Are You in Control of Your Choices & Beliefs?

I’m frequently asked what lead me to apply to the FBI, even now that I’ve retired. I love to believe that I am the master of my own destiny—that wherever I’ve ended up in life is the result of the considered and unbiased choices I’ve made along the way. And that the decision to submit my application was the result of a well-considered process. The truth is, I really have no idea why I applied. Someone said they thought I should, and I thought, “Yes, I should totally apply to the FBI,” despite knowing next to nothing about the FBI at the time.

I’m equally fond of the idea that my beliefs are the product of reading, listening to, and analyzing an array of viewpoints to come to a well-reasoned position.  For example, that my belief in New Hampshire as the best retirement location was based primarily on research and subsequent analysis.

In a perfect world, both things would be true, but we live in a rather imperfect world where our decisions and beliefs, often, are generated in a manner over which we have very little control…unless we consciously intervene and overrule the subconscious processes where most of this decision-making takes place.

Up to 80 percent of the choices and decisions we make in life are made at the subconscious level. We don’t weigh the costs and benefits; we don’t consider the long-term implications. An answer simply arrives in our conscious brain, and we act on that answer. We believe it to be the best answer, and that it was made by our conscious, rational brain, so we rationalize until we’re comfortable with it, so long as it generally aligns with our beliefs and values.

Then comes the tricky part. Our beliefs are also primarily formed at the subconscious level. We are exposed to thousands of bits of information every day. In fact, the average American spends 11 hours a day interacting with media in some form and 85 percent of us access the Internet daily. An astonishing 44 percent of those aged 18-49 report being engaged with the internet “almost constantly.” We are incessantly bombarded with subtle messages telling us what to believe and how we should be. Our conscious brain cannot possibly sort or make sense of all this information. So, our subconscious does; it processes all that to which we are exposed and slowly forms a belief system that is very often totally outside of our awareness and control. This belief system then gives rise to the answers to whatever questions and choices we are faced with each day.

I find that terrifying.

Consider this from the business perspective where you are considering two options and are reviewing arguments in favor of the two options. If you have been exposed to pieces of information before, whether in this context or any other context, you will process that information more quickly. The psychological terms for this are processing fluency and recall fluency. As a result of these pre-existing fluencies, you will feel more positive toward the information you’ve already seen (and it doesn’t matter whether you remember seeing it). When presented with new information, our processing and recall fluencies are slower, and we feel less favorable toward that information. None of this is happening at the conscious level; it’s just what our subconscious does every day to make the world easier to navigate. That works most of the time, until we find ourselves deciding based simply on our affective response toward a given piece of information and discounting other less subconsciously familiar pieces of information…pieces of information that could be far more important to reaching the right decision.

The good news is that we can interrupt this process with simple acts of metacognition. That is, questioning, “Why am I feeling this way?” or “Is this true?”.

There is a large body of research demonstrating how prior exposure to fake news headlines increases our perceived accuracy of such headlines, even patently ridiculous ones such as “the earth is square.” There is also a growing body of research showing that we can inoculate ourselves against this effect by the simple act of questioning the veracity of the headline—by asking ourselves, “is what I am reading true?” If we take that moment to reflect, we interrupt the passive absorption of information and minimize its later impact on our decision-making. Similarly, while we are making a decision, simple reflections such as “Do I believe this just because I want to believe it?” or “What has led me to believe this is the right decision?” will bring your conscious brain into the decision-making process.

Rather than just letting our conscious brain rationalize the decisions our subconscious has already made for us, we can question our decisions, question the beliefs that drive them, and update our beliefs as necessary. Adam Grant in Think Again makes a great point about this. He says, “Who we are should be defined by what we value, not what we believe.” His point is that updating our beliefs is not threat to us, and that rethinking those beliefs makes us better, conscious, decision makers.

For additional insight into the research behind our decision making processes you may want to check out Soon et al, 2012; Newell & Shanks, 2014; Pennycook, Cannon & Rand, 2018; and Baum, Fromer & Rahman, 2020.