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Hall, Chapter 5: Neuroscience and Decision Making

• Quick small group exercise on "how decision making feels"

Choose several kinds of decisions that you make (both those on a regular basis (whether to work out, buy something, what to eat, whether to go to a party) and those less frequent decisions, like choosing a college) and try to describe some of the phenomenal characteristics of the decision. What does it feel like as you make different kinds of decisions? Compare this to things that you have become habitual, but which maybe you used to have to make decisions about (taking out the trash, brushing your teeth, etc.)

• Problem of Free Will comes up throughout the chapter -- a short digression on compatabilism.

• Compatibilists on free will believe that free will and determinism are compatible.
• Several sources of evidence: research on the timing of neural and muscular events in relation to conscious awareness (Wegner). Also, conceptual arguments about how we talk about free will. Stacefreewill
• You could think of free will as the power of our "agency" to operate within a deterministic, but self-modifying system.

• Expected value problems -- Getting $20 now or more in the future. Glimcher: what's happening in the brain when people decide evps?
• 81-3: Problem of Valuation -- Decision making works on pre-existing value that we access in the event.

• Factors: time, impulse control, prudence. (note that these are independently trainable to some extent, but recall Mischel's marshmallows -- absent training, longitudinal results were significant.) (Maybe digress on Gilbert TED talk)

• Reinforcement Learning -- dopamine cycle (read about the design of slot machines.) (Digression on food science. Moss, Salt, Sugar, Fat, Neurogastronomy)

• Rutledge's "fishing for crabs" research:

• dopamine responses shift from reward to prediction, then diminishes.
• neural activity from failure seem to stimulate learning in some way. "Success breeds habit, failure breeds learning." (a heuristic for our times.)

• Pause on the issue of predictive power of the model behind the "fishing for crabs" game. Should good decision making be predictable? (Spring '16: What a weird question.)

• Problems comparing this research to wisdom problems: speed of decision, narrowness of the problem 89 (but note that the simplified problem can still tell us something about the more complex one.)
• Is deliberation really so separate from intuition (ethics students recall Haidt).

• "attentional blink" - def 92, might show limits of focused attention.
• Ap Dijksterhuis - on "deliberation without attention" - connects with discussion of training subjective states of mind for better decision making. Meditation again.
• "Attentional blink" and "decisional paralysis" - Davidson research on meditation effect on these phen. 2007 Vispassana meditation research.
• Decision paralysis -- Iyengar and Lepper gourment jelly studies 93-94 -- connection with Parkinson's

Daniel Gilbert, TED talk, "Why We Make Such Bad Decisions"

• Bernouli's formula for expected value: expected value = odds of gain x value of gain.

• two kinds of mistakes: estimating odds and value

• Errors estimating odds:

• Availability heuristic: works when estimating likelihood of seeing dogs vs. pigs on a leash, not when estimating odds of good or bad things happening (4:30). (example of words with R is diff places, things that get on the news.) (Already implications for wisdom if you think living well requires a rational approach to threats and gains. Do mostly fools play the lottery?

• Example of not buying a 10th lottery ticket because Leroy has the other nine.

• Mistakes estimating value

• Big Mac example - we compare to the past, instead of the possible; vacation package with price change; salaries that increase over salaries that decrease (but note happiness research on this).

• comparisons to the past - price cuts vs. price increases; theatre tickets (mental accounting) (11:00), liberals relative affection for Bush1, retailing (comparison of wine by price), potato chip / chocolate / spam study (14:30) (Note possible application to wisdom for wealthy culture), speaker comparison.

• People have trouble with future value calculations(discounting): "now" is better and "more" is better, but we don't do well when those rules conflict. 18min. Example also from Hall. When both expected value calculations are in the future we do better (pay offs in 12 vs. 13 months)

• Explanatory hypothesis: brain evolution not geared toward abstract calculation of rational alternatives.

• Implications for wisdom: 22 min: interesting comment about Bernouli in relation to evolutionary history 22:30 (and biases such as those underlying these expected value problems).

• What part of living well is comprised of expected value problems?

Hall, Chapter 12: Youth, Adversity, and Wisdom (Hall 12)

• Story of the scientist, Capechhi. Long list of "adversity achievers" (watch out for confirmation bias).

• 215: note how an adversity -- wisdom connection would fit with "early onset" hypothesis.

• Parker (Stanford) research on squirrel monkeys. stress inoculated monkeys less clingy, anxious, more curious and exploratory.219

• Davidson's left side prefrontal correlation: infants who coped with separation best also showed greater left side prefrontal activity in previous test.

• In theorizing about this, we need to acknowledge, as Hall does, that abnormal stress can also cause psychopathologies.

• Note competing theory: Maternal support causes resilience. McGill researcher Michael Meaney.

Hall, Chapter 13: Older and Wiser

• Fredda Blancard-Fields -- on how people of different ages respond to stressful situations. shows that older adults have measureable gains in social knowledge and emotional judgement, increasing problem solving skills. Both she and Carstensen have found evidence of comparatively better performance among older people when it comes to devising strategies for solving problems, precisely because older people tend to process emotion differently. (232)

• Decay of the brain (230): read it. At 232: use it or lose it.

• Background: reminder that Baltes didn't find older were wiser.

• Need for longitudinal study to see connection bt wisdom and age. Vaillant's secondary research on the Harvard longitudinal study, The Grant Study of Adult Development.

• Hall tries to push past the Freudian rhetoric of Vaillant's "Adaptation to Life" -- finds older people use "productive tricks" (234) and strategies: "1? Vaillant, echoing Anna Freud, came around to the view that successfully mature adults displayed such emotional strategies as "altruism, humor, suppression, anticipation.and sublimation." (Glosses "sublimation" as "emotional regulation")

• Ardelt worked with Vaillant on followup studies with this data: "Her preliminary analysis has turned up a strong correlation between those same mature defense mechanisms identified by Vaillant and a more charitable, compassionate pattern of behavior. This other-centeredness was independent of wealth, she found; some well-to-do Harvard men were especially effective in their charitable donations and activities, while others came from more modest backgrounds." 237

• point from Anna Freud: Maybe older people get better at social strategies like "altruism, humor, suppression, anticipation, and sublimation." 235 (Note on "detachment from criticism" in some olders).

• 238: research on older adults. note that if this hypothesis is correct, then research on college aged students is of limited value in filling in the whole picture.

Sternberg, "Wisdom and Its Relations to Intelligence and Creativity"

• Interested in both implicit and explicit theories that bring out the relationship of wisdom, intelligence, and creativity. Follow his own studies and rubric. More based on implicit research.
• Objectivity of wisdom: At p. 147, research finds external validation in correlation between wisdom prototype-resemblance and external measures of social intelligence and social judgement.
• Behavioral ratings experiment (similar to MDS study in Clayton and Birren) [Interesting details on Philosophy and Business Professors!]
• 2nd and 3rd experiments confirm closer association of wisdon and intelligence vs. wisdom and creativity.
• Follow Sternberg's explicit model and conclusion. Read p. 152.
• Explicit research: discuss matrix at 152. note on automatization. mixing of characteristics of intelligence and creativity in wisdom.
• Conclusion: read p. 157.