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

So

[MyLongNickName]

Will it help me to understand why I read Slashdot instead of doing something productive with my time?

Re:So

[spun]

Yes. You arbitrarily decided to read Slashdot one day. In order to maintain internal consistency, your brain had to make it seem like this is a good idea, and continually offers up excuses for reading Slashdot.

Re:So

[Idiomatick]

In case you were actually curious which I'm sure you are...

Humans are naturally curious, and we have a love for information. These are great things, clearly evolving to strive for greater knowledge and understanding is a good thing. And a certain level of curiousity is also good. So there are mechanisms in our brain that reward us for gaining knowledge... generally you feel good learning something.

That said, the implementation is terrible. We get rewarded (chemically) for ANY information we learn. There is no natural mechanism that filters out useless information. So at our base we feel equally rewarded learning about britney spears' baby as we do about our political system. This results in you feeling good learning the tidbits of information though they may not be very pertinent to your life. If you are good at trivial pursuit you are likely more of an addict and so on.

Re:So

[snowraver1]

I disagree. I find watching E-Daily, or Entertainment Tonight, or any other celebrity show physically nauseating. It's literally an assault on my brain.

Re:So

[lwsimon]

You probably do it too much, though, as you obviously have never spent any time with a dictionary. If you did, you would realize that you just stated that certain shows show intent to physically harm your brain.

Please use the word "literally" literally in the future.

Re:So

[causality]

I disagree. I find watching E-Daily, or Entertainment Tonight, or any other celebrity show physically nauseating. It's literally an assault on my brain.

That's because such trivia is designed for children who never really grew up. Y'know, the ones who have adult bodies. That's why they think someone else's personal life is so much more fascinating than their own, merely because that person can sing or dance or act. They don't seem to notice that the truly famous entertainers are some of the most out-of-touch people who are least worthy of this kind of adoration. The doctor who finally cures cancer will be an anonymous, unknown figure by comparison.

They're impressed with the entertainer's ability to entertain and that's their only real criteria; any critical thinking or other evaluation shuts down at that point. Their appetite for the superficial and insignificant is absolutely endless, even though those same mental faculties could be put towards educating themselves, establishing deep and meaningful connections with people like their neighbors, and finding real purpose and meaning in their own lives. They see nothing wrong with this or the waste that it represents.

It's an assault on your brain because the underlying message is "it's okay to devote so much time and energy to something completely devoid of any real meaning." There's also the implication that it's okay to form grossly asymmetric relationships instead of mutual relationships, that there is anything healthy or nurturing about this, like when a person learns all about the personal and romantic life of an actor when that actor doesn't even know that he or she exists. The message is that you should eagerly do such things merely because it's encouraged by the industry that was built around it. If you have any understanding whatsoever, how could you do anything but reject this notion?

Re:So

[linguizic]

Studies have shown that 80-90% of everything that humans talk about is gossip. When you think about this from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense. We're highly social animals and our biggest competitors are other humans. Sharing information about the members of tribe is a HUGE advantage. Unfortunately, today we have the same brains that our tribal ancestors did and these brains seem to include celebrities in our tribes, so we eat up gossip about them. The implementation isn't terrible, it's just legacy :)

Re:So

[Mr Z]

You're literally full of it. "Literally" has been used as an intensifier since the 17th Century. Get over it. And before you go off on the author of the article I just linked... He's a dictionary editor. I think he spends more time with a dictionary than any of us.

Re:So

[Idiomatick]

Exactly. The human brain is like a computer program that has constantly been patched for millions of years. The original intent of the program is completely different from how we use it now. And we have never had a version change or rewrite. Oh and we were programmed by inputting code semi-randomly.

When you think of it from that point of the it isn't at all surprising we have a few hundred stupid flaws.

I'll let someone else come up with a car analogy if they like.

Re:So

[causality]

So, what you're saying is, you're jealous of the ability of an entertainer to entertain, and because you once arbitrarily used the defense that what you do is more worthwhile than what they do in order to get a false sense of superiority, your brain keeps doing it to stay internally consistent?

You remind me of those people who call others "racist" because they disagree with Barack Obama on matters of public policy. Just like them, I am sure that you do it knowing that no one can rationally argue against something so absurd. For one thing, it would require them to prove a negative. That's why you never feel that before making such statements, you have a burden of proof to establish a) that jealousy of entertainers is the only possible reason to suggest that maybe there is something wrong with obsessing over strangers, or b) that the reasoning I openly explained is fatally flawed and that you know how it may be corrected.

Your failure to address or even to recognize that such a burden of proof goes along with your claim, combined with your insistence on making this into a personal matter instead of giving your counter-argument, can be taken as evidence that you are reacting emotionally, perhaps because I offended you. There was nothing malicious in what I said, so your offense is your own and it begins and ends with you. Therefore, you get to deal with it and will receive no relief from me.

I'll give you a free tip for the future: try these tactics on people who are unable to see right through them. You'll be much more "successful" if you really want to call it that.

Re:So

[dissy]

In order to maintain internal consistency, your brain had to make it seem like this is a good idea, and continually offers up excuses for reading Slashdot.

Pfft, I don't need excuses. I can stop reading Slashdot any time I want!

Re:So

[schon]

Remember that the next time someone calls the big tower next to their monitor their "hard drive", or calls their desktop wallpaper their "screen saver", or talks about the time they "programmed MS Office" when they just installed it from the CD.

Re:Yeehaw

[Aklyon]

define "big words". do you mean closer to "potato" or closer to "superstructure"

I'm not one to normally complain about articles...

[Red Flayer]

How the hell did this article make it off the firehose?

There is a quote in the summary from a blog referenced. The blog is not linked to -- instead the only link is to a site (Amazon, I think) selling the book.

Where's the actual discussion of what's in the book? Where's the article (or blog entry)?

If you're going to post a book review... please, include the review. Otherwise it looks like you're just hocking a book.

TFA

[TubeSteak]

http://www.ratracetrap.com/the-rat-race-trap/irrational-decisions-anchoring-and-arbitrary-coherence.html

Editors sleeping on the job
What a sweet job

Still, GIGO

[MikeRT]

Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made.

People tend to forget that logic is just a set of rules. If you load it up with bad data, especially data that is driven by pure emotions, you'll rationalize yourself into neat, coherent clusterfuck. The difference between wisdom and intelligence is that the former is an a priori mental filter for bad data, the latter is just raw capacity. That's why a wise person need not follow a life based on reason alone to generally make good decisions.

Re:Still, GIGO

[iamhigh]

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.

Re:Still, GIGO

[Bat Country]

Yes, we call that generalized anxiety disorder. You probably don't want that.

Re:Still, GIGO

[nine-times]

What's more, I would say it's very unclear that we'd be able to live, let alone become intelligent, without such irrational assumptions. This is something that people miss a lot when they talk about intelligence and AI: irrationality is part of intelligence.

Imagine you didn't generally make basic assumptions that your past actions and beliefs were appropriate. Let's say you wake up in the morning and feel a pain in your belly. Well, yesterday and the day before that, you ate a bowl of cereal with milk in it, and that seemed to make the pain go away. But you're not just going to follow habit or assume that it's a good decision. You're going to wake up every morning from now on and try random things. Maybe you'll try scratching your belly with a stick, or maybe you'll throw yourself out the window. How is intelligence ever going to emerge from that?

People are creatures of habit, and people are mimics. We do what other people around us are doing. We role-play and we follow fads and we talk the way our neighbors talk. We see friends and family and people on TV eating breakfast in the morning, and so we do it too. Our brains then try to tie all of that habit and mimicry up in a nice tidy logical explanation so that we can understand what we're doing, so that we can explain it to ourselves and to others.

Re:I'm not one to normally complain about articles

[Victor_0x53h]

Seriously..

It looks like the blog is here: http://www.ratracetrap.com/the-rat-race-trap/irrational-decisions-anchoring-and-arbitrary-coherence.html

Yard Sales

[dschmit1]

This is exactly why I never buy anything that is not previously labeled with a price. I will negotiate but not if I have to contemplate a starting value myself.

Anchoring

[INeededALogin]

Nothing really new here. Decisions making based on anchors is a large part of why we use Planning Poker when doing our estimations. All it takes is that one guy that says everything is easy to influence everyone's brain to under-estimate a project.

Re:Extremely significant?

[WAG24601G]

TFS never claimed it was a strong correlation. It's a highly SIGNIFICANT correlation (meaning that the probability that the result occurred by chance and not systematically is very low, less than 5%).

Now, whether or not .33 is a STRONG correlation is another matter. By most definitions, it is not, although .52 would be a moderate correlation. However, the correlation does suggest that about 10-30% (r-squared) or more of the variation in subjects' decisions was accounted for by their social security numbers (accounted for != caused by, but we can make inferences based on the experimental design). Over a lifetime, 10% variation due to random irrelevant factors (like SS number) is serious, and 30% is HUGE. In that sense, it is a meaningful result, even if the correlation is not a "strong" one in terms of proportion.

correlation != statistical significance

[crmarvin42]

Apparently I'm in a very pedantic mood today.

Correlation is a measure of how well the model describes the data. So according to the summary, 33 to 52% of the variation in the data was explained by the model. Depending on the inherent variability in the criteria being evaluated, that could be very good or very bad. In my line of work that would be very bad, but for social sciences such as sociology, that is very high. It all comes down to how many variables you can control. The more control, the less variation, the higher the correlation when the model is a good fit.

Significance is a measure of the probability that the response seen is due to random variation or errors in sampling. They may have given a measure of significance in the article, but the summary did not.

Re:The implications

[Colonel Korn]

As opposed to the liberal belief that...killing an unborn child is good.

I'm an Objectivist libertarian, and my beliefs are in fact based on rationality.

beep...boop...DOES NOT COMPUTE! How'd rationality lead you to think that "liberal belief" includes the idea that killing an unborn child is "good?"

Re:Yeehaw

[compro01]

Science basically involved checking whether what "everyone knows" is actually correct, and then trying to find out why.

Re:Yeehaw

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Laziness and Pride

[Temujin_12]

To me laziness and pride are the two biggest obstacles to rational thinking.

Laziness since, more often than not, simply sitting down and thinking things through you can avoid most irrational decisions. Time constraints can make this difficult. But I'm surprised at how often I see family/friends make poor decisions simply because they don't know how to stop and think. I like this quote from Samuel Johnson since it articulates the fact that easy access to information does not mean people will spend the energy to even look at it (let alone use it wisely):

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

Next to laziness, is pride. This boils down to the fact that culturally we're often taught to focus on being right rather than focusing on what's right. This comes from the illusion that one can own or control truth. I've seen this affect friendships, marriages, professional atmospheres, politics, etc. Truth is independent. You either align yourself with it or continue to live in ignorance. Of course, objective indisputable truth is rare or even non-existent in humanity, but it's the honest, humble desire to align oneself with truth (not the other way around) that's important here.

The wife's ends in 99

[threaded]

The wife's number ends in 99, which explains everything.

Re:The implications

[Culture20]

How'd rationality lead you to think that "liberal belief" includes the idea that killing an unborn child is "good?"

More objectively stated: "Liberal belief" includes the idea that being allowed to kill an unborn child without legal ramifications is "good", but only if the one making the decision is the mother; for anyone else, it's a crime.
For perspective: from a "Conservative" mindset, this is exactly like saying "being allowed to murder is 'good' as it does not restrict our innate freedom to act." Thus, why many Conservatives oppose legalized abortion.

Mods: Please remember what the definitions for Troll and Flamebait are before moderating. I'm reasonably on topic and continuing a civil dialogue without inflammatory language. If you happen to disagree politically or grammatically, that's what the "reply to this" button is for.

Watch Dan Ariely on TED

[blue_teeth]

For better understanding on Dan Ariely's point, see this video http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html

Re:The implications

[lwsimon]

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.