by Richard Robb
If I’m motivated solely by concern for the refugees’ welfare, I should now tear up the check I was about to mail. I wanted a world in which I had $100 less and the charity had $100 more. That world is now a reality by virtue of the lost $100 bill and my friend’s generosity. If I still send a $100 check, then either I truly preferred a $200 donation in the first place or the act of donation is about more than the money. Sending the check is a one-time, unique gesture. I don’t donate up to the “optimal point” where the marginal benefit of the last dollar to the refugees equals its next best use in my life. Nor do I investigate every other charity to ensure that this one is the most worthy. This act of giving stands for itself.
Commingling of the Two Realms
The purposeful and for-itself are often bound together in the same activity. Work is perhaps the ultimate example of an activity that is at once purposeful and a high-stakes for-itself game. Many aspects of the labor market that are inadequately accounted for by purposeful choice can be explained neatly once we recognize that money is in part a by-product of work, rather than its exclusive driver. As Alfred Marshall wrote in Principles of Economics, “Just as a race-horse or an athlete strains every nerve to get in advance of his competitors, and delights in the strain; so a manufacturer or a trader is often stimulated much more by the hope of victory over his rivals than by the desire to add something to his fortune. The action of such motives as these must be studied carefully by economists; and the allowance required to be made for them will in some cases be so great as to alter perceptibly the general character of their reasonings.”
The thrill of winning, “delight in the strain,” and engagement with colleagues in a team sport are intangibles generated by work that many people cannot access in any other way. These intangibles help explain why some work long hours and retire late in life or even deliberately work until the day they die. They account for a housecleaner who hires cleaners for his own house and a cobbler whose children have no shoes. Both are so caught up in their jobs that they neglect duties at home. This kind of work effort is inconsistent with the rational choice trade-off between labor and leisure, but consistent with the for-itself theory of overcoming obstacles.
Many members of the middle and upper class would end up with more money if they devoted one hour less a week to work and one hour more to optimizing investments, organizing tax records, and reducing interest and fees paid to banks or credit card issuers. By focusing on personal finances, a homeowner might, for example, realize that redeeming shares in mutual funds that invest in mortgage-backed securities and using the proceeds to repay her own mortgage would cut several layers of fees. But she doesn’t need to be told any of this: if all she cared about was maximizing steady-state consumption, she would have done so already.
The commingling of purposeful and for-itself also explains the phenomenon that economist Herbert Simon called “satisficing.” “Satisficing” describes decision-making that falls short of optimization. A satisficing person evaluates courses of action only until she arrives at one that is “good enough.” In Simon’s theory, the satisficer doesn’t try for the optimum because the calculations are too hard.5
A rational person with all the brainpower she needed, however, might want a reasonably good outcome in terms of satisfying preexisting desires while leaving room for choice. In this case, she would serve up a few acceptable options and pick one as if at random. The one she picked would come as a surprise, both to herself and to an observer. Although this might look like an irrational failure to optimize, it can be a deliberate attempt to preserve her ability to exercise her will. Satisficing thus enables us to go through our day, choosing (somewhat) freely while still doing pretty well in terms of satisfying our preferences. The two explanations for not-quite-optimizing—that is, cognitive failures and for-itself acts of will—can be distinguished empirically: unlike satisficing, for-itself choosing applies to complicated decisions as well as simple ones that require little effort or attention.
Defaulting to Purposeful Choice
Purposeful choice is easy to understand, think about, and explain. We are so steeped in this way of thinking that we take the question “why did you do this?” to mean “why is this optimal?” When the true nature of our behavior is obscure, we’ll default to an explanation that lets us maintain a rational self-image.
Self-image matters to us. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes a bloodthirsty murderer who, ashamed, robs his victim to provide a motive retroactively.6 Having established one, he can see himself as a rational actor rather than an incomprehensible monster. Though we may have little else in common with such a criminal, every one of us fabricates explanations for our behavior at least some of the time. We pride ourselves in our rationality, and when prompted to explain our own actions, may feel sheepish answering “just because.” As natural storytellers, we invent motives after the fact to explain actions that were without clear purpose, whether to some external audience or simply for our own benefit. Conditioned as we are to thinking in terms of causal relationships, we reflexively assume that our choices are motivated by a reason and buy into our own justifications.
On rare and spooky occasions, we catch ourselves splicing an event into our memory before it could have occurred. But while we only infrequently feel a sense of déjà vu, rationalizing a motive after we take action and experience the resulting pleasure or pain is woven into our experience.
This compulsion to identify rational motives for our actions can make it difficult to accept that some actions are simply play. Someone who earns more than she can consume in the short term is rational if she enjoys the work or wants to save for the future. Behavioral scientists examined what would happen in the absence of both conditions with an experiment in which the work was designed to be unpleasant and the subjects couldn’t save. During the first five minutes, subjects could choose to listen to obnoxious white noise or to music. They earned small chocolate bars in proportion to the amount of time they listened to the obnoxious noise. They then had five minutes to consume their earnings, after which they forfeited any chocolate they did not eat. Although they had been warned of this rule in advance, subjects earned significantly more chocolate than they consumed. Additionally, subjects who earned higher wages, that is, more chocolates per unit of noise, worked about as long as subjects who received a lower wage.7
The researchers decided that these results pointed to a pathological tendency to “overearn,” comparable to overeating. A Harvard Business School professor told the New York Times that the study’s implications were “enormous.”8 But were they really? Instead of suffering from a newly diagnosed mental disorder, perhaps the subjects simply treated the experiment as a game. Whether the wage was high or low, subjects were experiencing a novel challenge and wanted to see how well they could perform. Under this interpretation, overearning is no more irrational than playing a video game; why pound your fingers on a controller and stare at a screen for no pay?
Although we may feel uncomfortable admitting it, play is pervasive in life, even for adults. For instance, motorists sometimes drive around looking for cheaper gas when the cost of gas used in the search outweighs the likely savings. They might defend this behavior by claiming that they don’t want to be gouged or that they want to punish greedy gas station owners. But unless they spend resources punishing profiteers in general, this does not seem to be their real concern. Couldn’t consumers simply see gas station owners as adversaries in a game? Why should we question the judgment of consumers sacrificing efficient consumption so they can win? While it may be tempting to suggest more efficient solutions to someone hunting for cheaper gas, fixing her own car, or knitting his own sweater, doing so would be inconsiderate. If they wanted to think harder about the obvious inefficiencies, they would already have done so.
The same logic applies when, rather than fighting an adversary, we’re helping someone in need. Some people give money to panhandlers—occasionally. No one can argue that th
is is the most efficient way to reduce poverty. This capricious gesture cannot be cast in any cogent way as a purposeful optimization of fixed preferences. We may tell ourselves that charity will lead to rewards in this life (if we buy into the Western take on karma) or the afterlife (if we believe in a God who actively judges human affairs). Yet given that other types of charity would be more effective, these justifications amount to nothing more than efforts to defend our self-image as rational. Whatever we may tell ourselves, this spontaneous act of mercy is for-itself.
PART II
Belief
The conviction of the necessity of one’s convictions survives the most strenuous opposition and extensive contradiction … Since the self, even as it is transformed by its interactions with the world, also transforms how that world seems to itself, its system of self-securing is not thereby “unhinged” nor is it “corrected” by cosmopolitanism. Rather, in enlarging its view “from China to Peru,” it may become all the more imperialistic, seeing in every horizon of difference new peripheries of its own centrality.
—BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH, Contingencies of Value
3
Acting in Character
One sick person self-medicates with natural remedies, while another strictly follows the doctor’s orders. A third rejects treatment altogether and relies on prayer. All three believe they are doing the right thing.
Faith in natural remedies may stem from deeply held counterculture principles, mystical beliefs in the body’s self-healing powers, or distrust of the medical establishment. This faith may have been reinforced by a personal experience in which alternative medicine seemed to work. Conviction in modern medicine goes together with an opposite constellation of beliefs: scientific evidence is the highest standard, and the system that generates this evidence and delivers therapies to patients can be trusted. And the third person, who believes events are in divine hands, might rely on the experience of previously answered prayers. She rejects the scientific method because she believes that God works in mysterious ways.
The diversity of opinion in the world is astonishingly vast—far vaster than we would expect if everyone used beliefs merely as instruments to maximize results. Rather than formulating hypotheses, then checking them against empirical evidence to ensure we adopt only the most accurate ones, we pick beliefs that appeal to us. Each of us grounds our beliefs in other beliefs we already hold and favors experiential knowledge over equally valid knowledge gained secondhand. We find ways to dismiss arguments to the contrary. As Walt Whitman observed, “Logic and sermons never convince.”1
Before launching into the discussion, let’s clarify our terms. We’ll define beliefs as propositions that guide action and aren’t necessarily true as a matter of logic, grammar, or common knowledge that no one can reasonably dispute. For our purposes, then, “5 × 7 = 35,” “bachelors are not married,” and “the earth is bigger than the moon” are not beliefs. The realm of belief includes statements that could in principle be confirmed or refuted by evidence but where there is room to disagree. Examples of beliefs about treating illness are “herbal remedies work best,” “only medicine approved by the FDA is to be trusted,” and “prayer is the most effective.” Beliefs are supported to some extent by data, but for most people that’s not the only criterion—at least that’s my strong belief and the premise of this chapter.
Acting in Character Is For-Itself
According to the rational choice model, individuals’ actions are determined by their preferences and their resources, including financial wealth and human capital. Two rational, optimizing individuals with the same preferences and resources will make the same choices. Differences in risk aversion, from the standpoint of purposeful choice, can be accounted for as simply a matter of taste, that is, as further inputs into preferences. Expanding the model to incorporate behavioral biases allows for divergent courses of action if one person thinks more clearly than the other.
But in practice, people differ not only in their preferences and capacity to satisfy those preferences, but also in the beliefs they have formed. Beliefs take on a life of their own—they are more to us than tools to get ahead. They make up our identity.2 We care about them. We want our beliefs to be consistent with each other and with our experience. We want to be able to defend our beliefs with reasons we can understand and remember, only gradually revising them over time based on reflection and experience. We try to act within those beliefs, sometimes at the expense of maximizing our preferences.
Holding onto beliefs and acting within them is not another kind of desire that we can evaluate and trade off when it serves our purposes. When we change our beliefs we change ourselves, triggering feedback into our preferences. Tenaciously maintaining beliefs must be understood as for-itself.
To see why, let’s consider a woman who has lived in Texas all her life and thinks it’s the best place on earth. When offered a two-year, high-paying job in New York City, though, she’s tempted. She could earn enough to return to Texas and buy a ranch. But if she trades her cowboy boots for snow boots, jaywalks because she’s now too impatient to wait for the light to change, and learns to be amused rather than repulsed when she sees rats chase each other in the subway tracks, soon she’ll be a … New Yorker. As she comes to appreciate New York’s charms, she may cease to believe all the wonderful things about Texas that defined her. When considering whether to take the job, she has to imagine what it would be like to give up her identity as a Texan. If she stays in New York for good, she’ll have to think about the fact that the money she earns won’t go so far. The move makes perfect sense if she can assure herself she’ll come back to Texas with the loot as the same person who left. But that’s not the way it works. She’s got a decision to make. Purposeful choice, by itself, won’t give her the answer.
And it’s not just life-changing decisions, like whether to move from Texas to New York, that expose the limits of rational choice. Let’s say the same woman is considering how to invest her savings. She doesn’t like Wall Street or the idea of making money without doing work that feels real. She likes that the Texas economy depends on real things: oil, aeronautics, and agriculture. She grew up hearing how her family lost everything in 1929, so she doesn’t invest in stocks. From my point of view, her investments will probably underperform, but who’s to say?
One day, to everyone’s surprise, she invests in a technology stock that she finds exciting. She took a rare leap outside her settled beliefs just like the characters in any narrative that holds our attention. But the characters can’t leap too far or too often, or the plot would become incoherent. When we jump outside our beliefs, we are saying, in effect, “At this moment, my beliefs are no more compelling than this one-time act of will.”
How Beliefs Are Formed
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce outlined four routes to adopting a belief:
1. A new belief X is consistent with the things one already knows.
2. An authority to which one has committed says that X is so.
3. X is the style of thing that one is inclined to believe. In Peirce’s words, X is “agreeable to reason.”
4. A new belief X, when subjected to the scientific method, corresponds to data in the world.3
Loosely speaking, beliefs formed according to the first three routes allow us to build a coherent identity. Acting on settled beliefs, even ones that run contrary to empirical evidence, is not irrational but for-itself. In Repetition, Kierkegaard asks, “What would life be if there were no repetition? Who could want to be a tablet on which time writes something new every instant?”4 Rather than starting over, constantly reinventing ourselves in response to new data, we stick with who we are.
Only the fourth route is consistent with rational choice. Of course, a person solely interested in gratifying desires would incorporate the opinions of authorities to the extent that she trusted them to objectively convey valid information. She would dispassionately consider whether a new belief conflicted w
ith existing beliefs, again as just more data. She would adopt new beliefs quickly if the preponderance of evidence favored a change.
In Peirce’s outline, we care whether our beliefs are consistent in terms of logic and style. We are slow to depart from the existing beliefs that make up our character, even if those beliefs fail to hold up against new data. Couldn’t this desire to act in character be incorporated into models of rational choice? Specifically, couldn’t economists introduce a “belief-adjustment cost” or put a price on acting outside our beliefs? Let’s consider what that modification would entail.
When we encounter data that conflict with our beliefs, we experience what Peirce calls “the irritation of doubt.” We work to resolve that doubt by either modifying our beliefs to the minimum extent possible or explaining away the data. To even consider switching to a new belief, we would have to (1) imagine integrating that belief with our other beliefs and then (2) decide whether to switch. Not only does the first part of this undertaking come at a cost in terms of irritation, but it threatens to change us in ways we cannot anticipate, whether we adopt the new belief or not.
Another problem arises from actions that threaten to change beliefs in unpredictable ways. The Texan feared she might become a New Yorker in part because beliefs feed back into preferences. On whose behalf, then, do we choose? Our old familiar self or our partially new self? We are reluctant to change our beliefs to better satisfy the preferences of the person that those new beliefs would partially form, and with whom we share only a partial connection. Therefore we may choose not to evaluate the opposing belief at all and instead put on blinders. If doubt lingers, we can work to make existing beliefs feel rational—to “rationalize” them.
