The Science of Irrational Decisions

The Rat Race Trap blog has a look at one aspect of the irrational decision-making process humans employ, based on the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. "Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls 'arbitrary coherence.' Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions. That's the coherence part. Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made. I've read about that many times before, but what was surprising in this book was the the 'arbitrary' part. ... [In an experiment] the fact that the students contemplated a decision at a completely arbitrary price, the last two digits of their social security number, very heavily influenced what they were willing to pay for the product. The students denied that the anchor influenced them, but the data shows something totally different. Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."

Comments

Re:The implications

[Archangel Michael]

What happens when we can fully grow a baby outside of a natural womb?

So would you say that a fetus is no longer a fetus when technology and not a mother's womb can keep it alive long enough to ensure survival without technology? I wonder how you view 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions. FYI the youngest surviving premature birth was in the 21-23 week gestation period (about 5 months), depending on who you ask.

If you're protesting the use of technology to keep a baby alive, then what do you say about Scuba Divers and Astronauts who require technology to live outside their natural environments, are they not people at that moment? Or does the use of technology to keep people alive not count for babies? I wonder how you feel about people on heart/lung machines, or even dialysis.

How about you replace Fetus with .... say ... "Jew" or "Negro" or "Retarded". When we de-humanize the victim by calling them "non-human" we dehumanize all.

If it makes you feel better when you abort a baby by calling it a fetus, then by all means do so. It doesn't change the facts that by any arbitrary definition of what it means be "human", you can't justify killing the baby.

And if we, as a society, aren't going to protect the ones that need the most protecting, then we aren't much of a society, are we?