The Frontal Cortex

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.