Decision-Making: Thoughts on a Tweet from The President

This is not a political blog, but examining political events can sometimes help us learn about ourselves. And learning about ourselves and how to improve is a key part of what this blog is about.

Specifically, this post looks at a recent political event in terms of how “quirks” in the human brain led to the event. If you would like to get into this topic in more depth, books such as How We Decide and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational go into much more detail on why many of our decisions are irrational. Also, the video at the end of this post gives some great examples.

Over the weekend, the US House of Representatives passed a controversial health care reform package by a vote of 220 to 215. Shortly thereafter, President Obama tweeted the above message (“This is history”) on Twitter.

The President and Speaker Pelosi had worked hard for massive health care reform. Hence, as the tweet suggests, the President was apparently pleased with the result of the vote.

I like to think I would have taken a different view if I were in his shoes. For example, if the Speaker had hinted to me that the vote would be close, I like to think I would have said “If we are going to spend $1,500,000,000,000 on a program that impacts 300,000,000 people, we need more consensus than what we are seeing: we are doing something wrong.” But, the President is very goal-oriented, and is a master at achieving goals. That is admirable, of course. To a point. The problem comes in when we lose sight of the fact that “getting there” is not all that matters. How we get there counts, too. So he pushed toward the end result he wanted, irrespective of the lack of consensus.

So, that is the first lesson for all of us: goals are great, but we need to pay a lot of attention to how we reach them, and not let the end become greater than the means. When we have a lot of emotional attachment to a goal/result, it’s easy for us to forget to question whether how we are getting there is the right thing to do.

Note that, while I like to think that I would have chosen differently than President Obama did, it is likely that I would have behaved in the same way. Most of us probably would have. That is because we are wired to focus on results, especially ones we are emotionally attached to, sometimes ignoring warning signs about how we are getting there. That’s because we “know in our hearts” that we are well-intentioned, good people who would not intentionally go about something the wrong way.

Another thing that is very clear from the close vote is that many, many representatives voted along party lines. That is sad, in itself. But, what is even more sad is that most of them really and truly thought they were doing the right thing. They thought their party had the right points, and whenever they heard any rational arguments to the contrary, they did not give those arguments any real attention. The reason is that we generally find evidence to support our beliefs and we discount evidence that goes against our beliefs.

Gruber linked to a post that had the following quote:

Every vote over the minimum necessary to secure passage represents compromises that the Democrats as a group would prefer not to make. It’s not that Nancy Pelosi was lucky to pass the bill, it’s that the Democrats wrote the strongest bill they could that would get enough votes to pass. That’s good strategy.

This quote attempts to diffuse the issues that I am pointing out, making it seem that what Speaker Pelosi did was not only right, but it was smart. I would agree if the point of the House were to pit two parties against each other and let the one with the most votes “win.” But, that’s not why the House exists. They are supposed to exist to develop legislation that is in the best interests of those they represent, not to play a football game.

In fact, the above quote seems to me to not be justification for the vote, but rather another example of how people will rationalize a result as being acceptable, when the result is one that they want.

So, those are a couple of examples of the kinds of irrational behavior our smart, well-intentioned folks can have, simply by virtue of “how we are wired.” In the coming weeks and months, I will consider additional examples, perhaps from the books I mentioned, so that we can learn about ourselves. By understanding our weaknesses, we have a chance of overcoming them, at least some of the time.

Finally, you may want to bookmark this page for when you have an additional 17 minutes, so you can watch the following video of Dan Ariely talk about whether we are in control of our decisions. It’s very well done and also very enlightening: