“Because technology can evolve much faster than we can, our natural capacity to process information is likely to be increasingly inadequate to handle the surfeit of change, choice, and challenge that is characteristic of modern life…When making a decision, we will less frequently enjoy the luxury of a fully considered analysis of the total situation but will revert increasingly to a focus on a single, usually reliable feature of it…The problem comes when something causes the normally trustworthy cues to counsel us poorly, to lead us to erroneous actions and wrongheaded decisions…If, as seems true, the frequency of shortcut response is increasing with the pace and form of modern life, we can be sure that the frequency of this trickery is destined to increase as well.”
Attractive candidates in Canadian Federal elections have received 2.5 times as many votes as unattractive candidates, a fact that presumably makes Justin Trudeau rub his hands with glee. Better yet, despite such evidence, 73% of Canadians denied any possibility that physical attractiveness affects their votes. We don’t understand our own biases well, and they make a huge difference to our behaviour. That makes them fascinating and also extremely important.
Cialdini lists 6 factors that influence our behaviour: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. These explain why we buy what we do, how we vote, how Chinese POW camps worked, why giving people electric shocks or hazing them to join a group makes them value the group more, how to fundraise, why we say we won, referring to a sports team, while they lost, why banning cleaning products containing phosphates increased how effect people believed them to be, and many, many, many other factors.
Influence has been on my list for a while, and I’ve only just gotten around to reading it. I shouldn’t have taken so long: I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s the best guide to behavioural economics I’ve read, written when behavioural economics wasn’t much more than a dream in the minds of people like Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler. It’s fascinating and feels almost comprehensive in its discussion of the factors that influence our behaviour, and provides useful, insightful examples and commentary. My only complaint is that each section ends with a discussion of how to avoid the bias, and it does feel a bit out of date: using modern terminology, he basically just advises us to engage system 2 each time. Still, well worth the read, and definitely a classic.
Conundrum: what to do when we have a greater capacity for realizing our logical fallacies and lack of decision making bandwidth… but we’re too apathetic (or overwhelmed) to act on this data?
It’s a good point – just recognizing the logical fallacies and biases can use up the bandwidth we need to improve our decisions. Cialdini suggests some strategies he uses to avoid being manipulated, but a lot of it is about being aware of the techniques, which can be tiring or overwhelming, as you say.
I think the best I can come up with is to try to automate or outsource to technology some of your responses, so they aren’t as draining. There’s evidence, for example, that if we rate candidates on specific sub-criteria when interviewing them for a job rather than trying for a holistic overall ranking, we are less susceptible to biases. Investing time beforehand into coming up with criteria and a decision-method — whether in elections, hiring, or consumption — means that on the day, we’re less vulnerable to bias. Alternatively, maybe a cell phone app could remind you at key points of the need to avoid specific biases?
Realistically, though, bias will still leak through. Maybe the best you can do is accept it for the small decisions, and only try to avoid it in the big ones! Succumbing to bias is also often a good thing: apart from when it’s used by salespeople, I don’t mind reciprocating favours, for example.
Do you have a solution for your own life, Royce? I’m not sure I’ve cracked it for myself, yet.