart the tangled threads of feeling, and routinely differentiate emotions such as apprehension, fear and anxiety; contempt, boredom and disgust; or pride, satisfaction and admiration. But given these findings, Feldman Barrett suggests that we also try to learn new words – or invent our own – to fill a particular niche on our emotional awareness.

Just think of the term ‘hangry’ – a relatively recent entry into the English language that describes the particular irritability when we haven’t eaten.36 Although we don’t necessarily need psychological research to tell us that low blood sugar will cause an accompanying dip in your mood and a dangerously short fuse, naming the concept means that we are now more aware of the feeling when it does happen, and better able to account for the ways it might be influencing our thinking.

In his Dictionary of Lost Sorrows, the writer and artist John Koenig shows just the kind of sensitivity that Feldman Barrett describes, inventing words such as ‘liberosis’, the desire to care less about things, and ‘altschmerz’ – a weariness with the same old issues you’ve always had. According to the scientific research, enriching our vocabulary in this way isn’t just a poetic exercise: looking for, and then defining, those kinds of nuances will actually change the way you think in profound ways.37

If you are really serious about fine-tuning your emotional compass, many of the researchers also suggest that you spend a few minutes to jot down your thoughts and feelings from the day and the ways they might have influenced your decisions. Not only does the writing process encourage deeper introspection and the differentiation of your feelings, which should naturally improve your intuitive instincts; it also ensures you learn and remember what worked and what didn’t, so you don’t make the same mistakes twice.

You may believe you are too busy for this kind of reflection, but the research suggests that spending a few minutes in introspection will more than pay for itself in the long run. A study by Francesca Gino at Harvard University, for instance, asked trainees at an IT centre in Bangalore to devote just fifteen minutes a day to writing and reflecting on the lessons they had learnt, while drawing out the more intuitive elements of their daily tasks. After eleven days, she found that they had improved their performance by 23 per cent, compared to participants who had spent the same time actively practising their skills.38 Your daily commute may be the obvious period to engage your mind in this way.

Comprenez-vous cette phrase? Parler dans une langue étrangère modifie l’attitude de l’individu, le rendant plus rationnel et plus sage!

We will shortly see how reflective thinking can potentially save lives. But if you are lucky enough to be bilingual – or willing to learn – you can add one final strategy to your new decision-making toolkit – called the foreign language effect.

The effect hinges on the emotional resonances within the words we speak. Linguists and writers have long known that our emotional experience of a second language will be very different from that of our mother tongue; Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, claimed to feel that his English was ‘a stiffish, artificial thing’ compared to his native Russian, despite becoming one of the language’s most proficient stylists: it simply didn’t have the same deep resonance for him.39 And this is reflected in our somatic markers, like the sweat response: when we hear messages in another language, the emotional content is less likely to move the body.

Although that may be a frustration for writers such as Nabokov, Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago’s Center for Practical Wisdom has shown that it may also offer us another way to control our emotions.

The first experiment, published in 2012, examined the framing effect, using English speakers studying Japanese and French, and Korean speakers learning English. In their native languages, the participants were all influenced by whether the scenarios were presented as ‘gains’ or ‘losses’. But this effect disappeared when they used their second language. Now, they were less easily swayed by the wording and more rational as a result.40

The ‘foreign language effect’ has since been replicated many times in many other countries, including Israel and Spain, and with many other cognitive biases, including the ‘hot hand illusion’ – the belief, in sport or gambling, that success at one random event means we are more likely to have similar luck in the future.41

In each case, people were more rational when they were asked to reason in their second language, compared with their first. Our thinking may feel ‘stiffish’, as Nabokov put it, but the slight emotional distance means that we can think more reflectively about the problem at hand.42

Besides offering this immediate effect, learning another language can improve your emotion differentiation, as you pick up new ‘untranslatable’ terms that help you see more nuance in your feelings. And by forcing you to see the world through a new cultural lens, it can exercise your actively open-minded thinking, while the challenge of grappling with unknown phrases increases your ‘tolerance of ambiguity’, a related psychological measure which means that you are better equipped to cope with feelings of uncertainty rather than jumping to a conclusion too quickly. Besides reducing bias, that’s also thought to be essential for creativity; tolerance of ambiguity is linked to entrepreneurial innovation, for instance.43

Given the effort involved, no one would advise that you learn a language solely to improve your reasoning – but if you already speak one or have been tempted to resuscitate a language you left behind at school, then the foreign language effect could be one additional strategy to regulate your emotions and improve your decision making.

If nothing else, you might consider the way it influences your professional relationships with international colleagues; the language you use could determine whether they are swayed by the emotions behind the statement or the facts. As Nelson Mandela once said: ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’

One of the most exciting implications of the research on emotional awareness and reflective thinking is that it may finally offer a way to resolve the ‘the curse of expertise’. As we saw in Chapter 3, greater experience can lead experts to rely on fuzzy, gist-based intuitions that often offer rapid and efficient decision making, but can also lead to error. The implication might have seemed to be that we would need to lose some of that efficiency, but the latest studies show that there are ways to use those flashes of insight while reducing the needless mistakes.

The field of medicine has been at the forefront of these explorations – for good reason. Currently, around 10?15 per cent of initial diagnoses are incorrect, meaning many doctors will make at least one error for every six patients they see. Often these errors can be corrected before harm is done, but it is thought that in US hospitals alone, around one in ten patient deaths – between 40,000 and 80,000 per annum – can be traced to a diagnostic mistake.44

Could a simple change of thinking style help save some of those lives? To find out, I met Silvia Mamede in the hubbub of Rotterdam’s Erasmus Medical Centre. Mamede moved to the Netherlands from Ceará, Brazil, more than a decade ago, and she immediately offers me a strong cup of coffee – ‘not the watery stuff you normally get here’ – before sitting opposite me with a notebook in hand. ‘You organise your ideas better if you have a pencil and paper,’ she explained. (Psychological research does indeed suggest that your memory often functions better if you are allowed to doodle as you talk.45)

Her aim is to teach doctors to be similarly reflective concerning the ways they make their decision making. Like the medical checklist, which the doctor and writer Atul Gawande has shown to be so powerful for preventing memory failures during surgery, the concept is superficially simple: to pause, think and question your assumptions. Early attempts to engage ‘system 2’ thinking had been disappointing, however; doctors told to use pure analysis, in place of intuition – by immediately listing all the alternative hypotheses, for instance – often performed worse than those who had taken a less deliberative, more intuitive approach.46

In light of the somatic marker hypothesis, this makes sense. If you ask someone to reflect too early, they fail to draw on their experience, and may become overly focused on inconsequential information. You are blocking them from using their emotional compass, and so they become a little like Damasio’s brain injury patients, stuck in their ‘analysis paralysis’. You can’t just use system 1 or system 2 – you need to use both.

For this reason, Mamede suggests that doctors note down their gut reaction as quickly as possible; and only then should they analyse the evidence for their gut reaction and compare it to alternative hypotheses. Sure enough, she has since found that doctors can improve their diagnostic accuracy by up to 40 per cent by taking this simple approach – a huge achievement for such a small measure. Simply telling doctors to revisit their initial hypothesis – without any detailed instructions on re-examining the data or generating new ideas – managed to boost accuracy by 10 per cent, which again is a significant improvement for little extra effort.

Importantly, and in line with the broader research on emotion, this reflective reasoning also reduces the ‘affective biases’ that can sway a doctor’s intuition. ‘There are all these factors that could disturb “System 1” – the patient’s appearance, whether they are rich or poor, the time pressure, whether they interrupt you,’ she said. ‘But the hope is that reflective reasoning can make the physician take a step back.’

To explore one such factor, Mamede recently tested how doctors respond to ‘difficult’ patients, such as those who rudely question the professionals’ decisions. Rather than observing real encounters, which would be difficult to measure objectively, Mamede offered fictional vignettes to a group of general practitioners (family doctors). The text mostly outlined their symptoms and test results, but it also included a couple of sentences detailing their behaviour.

Many of the doctors did not even report noticing the contextual information, while others were perplexed at the reasons they had been given these extra details. ‘They said, “But this doesn’t matter! We are trained to look past that, to not look at the behaviour. This should make no difference,” ’ Mamede told me. In fact, as the research on emotion would suggest, it had a huge impact. For more complex cases, the general practitioners were 42 per cent more likely to make a diagnostic error for the difficult patients.47

If the doctors were told to engage in the more reflective procedure, however, they were more likely to look past their frustration and give a correct diagnosis. It seems that the pause in their thinking allowed them to gauge their own emotions and correct for their frustration, just as the theories of emotion differentiation and regulation would predict.

Mamede has also examined the availability bias, causing doctors to over-diagnose an illness if it has recently appeared in the media and is already on their mind. Again, she has shown that the more reflective procedure eliminates the error – even though she offered no specific instructions or explanations warning them of that particular bias.48 ‘It’s amazing, when you see the graphs of these studies. The doctors who weren’t exposed to the reports of disease had an accuracy of 71 per cent, and the biased ones only had an accuracy of 50 per cent. And then, when they reflected they went back to the 70 per cent,’ she told me. ‘So it completely corrected for the bias.’

These are astonishing results for such small interventions, but they all show us the power of greater self-awareness, when we allow ourselves to think more reflectively about our intuitions.

Some doctors may resist Mamede’s suggestions; the very idea that, after all their training, something so simple could correct their mistakes is bruising to the ego, particularly when many take enormous pride in the power of their rapid intuition. At conferences, for instance, she will present a case on the projector and wait for the doctors to give a diagnosis. ‘It’s sometimes twenty seconds – they just read four or five lines and they say ‘‘appendicitis’’,’ she told me. ‘There is even this joke saying that if the doctor needs to think, leave the room.’

But there is now a growing momentum throughout medicine to incorporate the latest psychological findings into the physician’s daily practice. Pat Croskerry at Dalhousie University in Canada is leading a critical thinking programme for doctors – and much of his advice echoes the research we have explored in this chapter, including, for instance, the use of mindfulness to identify the emotional sources of our decision, and, when errors have occurred, the employment of a ‘cognitive and affective autopsy’ to identify the reasons that their intuition backfired. He also advocates ‘cognitive inoculation’ – using case-studies to identify the potential sources of bias, which should mean that the doctors are more mindful of the factors influencing their thinking.

Croskerry is still collecting the data from his courses to see the long-term effects on diagnostic accuracy. But if these methods can prevent just a small portion of those 40,000?80,000 deaths per year, they will have contributed more than a major new drug.49

Although medicine is leading the way, a few other professions are also coming around to this way of thinking. The legal system, for instance, is notoriously plagued by bias – and in response to this research, the American Judges Association has now issued a white paper that advocated mindfulness as one of the key strategies to improve judicial decision making, while also advising each judge to take a moment to ‘read the dials’ and interrogate their feelings in detail, just as neuroscientists and psychologists such as Feldman Barrett are suggesting.50

 

Ultimately, these findings could change our understanding of what it means to be an expert.

 

 

In the past, psychologists had described four distinct stages in the learning curve. The complete beginner is unconsciously incompetent – she does not even know what she doesn’t know (potentially leading to the over-confidence of the Dunning?Kruger effect we saw in Chapter 3). After a short while, however, she will understand the skills she lacks, and what she must do to learn them; she is consciously incompetent. With effort, she can eventually become consciously competent – she can solve most problems, but she has to think a lot about the decisions she is making. Finally, after years of training and on-the-job experience, those decisions become second nature – she has reached unconscious competence. This was traditionally the pinnacle of expertise, but as we have seen, she may then hit a kind of ‘ceiling’ where her accuracy plateaus as a result of the expert biases we explored in Chapter 3.51 To break through that ceiling, we may need one final stage – ‘reflective competence’ – which describes the capacity to explore our feelings and intuitions, and to identify biases before they cause harm.52

As Ray Kroc had found in that Californian diner, intuition can be a powerful thing – but only once we know how to read those funny-bone feelings.