This week I read Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely. The book covers everything from supply and demand to procrastination to the allure of freebies.
The conclusion: We’re irrational, but we rationalize it so we seem rational. Maybe we can try to work on that?
An analogy for this conclusion: Dearly departed Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery denial. “Of course, my face is shaped completely differently! I’m an adult now!”
Okay, so things aren’t that dire.
If you read Ariely’s book, you may even see some logic and stop buying so many damn boxes of graham crackers, because they happen to be on sale for a limited time only. You don’t even eat graham crackers!
(I’d like to dedicate the above paragraph to my dad, by the way).
Chapter eight of Predictably Irrational really struck a chord with me. It’s called “Keeping Doors Open: Why Options Distract Us from Our Main Objective.”
My “Say yes!” approach to life can be crazymaking. Alas, the book gives no easy solution to knowing what doors to close and what doors to prop open with a large reference book. But it did make me think.
This excerpt starts with an explanation of a computer experiment given to MIT students. They were asked to click colored doors and then items in the rooms behind those doors to earn as much money as possible.
The green door appeared to be delivering the highest payout. So should he stay there? (Remember that each room had a range of payouts. So Sam could not be completely convinced that the green door was actually the best. The blue might have been better, or perhaps the red, or maybe neither.) With a frenzied look in his eye, Sam swung his cursor across the screen. He clicked the red door and watched the blue door continue to shrink. After a few clicks in the red, he jumped over to the blue…
Is this an efficient way to live our lives - especially when another door or two is added every week? I can’t tell you the answer for certain in terms of your personal life, but in our experiments we saw clearly that running from pillar to post was not only stressful but uneconomical. In fact, in their frenzy to keep doors from shutting, our participants ended up making substantially less money (about 15 percent less) than the participants who didn’t have to deal with closing doors. The truth is that they could have made more money by picking a room - any room – and merely staying there for the whole experiment! (Think about that in terms of your life or career).
How can we unshackle ourselves from this irrational impulse to chase worthless options? In 1941 the philosopher Erich Fromm wrote a book called Escape from Freedom. In a modern democracy, he said, people are beset not by a lack of opportunity, but by a dizzying abundance of it… We are continually reminded that we can do anything and be anything we want to be. The problem is living up to this dream. We must develop ourselves in every way possible; must taste every aspect of life; must make sure that of the 1,000 things to see before dying, we have not stopped at number 999. But then comes a problem - are we spreading ourselves too thin?
Running from door to door is a strange enough human activity. But even stranger is our compulsion to chase after doors of little worth – opportunities that are nearly dead, or that hold little interest for us…
The other side of this tragedy develops when we fail to realize that some things really are disappearing doors, and need our immediate attention. We may work more hours at our jobs, for instance, without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.
