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Secretly Rational
Like many who aren’t born fashionistas, I found myself needing advice on how to not dress like a schlub (or in my case, schlubbette). Trolling the interwebs several years ago, I ran across GoFugYourself.com, a website devoted to demonstrating that making others’ eyes bleed with your attire is not the unique domain of the fat and poor, but that Hollywood’s richest and fittest can do it, too. It gave great lessons in what not to do. But the Fug Girls also have a category for fashion explosions so spectacular that they transcend all ugliness to create their own kind of beauty: “secretly awesome!”. This, along with Bernie Sanders’s recent meditation on deodorant – got me thinking about all those activities in life that are secretly rational. Meaning, they look irrational to outsiders, but from the perspective of the one doing the activity, they are at least as rational as, say a tree is when “deciding” where to put its leaves:
For example, consider the trendy idea of The Framing Effect – the observation that people respond differently to the same situation if it’s simply framed differently. In The Why Axis, a spirited journey into the exciting realm of economic fieldwork, authors Gneezy and List experimentally verified that giving children money before an exam, then taking it away if they score badly, improves exam scores more than promising them money if they score well.* They call this an example of loss-framing, and framing is supposed to be a “cognitive bias” – one of those things humans do that’s not quite rational. But as any child might know – and as researchers discovered when they revisited the marshmallow test – a reward promised at some point in the future really is worth less than the same reward now, because there’s less chance you’ll actually receive it. These children aren’t responding differently to the same situation depending on how it’s framed: they’re responding to genuinely different situations. And quite rationally, too! – especially considering these particular children’s impoverished, chaotic environment, where adult inability to make good on promises to children may be quite common.
As the authors also observe,** when adults reward children repeatedly and consistently, the difference between gain-framing and loss-framing the rewards disappears. They offer no explanation for this, but I do: once adults earn these children’s trust by rewarding them consistently, the children have more reason to believe they’ll receive what they’re promised. Kids are more secretly rational than we suspect.
Similarly, the paradox of choice sounds cool, and might sound like a fun explanation for why collectively having 23 brands of spray-on deodorant in our country is, in fact, uneconomical. But merchants already take human analysis-paralysis – and its cure, rational ignorance – into account when deciding how to stock their stores. Chains like Trader Joe’s and elite department stores gain their reputation by offering fewer product choices than their competitors, but vetting them carefully, so that customers don’t have to waste their precious time and psychological stamina squinting at rank on rank of bagged lettuce or tube socks in order to pick just one item. The trade-off, of course, is that the service rendered – saving the consumer from analysis paralysis – is reflected in the price: fine department stores and Trader Joe’s are thought of as Stuff White People Like for a reason.
That said, even discount stores like Aldi offer a similar service – there’s only one brand of everything – though in this case, the trade-off is that many items (but not all – there are some fantastic deals at an Aldi’s) are of poor quality. In between the deep-discount stores offering only one of everything, and the elite stores that do the same thing, there are many stores that offer a dazzling mishmash of stuff – it sometimes seems like hundreds of choices in cucumbers or cotton socks – where customers so inclined can browse to their heart’s content to find that one super-cheap item that exactly fits their needs. This is how I shop for clothes – in part because I find it an unpleasant way to shop for clothes. And in making this choice, I, too, am being secretly rational: if I began to enjoy clothes shopping, I know I’d do way too much of it; it’s better for all concerned if I stick to a mode of upholstering myself that I don’t find too pleasant.
Those of you already know about the Kuznets Curve might be wondering at this point whether it applies to shopping habits, too, as well as pollution and income inequality. If it did, we’d expect to see the amount of comparison-shopping consumers are required to do rise as they begin to become wealthier, then taper off again as they become wealthy enough to pay for others (merchants at fine stores, personal shoppers, ratings agencies, etc) to do their comparison-shopping for them.
Whether theKuznets-Curve analogy applies or not, the free market doesn’t just create the “problem” of abundant choice, it also solves it by providing an abundance of sorting services, tailored to individuals’ budgets and preferences, many run by those evil pirates, middlemen. Despite their eye-patches, middlemen are, in secret, the brave souls who endure analysis-paralysis for us so that we don’t have to. Of course, their service comes at a price and – as in all things – it’s easier to pay if you’re richer than poorer. And yes, when an abundance of brands explode overnight, it might take middlemen a while to catch up on the sorting. But on the whole, this system works pretty well without government stepping in to correct human “irrationality.” It’s a system much more secretly rational than it lets on.
For something so weak and secretive, human rationality is nonetheless capable of amazing – and sometimes amusing – feats of turning weakness into strength.
I have a childhood friend diagnosed with ADD. If anyone struggles with overcoming analysis-paralysis, it’s her. She’s also a very healthy eater. You might not think these two things would be related, but they are: her brain, being poorer than most brains at filtering out extraneous signals, gets overwhelmed in the middle aisles of the grocery store, where all the processed, prepackaged food is. She can only function as a shopper by sticking to the edges of the grocery store, where food is predominantly fresh, and packaged to reveal itself, not the advertising with its loud colors and jarring designs, which she describes as screaming at her brain like a roomful of toddlers with megaphones.
In other words, she remains rationally ignorant of middle aisles. That’s her story of secret rationality.
What’s yours?
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* Ch 4 sec 8: “Reframing Achievement”
** end of Ch 4 sec 8Published in General
Fair enough. Another term of stereotyping is profiling, used to good effect by Israeli security.
I suppose my secret rationality is that of all things as there being a curve, surface, density function that explains it.
I’ve failed Calculus III three times. Apparently I’m not that good of a mathematician (even though I work in an engineering field [Big SAD FACE here]). But my esposure to mathematics has given rise to my thinking of curves and surfaces and fields of flux to describe pretty much everything. I first started thinking of it when I learned of(correct me if I’m wrong) Ronald Coase’s Explanation as to why rich parents have fewer children.
For example:
When I think of my wife I think that the function of how much she loves me is a function of the time I spend doing chores. Of the form y=x^2 or so.
People look at my like I’m crazy when I explain that automotive performance can be described as a family of densities. Or that the the favorable news coverage that leftist politicians receive is just the line integral of sin(x) from n*pi to n*pi/4. where the positive sloped tangent vector above axis means good things getting better.
After getting through physics, I found that the units just don’t matter any more. The relationships of the axes are what’s important to understand. Because, at work i have a calculator that finds the exact value. But that’s boring.
You’re in good company with Midge and me. Let’s ask her if she still has a copy of a list of, IIRC, 4 (maybe 5) things, each of which I suggested the average person would think of as magic/nonsense, but which we nevertheless know to be true. It went something like:
IIRC, Midge added:
Midge, did I get the gist of those e-mails right?
You might want to revise that curve based on the findings of this paper. The relevant quote from the abstract:
By the way, your curve is more along the lines of y=x^(1/2), not x^2. The true curve may be more like y=exp(-kx), at least according to that paper. Your mileage may vary.
I was going to correct you… As I was thinking of the y-axis in terms of a summation of kisses, smiles, kind words, thank you’s, etc. But, if the measure of affection is per unit coitus, then that study is dead on the money. We have a newborn at home and I’ve been doing more dishes and laundry… and… Suffice it to say that my curve wouldn’t fit at all.
I’m humbled, to say the least. I’ve been toying with an extension of Ayn’s Objectivism: that our inability to quantify a phenomenon holds no bearing on it’s quantifiability. Whether the intensity of love, or the weight of choice, or the extents of the universe.
My comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek anyway. One shouldn’t take these sociological studies too seriously. I can’t say that I scrutinized the methodology or the significance of the results.
Yyyyyup.
Interesting post and comments, until, well … what the heck are you people talking about! So rational you’re irrational. :) Or the rationality of this comment thread follows a perfect Kuznets Curve, if I got that right.
I love the Land’s End catalog. I also need professional help.
The OP made me think of Dave Ramsey and his “debt snowball”. The idea is that when you’re deep in debt, the way to get out is to (a) make the minimum payment on everything, and then (b) put all your extra money toward paying off the smallest debt, regardless of interest rates.
Ramsey is upfront about the fact that mathematically it’s better to pay off the highest interest rate. However, psychologically, it works better to go after the smallest debt. You get a morale boost by seeing that it’s possible to get out from under one creditor, which then propels you to pay down the next one. (It’s a snowball because once the first debt is paid off, you now have one less minimum payment to make each month. So paying off what used to be your second-smallest debt goes faster.)
I think of search algorithms as a kind of sorting service. One where others have done so very much of the work, that the end user has to do hardly any work.*
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* as long as it really is a good search algorithm
I don’t want to put words in Midge’s mouth, so she can correct me if I do, but: the observation was that in principle, rational decision-making machines—AI—are perfectly possible. All of the outstanding challenges appear to be engineering, not foundational.
A more sobering observation than that, perhaps, is that to the extent human beings deviate from the estimate-Solomonoff/get-new-info/update-probabilities-via-Bayes/act-accordingly loop, we’re being less than completely rational.
Note here that in humans and modern models of rationality generally, emotions, survival instinct, etc. are included—it’s two decades after the publication of “Descartes’ Error;” the “superintelligent remorseless AI of science fiction” is just that: science fiction.
But the model fits my data ! Therefore, it is correct !
Hashtag: Climate Change
In regards to the OP, which is simply about how behaviors and decisions that bystanders might describe as “irrational” turn out to be a whole lot more rational when understood from the perspective of the one doing them, this is a bit putting-words-in-my mouth.
But they’re words I’m happy to have put there, since in other contexts, I do strive to say them :-)
Exactly. As a biologist might put it, it turns out those “irrational, animal instincts” are adaptive – hence what an economist might call “rational”.
As always when Midge starts talking about rationality, I realize I have no idea what she’s talking about. I suspect the problem isn’t just me.
What do y’all mean by rational?