Born to Choose

Evolution, Self, and Well-Being

John H Falk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781629585628
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351602662
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

Born to Choose is John H. Falk's compelling account of why and how we make the endless set of choices we do, every second of every day of our lives. Synthesizing research from across the biological and social sciences, Falk argues that human choice-making is an evolutionarily ancient and complex process. He suggests that all our choices are influenced by very basic and early evolving needs, and that ultimately each choice is designed to support survival in the guise of perceived well-being. This engaging book breaks new intellectual ground and enhances our understanding not just of human choice-making but human behavior overall.

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Born to Choose

An Introduction

People were born to choose. And choose they do, from birth to death each human being spends every second of his or her life making choices. To be alive is to make choices. Some choices are momentous and life-altering; most are tiny. Collectively, choices define the trajectory of a person’s life.

Life involves choices, such as who one associates with, how one raises children or how one practices one’s religion, as well as how one moves through an average day, deciding what time to get up, when to head to bed, what clothes to wear and how to entertain oneself in the evening. Little is more characteristic of what it means to be alive and human than the choices a person makes, but surprisingly, few aspects of choice-making are understood. Despite thousands of years of wondering about why people make the choices they do, no one has yet developed a completely satisfactory answer, one that suitably accommodates all human choices, choices large and small, those made by Americans, Chinese and Inuit, and those made consciously, as well as the innumerable choices a person makes unconsciously.

The purpose of this book is to address the following major questions: Why do humans make the choices they do? What mechanisms regulate human choice-making? And ultimately, does an understanding of the whys and hows of human choice-making afford a better understanding of human behavior overall?

It is not the case that there are no theories of human choice-making. There are many.¹ Most are highly domain-specific, providing reasonable insights and predictions about choice-making for certain groups of people within specific circumstances, but few if any are truly generalizable to all humans under all circumstances. In great part this is because virtually all have attempted to answer such questions based on two highly flawed assumptions.

The first is the interesting and peculiar modern, primarily Western assumption that choices, like so much else related to life processes, are isolatable events; something that can be dissected, analyzed and a-contextually studied. Most social scientists have approached choice-making as if it was a process with a definable beginning, middle and end point; a person is confronted with a problem, ponders it and then chooses. If true, then it follows that the rules of choice-making can be examined through constructed experiments designed to test specific hypotheses and resulting in generalizable conclusions. In reality, though, choice-making is not so readily manipulated. All choices are “situated,” meaning they are made within specific contexts, and all are parts of never-ending loops; loops with no clearly defined beginning or end. Of course it is possible to arbitrarily define the boundaries of a choice, but that is the point. Any effort to place boundaries around a choice is always going to be arbitrary and by necessity distort the true context in which that choice is made. Every human choice is part of a much larger system of influences, each part of a continuum of choices, with all current choices dependent upon previously made experiences and choices. Every choice builds upon not only the choices made over the lifetime of that individual but upon the choices made over the lifespan of that individual’s entire genetic lineage going back to beginnings of life itself. Every previous choice affects, even if only in the tiniest way, the outcomes of future choices.

The second flawed assumption is the presumption that human choice-making is a uniquely human process requiring a complex mind, largely achieved through the conscious awareness that one is initiating, executing and controlling one’s actions, what social scientists refer to as agency.² However, choice-making is not uniquely human, nor is it always or typically driven by complex, conscious processes. In fact, nearly all human choices are simple dichotomous, concrete choices between continuing to do more of the same or doing something different, with well over 90% of the time the choice being to continue on as before. Only a small percentage of choices involve new actions, and even in these cases, surprisingly few involve conscious deliberation. Admittedly some of these “new action” choices can be quite interesting, and seemingly do involve consciousness, but it is problematic when one’s generalized models of choice are based on only these few exceptions rather than the norm.

A truly comprehensive model of human choice-making needs to provide an understanding of all choices made, not just the exceptional choices. It needs to explain both simple and complex choices, and it needs to do so in a way that is consonant with all the facts, not just some. Given how fundamental choice-making is to life, a robust model must transcend a single intellectual tradition, be it psychology, philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, physiology, immunology or evolutionary biology, and accommodate understandings deriving from all of these domains.

Towards a Unified Model of Human Choice-Making

My major premise is that human choice-making is an evolutionarily ancient and complex process involving multiple biological as well as psychological processes. Only a small fraction of human choices involves any measure of conscious deliberation. At its core, choice is an on-going mechanism for insuring survival using feelings of well-being as a proxy. All living things, from the tiniest microbe to the most complex social primate, strive to achieve well-being through functionally similar processes of choice-making. Although some choices humans make are distinctly human, and, in some cases, even culturally specific, a surprisingly large number of human choices are not specific to any particular human group or even to humans in general. Most social science theories of choice-making ignore the thousands of survival-oriented choices people make daily, ranging from temperature control to the need to consume a sufficient number of calories, instead focusing on choices such as making a decision about one’s career or investments or whom to vote for in the upcoming election.

The focus on these latter choices is understandable at one level, yet such a narrow focus on a small subset of human choices has resulted in a distorted view of the causative mechanisms underlying choice. Even more importantly, despite these “big” choices being highly salient and thus memorable, they are typically not the most important choices a person makes in any given day. Far and away the thousands of small, mostly unconscious choices a person makes over the course of each day—choices about diet, general health and social relationships—are much more likely to directly influence a person’s well-being. Ultimately though, as I will describe in this book, all the choices people make—both the myriad “small” ones, as well as the few “big” choices—share a common structure and pedigree.

The model I propose posits that choice-making is only one step in a whole process. Choices are always self-referential and always focused on well-being. Choice-making is one step in a cyclical, highly integrated Well-Being System; a system with no real beginning or end. The System consists of a continual series of feedback loops in which events going on outside and within the individual trigger needs, which necessitate choices, which trigger actions, which influence perceptions of self-related needs, which in turn trigger more choices; all of which collectively generate feelings of well-being. In such a System, past choices are recalled relative to the feelings of well-being they generated, which in turn influences the making of future choices. Take for example the following discussion with my wife Lynn about cooking, where it is clear that her past positive feelings of well-being influenced her current choice-making.

I love cooking. My mother was a good cook, and I used to love to watch her bake or prepare meals. I always wanted her to let me help, however, she controlled the kitchen. She’d choose small jobs for me to do. Like at Thanksgiving, she’d give me the job of preparing the relish trays, cutting up the carrots and stuff.… I used to go grocery shopping with her too, and I enjoyed watching how and what she selected to buy. Maybe that’s why I like shopping for food so much myself.

Something I really enjoy now is going to the local Farmer’s Market. Over the years I’ve established strong relationships with some of the people there. I learned who grows the best tomatoes, the best lettuce. There’s one person who’s always there at the end of the summer with melons. He’s a connoisseur of melons. If you say I want a melon that will be ripe in three days he’ll find it for you. I like to try and pick the perfect apple or tomato, choosing one that will be right for the meal I’m planning. I’ll be thinking ahead to the meals I want to make the next week and try to choose just the right ingredients for that meal.³

Lynn’s feelings of well-being around cooking build on her early childhood experiences with her mother, and her mother’s attitudes around cooking no doubt derived from her early experiences with her family, and so on back generations. The processing and preparation of food for meals is one of the most basic of life’s routines, a distinctively human approach to one of life’s most essential needs—eating. The time-intensive choice-making involved in the selection and preparation of plants and animals for eating has been a fundamental part of the human experience for millions of years,⁴ with every human culture in every corner of the globe developing their own unique solutions.⁵ As the example above illustrates, cooking provides a wonderful example of the continuous, cyclical nature of Well-Being Systems; it also serves as a useful metaphor for thinking about how these systems work. For example, regardless of approach, all cooking starts with the ingredients; so too all Well-Being Systems.

The Ingredients of Well-Being

You can’t make a good meal without first having good ingredients. That’s essential. When I am choosing ingredients for a dish I try to balance nutrition and aesthetics. You need to start with a good nutritional foundation but I also like to think about the look and feel I might want to have in the finished product. A simple and quick meal I like to prepare is an Italian dish called Aglio Olio. It is a pasta dish, literally translated it means garlic oil, but I usually make it with not only garlic and oil, but red pepper flakes, anchovies, capers, and depending upon how I feel and what I have available, I always add yellow, red or orange capsicum peppers for color. Texture is also important, so I will think about perhaps adding something like roasted pine nuts to the dish as I serve it, since that will add a little extra “crunch.”⁶

The five key ingredients of all Well-Being Systems are: Choice, Actor, Need, Sensor, and of course Well-Being. Before I define each of these key ingredients, I need to provide some framing about my terminology.

I purposefully avoided “scientific,” jargon-laden terms and the use of acronyms. I wanted words that might be readily recognized and understood by a wide readership spanning both the social and biological sciences. There is an obvious advantage to this approach. The goal of language is effective communication; it is always easier to communicate with a person if she does not have to constantly refer to a glossary to understand the words used. However, there also is an inherent danger in using common terms. All these words already come with a variety of meanings, particularly key terms like Choice, Need and Well-Being. Each has a long history of vernacular use. These terms also have a long history of use within the social sciences, humanities and biology; though interestingly and significantly there are no universally agreed upon definitions for any of these terms. I would implore the reader to try to set aside prior conceptualizations and understandings of these terms and think about them only in the specific ways I define here.

Choice: Is the active response to Self-Related Needs and selection between options. I use the term choice to include selections that involve both conscious agency, but also those decisions processed unconsciously, including choices that other theorists have categorized as “instinct.” Even “instinctual” choices arise through active selection of options and are subject to change and manipulation. Also important to appreciate is that the most frequent choices people make are the “choices” to continue doing the same thing they are currently doing. In humans, choice-making typically though not exclusively involves some kind of brain-based, neural processing.

Actor: Is the structure; it can be a collection of nerves, muscles, a whole person or even a group of people that responds to choices. Actions typically involve physical responses, ranging from simple movements to more complex behaviors, but actions can and do happen at every organizational level, from the biochemical to the collective efforts of groups of people.

(Self-Related) Need: Is a perception of an underlying state; a threshold-like, regulatory “construct.” Perceived needs can be based on an actual physical entity such as a molecule or possession, but they can also be based on totally abstract, entirely mental constructions such as a relationship or an idea. Whether physical or mental, individual or social, Needs are always self-referential and based on previous lived experiences, always framed in relationship to the balance of a person’s perceived requirements as compared with some intended internal or external reality.

Sensor: Is the bodily structure that takes in information and is capable of perceiving the status of Self-Related Needs relative to the internal and external environment. Some sensors are externally focused, such as eyes and ears, but others are internally focused, attuned to electrical and biochemical signals coming from the gut or circulatory system.

Well-Being: Is the holistic perception of the entire dynamic system. Well-Being is the feeling one has when there is an optimal satisfaction of Self-Related Needs, monitored by Sensors, regulated by Choice and maintained through Actions. Well-Being, in particular short-term Well-Being, has evolved as a perceptible proxy for fitness. People perceive Well-Being when they feel they are healthy, part of and appreciated by their group, physically safe and secure and intellectually and spiritually satisfied. Perceived states of Well-Being generally correlate with enhanced survival.

However, ingredients alone do not make a dish. The cook needs to combine the ingredients in just the right way; he needs a recipe.

A Recipe for Well-Being

One of the things that cooking does for me is provide an outlet for creativity. I’ve always appreciated art and music but never pursued either. Cooking is an area in which I can express my creativity. As I’m thinking about the colors, tastes and textures it’s an opportunity for me t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• 1 Born to Choose: An Introduction
• PART I Developing the Well-Being Systems Model
• PART II Evolution and Workings of Well-Being Systems
• PART III Applying the Well-Being Systems Model
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index