We don’t know our preferences that well and are susceptible to influences.
Dan Ariely gave a TED talk called ‘Are We In Control of our own Decisions?’
These are some notes I took, plus some of my comments.
Whatever is the default choice, or is in motion already, has a tremendous influence on what choices are made.
The form at the DMVs for in different countries ask if you’d like to be an organ donor. This resulted in between 4% and 17% participation. In other countries, the form asks if you don’t want to participate in the organ donor program. People don’t check the boxes, so the result is very different: 86% - 100% participation. Not deciding on this question is not because it’s trivial or we don’t car. In fact, we care a lot, it is a difficult decision, and it is so complex that we don’t know what to do so we do the default. Dan looks at it as the decision is made for us and that’s what we go with.
The choices we’re presented with make a huge difference.
Some doctors were given the situation that they sent a patient for hip replacement, then remembered that they hadn’t tried ibuprofen for the patient’s problem. When asked, most doctors pulled the patient from the hip replacement track and had them try ibuprofen. When other doctors were given the situation that they sent a patient for hip replacement, then remembered that they hadn’t tried ibuprofen, or piroxican for the patient’s problem, most doctors chose to send the patient on because the decision to pull the patient out of the track to get a hip replacement became more complex.
People reported that if the choices are an all expenses paid for a trip to ‘Rome with coffee,’ ‘Rome without coffee,’ or ‘Paris,’ people chose Rome with coffee.
When presented the choice of Jerry, Ugly Jerry, and Tom, women chose to date Jerry. When presented with Jerry, Ugly Tom, and Tom, they chose Tom!
When students were presented with the choice of Online for $80, Print for $125, and Both for $125, most chose Both. When Print alone wasn’t offered, most chose Online.
We don’t know our preferences that well and are susceptible to influences.
Dan finds ‘behavioral economics’ exciting. When it comes to building the physical world, we understand our limitations and build around them. For building our mental world, things like health care, retirement, stock markets, we forget we’re limited. If we understood our cognitive limitations as well as we understand our physical limitations we could design a better world. That is Dan’s hope.
My comments: We can’t really know what we would decide about something until we need to make a decision about it. Sure, we have opinions on plenty of things, but there are a lot of things we haven’t had to think about.
One thing DG makes us do is think about the issues that come up in a circle and make decisions about them. To some extent, it is the same learning curve that a new manager goes through. We can be afraid to make the decisions at first because we know they’ll affect other people in a way we haven’t been in a position to do before. We also then start thinking about other aspects of our environment and deciding that it would be good to think about them and have an opinion on them.
I call the process of making decisions about the world around us ‘differentiation.’ Our opinions and decisions make each of us different from each other.
If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.
