This session's theme is empathy and decision making, in which I'll discuss how the human brain processes and understands the gulf between ourselves and others. We'll even do a little digging into what science tells us about how our minds process decisions that we make for ourselves differently than how our minds process decisions that we make for others. This all starts with a fundamental truth about human psychology. We don't have perfect insight into ourselves. Depending on the circumstances, we really don't have a good sense of how smart we are, how far we can throw, how good we are at driving and so on. Among the most well known examples of this is the human tendency to be overconfident, which simply means we expect to do better than our skills or knowledge would justify. It's a mathematical reality that only 50% of people can be above average drivers. Nonetheless, 90% of people believe they are above average drivers. Going one step further, we have limited self-insight, but we have even less insight into others. If we don't know how good we are driving, then we certainly don't know how good others are driving. As an example consider a time when someone you know, came to you for advice. You spent a lot of time thinking about the best suggestion you could offer, but then the person turns around and ignores your advice anyway. It happens all the time. People systematically under use advice and though there are various possible explanations as to why I believe the most intuitive and most likely explanation is that we have privileged access to our own reasoning and justifications. We mostly understand them, but we have little access to the reasoning and justification of the person giving us advice. Even if the advisor explains their reasoning to us, it's still just a tip of the iceberg. So we understand our own reasons better than the reasons of our advisor thus we give too little weight to the advisor's suggestion. If we want to get a sense of how empathy could benefit people, just think about how often people would benefit from following advice that they instead ignore. Now switch it up and look at it from the advisor's perspective. Others are a black box. We have no insight into their thoughts, feelings, goals, beliefs, values. How can we add value to them if we have no insight into what they want? Instead of asking us, the other person could just Google it. Sure it's impersonal, but it's fast. Research tells us that we think differently when we decide for ourselves, than when we decide on behalf of others or even make recommendations to others. We don't act in the ways that we recommend others act. This seems impactful because there are so many situations in business and in life when people make choices for others. We elect mayors, school board members, presidents to make policy choices for us. Other examples include corporate boards of directors, consultants, real estate agents, lawyers and doctors. Doctors make different choices for themselves then they recommend to patients. Let's take a deeper dive into a research study examining this. It was published in 2011. Primary care physicians read a clinical scenario in which they have to choose between two treatment alternatives for a potentially fatal case of colon cancer. One of the treatments has a higher survival rate, but an increased chance of adverse side effects, whereas the other has a higher death rate, but no other side effects. Here's the twist. Half of the doctors were told to indicate what they'd prefer for themselves while the other half was told to indicate which treatment they'd recommend to a patient. What did doctors decide? Well, 38% chose the treatment with the higher death rate for themselves but only 24% shows that treatment for their patients. Doctors preferred the riskier procedure for themselves. Just to be safe, the researchers repeated the same basic experiment with different doctors and a different disease. In this case, avian flu, same setup. Otherwise, choose between all treatment alternatives, one of which has a higher survival rate, but some chance of adverse side effects. Once again, more doctors chose the outcome with the higher death rate for themselves than chose the same treatment for their patients. Once again, it appears that doctors prefer the riskier procedure for themselves. Why? There are a few possibilities, you may have thought of some that I didn't. One is that doctors don't want to be held liable for the death of a patient. And, more generally, human beings want to avoid the guilt of causing another person's death. Maybe we're more tolerant of risk for ourselves than for others. That's possible. Another is offered by the researchers themselves. Perhaps the mere act of making a recommendation can alter the psychology of the decision. Our brains treat deciding for others and deciding for ourselves differently. We'll explore that in the next session.