The Paradox Of Rational Choice
Wisdom Letter #36 | The one About Behavioral Science
Are you a rational person?
Do you take decisions in a logical, sensible manner?
You would naturally say Yes.
Right. Got it!
So try to think about other people now, those around you, or even far from you.
You know people like politicians, businessmen, your neighbor, your spouse.
Yes, you can see hints of irrationality in their actions. The decisions that they take, often lead to nonsensical outcomes. And you can see those decisions quite rationally.
You can judge their choices, their tastes, analyse them and break down their decisions and criticize them.
Coincidentally, they can do the same to you as well.
They can take apart every life choice you have made and judge your behavior in ways you are not comfortable with.
And those choices will prove to be as irrational and illogical as anything you can muster up about them.
Turns out all humans are wired quite the same, and we carry around the same set of instincts, biases and insecurities within our heads and hearts.
We are not rational, but rationalizing beings.
We take decisions out of instincts and emotions, sometimes just on a whim, or based on our “gut”. But we are very good at inventing rationalizations after taking the decisions(that stock you picked when everybody was against it, the person you married or chose not to, that job you took so on and so forth).
We are very quick to come up with reasons that make the decisions look perfectly rational.
These rationalizations make a lot of sense in hindsight and seem very cool to talk about. These are stories we tell to the world and to ourselves about why we did what we did.
The real reason might be just that we “felt” like doing it at some point in the past, but our brain is not comfortable admitting its fallibility.
Any action that anyone ever takes can fit this model. And that includes reading and writing obscure blog posts like this one.
And yes, this applies to our inaction as well. If I skip a work out tomorrow morning, I can easily invent reasons that make it seem perfectly logical. ( I needed the break after a 6 day streak, right?)
We must realize that what we “felt” like at some point in the past was a product of a complex set of factors.
It depended on the kind of environment we were in, the people we were surrounded by, the food we ate, the kind of sleep we had the night before, what we had read, watched or listened to online and many more such external/internal events.
By changing our environment, our behavior can be manipulated.
Companies that want to sell you anything have been using behavior science for a long time.
Supermarkets have been known to influence consumer behaviour by designing environments that nudge you into making more irrational purchases.
The digital companies of today, often don’t have much to sell to you. Instead they employ the best designers and engineers in the world to make products that help them sell You.
For example every time you click on a button on Facebook, you are profiled as a person who does a particular kind of action. And that information is used to sell your “feed space” to digital marketers wanting to display ads to you.
(Right now, FB ad space can be bought to reach out to audiences who “Like” more pages, or who “Share” more posts, or who “Comment” more on posts. A marketer can fine tune exactly the kind of audience he wants to reach)
This becomes problematic when Facebook tries to influence your behavior to perform actions that are most lucrative for itself. So it will influence you to post more content and like more stuff than to just passively consume content from other people.
The efficacy of these digital products is such that we are easily driven to do what the designers want us to do. We keep going back for those “unread notifications” “Likes” and “Comments”.
We are constantly nudged to do what someone else wants us to do.
We act like helpless sheep being shepherded by these digital shepherds.
But there is hope in Behavior Science.
Once we know that we are irrational beings, once we know that our actions are driven by our internal and external environment, we can work towards constructing our world to mitigate the ill-effects of those factors.
We can nudge ourselves to become a better versions of ourselves everyday.
Today on The Wisdom Project, we take deeper look at our irrational behavior, we discuss the deluge of choices we seemed to be drowned in, and are they a good or a bad thing? We try to understand behavior science concepts such as “Nudge” and “Choice Architecture” in the most fun way possible.
And, we take a look at a Fly on the Wall. (Well technically, not on the wall!)
You are the average of the 5 types of content you consume most online.
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