How to Make Better Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt
Dr. Michael Platt, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses how hormones and social status influence decision-making, valuation, and perceptions. He also shares science-based tools for improving focus, creativity, and attention.
Deep Dive Analysis
18 Topic Outline
Humans, Old World Primates & Decision-Making
Attention Allocation, Resource Foraging & Distraction
Behavioral Tools for Improving Attention and Focus
Attention Continuum and Career Suitability
Theory of Mind and Covert Attention
Primate Social Structures, Hormones & Brain Size
Neuronal Multiplexing and Social Relationship Accounts
Relationships, Power Dynamics & Neuroethology
Human Hormonal Signaling and Attractiveness
Value-Based Decision Making & Altruism
Testosterone's Influence on Male Behavior
Oxytocin, Pro-Social Behaviors & Behavioral Synchrony
Social Isolation, Despair & Bridging Divides
Decision-Making: Speed, Accuracy, Time & Fatigue
Advertising, Status, Celebrity & Primate Valuation
Hierarchy, Abundance, Scarcity & Happiness
Bounded Rationality, Urgency & Meme Coins
Longevity, Mortality, Brand Loyalty & Political Empathy
8 Key Concepts
Marginal Value Theorem
This ecological principle states that animals (and humans) will leave a resource when the rate of return from it falls below the average rate of return for the environment, optimizing efficiency in foraging for resources like food, mates, or information.
Covert Attention
The ability to direct one's attention to a location or object in the environment without overtly moving one's eyes to look directly at it. This allows for tracking multiple points of interest simultaneously, which is crucial in complex social environments.
Theory of Mind
The capacity to infer what another individual knows, sees, wants, or their overall state of mind, which may differ from one's own. It is believed to develop through early gaze following and joint attention with caregivers.
Neuronal Multiplexing
The phenomenon where individual neurons in the brain are not specialized to encode only one specific piece of information, but rather respond to and are affected by multiple different behaviors, contexts, and social cues simultaneously, indicating a more complex neural encoding than previously thought.
Behavioral Synchrony
The mirroring of movements, postures, and even physiological states (like heart rate and breathing) between individuals. It serves as a biomarker for strong social relationships, rapport, and predicts better communication, increased trust, and improved teamwork.
Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff
In decision-making, there is an inverse relationship between the speed at which a decision is made and its accuracy; faster decisions tend to lead to more mistakes, while taking more time allows for greater evidence accumulation and accuracy.
Loss Aversion
The observation that people generally feel the pain of a loss more intensely than the pleasure of an equivalent gain, leading them to be more reluctant to take risks in gambles where the potential loss and gain are objectively equal.
Ecological Rationality
This concept suggests that human brains are designed to make decisions optimally within the environment of evolutionary adaptation (small, stable groups with limited resources and slow change), and may not be perfectly rational in modern, complex, fast-paced societies.
15 Questions Answered
Human brains and behaviors are remarkably similar to those of other old-world primates like macaque monkeys, sharing deep commonalities in decision-making, social interaction, exploration, and creativity, suggesting a shared evolutionary 'Swiss army knife' brain.
It's challenging because our brains are wired to forage for resources, and modern environments (like the internet with multiple devices) offer an abundance of easily accessible, constantly changing stimuli, encouraging rapid switching rather than sustained focus.
Even if a smartphone is turned off or face down, its mere presence in the same room can significantly impair working memory and cognitive performance, with optimal focus achieved only when the phone is in a completely separate environment.
Yes, practices like internally maintaining a thought train with eyes closed, similar to certain meditation forms, can serve as a training ground to improve the ability to harness and maintain attention.
Focusing on a small, contained area (like a fixation point) can narrow cognitive attention, while panoramic vision or focusing on dispersed elements can promote a more exploratory and creative cognitive state.
Female macaques signal ovulation through the swelling and coloration of their perineum, while male macaques signal testosterone levels through the redness of their perineum and the physical size of their testes.
Yes, human females show subtle changes in facial skin turgidity and redness around ovulation, and exhibit more flirtatious behavior, which heterosexual males unconsciously perceive as increased attractiveness.
Oxytocin acts as an anxiolytic, reducing vigilance and promoting pro-social behaviors like increased eye contact, altruism, and flattening social hierarchies in males, while in females it can increase affiliative behavior towards other females but aggression towards males.
Behavioral and neural synchrony, where individuals' brains, hearts, breathing, and movements align, acts as a powerful social glue that fosters rapport, communication, trust, and effective teamwork.
Engaging in deep, structured conversations using specific question sets can lead to neural alignment and increased feelings of closeness and value between individuals, helping to overcome existing divides.
As individuals experience greater physical and cognitive fatigue, they tend to prioritize speed over accuracy in decision-making, leading to more mistakes and less deliberation.
Our brains are wired to attend to and value information from high-status or 'sexy' individuals, leading us to associate products with their perceived positive attributes, even if there's no logical connection.
While initial increases in income (up to about $75,000/year) correlate with increased happiness, some recent research suggests that happiness can continue to increase significantly at much higher levels of wealth, beyond an initial plateau.
This phenomenon leverages our innate wiring to pay attention to what other people are doing, especially if they are perceived as high-status or successful, leading to social contagion and herd behavior in investment decisions.
Apple users exhibit strong emotional empathy for their brand, showing reward activation for good news and pain for bad news, and their brains show greater physical size in social relationship areas and higher neural synchrony. Samsung users, in contrast, often choose the brand out of anti-Apple sentiment and show little neural empathy for Samsung.
18 Actionable Insights
1. Remove Phone from Workspace
To maximize working memory and focus for deep work, ensure your phone is completely outside of the room where you are working, as its mere presence, even if face down or in a bag, can impair cognitive performance.
2. Prioritize Accuracy Over Speed
For critical decisions, intentionally slow down and take ample time to gather information, as haste increases errors; use calming strategies like breathing or a long-term mantra to reduce arousal and improve decision quality.
3. Reduce Digital Distraction Environment
To improve focus, make your environment ‘harder’ for distraction by physically putting devices away or making them less appealing, such as turning your phone screen to monochrome to reduce its attractiveness as a source of information.
4. Adjust Attentional Aperture
To prepare for cognitive work, consciously adjust your attentional ‘aperture’: focus on a small, specific point to narrow your attention for focused tasks, or engage in broad, panoramic vision to promote creative exploration.
5. Practice Internal Cognitive Focus
To train attention, try closing your eyes and thinking in complete sentences, engaging in an internal conversation with yourself while constantly redirecting your focus to stay on a single thought train.
6. Foster Behavioral Synchrony
To improve communication, trust, and teamwork in relationships or groups, actively foster behavioral and physiological synchrony (e.g., mirroring movements, shared gaze), as this alignment predicts stronger bonds and better decision-making.
7. Engage Deep, Structured Conversations
To build rapport and synchrony with others, especially those you are out of sync with or don’t know well, make time and space for intentional, deep conversations using structured question sets.
8. Utilize Consensual Social Touch
Engage in consensual, pleasant social touch (like grooming or gentle contact at body temperature) to stimulate oxytocin release, an intrinsic mechanism for building and strengthening social bonds and combating isolation.
9. Offload Decisions When Fatigued
When you or your team are fatigued, offload critical decisions to an external, non-fatigued person or system, as fatigue causes a shift towards prioritizing speed over accuracy, leading to more mistakes.
10. Build Complementary Team Strengths
Entrepreneurs and innovators should build teams with complementary strengths to ensure that while they leverage their creative and exploratory tendencies, they also have support for necessary focus and execution.
11. Highlight Potential Gains Visually
To overcome loss aversion and encourage taking beneficial risks, visually emphasize potential gains (e.g., larger font, brighter display) over potential losses, as this directs attention and shifts decision-making.
12. Be Wary of Urgent Pressure
If someone pressures you to make a decision very quickly, especially if it’s not a clear emergency, view it as a potential scam, as urgency is often a tactic used to bypass rational deliberation.
13. Ensure Foundational Nutrition
To support overall health, digestion, immune system, mood, and mental focus, ensure you are getting all necessary vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients, potentially through a comprehensive daily supplement.
14. Utilize Comprehensive Lab Testing
Get comprehensive lab tests to gain insights into your bodily health, including heart, hormones, immune function, and nutrient levels, and to detect toxins, which can then inform targeted health adjustments.
15. Reduce Mercury Levels
If you have elevated mercury, limit tuna consumption, increase leafy green intake, and consider supplementing with NAC (N-acetylcysteine) to support glutathione production and detoxification.
16. Engage in Professional Therapy
Consider engaging in professional therapy for overall health, as it provides a trusted rapport, emotional support, directed guidance, and useful insights for various life issues.
17. Perform 100 Jumping Jacks Warm-up
Before any cardiovascular or resistance training, perform 100 jumping jacks to significantly diminish the chance of injury, likely by raising core body temperature.
18. Avoid PFAS/Forever Chemicals Cookware
Opt for cookware made with materials like pure titanium, as PFASs and forever chemicals (like Teflon) found in many nonstick pans have been linked to hormone disruption, gut microbiome issues, and fertility problems.
8 Key Quotes
I always like to say there's a little monkey in all of us, right? And I believe that going in, you know, having spent actually my formative years, you know, just watching monkeys. And I worked at the Cleveland Zoo, you know, when I was in college and I took every opportunity I could get to go, you know, I went to the field, you know, I watched monkeys in South America and in Mexico. And I think we all get that. But over the course of my career, I'm astonished at how deep that goes.
Dr. Michael Platt
If you're in a really poor environment, like you – let's say you forage for apples, right? And there's one apple tree for the next 10 miles. You stay in that apple tree until you picked every apple, rotten or not rotten, not ripe, right, before you move on. If you were in an orchard with apple trees everywhere, you just pick the ones that are easiest to get and then you move on.
Dr. Michael Platt
I think that attention, this is the argument we've made, operates according to essentially the same rules and principles that our bodies do when we are searching the environment for resources.
Dr. Michael Platt
I feel like the overlap of covert attention and theory of mind, as you described, comes from this assumption that I have, which is that we have effectively two spotlights of attention and that we can merge them.
Andrew Huberman
I mean, the work is very clear that like being isolated, being alone is worse for your health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Dr. Michael Platt
I can divine the mechanics of the planets and the heavens but I can't understand the minds of men or something like that.
Dr. Michael Platt (quoting Isaac Newton)
The fundamental drive is to climb the hierarchy is more or less kind of baked in.
Dr. Michael Platt
Apple customers choose Apple because they love Apple, and they want to be part of something bigger... And Samsung users choose Samsung because they hate Apple.
Dr. Michael Platt
6 Protocols
Improving Focus by Removing Phone
Andrew Huberman (referencing a study)- Place your smartphone completely outside the room where you are working or focusing.
Cognitive Warm-Up for Focus
Dr. Michael Platt (referencing practices in China)- Before engaging in deep cognitive work, focus your visual attention on a small, contained area or a fixation point.
- This practice helps to narrow your cognitive aperture and prepare the brain for sustained attention.
Enhancing Focus by Changing Environment
Dr. Michael Platt- Actively change your environment by removing distracting devices (e.g., phones, tablets, laptops) from your immediate vicinity.
- Alternatively, make devices less appealing (e.g., by turning a phone monochrome) to reduce the temptation to switch attention.
Bridging Social Divides Through Deep Conversation
Dr. Michael Platt- Make time and create space for intentional, deep conversations with individuals from different backgrounds or political affiliations.
- Utilize structured sets of questions (e.g., Fast Friends questions or commercially available decks) designed to break the ice and quickly delve into deeper, personal topics to foster neural alignment and connection.
Decision-Making Strategy for Accuracy
Dr. Michael Platt- When facing an important decision, consciously choose to prioritize accuracy over speed.
- Slow down and take as much time as needed to gather the most information possible, reducing reliance on noise and increasing the signal-to-noise ratio in your decision process.
Offloading Decisions Under Fatigue
Dr. Michael Platt (referencing wrestling team study)- When an individual or team is experiencing high levels of physical and cognitive fatigue, offload critical decision-making to an external, less fatigued person (e.g., a coach or manager).
- The fatigued individual or team then focuses on simply executing the instructions provided by the external decision-maker.