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Tween us and the sun only the side opposite from Earth is lit. As Venus gets closer to us it also appears to move much faster just as a distant speeding car seems to go faster as it gets closer to you Venus will get closer and closer to the horizon and it will disappear from our early evening skies next month. Although Venus reached a maximum in Amman geishas last month it continued to grow brighter and this Friday Venus will be at its brightest for this trip at in the stoning negative $4.00 Don't forget to go out and have a look. There's a seasonal milestone this week Sunday is the 1st day of autumn in the northern hemisphere it's the equinox when the sun rises and sets at the same time and the day and night really are equal that's what equinox mean. Of course those of you who are loyal listeners of tropicals guys know that that's not what happens here on gone. We rapidly lose evening daylight in September and this year we lose an astounding 20 minutes the sun set at $632.00 on the 1st of September and will set it $612.00 on the 30th but we lose no morning day lie at all sunrise is stuck at 610 m. For the end higher mind. The sun sets on Sunday at 6 16 pm So the data link on our equinox will be 12 hours and 6 minutes our real equinox days are actually on the 2nd and 3rd of October when the sun rises and sets at 610 there's also something that happens on the equinox that can help you with your star gazing on Sunday the sun will rise due east and set due west so go out on Sunday and find the cardinal points in your personal sky. And although the moon will be growing brighter full moon is next Tuesday the planets are astoundingly bright definitely have a look on Friday at the light trails brilliant Venus makes on the water we have an amazing night sky here enjoy it this week and until next week this is Pam. Reminding you to look up the universe awaits you. It's the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. I'm Guy Raz And on the show today decisions ideas about how we make them and why we tend to agonize over them because it's some point we all have to make a decision about something. It can be as trivial as picking out a restaurant will I avoid yell for this very reason I've never known Look at look at you know this is Malcolm Gladwell by the way Malcolm Gladwell is well you know he has writer podcast host l. Hater they know about it others talk about it yeah this happens to me I have never opened it don't do it. And to Malcolm This feels like a kind of freedom he doesn't have to scroll through hundreds and hundreds of options on where to dinner because the truth is there's such a thing as too much choice so I can ask you a question about Howard mascots Yes yes it was Howard Ok so who was Howard mask with the Psych a physicist so psycho physicists are people who are in the business of measuring sings and he might be the greatest character I ever hung out with wow he was short and round and in the best possible way exuberantly Jewish. You know full of Yiddish is a music in your city I mean because one of the things that I when I wrote about him he's responsible for kind of uncovering the truth about how human beings make decisions. Our Moscowitz uncovered the truth while working on something kind of unexpected and Malcolm Gladwell picks up the story from the Ted stage. Howard graduated with his doctorate from Harvard and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains New York and one of his 1st clients was this is many years ago back in the early seventy's when I was 1st clients was Pepsi . And Pepsi came to Howard and they said you know we there's this new thing called aspartame and we would like to make diet Pepsi and we'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi in order to have the perfect drink now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer and that's what Howard thought because Pepsi told them Look we're working with a band between 8 and 12 percent anything below 8 percent sweetness is not sweet enough Anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet we want to know what's the sweet spot between 8 and 12. Now if I gave this problem to do you would all say this very simple what we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi every degree of sweetness 8 percent a point 18.28.3 always up to 12 and we can try this out with thousands of people and we plot the results on a curve and we take the most popular concentration right really simple Howard does the experiment and it gets the data about clots on a curve at all 7 he realizes it's not a nice bell curve in fact there doesn't make any sense it's a mess it's all over the place. And what our discoveries when he does that work for them is that people's ensues do not coalesce around a single solution there are some people who like their diet Pepsi really sweet and some who don't like it sweet at all. And they're not part of some kind of continuum they are completely different places in the world of colors in the world of sweetness. And so he he says look we've been operating under a paradigm which says there is a perfect diet pepsi this wrong there are only perfect diet Pepsi. But Pepsi didn't buy this idea that there could be more than one perfect product and neither did anyone else in the food industry but that didn't stop Howard from talking about it for years. He was obsessed with it. And finally he had a breakthrough Campbell Soup Campbell's made prego prego in the early eighty's was struggling next to Raghu which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the seventy's and eighty's so they came to Howard said fix us and Howard looked at their product line and he said what you have is a dead tomato society so he said this is what I want to do and I got together with Campbell's soup kitchen and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce and he very dim according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce by sweetness by level of garlic by tartness by sourdough Spike tomato Enos by this little solids my favorite term and in this. Very start business every conceivable way you can very again he starts he very spaghetti sauce and sure enough if you sit down and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce you realize that all Americans fall into one of 3 groups there are people who like to spaghetti sauce plain there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy and there are people who like it extra chunky and all of those 3 facts the 3rd one was the most significant because at the time in the early 1980 s. If you went to a supermarket you would not find extra chunky spaghetti sauce and prego turned on her and they said Are you telling me that one 3rd of Americans crave extra chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs and he said yes. And try to go then went back and completely reformulate their spaghetti sauce and came out with a lot of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country and. Over the next 10 years they made $600000000.00 off their line of extra company so. I mean it was. Behind having many a sausage or or many different kinds of Pepsi. Was the idea behind that that if you gave people lots of choices they'd be happier I don't know so I am not sure that even hard to go that far I think what he would say is that for too long people in positions of authority in places like the food industry assume it was their job to define what pasta sauce was or what diet cola was and to educate the rest of us to the point where we agree with them. And what I was saying was that's wrong that's backwards that if you want to discover what pasta sauce is you have to listen to the people who are eating pasta sauce and let their own particular in your syntheses be your guide that's a separate question from the question of whether multiple choices make you happy or I think what he was perhaps thinking of is that you enter the supermarket knowing that you are someone who likes spicy pasta sauce and now the spicy pasta sauce for you and you almost kind of ignore all the other choices they're all I've done is I'm going to much better job of delivering to you something that conforms with your own taste. People don't know what they want right that's hard love to say the mind knows not what the tongue wants it's a mystery. And they pour in a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want to know if I ask all of you for example in this room what you want a coffee you know you say every one of you would say I want to dark rich hearty roast so people always say when you ask them I want a coffee would you like dark which hardly rose. What percentage of you actually like a dark rich hearty Rose according to Howard some are between 25 and 27 percent of most of you like milky weak gothic. Puts you would never ever say to someone who asks you what you want that I want to milky we've got. Now most people want milky we coffee I could not know that we but wouldn't you agree that like like your own world is your own person like this is just so much better because you can pick among many different kinds of coffee is right I mean I kind of feel that way right I do but I but where I think those psychologists who study choice are really right is when they move beyond some of these more prosaic consumer choices into things like dating So where now you have getting marketplaces in urban centers that are where choice is essentially infinite And I think that is a problem there is a case where I do not think increased choices bring happiness I think it's just creating a kind of endless treadmill of choice but I just don't think it's as simple as it's always better to have less choice but I think we have this assumption that that a choice has consequences right like like you members choose your adventure books you know if you if you chose you know to go to page 9 you might die off a cliff but if you went to page 12 you would go to Candy Land you know I mean the choice is black. The choices they have consequences but not predictable consequences that's my point yes they have consequences but you can't know beforehand to stop worrying about it now I mean easy for you to say right do you know the reason for all of us is that it's a very use of flip the switch in your head it doesn't matter so are you Tony you were always the person picks the right line at the supermarket you know or at least I do you worry about it I dislike get into a line stop worrying about it and you know daydream happily while you wait what if you get a line right you get into a line and you look at the last person in the line that you didn't choose and then you see like 4 people get behind that person and then they end up shaking out before you even get to the register does not drive you crazy. I cannot help you I can't have you too far gone for me we occupy different universes you know I think I reflect the sensibility of most people like choice and this is making is actually hard right Me Did you ever agonize over decision making at all here I'm not those kinds of decisions so I'm astonished by the way that Americans agonize about their college decisions and the reason I find it so preposterous is that there is an assumption that the thing that makes an education good or bad is knowable beforehand I would have thought that the ingredients of a good education are largely unknowable. The most important thing about my education at university trauma was the fact that I met a guy named Tom Connell and I hung out with Tom and had a 1000000 fantastic conversations with Tom and immersion University a vastly wiser and more interesting person. There is not in a 1000000 years I would how would I have known whether Tom was going to be there. Is also pointless because most universities the question of whether you get a good education is up to news not up to the university. So I think a lot of these choice words are just based on this pastor's notion of the consumer as a passive recipient of prepackaged experiences and most of life is not prepared. Well except for the good. Even that's not always an easy decision I have encountered recently but I think I went into a grocery store and discovered 36 different varieties within one brand so if you had to just as a thought experiment if you had to pick it would you go for smooth pasta sauce or zesty or extra chunky or spicy. It's actually much more important about how you do the pasta than I do the pasta sauce so when you do like elbow and rigatoni linguini in there where you cook it yeah but what do you decide which one to make you know why does it matter. To me. That's Malcolm Gladwell you can hear all of his talks at ted dot com By the way check out his i Pod cast it's called revisionist history. On the show today ideas about decisions the easy ones the agonizing ones I'm Guy Raz And you're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. . News. Support for the Ted Radio Hour comes from Life Lock Life Lock with Norton works to help protect identities and the information on devices from cyber criminals learn more at Life Lock dot com from the Epstein Family Foundation in support of the David Gilkey and you look to mana memorial fund established to support N.P.R.'s international journalists their coverage and their commitment to providing the news of the world to audiences back home and from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at our w j f dot org. It's the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. I'm Guy Raz And on the show today ideas about decisions how we make them why they can be so hard and how lots of choices don't necessarily help like like when you're standing in the grocery aisle paralyzed by the prospect of choosing from 36 writings of spaghetti sauce Yeah we should try to minimize the number of times were paralyzed over what ought to be mundane choices. This is she no I mean go or look at the end of the day the stakes on this aren't really very high so just choose she knows a professor at Columbia Business School I study why choice matters to people and how they can get the most from this thing called choice. But even though she says we shouldn't get paralyzed by things like spaghetti sauce she still admits that it happens all the time she even has a term for it the choice overload problem the choice overload problem she explained that idea from the Ted stage so when I was a graduate student at Stanford University I used to go to this very very upscale grocery store wasn't store called traders they had 250 different kinds of mustards and better girders and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than 2 dozen different kinds of bottled water I used to love going to the store but I don't want to Cajun I asked myself how come I never buy anything so I decided to do a little experiment and we picked up champ for our experiment they had 348 different kinds of jam we set up a little tasting but right near the entrance of the store we never put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at to thinks 1st in which case were people more likely that you know stop sample some jam more people stop when they were 24 about 60 percent and when there were 6 about 40 percent and I think we looked at this in which case. People more likely to online a jar of jam and now we see the opposite effect of the people who stopped when they were $24.00 only 3 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam of the people who stopped when they were 6 Well now we saw that 30 per cent of them actually bought a jar of jam now if you do the math people were at least 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered 6 than if they encountered 24 now the main reason for this is because well we might enjoy a game as any of those giant walls of mayonnaise is mustards vinegar and jams but we can actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually taking from that stunning display. So it was this study that made Sheena think maybe we've gone too far maybe companies are overloading consumers with choice which is why she has advice to companies today is to cut cut you've heard it said before but it's never been more true than today that less is more when Procter and Gamble went from 26 different kinds of head and shoulders to 15 they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent when the golden cat corporation got rid of their 10 worst selling cat litter products they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent you know the average grocery store today offers you 45000 products but the 9th biggest retailer in the world today is all these and it offers you only 1400 products one kind of canned tomato sauce. Wow that's totally counterintuitive but I mean companies are actually seeing an increase in sales when they reduce the number of choices yes it just looks less overwhelming and you can now see that Ok this is the Hidden Children I want and when Kosko recently reduced their number of choices they actually saw an increase in sounds really they just like things they offer you just cut across the board you know even Wal-Mart is beginning to cut across so what is it about choice that overwhelms us that can paralyze us. So I think there's a few things that happen when we get paralyzed by choice sometimes when we're trying to choose amongst really minor things like let's say you're looking at a menu in a restaurant and he starts liberating over out of the steak versus the salmon versus the salad and you start contemplating old different kinds of criteria by which you want to compare and contrast your options but I think there are times when we get paralyzed is because it really is something that we are very aware is very very consequential like should I get married or not they have a child or not there's a lot of unknowns there so how is it that both of those scenarios produce agony. Because there's this thing called heart versus mind or got versus reason everyone to label it even though they're both working in concert I think the reality is you're constantly asking yourself 2 questions What do I want and what should I choose and those don't give you the same answers because when you ask yourself what should I choose it tells you what you ought to want tomorrow or the day after tomorrow when you ask yourself what you want we're very aware of the fact that what I want right now may not be what I want in 5 minutes so that's what it's about it's about what I want and what I should want that's the inherent conflict do all of us feel this conflict you know when it comes to say choosing jam or choosing an entrée like is this just part of human behavior the desire for personal control and competency is innate but everything else about choice is learned Wow And a lot of what your culture teaches you is how to think about your life and whether to perceive things in terms of choice or in terms of something else right yeah I think to the extent that you see a choice is how you frame your life that's not a given. We as Americans think that choice is a quote objective thing it's not it's a very subjective thing. And because choice is learned she says choice can work differently in different cultures and she got a glimpse of that early on in her career when she was doing some research in Japan . On my 1st day I went to a restaurant and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar after a pause the waiter said when there's not much sugar in green tea. I know I said I'm aware of this custom but I really like my tea sweet. And response he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation. One does not put sugar in green tea. I understand I said that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea but I like to listen to her in my green tea. Surprised by my insistence the waiter took up the issue with the manager pretty soon it was. A lengthy discussion ensued and finally the manager came over to me and said I am very sorry we do not have sugar. Well since I couldn't have my tea the way I wanted it I ordered a cup of coffee which the waiter brought over promptly resting on the saucer were 2 packets of sugar rush through my failure to procure myself a cup of sweet green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding this was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice the American Way To quote Burger King is to have it your way because a Starbucks says Happiness is in your choices. But from the Japanese perspective it's their duty to protect those who don't know any better. In this case the ignorant guy engine for making the wrong choice. Americans tend to believe that they've reached some sort of pinnacle in the way they practice choice they think. The choice is seen through the American lens best fulfills an inmate and universal desire for choice in all humans. So why is choice seen as like this this great American Virtue Well you could argue that the unique history of this country made us more likely to have it than any other country and that is because in 1776 our forefathers began to think about what a political democratic institution might look like but at the same time you have Adam Smith and capitalism and the idea of the independent individual consumer employee shortly thereafter you have Ralph Waldo Emerson with the ideas of self-reliance is I mean there must be a correlation between an emphasis on choice and a culture that that elevates the individual over the collective Oh there is so certainly in cultures that are more collectivistic they tend to value more social conformity more of a sense of duty and responsibility and so you ask yourself what are my responsibilities and what would other people expect of me whereas cultures that value more independence or individual lives and value more in self-reliance personal preference matching what's good for me what's the right fit for me what is it that I really care about what do I want that being said individual ism is on the rise and that that's probably one of our biggest exports around the globe. The question is does everyone want that explored does everyone want lots of choices she decided to go to Eastern Europe to find out. Here I interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries we'd all face the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society for Eastern Europeans the Simon availability of all these consumer products on the marketplace was and tell you when asked what words and images do you associate with choice Gregor's from Warsaw said Art For me it is fear there are some dilemmas you see I am used to no choice Bowden from Kiev said in response to how we felt about the new consumer marketplace it is too much we do not need everything that is there and Hamas a young Polish man said I don't need 20 kinds of chewing gum I don't mean to say that I want no choice but many of these choices are quite artificial the value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options when there are too many choices to compare and contrast instead of making better choices we become overwhelmed by choice sometimes even afraid of it Americans have so often tried to disseminate their ideas of choice believing that they will be or ought to be welcomed with open hearts and minds. But the history books and the daily news tell us it doesn't always work out that way Americans themselves are discovering that unlimited choice seems more attractive in theory than in practice no matter where we're from we all have a responsibility to open ourselves up to a wider array of what choices can do and what it can represent it teaches us when and how to act it brings us that much closer to inspiring the hope and achieving the freedom that choice promises but doesn't always deliver. If we learn to speak to one another and we can begin to see choice in all its strangeness complexity and compelling beauty Thank you. In a younger teaches at Columbia Business School you can see all of her Talks dot com If you've ever been to t.g.i. Friday's mean talk about paralysis I actually have not been yeah I am a steak sack Carol and I am a big In and Out Burger girl and I guess that is because there really is just one choice yes you would have thought you would have a nervous breakdown at t.g.i. Friday's No I probably just asked the waiter waitress to tell me when to get not be happy with that. Differ hard time making choices or is it like pretty easy for me to do that I cannot make a decision to save my life oh wow really you're the decision choice person I am a terrible decision at leaves no hope for the rest of us yet this is Ruth Chang She's a professor of philosophy at wrecker's University and she studies hard choices so what I should say is I used to be a terrible decision writer but that's how I got interested and thinking about hard choices can you can you help me make a decision about something sure. I can't tell you exactly what it is I just need to know what to do so I believe that there are 5 steps to confronting a difficult decision Ok if you want to hear the 5 steps Yeah I do Ok the 1st thing you have to do when you're confronting a hard choice is to figure out what matters in the choice between the alternatives so like write them down write them down and they'll be a mishmash and then you lather rinse and repeat you go back and you think well gee did I miss something that matters in the choice yeah then you recognize that you're in a hard choice there is no. Stance or. The next step commit to one of the options create a reason for yourself to pursue that option Ok so what's 5 so 5 is not really step it's more of a consequence when you commit to something you create your own identity you make yourself into who you are those are the 5 steps Ok Mitt a 5 step plan might sound too simple especially when you have to make a big choice but with changes it doesn't actually have to be that hard here she is on the Ted stage I think we've misunderstood hard choices and the role they play in our lives we shouldn't think that all hard choices are let's say you're deciding what to have for breakfast you could have high fiber bran cereal or chocolate on the cereal is better for you don't it tastes way better but neither is better than the other overall a hard choice realizing that small choices can also be hard may make big hard choices seem less intractable what makes a choice hard is the way the alternatives relate in an easy choice one alternative is better than the other and a hard choice one alternative is better in some ways the other alternative is better other ways and neither is better than the other overall when I graduated from college I couldn't decide which reason careers philosophy and law. So I got out my yellow pad and actualized down the middle and I tried my best to think of the reasons for and against each alternative I did what many of us do with hard choices I took the safest option and as I discovered lawyer didn't quite fit it wasn't who I was. So now I'm a philosopher and I study hard choices and I can tell you that fear of the I know while a common motivational to fault in dealing with hard choices restaurant a misconception of hard choices are hard not because of us or our ignorance they're hard because there is no best option. A recent example from my own life as this is a small decision actually really hard we were a fish restaurant where there really famous for their fish and chips but the headache was really fresh that my to order the headache then they brought the fish and chips to my son and when I watched him eat it I was really regretting the choice I made Ok 2 things that might be happening in that case one is that you just made a mistake right the card was better to have it was pretty good I have to say but if the car was better than a headache then you made a mistake but how would I know right I mean I guess I could taste them and this year I mean that's like asking how do we know when one thing is better than the other that's very difficult how do we know anything when I'm interested in is the 2nd possibility which is suppose the car was better in some of those respects that had it was better in other respects and yet neither seemed to you at least as good as the other overall and it's going to sound crazy when we're talking about fish dinner yes but one possibility is to commit to one of the dinners I commit to a card I'm a card guy and by committing to the card you actually can create a reason for you to have the card which then may give you most recent to choose the card over the heading. That seems less crazy when we're talking about careers right or people to marry or places to live but the structure of each of those choices will be. When we come back Ruth Chang on why committing to a decision that only helps you make the right choice helps define who you are I'm Guy Raz And you're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. . Support for the Ted Radio Hour comes from Viking dedicated to bringing the traveler closer to the destination by river and by offering a small ship experience with a shore excursion included in every port learn more at Viking cruises dot com from the John d. And Catherine t. MacArthur Foundation supporting creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just a verdant and peaceful world more information is that Mack found dot org And from the listeners who support this n.p.r. Station. It's the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. I'm Guy Raz And I'm sure to day decisions and we were just hearing from philosopher Ruth Chang on why both big and small decisions can be hard but one way to make them easier is to commit so suppose you spent your whole life never committing to anything never putting your agency parents something you drift through life which most of us do well what's sad is that you've never exercised this amazing power you have to create reasons for yourself when you drift through life you're never the author of your own life you're just something being buffeted around by your circumstances I think that what we've missed is that we have this other capacity to commit to things and to actually write the story of our own lives by committing to people in projects and plans of actions that then create reasons for ourselves to live one way as opposed to another. Here's more from returning the 10 stage I think the puzzle arises because of an arm reflective assumptions we make about value if what matters to us be represented by real numbers and there's no reason to believe that in choice there are only 3 possibilities one alternative is better or worse or equal to the other we need to introduce a new 4th relation beyond being better or worse or evil that describes what's going on and hard choices. I like to say that the alternatives are on a car when alternatives are on a par it may matter very much which you choose one alternative isn't better than the other that's why the choices hard understanding hard choices in this way uncover something about ourselves we didn't know you faced alternatives that were on a par hard choices and you made reasons for yourself to choose the exact hobbies you do to live in the exact house you choose to work at the exact job you do it's here in the space of hard choices that we get to exercise our normative power. We can put our very selves behind an option. Here's where I stand here's who I am. Far from being sources of agony and dread hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. So I completely hear you what I heard. But it's still hard like making a big decision is still sometimes agonizing So so how do we make peace with it so when people agonize over hard choices the source of the egg me he's usually lack of information if only I knew how this alternative would work out I would know that this is better than that and what I want to say is that's a mistake that even if you had video of your 2 possible futures and you could watch them side by side it could be the case that you're too future careers let's say being a lumberjack and being an accountant are on a par even some omniscient being couldn't determine look this life for you this future life is better than that one and now the question is Well what do you do and I think what you should do is turn inwards and ask yourself what can I commit to. If you can commit to one of the options then by putting your agency behind that option you could actually do this incredible thing which is you can confer a value on that option you can make it the case that now you have this reason to pursue that option that you didn't have before and I think that's a power all rationalisations have. Retained she is a professor of philosophy at wrecker's university you can find her talk to dot com . So so Ruth chain was just saying that she used to be terrible at making decisions have a you are you good at making decisions. I'm really good about giving other people advice about how to make their decisions this is Dan Arioli officially I'm Dick James Big ukra 1st of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and this entire show we've been talking about how to make decisions but then says you know we think we are making decisions a lot of decisions are actually made for us and ways we don't even realize it can't control it's an idea called choice architecture choice architect 2 is the decisions we made are a function of the environment that we are in. And I am a 10 stage and explained one example should the audience a chart it's a chart that plots the percentage of Europeans who signed up for organ donation and this is one of my favorite plot in social sciences and these are different countries in Europe and you basically see 2 cups of countries countries on the right that seems to be giving a lot and countries on the left that seems to be using very little or not much less the question is why why do some countries give a lot and some countries give a little when you ask people this question they usually think that it has to be something about culture how much do you care about people needing your organs to somebody else is probably about how much you care about society or maybe it is about religion but if you look at this plot you can see that countries that we think about is very similar actually exhibits very different behavior. For example Sweden is all the way on the right and then the mark that we think is culturally very similar is on the way on the left Germany's on the left and Austria is on the right the Netherlands on the left and Belgium is on the right and by the way the Netherlands an interesting story you see the Netherlands kind of the biggest of the small group turns out that they got to 28 percent after mailing every household in the country a letter begging people to join this organ donation program that's you know the expression begging only gets you so far it's 28 percent an organ donation. But whatever the country's on the right are doing they're doing a much better job than begging So what are they doing turns out the secret has to do with the form at the d.m.v. And here's the story the countries on the left have a form of the d.m.v. That looks something like this check the box below if you want to participate in the organ donor program and what happens people don't check and they don't join the countries on the right the one that gives a lot have a slightly different form he says check the box below if you don't want to participate interestingly enough when people get this they again don't check but now they do and I am on the program now think about what this means you know we wake up in the morning and we feel we make decisions we wake up in the morning and we open the closet and we feel that we decide what to wear and we open the refrigerator and we feel that we decide what to eat and what this is actually saying that much of these decisions are not residing within us they're resigning by the person who's designing that form when you walk into the d.m.v. . The person who designed the form will have a huge influence on what you end up doing. Most or all of the decisions we make are make it for us. I'm sort of it's kind of a very stressful thought but this choice architecture is notion that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in so if we put you in one kind of you with it in this way you felt between another kind of before you will it very differently you fall set up your phone with some kind of notifications you'll end up spending much more common Facebook before Senate with another kind of notification you will spend much more time reading the news or something else but this example with the organ donation has a couple of important things you mention the following study and we have a group of people we send them to the Department of Motor Vehicle half of them get the open form half of them get their act out form and then you stop people when they come out and you say excuse me can you tell me I see that you didn't donate or say you donated you can you explain to me why why you did what you did there's anybody says I have no idea this was the default choice I didn't anybody says I was too lazy No What happened is that people kill stories about why they made those decisions they put trade them is is if they spend a whole week on that decisions people who are in the opt in form say things like you know I'm really worried about the medical system and whether some physicians will pull the plug a little too early if I do this and people in the opt out form says you know my parents raised me to be a caring wonderful human being and what happens we don't make the decision but we tell up a story about why we do it and distilleries are so good that we even convince ourselves that the decisions we make are actually because of our preferences and not because somebody else made something that most decisions are unconscious like I woke up this morning I took a shower and I made breakfast and coffee and I didn't think about I thought about what breakfast to make for my kids and. These were things that I had already decided even before I started to do them. Yes And you know that we have to make a lot of decisions all the time and we don't have the capacity or the resources to do it so we make the easy decision and tell a story about a company called Express script and they manage pharmaceutical benefits they do all kinds of things but one of the things they do. Is they send people with chronic illness medication over the mail every 90 days and what Express Scripts tries to do is to switch you from taking branded medication to generic medication and they write you a letter and they say you're guy you're going to save money your employer will save money we will save money if you only switch to generic and people don't switch and they try all kind of approaches and people don't switch so for one year they offer people 0 co-pay less than 10 percent of the people switched right so they said look you give people free medications free generic medication even with free they're not getting it and they say could it be that people really hate generic medications so much that even free is not helpful and the answer was to say look it could be that people had generic medication but it could be that people hate doing anything so let's look at the detail on the choice architecture of what you're doing right now people start with brand that they can do nothing and stay with branded or they could do something in move to generics so the 1st thought was to say let's reverse thing let's send people a letter and say we're going to switch you to generics this is the path of least resistance so you don't have to do anything right it turns out this is illegal in this domain but instead what they did was they send people letter and they say if you don't return this letter we will be forced to stop your medications but when you return this letter you can choose branded this price or generic at this price what happened now between 70 and 80 percent of the people switched depend on the employer. So what does it tell you people like Brenda or genetics Well it tells people don't care yeah right people don't care so much and the big issue in the whole thing was returning a letter no when we set up the decision we think it's a decision about Brandon versus generic but the reality is that it's a decision about choice architecture and as long as we understand this we could reengineer the environment in a different way yes so really mean the person doing that engineering like the the form designer right they have a lot of power to kind of shape our decisions to their own advantage I mean companies that are trying to sell us stuff certainly they must know this right you know you know you know and think about the following Think about this notion of choice architecture. Every store every restaurant every Q Last every app is an actor in the environment there you can say what is the goal of these actors are they working in our long term best interest or are they working in their short term best interest and the answer is of course that they're working in their short term best interests right all of them want our time money attention right now and because they control our environment we fail now do we fail all the time no but we certainly for a long. Give you one more example for this this was an ad from The Economist a few years ago that gave us 3 choices an online subscription for $59.00 a prince obstruction $425.00 you could get both 425. Now I look at this and I decided to do the experiment that I knew I would have loved the economist to do with me I took this and I gave it $100.00 students I said What would you choose most people wanted the combo deal Thankfully nobody wanted the dominated option that means our students can read. The book Now if you have an option that nobody wants you can take it off right so I took a printed another version of this when I eliminated the middle option and I gave it to another 100 students now the most popular option became the least popular and the least popular became the most popular. What was happening is that option that was useless was useless in the sense that nobody wanted it but it wasn't useless in the sense and help people figure out what they wanted in fact relative to the option in the middle which was to get only the print 425 to print anyway 425 looks like a fantastic deal and as a consequence people chose it the general idea here by the way is that we actually don't know our preferences that well and because we don't know our preferences that well we're susceptible to all of these influences from the external forces the defaults their particular option that are presented to us and so on. So if we wanted to write like how could we resist those external forces that clearly influence our decisions. You know so 1st of all I think we have to admit that we can't resist all of force and it's true that we don't make our own decision the environment does but it's also true that we have a choice of what environments we want to create for ourselves so I think about something like donuts thank you measure I came every morning to your office and I layered your desk with fresh donors and crossbones What are the odds that at the end of the year you'll be as trim and healthy as you are right now very low very low and in human will right our ability to make decisions is not in resisting the governments when they're there it's about deciding not to have the Hornets on the desk so you know it's very sad that we really are influenced dramatically by the environment but each one of us is really a choice architect and this is the strength and the importance of choice architecture that the environment that we could people in matters a great great you know much more than we understand very few kids grow up and say when I grow up I want to be a form design. But I want to be a focus on the place where we make decisions and if we think about those forms and we say how do we design those homes to help people make the best decisions there's lots of room there for improvement. And areally is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University he's given many many new tax you can find all of them at ted dot com. You should stay or should. She should say thanks for listening to our show on decisions this week if you want to find out more about who was on it go to Ted at npr dot org to see hundreds more Ted Talks check out ted dot com or the Ted app our production staff at n.p.r. And cleats Jeff Rogers Brant Bachman San especially in poor Eva Grant Casey Herman in a West End Rachel factor with help from Daniel to get are in turn is Thomas Lou our partners at Ted our Chris Anderson Kelly's that's all and I feel I'm in gently if you want to let us know what you think about the show you can write I said Ted Radio Hour at n.p.r. Gun oh r g and you can follow us on Twitter it's at Ted Radio Hour and if you haven't already done so be sure to subscribe to our podcast on i Tunes I'm Guy Raz And you've been listening to ideas worth spreading right here on the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. . She. Was with. Support for the Ted Radio Hour comes from t.i.a. T.i.a.a. Is committed to helping those who are driven by purpose reach their definition of success investing advice banking retirement learn more it t.i.a. Any dot org from the candy to fund supporting individual dignity and sustainable communities through investments in transformative leaders and ideas learn more in k e n d e d n a fund dot org. And from the n.e.a. Casey Foundation. Off again and thank you for listening to 89.38 p.r.g. I got you want your source for n.p.r. News and music discovering. Support for t.p.r. G. Is brought to you by the blog symphony society for over 50 years performing music from classical to pop to Broadway while promoting local talent and the development of young artists the Guam symphony society. I think. You are listening to radio land radio from the new you and Weiss say you know. We're going to start the show with this fellow is names Ben Zimmer he's the On Language columnist for The New York Times magazine because he figured since we wanted to do a show called loops and break we thought we should call and so we came to the studio and he brought with him a bunch of his favorite groups as an example the 1st one the it is where the began it's life was it in an a.p. News article Well it was an a.p. Story but the a.p. Story was fine when the a.p. Story appeared on a news site from the American Family Association which by the way is the conservative.

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