and scientist, his books include The Mind within the Brain: How We Make Decisions and How Those Decisions Go Wrong and Computational Psychiatry: New Perspectives on Mental Illness.
Redish applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Changing How We Choose: The New Science of Morality, and reported the following:
If you read the book online and go to the 99th page of the text, you’ll find yourself at the beginning of chapter 7, “The neuroscience of choice”. If you open the book to the page labeled 99 (a few pages later), you’ll find a discussion of self-control and why the classical old psychology dual-process theories of you as a self that is trying to control a wild “animal” side are incomplete. This makes an excellent introduction to the ideas in this book – both address the idea that the person we are includes multiple decision-makers, multiple decision-processes, and how, in contrast to those older dual-process theories, you are all of these decision-makers. The reason that this is important is that moral decisions (such as whether to stand and fight or to run, whether to help or to betray a companion, whether or not to dive into a freezing river to save a drowning stranger) turn out to depend on all of these systems, operating at different times in different situations.Visit A. David Redish's website.
The Page 99 Test is a fascinating entry point into the ideas in this book, because the key idea in the book is that how one views the question at hand changes which decision system controls the actions one takes. (Remember, you are all of these systems, working together.) Moreover, it changes how that system controls the actions one takes – it changes how you make your decisions. This means that we can change how we choose by changing the perspectives we take on a situation. The premise of the book is that moral codes are “toolkits” (social technologies) that change our behavior by changing how our decision systems interact with the world.
What the Page 99 Test doesn’t capture is the fun that we can have looking at how artistic works, historical situations, and the world in general showcase how moral codes change behavior. How we can see that the key to the success of the Marvel movie The Avengers is in how the superheroes learn to work together by respecting each other’s individual talents (page 58), or how we can see these sociological interactions among cattle ranchers in northern California (page 74) and lobstermen in Maine (page 77) and scientists in a lab (page 55), or how we will need to think carefully about these moral codes when we begin to interact with intelligent machines (page 258). But it does get us to the key idea in the book – if we understand what it means to be human, we can understand how moral codes work, and we can identify how to create moral codes that work best --- so that we can all do better when we all do better.
--Marshal Zeringue
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