The class’s first big assignment was to design an electric car. For weeks, students in Mr. Edwards’s class arranged themselves into teams and followed flowcharts detailing each engineering design process step. The classroom had few materials to work with. But that was okay, because the real point of the exercise was to learn how to squeeze information from your environment, no matter where it comes from. Soon students were visiting car dealerships, going to mechanics’ shops, and raiding aluminum cans from recycling bins to make battery-testing kits from instructions they had found online. “My first job is to teach them to slow down a little bit,” Deon Edwards told me. “These are kids who solve problems all day long. They deal with missing parents and violent boyfriends and classmates on drugs. Everything they experience says they have to choose quickly. I just want to show them that if you have a system for making choices, you can afford to slow down and think.”
Midway through the semester, after the class had completed their car designs and moved on to building marble sorters, Delia’s twenty-one-year-old sister had a baby. The child’s father was out of the picture and Delia’s sister, exhausted, begged her to babysit in the afternoons. It felt like a request that was impossible for Delia to refuse. The right decision, Delia’s dad told her, was obvious. This was family.
So one day in Mr. Edwards’s class, Delia pulled the engineering flowchart from her binder and, with her group, put her dilemma through the design process’s steps. If she babysat, what would happen? One of the first tasks in engineering design is finding data, so Delia began making a list of experiences that seemed germane. Another sister, Delia told the group, had taken an after-school job a few years earlier and the family had quickly come to rely on that paycheck, making it impossible for her to quit and putting her hopes of community college on hold. If Delia started babysitting, something similar would happen, she suspected. That was data point one.
Then Delia began writing out what her schedule might look like if she was responsible for an infant every afternoon. School from 8:30 to 3:30. Babysitting from 3:30 to 7:30. Homework from 7:30 to 10:00. She would be tired after watching her nephew and would probably end up watching television instead of doing her math or studying for a test. She would become resentful and make bad choices on the weekends. Data point two.
As her group walked through the flowchart, they broke her dilemma into smaller pieces and brainstormed solutions and role-played conversations while the rest of the class discussed how to separate colored marbles from clear ones. Eventually, an answer emerged: Babysitting seemed like a minor sacrifice, but the evidence suggested it wasn’t minor at all. Delia prepared a memo for her father listing the steps she had gone through. She wouldn’t be able to do it, she told her dad.
Psychologists say learning how to make decisions this way is important, particularly for young people, because it makes it easier for them to learn from their experiences and to see choices from different perspectives. This is a form of disfluency that allows us to evaluate our own lives more objectively, to offset the emotions and biases that might otherwise blind us to the lessons embedded in our pasts. When the animators behind Frozen were trying to figure out their film, the Disney system pushed them to look to their own lives as creative fodder. But it’s not just creative material we can mine from our experiences—we can find data in our pasts, as well. We all have a natural tendency to ignore the information contained in our previous decisions, to forget that we’ve already conducted thousands of experiments each time we made a choice. We’re often too close to our own experiences to see how to break that data into smaller bits.
But systems such as the engineering design process—which forces us to search for information and brainstorm potential solutions, to look for different kinds of insights and test various ideas—help us achieve disfluency by putting the past in a new frame of reference. It subverts our brain’s craving for binary choices—Should I help my sister or let my family down?—by learning to reframe decisions in new ways.
One important study of the power of such decision-making frames was published in 1984, after a researcher from Northwestern University asked a group of participants to list reasons why they should buy a VCR based on their own experiences. Volunteers generated dozens of justifications for such a purchase. Some said they felt a VCR would provide entertainment. Others saw it as an investment in their education or a way for their families to spend time together. Then those same volunteers were asked to generate reasons not to buy a VCR. They struggled to come up with arguments against the expenditure. The vast majority said they were likely to buy one sometime soon.
Next, the researcher asked a new group of volunteers to come up with a list of reasons against purchasing a VCR. No problem, they replied. Some said watching television distracted them from their families. Others said that movies were mindless, and they didn’t need the temptation. When those same people were then asked to list reasons for buying a VCR, they had trouble coming up with convincing reasons to make the purchase and said they were unlikely to ever buy one.
What interested the researcher was how much each group struggled to adopt an opposing viewpoint once they had an initial frame for making a decision. The two groups were demographically similar. They should have been equally interested in buying a VCR. At the very least, they should have generated equal numbers of reasons to buy or spurn the machines. But once a participant grabbed on to a decision-making frame—This is an investment in my education versus This is a distraction from my family—they found it hard to envision the choice in a different way. A VCR was either a tool for learning or a time-wasting distraction, based on how the question was framed. Similar results have been found in dozens of other experiments in which people were presented with decisions ranging from the vital, such as end-of-life choices, to the costly, such as buying a car. Once a frame is established, that context is hard to dislodge.
Frames can be uprooted, however, if we force ourselves to seek fresh vantage points. When Delia put her babysitting dilemma through Mr. Edwards’s flowcharts, it introduced just enough disfluency to disrupt the frame she had initially assumed she should use. When she went home and walked her father through her logic, it shifted his frame, as well. She couldn’t care for her nephew, she told him, because Mr. Edwards’s Robotics Club required her to stay at school until six o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and that club was her path to college. What’s more, the other days of the week she needed to get her homework done in the library before coming home because otherwise it wouldn’t get finished amid the family’s chaos and noise. She reframed the decision as a choice between helping her family now, or succeeding at school and helping in other, more important ways down the road. Her father agreed. They would find another babysitter. Delia needed to stay in school.