Irrationally Yours : On Missing Socks, Pick-Up Lines and Other Existential Puzzles
Page 10
ON RIDING YOUR DRYER TO TUCSON
Dear Dan,
I’m shopping for a flight for a personal trip that will take place in a few months, and I keep running into the same problem: “Current me” wants to pinch pennies by choosing an overnight flight with several legs and an inconvenient airport that would require me to drive a few hours out of my way. “Future me”—the one that will actually pick up the rental car at 11 p.m. and drive two hours from Phoenix to Tucson the night before my friend’s wedding—will resent that I was saving the extra hundred dollars instead of trying to make an already expensive trip more pleasant. Travel-booking websites are getting better and better at predicting what will happen to flight prices, but I don’t seem to have gotten any better at predicting my own preferences.
How can I best determine whether these savings will feel worth it to me in the future? Or, failing that, how can I console myself when I’m pulling into a Tucson motel parking lot at 1 a.m.?
—RUTH
Your framing of the problem is spot-on. In your current “cold” state, you pay attention to the price, which is clear and vivid and easy for you to focus on and think about. When you will actually be on the trip, you will be exhausted and in need of sleep (a “hot” state), which will be painfully apparent to you at that point. But all of this is not as vivid to your current self as you sit comfortably and well rested at your computer, comparing the different travel options.
This, by the way, is a common problem that arises every time we make decisions in one emotional state about a consumption experience that will take place under a different state of mind and a different emotional state.
Here is what I recommend. In order to make a better decision, tonight at 9 p.m. put in some laundry and spend the next two hours sitting on the washer and dryer. This is to simulate the fun of flight. If you want to really go all out, supply yourself with a package of peanuts and a ginger ale. When you “land” at 11 p.m., look around for some missing socks (to simulate looking for your luggage) and then, properly primed to better understand how the actual experience will feel, log into the travel website and see what is more important to you: saving a few bucks or getting to bed sooner.
And to make the simulation even more effective, try to imagine how you will look in the wedding pictures after a long night of uncomfortable travel.
Good luck with your decision and “mazel tov” to your friend.
Travel, Predictions, Emotions, Decisions
ON PROMOTIONS AND THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS
“If you don’t want to feel inferior to your classmates, you shouldn’t have gone to such a good school.”
{Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}
Dear Dan,
I work in high tech but can’t seem to get ahead. A good friend of mine is in the police force, and he gets promoted all the time. He claims that it has nothing to do with his skills, but with the lower quality of the people working there. Would it be better to choose a line of work where everybody else is mediocre and I’m the best instead of picking a high-profile workplace where I continuously feel unpromotable?
—DAVID
Your general question has to do with the joy people derive from feeling that they are advancing and developing in their careers. This feeling of progress is very important to our well-being and it provides gratification, self-esteem, and recognition from our peers.
Widespread recognition of the need for progress explains why so many companies have invented titles and intermediate positions for management types (officer, executive, chief, vice president, senior vice president, deputy CEO, etc.). In a gamification-like approach companies want their employees to feel that they are making progress and moving ahead even when these steps are not very meaningful.
Historically, this trend only affected those who were on the management path. Engineers remained engineers, even when their salaries increased and their responsibilities expanded. But over the years, companies have embraced the strategy of creating new titles across many departments within their organization. Now most companies, across all positions, have a list of titles that give all employees the feeling that we are moving ahead on this title treadmill (and academia is certainly a leader in this process).
Given the elegance, simplicity, and ease of feeling a sense of progress—and before you quit your job for one where your coworkers aren’t going to be as good—see if you can receive, or even create, a promotion with a new title. Speak to your boss. Try to increase your responsibilities. Suggest a new title on your business card. With these changes you will certainly achieve your well-deserved feeling of accomplishment.
And if this approach doesn’t work, talk to more people, maybe even find some new friends who are not doing as well at their jobs as your policeman friend. You may find that you are extremely successful compared to some of them, and if you stick with these less successful friends you will feel better in comparison.
Workplace, Comparison, Goals
ON DISTANCE FROM EMOTION AND CARING
Dear Dan,
I am writing to you from a train in Germany, sitting on the floor. The train is crowded, and all the seats are taken. However, there is a special class of “comfort customers” who are allowed to make those already seated give up their seats. This status is given to those (like me) who travel a lot on the train. Obviously, it would be nice to get a seat and, according to the rules, I deserve one. But I can’t see myself asking one of the “non–comfort customers” to give up their seat for me. Why is this so difficult for me?
—FREDERICK
Your question has to do with what is called the “identifiable victim effect.” The basic idea is that when we see a person suffering up close, our hearts go out to them, we care about them, and if we can, we help. But when the problem is very large or far away, or when we don’t see the person who is suffering, we don’t care to the same degree and we don’t help.
In your case, I suspect that if ten minutes before you boarded the train the train conductor picked a random passenger to clear their seat for you, the situation would place a large psychological distance between you and the victim and, as a consequence, you would be perfectly able to enjoy the seat.
And what if the person giving up their seat was more identifiable? For example, what if the conductor pointed the seat victim out to you as you boarded the train? Or even worse, what if the process of evacuating the person from their seat was done in front of you? The worst of course would be for you to pick the person, inform them that your comfort demands that they leave their seat, and watch their reaction to the news.
What’s the lesson here? Direct contact with other people makes the impact of our actions more vivid. It causes us to feel, empathize, and act with more care and compassion. And the big question is how to get our politicians, bankers, CEOs, and everyone else who has remote impact on our lives feel the consequences of their decisions and actions.
Travel, Other People, Emotions
ON PREDICTING HAPPINESS
“I’m afraid of the person I might become if I ever left New York.”
{Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}
Dear Dan,
Should I quit my job? I’m generally unhappy with it, but I’ve been with the company for eight years, and there are several practical and financial reasons to stay: I make a good salary, including stock options and grants; I get several weeks of vacation each year; and I have a pension. In addition, there is a lot of uncertainty with starting over in a new job, and there is no telling whether I would be any happier in a new place. Any advice on whether I should stick with what I know or if I should look for fulfillment in a new place?
—KP
Your question is really about the roots of your unhappiness. Is it caused by the job or by you? If your unhappiness is based on your particular job, then switching is a good path to a better future. On the other hand, if the cause for your misery is you, then switching is going to be of no use, because, as the saying goes: “no matter where yo
u go, there you are,” and you will still be there to make your new job just as miserable.
So, which one is it? It is hard to tell, and in particular it is hard to tell because you have been in the same job for a long time, and you have no evidence for how you would feel under different circumstances and in a different job (by the way, you can think about analogous questions in romantic relationships).
With this difficulty in mind, I would suggest that you take your next vacation (let’s say three weeks) and use the time to volunteer at the kind of a company you are considering moving to. Note that I am recommending a rather long trial period because you need some time to get a better sense for how this other job would feel once the initial newness wears off. Of course, a few weeks as a volunteer would not give you the full sense of what it would feel like working at that company for a long time, but it would give you a much better sense of the root cause of your current joyless state. At the end of this trial period you should have a better idea if the cause for your unhappiness is your current job or you.
And one more thing: If you don’t think that spending three weeks of your vacation trying to figure out if you should stay at the same job or move, you are probably not really that unhappy and you should stay where you are and stop complaining.
..........................
Dear Dan,
Seventeen years ago when my son was eighteen he moved to New York to attend The Cooper Union as an art student. He is now thirty-five and afraid to leave NYC. He doesn’t like living in NYC and says he would love to move west, to be with us and to develop his art (and hopefully a career) in photography. But the people around him are giving him very different advice. It seems that people in New York believe that it is the only place in the world to live and to get a job. Is there any advice or constructive approach you can offer to make it clear to him that he is stuck and should move west?
—BARBARA
First, it’s delightful that you want your son to move closer to you rather than stay on the other coast, and I am sure that he feels the same.
In terms of his moving versus not moving, I suspect your son is suffering from a combination of three decision biases. The first is the endowment effect, which has to do with our tendency to use our current situation as a reference point, and view any other alternative as a negative change from where we are now. In your son’s case, moving from New York City to the West Coast has some advantages (weather, his parents, etc.) and some disadvantages (lower density, fewer art galleries, etc.), and the endowment effect suggests that he is focusing to a larger degree on the things he would give up, and not paying sufficient attention to the things that he would gain if he ever moved to the West Coast.
The second decision bias your son is most likely suffering from is the status quo bias, which means that we feel very differently about a decision to stay in a situation, compared with a decision to change our situation. I once heard an air force commander tell his pilots that every second, they are making a decision to change course or to stay their course, and that they should always think about their actions as active choices. The problem is that very few of us think about our decisions this way. We think that moving, getting married, changing jobs, etc., as decisions, but we don’t think about staying in the same place, staying single, keeping the same job etc., as decisions. Or at least we don’t think of them as decisions to the same degree.
The third decision bias is the unchangeability bias. The idea here is that when we face large decisions that seem to be immutable (getting married, having kids, moving to a distant place), the permanence of these decisions makes them seem even larger and more frightening. Not to mention that such decisions increase our potential for regret.
With these three biases combined, it’s only natural that your son is apprehensive about moving west. Now, the question is, what can you do to help him make this decision? If I were you I would frame the move as “a six-month trial.” With this kind of perspective your son would not think of himself as moving (so there is no loss), he would not think of himself as changing his status quo (he would still think of himself as a New Yorker, only temporarily experiencing the West Coast), and the decision to give the West Coast a try would not look so large and daunting. But of course, once he moves to the West Coast, his perspective will shift. Very quickly he will start feeling at home, get used to his new environment, and develop a new status quo. And from that point, any change from the West Coast would look like a large and potentially regretful decision.
Workplace, Experimenting, Happiness
ON THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE
“Relax. You’re a famous author—no one expects you to talk about anything other than yourself.”
{Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}
Dear Dan,
I recently attended a lecture by a well-known academic, and I was amazed and baffled by his inability to communicate even the most basic concepts in his field of expertise. How can such famous experts be so bad at explaining ideas to others? Is this a requirement of academia?
—RACHEL
Here’s a game I sometimes play in my class: I ask a few students to think about a song, not to tell anyone what song they picked, and tap the beat of that song on a table. Next I ask the students to predict how many of the students in the room will correctly guess the song’s name. They usually think that about half will get it. Then I ask the students who were listening to the beat to name the song that they think was being played, and almost no one gets it right.
The point is that when we know something and know it well (for example, the song that we have picked), it is hard for us to appreciate the gaps in other people’s understanding—a bias that is called “the curse of knowledge.” We all suffer from this affliction, but it’s particularly severe for academics. Why? Because academics study the same topic for years in all its details and intricacies, and by the time we become one of the world’s experts on that particular topic, the whole domain seems simpler and more intuitive. And with this curse of knowledge it is easy to assume that everyone else also finds the topic simple and easy to understand.
So maybe the type of difficulties you experienced is indeed something of a professional requirement.
Language, Other People, Predictions
ON BAD SEX
“You haven’t a clue which buttons to push.”
{Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}
Dear Dan,
What do you think is worse for a man, if a woman falls asleep during the first time they have sex, or if she starts crying?
—SIIRI
My nonscientific sense is that crying would be much worse. Unless the man could tell himself that the reason for the crying is that she just realized for the first time how wonderful sex can be.
Relationships, Sex, Self-Deception
ON MICE AND MARKETS
Dear Dan,
Do markets make us more or less moral? On one hand, markets make us think explicitly about other people, which might increase our morality. On the other hand, markets are competitive in nature, which might make people more focused on winning and losing—and less on the fairness of the process. Any insight on this?
—XIMENA
One answer to your question comes from a set of experiments by Armin Falk and Nora Szech. In one of their experiments they asked participants to make a trade-off between saving the life of a mouse that was about to be put to death and earning some money. In the basic condition (the individual condition) participants could either receive no money and save the life of a mouse, or get some money and the mouse would be killed (they were also shown a picture of the mouse and a video about the killing procedure). The decision to save the life of the mouse at a personal expense was compared between this individual condition and two market conditions. In the first market condition (the bilateral market condition) one seller and one buyer negotiated over the killing of the mouse for money. In the second market condition (the multilateral market condition) multiple b
uyers and sellers negotiated over the killing of the mouse for money.
The results showed that a much larger percentage of participants were willing to kill the mouse in the market conditions (72.2 percent in the bilateral and 75.9 percent in the multilateral) compared with the individual condition (45.9 percent). These results indicate that when we come together in markets, we are more likely to disregard our moral standards for personal gain. Falk and Szech carried out another experiment, one that did not include any moral questions, and they showed that when morality was not involved, there was no difference between individual and market conditions—suggesting that markets directly erode morals, which is certainly not good news for our market-based society.
Stock Market, Morality, Honesty
ON LETTING LOOSE
Dear Dan,
You’ve talked a lot about how to resist the many temptations that are all around us. I have a similar question, but from the opposite angle.
I’m generally pretty good at making rational decisions that are good for me in the long term and in general I am able to avoid temptation. However, I sometimes take this skill to the extreme. For example, when deciding between whether to watch a movie or make progress on a work-related project, I go for the work-related project, even when I don’t feel like it. For some reason, I am not able to bring myself to relax, watch TV, or hang out with friends because I can’t help but feel that these activities are a waste of time.
How do you recommend I deal with this need for hyperproductivity?
—DAVE
The feeling you’re describing is the need to achieve, make progress, satisfy important general objectives, and be in control. But sometimes we just want to relax and have a good time. Sometimes we need to let go. How can we be who we want to be when the need for achievement and control is so high? I suspect that the most common remedy for this situation is alcohol. Have a fun weekend, and remember to take two aspirin and drink lots of water before going to bed.