Another method is to perform what is called a thought experiment. For instance, ask yourself which message on a flight departure board would distress you more:
BA 786 – Frankfurt – DELAYED
or
BA 786 – Frankfurt – DELAYED 70 minutes.
The second message is a bit of a pain – but at least you are in control of the situation. You may need to make a few apologetic telephone calls, or go to a lounge and get your laptop out, but you can get on with re-planning your day. The first message, however, is a form of mental torture. You know there is bad news, but you do not have sufficient information to respond to it. Is it a 10-minute delay or a 90-minute delay? You might also worry that ‘delayed’ is merely a precursor to ‘cancelled’. That loss of power and control can create far stronger feelings of annoyance than the loss of punctuality.*
Unfortunately we are unable to distinguish between these two emotions: you don’t say, ‘I am unhappy because inadequate information has left me powerless’; you say, ‘I’m angry because my bloody plane’s late.’ In such cases, neither lens of the binoculars will present you with a solution. Airline passengers won’t want me to say this, but it’s true: if, as an airline, you have a choice between delaying a flight by an hour or spending £5,000 to leave on time, your decision should be influenced by the quality of passenger information you can provide. I would also say that, from a psycho-logical point of view, metrics which target the punctuality of an airline without factoring in the quality of their information may be encouraging them to optimise the wrong thing.* (Remember also that perhaps twenty passengers on any flight might be delighted to receive a text message telling them that their flight is delayed – namely the people running late.)*
This might all sound like rather a trivial use of behavioural science. But, as you will learn later, the same techniques which can solve minor problems can also be deployed to solve much larger ones. For instance, the technique which might solve the problem of appointments for heating engineers may reduce people’s reluctance to save for their pension.* One of the reasons I believe there is genuine value to the study of behavioural science is that the same patterns recur: a solution which at a relatively trivial level helps encourage people to apply for credit cards might also be used to make people less reluctant to have medical tests.
More on this later . . .
1.2: I Know It Works in Practice, but Does It Work in Theory? On John Harrison, Semmelweis and the Electronic Cigarette
The approach that I am proposing will help you generate new and interesting ideas that are worthy of experimental testing, but do not expect them to be immediately popular or easy to sell. If you would like an easy life, never come up with a solution to a problem that is drawn from a field of expertise other than that from which it is assumed the solution will arise. A few years ago, my colleagues produced an extraordinary intervention to reduce crime. They hypothesised that the presence of the metal shutters that shops in crime-ridden areas covered their windows with at night may in fact increase the incidence of crime, since they implicitly communicated that this was a lawless area.
One of my colleagues, the brilliant Tara Austin, had seen research that suggested that ‘Disney faces’ – large-eyed human faces with the proportions of young children – seemed to have a calming effect. Combining the two ideas, she created an experiment where shop shutters were painted with the faces of babies and toddlers by a local graffiti artist collective.
By all measures, this seemed to reduce crime significantly; moreover, it did so at a tiny cost, and certainly by less than the cost of direct policing. Several other local authorities have since repeated the approach, though take-up is low – it is much easier to argue for larger policing budgets or for the installation of CCTV, than to approach a problem psycho-logically.
Copyright © Benoit Grogan-Avignon, with permission of Shutter Media
Contrast this effect with the impression given by plain steel shutters.
In a sensible world, the only thing that would matter would be solving a problem by whatever means work best, but problem-solving is a strangely status-conscious job: there are high-status approaches and low-status approaches. Even Steve Jobs encountered the disdain of the nerdier elements of the software industry – ‘What does Steve do exactly? He can’t even code,’ an employee once snootily observed.
But compared to an eighteenth-century counterpart, Jobs had it easy. In the mid-eighteenth century, a largely self-taught clockmaker called John Harrison heard that the UK Government had pledged £20,000 – several million pounds in today’s currency – as a prize for anyone who could establish longitude to within half a degree* after a journey from England to the West Indies, and was determined to find a solution. This was a life and death matter – a navigational disaster by British naval ships off the Isles of Scilly in 1707 had left several thousand sailors dead. To judge proposed solutions, the crown established a Board of Longitude, consisting of the Astronomer Royal, admirals and mathematics professors, the Speaker of the House of Commons and ten Members of Parliament.
You’ll notice that there were no clockmakers on the committee – the prize was clearly offered under the assumption that the solution would be an astronomical one, featuring celestial measurement and advanced calculation. In the end, Harrison produced an astonishing series of discoveries that led to the invention of the marine chronometer, and with it a revolution in navigation. Once ships could carry an accurate timepiece at sea, they were finally able to calculate how far they had travelled from east to west without recourse to less reliable methods.*
Alongside Harrison’s remarkable technological work, there is also an interesting psychological aspect to this story. Though they awarded him a great deal of money for his invention, the prize was always denied to him, even though he demonstrated that his solution worked more than once. A great part of his later life was spent petitioning the authorities and complaining that he had been cheated of his reward. Nevil Maskelyne, a supporter of the ‘lunar distances’ method of astronomical calculation, is often portrayed as the villain for denying Harrison the prize – and it cannot have helped Harrison’s case when Maskelyne was made Astronomer Royal and a member of the prize-giving committee. But the real story is one of professional and academic hierarchy: to an astronomer, the solution of an uneducated man whose life had been spent making clocks did not seem worthy of recognition.
I am not so sure that Maskelyne was a villain and instead see him as a ‘typical intellectual’. I say this because we see the same pattern in a series of significant innovations – science seems to fall short of its ideals whenever the theoretical elegance of the solution or the intellectual credentials of the solver are valued above the practicality of an idea. If a problem is solved using a discipline other than that practised by those who believe themselves the rightful guardians of the solution, you’ll face an uphill struggle no matter how much evidence you can amass.
Until 1948, the Wright brothers’ Flyer was displayed not in the Smithsonian, but in the Science Museum in London. This might seem strange, but for years after the bicycle shop owners from Ohio had flown their manned heavier-than-air device on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the US Government refused to acknowledge their achievement, maintaining that a government-sponsored programme had actually been first.* In 1847, when Ignaz Semmelweis decisively proved that hand-washing by doctors would cut the incidence of puerperal fever, a condition that could be fatal during childbirth, he was spurned. All too often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal.*
I had always innocently assumed that after Edward Jenner discovered a vaccination against smallpox he would have presented his findings before sitting back to enjoy the acclaim. The truth was nothing of the kind; he spent the rest of his life defending his idea against a large number of people who had profited from an earlier practice called variolation, and were reluctant to admit that anything el
se was better. And if you think this problem is confined to history, consider the reaction to the invention of the electronic cigarette.
The scientific establishment has been right to be sceptical about e-cigarettes – we still do not know for sure what the long-term consequences of this technology might be. But the invention of a delivery device for nicotine that recreates much of the feeling of smoking without the carcinogens which accompany burning tobacco is clearly a significant idea, and something that should be given open-minded consideration. However, from the first moment this technology appeared, the opposition was out in force. Many countries banned the devices immediately, and the World Health Organization and anti-smoking groups worldwide clamoured for their use to be banned wherever smoking was banned. Weirder still, they were also banned in many Middle Eastern countries which have almost no prohibitions on smoking. The question being asked seemed to be, ‘Yes I know it works in practice, but does it work in theory?’ Just as, under Maskelyne, the dominant model was astronomical rather than horological, in smoking cessation the dominant model was one of shame* rather than of accommodation.
If you have spent the last 20 years as a public health advisor promoting policies designed to create shame, alongside colleagues who all believe the same thing, the last thing you want to hear is ‘Don’t worry about that, because a bloke in China has come up with a gadget which means that the problem to which you have dedicated your life and from which your social status derives is no longer a problem any more.’ Even worse, the inventor was a businessman rather than a health professional. As with Maskelyne’s rejection of Harrison’s marine chronometer, there were vested interests at stake. Some of the funding for anti-vaping campaigns came from large pharmaceutical companies, which saw the devices as threatening their investment in less potent quitting treatments such as patches or gum.* Thankfully, in some countries, a kind of common sense prevailed,* though the majority of public health professionals nevertheless were highly reluctant to endorse the use of electronic cigarettes – they may well have been unconsciously affected by the thought that a successful substitute for cigarettes would make their skills redundant. Maskelyne might have felt the same way: ‘We don’t need your spectacular astronomical knowledge any more, mate, because this clockmaker has just cracked the problem.’
The same problem is widespread in medicine. Surgeons felt challenged by keyhole surgery and other new, less invasive procedures that can be carried out with the support of radiographers, because they used skills different from those that they had spent a lifetime perfecting. Similarly, you can imagine how London black cab drivers feel about Uber. As the novelist Upton Sinclair once remarked, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’
One of the common arguments against vaping was that it renormalised smoking, because it looks a bit like smoking. I find that quite hard to believe, frankly. Whatever you think about smoking, it does look fairly cool – a remake of Casablanca with the cigarettes replaced with vaporisers would be somewhat less romantic. The other argument, which I found even more implausible, was that vaping might act as a gateway drug to more serious substances. Most heroin addicts may have started with cannabis, but then, most cannabis addicts probably started with tea and coffee.
A few years ago I was puffing on an e-cigarette outside an office, when a security guard came out. ‘You can’t smoke here,’ he shouted. ‘I’m not, actually,’ I replied. He went to consult his superior, reappearing a few minutes later. ‘You can’t use e-cigarettes here, either.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you are projecting the image of smoking.’ ‘What, you mean insouciance?’
‘Go away.’ I did.
That phrase, ‘projecting the image of smoking’ – along with ‘renormalisation’ and ‘gateway effect’ – appears frequently in arguments for restricting vaping in public places. And, while new evidence may yet emerge to support restrictions, these reasons aren’t convincing; like the security guard’s response, they look to me like a desperate attempt to reverse-engineer a logical argument to suit an emotional predisposition.
As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown, most moralising works in this way. We react instinctively, before hastily casting about for rationalisations. For instance, most Britons feel it is repulsive to eat dogs or even horses. If you ask them why, they will contrive a series of arguments to defend what is really a socially constructed belief, just as people with a distaste for vaping seize on the argument that non-smokers will take up e-cigarettes and then migrate to real cigarettes. The gateway effect would make sense, were the evidence for it not somewhere between negligible and non-existent. The traffic seems to flow in the opposite direction – from smoking to vaping to (in many cases) quitting altogether. According to ASH, only 0.1 per cent of e-smokers have never smoked tobacco. Only 5 per cent of children use e-cigarettes more than once a week, almost all of whom are current or ex-smokers. If it is a gateway drug, it mostly seems to be a gateway out.*
One possible explanation for this is that smoking is not so much an addiction as a habit: that after a few years of smoking, it is the associations, actions and mannerisms we crave more than the drug itself. Hence, if you have not been addicted to smoking cigarettes, e-cigs simply don’t hit the spot, just as those of us who have never been heroin addicts tend not to be all that keen on needles.
A few years ago, a High Court judge was driving home from his golf club after five or six double gin and tonics when he was pulled over by the police and breathalysed. When the machine barely registered an amber light, the police let him go – at which point, he drove back to the club and demanded that the head barman be fired for watering down the drinks. Dodgy barmen have known for years that, after one proper G&T, you can sell people tonic water in a glass lightly rinsed in gin and not only will they not notice the difference, but regular drinkers may still manifest all the effects of drunkenness – slurred speech and poor coordination – even though they have consumed almost no alcohol.* A similar placebo effect may mean that ersatz smoking only works for ex-smokers. If that is the case, the good news for the vaping industry is that one common objection to it can be rejected, though the bad news is that e-cigarette sales may shrink as they run out of former smokers to convert.
1.3: Psychological Moonshots
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, runs a division that is now simply called ‘X’. It was founded as Google X, with the aim of developing what the company calls ‘moonshots’. A moonshot is an incredibly ambitious innovation; instead of pursuing change by increments, it aims to change something by a factor of ten. For instance, X funds research into driverless cars, with the explicit aim of reducing road-accident fatalities by at least 90 per cent. The argument for X is that the major advances in human civilisation have come from things that, rather than resulting in modest improvement, were game-changers – steam power versus horse power, train versus canal, electricity versus gaslight.
I hope X is successful but think that their engineers will find it difficult. We are now, in many cases, competing with the laws of physics. The scramjet or the hyperloop* might be potential moonshots, but making land- or air-travel-speeds so much faster is a really hard problem – and comes with unforeseen dangers.* By contrast, I think ‘psychological moonshots’ are comparatively easy. Making a train journey 20 per cent faster might cost hundreds of millions, but making it 20 per cent more enjoyable may cost almost nothing.
It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking. Put simply, it’s easy to achieve massive improvements in perception at a fraction of the cost of equivalent improvements in reality. Logic tends to rule out magical improvements of this kind, but psycho-logic doesn’t. We are wrong about psychology to a far grater degree than we are about physics, so there is more scope for improvement. Also, we have a culture that prizes measuring things over understanding people, and hence is disproport
ionately weak at both seeking and recognising psychological answers.
Let me give a simple example. The Uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90 per cent less frustrating. This innovation came from the founder’s flash of insight (while watching a James Bond film, no less*) that, regardless of what we say, we are much bothered by the uncertainty of waiting than by the duration of a wait. The invention of the map was perhaps equivalent to multiplying the number of cabs on the road by a factor of ten – not because waiting times got any shorter, but because they felt ten times less irritating.
And yet we spend very little money and time looking for psychological solutions, partly because, in attempting to understand why people do things, we have a tendency to default to the rational explanation whenever there is one. As we saw with Maskelyne’s response to Harrison’s nautical innovation, the people at the top of organisations are largely rational decision makers who are naturally disparaging of psychological solutions. But it also comes from our urge to depict our behaviour in as high-minded a way as we can manage, hiding our unconscious motivations beneath a rational facade.
We may grudgingly accept that people may have unconscious emotional motivations for preferring one brand of beer over another, but that’s because we don’t see beer as an essential product. Most people would acknowledge that relatively trivial considerations, such as an ad campaign or the design of a label, may have an influence on what we drink in a bar, but if you suggest to people that similar unconscious motivations could be decisive in our use of healthcare or how we choose to save for retirement, people are scandalised.
Alchemy Page 6
