The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  107. If others talk at table be attentive, but talk not with meat in your mouth.

  108. When you speak of God or His attributes, let it be seriously and with reverence. Honor and obey your natural parents although they be poor.

  109. Let your recreations be manful not sinful.

  110. Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

  Appendix B: List of Cognitive Biases

  A few words about this list. First, it’s not meant to be a comprehensive list—the brain has dozens of other quirks I didn’t include. This is just a Whitman’s Sampler of the biases I found to be most interesting and/or influential. I assembled the list from such books as Nudge, Predictably Irrational, Sway, and The Science of Fear. And also Wikipedia, which, objectively speaking, has impressive coverage of cognitive biases. In fact, a lot of the descriptions, phrasings, and examples are taken directly from Wikipedia (though I checked them with alternate sources to make sure they were correct). In a few cases, I came up with the name for the bias myself. This happened when an author or researcher described the phenomenon but didn’t label it, or else labeled it with a highly technical name. (These entries are marked with an asterisk.)

  And finally, so as not to cause undue bias against biases, I should mention that these biases aren’t necessarily bad. Often they are. Often they lead us to form harmful stereotypes or make terrible decisions. But in many situations, these biases can be useful. Like the Bandwagon Effect. Following the crowd may not always be right, but it is often the most efficient way to make a decision.

  Anchoring—When we’re estimating the value of something, we give too much weight to the first number we hear.

  Availability Fallacy—Our lazy mind gloms on to the most vivid, emotional examples. When we think of danger, we think of hideous plane crashes or acts of terrorism. Even though boring old cars kill eighty-four times more people.

  Bandwagon Effect—We are overly influenced to behave and think like the majority. It’s why the Billboard Hot 100 list is self-perpetuating.

  Bias Blind Spot—We fail to compensate for those biases that we’re aware of. (In other words, even behavioral economists fall for biases.)

  The Big Man Bias—A person with authority is perceived to be taller than he or she is. In one study, subjects estimated a man was 2.5 inches taller when he was introduced as a professor instead of as a student.*

  Choice-Supportive Bias—The tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected. In other words, we are master rationalizers.

  Conjunction Fallacy—Take this test from Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two giants in the field.

  Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?

  A: Linda is a bank teller.

  B: Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

  If you’re like 85 percent of people, you chose option B. Even though it couldn’t possibly be more probable, because it’s more specific than A. That’s the conjunction fallacy.

  Consistency Bias—Remembering your past opinions and behavior as resembling present opinions and behavior—even though they don’t.

  Contrast Effect—We overestimate something if it happens right after we experience a contrasting stimulus. If you lift a fifty-pound sack of bricks, then lift a ten-pound sack of bricks, the ten-pound sack will feel feather-light.

  The Creaking Bridge Effect—Our tendency to confuse general excitement and/or fear with sexual excitement. I got the name from an experiment involving an attractive woman asking men to take a poll. If the poll was given on a dangerously creaky footbridge, the men were much more likely to hit on the woman than if the poll was given on steady ground.*

  The Decoy Effect—When you prefer Option A over Option B thanks to the introduction of Option C. The key is that Option C is a lesser version of Option A. As Dan Ariely says, if you go out to a bar, try bringing along two friends: One who is good-looking but looks nothing like you, and one who is an uglier version of you. You’ll get a lot more attention.

  Distinction Bias—When we see two options side by side, we overestimate their differences. For example, when TVs are displayed next to each other on the sales floor, the difference in quality between two very similar, high-quality TVs may appear huge. So you might shell out a lot more for the higher-quality TV, even though the difference in quality is imperceptible when the TVs are viewed in isolation.

  Endowment Effect—If we own something, we think it’s more valuable than if we don’t own it.

  Extremeness Aversion—Our tendency to avoid extremes, being more likely to choose an option if it is the intermediate choice. It’s why we never order the least or most expensive wine. (As Homer Simpson says, “Waiter, a bottle of your second-least expensive champagne.”)

  Forer Effect—The reason why we so often fall for horoscopes and carnival mind-readers. It’s our tendency to think that vague, general descriptions that would fit any personality are accurate descriptions of our personality. Yes, I do sometimes get angry but then often forgive people later. How did you know?

  Framing Effect—We make different choices about the same situation depending on how it’s presented. You might undergo surgery with a “95 percent survival rate,” but avoid surgery with a “5 percent mortality rate.”

  Fundamental Attribution Error—When explaining another person’s behavior, we give too much weight to his or her personality and too little to the situation. If a flight attendant is rude, we’re quick to say she’s “a bitch,” without taking into account situational factors (e.g. maybe her mom is dying, maybe her husband cheated on her, etc.).

  Gambler’s Fallacy—The belief that the past can influence a random event. In other words, if you toss a coin, and it comes up heads ten times in a row, and you say “Next time, it’s got to be tails,” you’ve just committed the Gambler’s Fallacy.

  Halo Effect—If we like one aspect of a person, the positive feeling spills over into other areas. It’s why we think good-looking people are virtuous and smart.

  Hindsight Bias—The belief that something was more predictable than it was. In more colloquial terms, “hindsight is 20/20.” How could we have missed the signs that Pearl Harbor was coming? Because there was lots of conflicting intelligence.

  Ikea Effect—We overvalue an object if it was difficult to assemble. Buy a friend a table that requires assembly and he’ll like it more.

  Illusion of Control—Our tendency, as Wikipedia puts it, “to believe we can control or at least influence outcomes that we clearly cannot.” In other words, most of my life.

  Illusory Correlation—When you falsely believe that two things are linked. For example, many of us believe that we always choose the slow line at the grocery. But that’s only because we remember the slow lines, not the fast ones.

  Just World Phenomenon—Our tendency to believe that the world is “fair” and people get what they deserve. Frankly, to me, this is the most depressing bias. I desperately want to believe that people get what they deserve. But Ecclesiastes is right: The race does not go to the swift. Bad things happen to good people.

  Lake Wobegon Effect—Our brains are delusively cocky. We all think we’re better-looking, smarter, and more virtuous than we are. (It’s named for Garrison Keillor’s town, where “all the children are above average.”)

  Law of Similarity—If X and Y look similar, humans believe they are somehow related, whether they are or not.

  Mere Exposure Effect—Our tendency “to express undue liking for things merely because we are familiar with them,” as Wikipedia says. It’s why I brushed with Crest for twenty years.

  Name Narcissism—The preference for words that begin with the same letter with which your name begins. (Maybe my surname is why I married Julie and
named my son Jasper.)*

  Not-Invented-Here Syndrome—The tendency to discount products and solutions that were created by other people.

  Omission Bias—The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions.

  Out-Group Homogeneity Bias—“Our tendency to see members of our own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups,” in the words of Wikipedia. It’s the bias behind statements like “they all look the same to me.”

  Overconfidence Effect—You are correct far less often than you think you are (related to the Lake Wobegon Effect). It’s especially true for hard tasks. In spelling tests, subjects were correct about 80 percent of the time when they were “100 percent certain.”

  The Palmolive Effect—We irrationally link physical cleanliness to moral cleanliness. For instance, handwashing lessens our sense of guilt. A study showed that subjects who washed while feeling guilty were less likely to compensate for their guilt later by donating to charity.*

  Patternicity—The tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise (seeing the Virgin Mary in a tortilla, for instance).

  Planning Fallacy—Our tendency to underestimate task-completion times. Or why I thought that I would finish this book in December when I finished it in May. Actually, June.

  Primacy Effect—The tendency to weight initial events more than subsequent events. Why first impressions are unduly powerful.

  The Pygmalian Effect—A type of self-fulfilling prophecy: A student will perform better if the teacher expects him or her to do so. The opposite is called the Golem Effect, where low expectations lead to bad performance.

  Reactance—The cognitive bias that dominates our teen years. We sometimes have the urge to do the opposite of what we’ve been told to do simply because we want to resist a perceived incursion on our freedom of choice.

  Recency Effect—The tendency to weight recent events more than earlier events. (Psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this with regard to his memory of Schindler’s List. He remembers not liking the whole movie. Even though he did like most of it, he just didn’t like the ending—a fact he didn’t realize until he rewatched the movie.)

  Reminiscence Bump—Your memory overrepresents events that happened when you were ten to twenty-five years old, deemphasizing events that happened in other periods of life.

  Romeo Bias—Men generally overestimate a woman’s sexual interest in them. (As Ariely points out, this is a good evolutionary strategy. It’s better to err on the side of delusional than miss opportunities.)*

  Rosy Retrospection—We often rate past events more positively in retrospect than we rated them when they occurred. This especially occurs with moderately pleasant effects, like vacations, when the minor annoyances fade from memory. In other words, “the good old days” are a myth.

  The Scrooge Effect—The tendency to be more generous when you’re full and more stingy when you’re hungry. It’s why fund-raisers should always ask for money after the rubber-chicken lunch.*

  Self-serving Bias—When you attribute your successes to internal factors but attribute your failures to situational factors beyond your control. As in, I got an A because I worked hard. Whereas, I got an F because the teacher doesn’t like me.

  Serial Position Effect—It’s easier to remember items near the end of a list and the beginning of the list. Those poor items in the middle are often forgotten.

  Source Amnesia—We forget where we learned a fact. Facts learned in The Wall Street Journal gain as much credulity as a “fact” learned from your cousin’s barber.

  Spontaneous Trait Transference—Why you should avoid trash-talking. “People will unintentionally associate what I say about the qualities of other people with my own qualities. So if I told Jean that Pat is arrogant, unconsciously Jean would associate that quality with me.” (From Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project.)

  Sunk Cost—We allow costs that can’t be recovered to irrationally influence our decision. If you buy a movie ticket, then find out from Rotten Tomatoes that it’s almost surely going to be terrible, but you still go to the theater and suffer through it in order to avoid “wasting” money, you’ve fallen for sunk-cost thinking

  Supply Closet Effect—We find it easier to justify stealing if we’re not stealing cash. It’s more palatable for us to steal pens and envelopes from the supply closet than it is to steal the equivalent in dollars. The farther removed something is from cash, the easier it is for us to steal.*

  Swag Bias—Our tendency to take free stuff, whether or not we want it. It’s why my apartment is still cluttered with promotional computer mouse pads from conventions, even though I don’t use a computer mouse.*

  Telescoping Effect—The fancy name for how memories move to the middle distance. We move recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear to be more remote, and remote events, more recent.

  Unit Bias—The irrational urge to finish an entire unit, such as a plateful of food.

  Valence Effect—The tendency to overestimate the chance that good things will happen.

  Von Restorff Effect—An item that “stands out like a sore thumb” is more likely to be remembered than other items. For instance, if a person examines a shopping list with one item highlighted in bright green, he or she will be more likely to remember the highlighted item than any of the others.

  Zeigarnik Effect—People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik first studied the phenomenon after noticing that waiters seemed to remember orders only as long as the order was in the process of being served. (Some life hacker sites suggest taking advantage of this quirk when studying for a test. Take frequent breaks in which you play games or go for a walk, so you remember the unfinished material better.)

  Zero-Risk Bias—When we crave the complete elimination of Risk A, even if that creates an increase in Risk B. Wikipedia cites the “Delaney clause of the Food and Drug Act of 1958, which stipulated a total ban on synthetic carcinogenic food additives. The ’total ban’ was a zero-risk policy that actually led to health risks due to exposure to older, probably more dangerous food additives that continued to be used.”

  Notes

  DEDICATION

  vii Courtney Holt: Who is Courtney Holt? He’s a guy I met at a dinner party. The night I met him, he was talking about how much he loved Wii Fit. At the time, the only way to buy the much-in-demand game was to line up outside a certain midtown store at 6 A.M. so you could get one of the dozen or so units released that day. I casually mentioned that if he scored me a Wii Fit, I’d dedicate my next book to him. Two days later I got a huge box in the mail. And . . . well, Courtney: I’m fulfilling my side of the bargain. Thank you for my Wii Fit.

  INTRODUCTION

  xiii have transformed my life: Regarding the issue of transformation, I’m sometimes asked if my Bible experiment or encyclopedia experiment had any long-lasting effects. The answer is yes to both, but more so with the Bible project.

  That year changed me more deeply than anything since going through puberty (an experience that also involved odd facial hair growth, come to think of it). It changed me in ways large and small. Perhaps most notably, it’s given me a sense of gratitude. Thanksgiving is a huge theme in the Bible, and I got carried away saying prayers of gratefulness. (I’d be thankful the elevator came when I pressed the button, thankful it didn’t plunge to the basement when I stepped inside, and on and on.) I’ve tried to retain that point of view. I try (emphasis on the word try) to be thankful for the one hundred little things that go right every day instead of focusing on the three or four that go wrong—which has been a radical shift in perspective. Every night, I spend several minutes listing some of the things for which I’m grateful. I ask Jasper to do this as well—though he’s always thankful for the same three things: Wii bowling, Wii baseball, and Wii golf. It’s a start, anyway.

  I also try to keep t
he Sabbath. I’m a convert to the idea that we need a sanctuary in time (something I talk about in the Unitasker essay as well). I don’t observe Shabbat in the Orthodox Jewish sense—I still flick on and off lights on Saturdays—but I try my hardest not to check e-mail or talk on the phone.

  In my daily life, I still sin all the time. But . . . I think I sin about 30 or 40 percent less than I used to. One of my big battles is with gossip. My biblical year taught me that gossip, though it’s mighty tasty, as the Bible says, can be shockingly corrosive. If you cut down on negative speech, it changes the way you think. You begin to have a more optimistic view of the human species. Which I really need these days.

  I’m still agnostic, but after my year, I did end up joining a synagogue in our neighborhood. It’s reform. And we don’t go very often. But Julie and I did join. And for now, Julie and I are sending our kids to the synagogue’s day school. I actually don’t care if my sons grow up to be hard-core atheists or steadfast observers, as long as they are good people. Mensches, if you will. But I thought it’d be nice to give them a little taste of religion so that they can make a decision for themselves.

  The result is, Jasper now knows more Hebrew than I do. It’s kind of disorienting. He’ll come home and I don’t know whether he’s spouting the usual four-year-old nonsense words, or if he’s saying a blessing.

  As for the encyclopedia book, one of the most long-lasting effects was to fuel my curiosity. It gave me a little appetizer-sized taste of all these fascinating topics, and inspired me to try to keep on ingesting knowledge.

  I can’t say I remember everything I read in the encyclopedia. I’ve forgotten, oh, 99 percent of it. But in my defense, 1 percent of the encyclopedia—that’s still a whole bunch of information. I still have way too many facts rattling around in my brain. I know this because no matter what I see, it somehow triggers a fact. It’s like a sickness. I’ll see a cat, and I’ll think of how the Egyptians made mummies of their cats—but they also made mummies of mice so that the cats would have something to eat in the afterlife. Very considerate. Oh, and no matter how hard I try, I still can’t forget that René Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women.