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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."
To bring it full circle... you made a logical decision to do x, this sets a rule in your mind that x is true. Once you made x decision, you had no further reason to question that, and you would base many more decisions on that "logical rule". When x is challanged, it would require you to re-think all past decisions that were based on x, which might include who you married, why you took this job, your religious beliefs and other important life decisions.
Is it any wonder our minds are wired to assume we were right and keep on moving in the same directions? The brain is trying to keep you alive; anything you have done up to this point won't kill you, so why would the brain try to change that? That's why few people really have a life changing moment unless forced upon them by war, death, or other bad things. When the going is good, you will keep going.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Science basically involved checking whether what "everyone knows" is actually correct, and then trying to find out why.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Wow. I knew the "hurr durr, what good is this study, it's only repeating common sense, what a waste of time/resources" response was coming as soon as I read the summary title, but I didn't expect it would be the first post. Especially since this story is specifically ABOUT the way that people are prone to believe "obvious" things in spite of actual evidence.
Please, get this through your heads: "common sense" (another name for biases gained from anecdotes and cultural groupthink) is often misleading, unreliable, over-broad, or outright wrong. At one time it was "common sense" that heavy objects fall faster than light objects. It was "common sense" that large, heavy objects can't float in water. It was "common sense" that the world is flat and women and blacks are intellectually inferior to white men and that the planets and moons are perfect spheres orbiting in perfect circles.
Science is about testing claims through empirical experiment--sometimes the results match up with "common sense", sometimes they don't. Sure, this story an example of a place where experiment confirmed something that is fairly obvious on its face--but the data goes a long way towards better understanding the WHYS and HOWS of this "obvious" phenomenon. Data is never a bad thing.
Yes, I clarified this point in a response to another reply.
I split from the conservative movement a long time ago due to issues like this. Truthfully, I've not made my mind up about abortion, because I can't objectively nail down when a child should be considered a human life.
It bothers me that so many people hold positions on issues of great importance based on how they "feel", rather than seeking to find the truth.
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