As a decision scholar, I’m a firm believer in the benefits of specialization. If someone is really good at doing something, then it’s often better to rely on them in that issue, and focus efforts towards where you’re personally the most beneficial to others and society at large. Of course, this principle has to apply over all agents – including myself. With that in mind, I’m going to make a feature post about something a certain someone else does – and does it much better than me.

Enter Spencer Greenberg. I’ve talked to Spencer over email a couple of times, and he’s really a great and enthusiastic guy. But that’s not the point. The point is that he does a great service to the community by producing awesome tests, which you can use to educate yourself, your partner or anyone you come across about good decision making. What’s even better is that the tests are done with the right kind of mindset: they’re well backed up by actual, hard science. What this means is that the questions make sense – there’s none of that newspaper-clickbait “find your totem animal” kind of stuff. There’s proper, science-backed measuring. Even better, the tests have been written in a way anyone can understand. You don’t need to be a book-loving nerdy scholar to gain some insights!
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Now, I’ve always wanted to bring something to the world community. And a while ago, I thought maybe I could produce some online tests about decision making. But after seeing these tests, I’ll just tip my hat and say that it’s been done way better than I ever could have! Congrats!
And now, enough of the babbling: go here to test yourself! (For comparison, a reflection of my results can be seen in next week’s post :)

We are the result of thousands of years of evolution. And like we all know, the modern life didn’t really exist back then, when evolution was pulling the strings and picking our physical and psychological makeup. This is a problem. One only needs to consider the obesity crisis, or our limited sense of understanding statistics to realize that we’re very far from being optimized for our current environment.

One particular example is the nonlinearity of many professions. Take a writer, for example. A writer spends hour after hour, working on the new manuscript with very limited feedback. The feedback he does get, is essentially coming from friends, who have either willingly or through coercion agreed to read the book. Or, if the writer is at least moderately successful, some feedback might even come from a professional editor. But now, consider the income of writers. It is highly nonlinear: some writers  - like J.K. Rowling – have their income counted in the millions. Most, however, make do with a few bucks here and there (or have a “proper” day job, and write at night).

Now, if you ask a writer whether their work is “going well”, or something similar, what could they say? I’m pretty sure that they have actually very little idea how it is going. Pages appear (and then disappear through editing). But the connection to the actual payoff is tenuous at best. Writing today means the book may come out next year – or in 10 years. Furthermore, there is little common knowledge about what makes a book good, or an author successful.

The key, we see here, is that the writer’s life is a nonlinear one. You can’t tell progress from walking backwards, because they look exactly the same. Of course, this is not true of just writers. In fact, this is true for almost any creative profession: artists, scientists, designers, or maybe even business strategists. They’re all living in the same nonlinear worlds: some people earn thousands of times more than others, and there’s very few signs that a result is good – other than its popularity.
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The actual problem in relation to emotions is that our emotions love linearity. We love to see progress, and we’d like to see it every day. I presume this is why many creative professionals like renovating, knitting, or just something where you do stuff with your hands. Because, once we move from creating ideas to creating physical items, we enter the linear world. When you renovate a room, there’s only so many floorboards to replace – hence linear progress.

When we don’t get that linear emotional sense of achievement, we become skeptical of our work and progress. For some, it may even become bad enough to get depressed. For others, I think it's just a big rollercoaster. Sometimes, you're over the moon about what's happening - and sometimes, you're having that angry "this isn't fucking working" moment.

Fortunately, I think there are ways around the problem. You can create a – admittedly somewhat false – sense of linear progress. By thinking of actions that you constantly should be doing to improve yourself, you can also construct a sense of moving linearly forward. For example, I have as a goal every workday to do two things: 1) write at least half a page, and 2) read at least one article. Of course, these are not have truly linear payoffs: one day’s writing may be the turning point to a good publication – or just a lot of nonsense. Likewise, one article may be much more vital for me than another.

However, the point being that mentally ticking off these boxes (or physically in Habitica) creates an illusion of linear progress. This is false, like I said above. But, crucially, it helps to create emotional value, because I’m getting a sense of accomplishment every day from it. And even if it’s not true progress, it’s ok, because both of the actions are important enough for a scientist to never be a waste of time. 

Human minds are quite complex, but they also need to use simplifications. One of the most common ways of simplifying things is to label them. You know, like “oh, that’s someone from political studies, I bet she is [insert your favorite trope about politics students]”. It’s a really easy way of making observing the world simpler. Just connect a lot of labels that you encounter often enough to attributes and actions people from those categories typically exhibit or do. Leftists bashing rich people, Christian conservatives bashing gays, scientists not doing anything with actual impact, etc.

Of course, this is also a really bad thing to do. In the extreme, by allowing the labels to completely take over we become racists, fascists, communists, or just generally inconsiderate people that define other people through their labels. This is a bad thing itself, and we should naturally avoid it. However, so much has been said about this that I don’t think I can bring anything new into the picture. That’s why I want to flip the concept over, and talk about discriminating against yourself.

Just as we apply the labels to other people, we also apply to ourselves. For example, depending on the social environment and my past few weeks of successes – or lack thereof – I tend to perceive myself as a friend, scientist, runner, philosopher, blogger, reader, boyfriend, family, or whatever is important in the current context. But they’re all labels. 

The labels are useful in helping me to have a sense of self in the context, allowing me to focus on certain part of myself. Who am I in relation to these people? Why am I here? These are questions we hardly ever ask, because we answer them implicitly through the application of labels. But there’s a crucial question that should not be answered with a label: what should I do?

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that “well, I’m the junior in this group, so I should carry the most burden here, working long into the night” or that “well, I’m a professional banker so I can’t really do painting seriously”. When we apply labels to ourselves too indiscriminately and without thinking, we end up constraining ourselves. Instead of spending time learning Javascript during evenings, we may apply the label of a humanist and discard programming as something that humanists just don’t do (which is false, by the way).

It’s true that Javascript may not be the most important thing for an art scholar, for example. But that’s no reason to discard it offhand with simple label identity. Instead, it would be better to evaluate things on their own merits. Sure, if I can’t see programming as anything useful or interesting, I probably am better off doing something else, instead. But if I have a strong interest it – but no obvious usage – it might make sense to give it a try. Who knows what might come out of it? In fact, combinations of different fields are becoming ever more valuable these days.

The point is very simple here: don’t let labels define your actions. Stopping that from happening, that’s the hard part. It’s difficult to notice the implicit labels, because we do it so unconsciously. But if you ask yourself “why am I doing this?” and find yourself answering that “because that’s who I am”, then that’s a definite warning sign.

A naïve view of public policy (like mine, for example) might be that a body of public servants gets a set of options from the parliament, studies them and their effects, and then returns a report replete with recommendations about what the outcomes of each of the legislative options might be. A good report would say clearly “If you do this, you get A. If you do that, you get B.” The parliament’s job then is to reflect on this information and decide on the tradeoffs that the nation should accept.

In reality, however, I feel that instead of choosing from a set of options, a lot of public policy seems to be looking at options one at a time, instead of choosing the best one from a set. Suppose the economy is doing badly, and we would need either to get that back on the track, or cut costs from government. An exchange might go like this.

- Parliament: So maybe we can raise taxes?
- Right wing: NO!

- Parliament: So cut benefits to lower costs?
- Left wing: NO!

- Parliament: Reduce work legislation to increase efficiency?
- Unions: NO!

…and so on. Instead of going “OK, we have to do something, and we have options A, B, C and D”, politics employs a method I call piecewise running into a wall: evaluating one option at a time, with each being rejected by some advocacy group.

Since there is an advocacy group for almost anything, presenting options in this piecewise fashion means they will all get rejected. Following the rule “don’t do anything someone might object to” is not good policy-making: it just ensures nothing at all will be done. What is needed is a comparison of options, and then deciding which of them is the best one.

On the other hand, presenting options as a list and saying we need to choose one of them – well, that’s one of the oldest political tricks in the world. There’s nothing better than creating a false dilemma, asking a voter to pick whether for cutting taxes or reducing prosperity. Or whether he supports corporate rights or human rights. And so on.

A crucial question emerging from this is: who generates the options, and how? Letting a small group generate them invites the false dilemma trap. Getting to choose the options means you have a lot of power. Your decision may surprisingly much depend on the options that you are given. However, letting the public generate the options directly is unlikely to work, either. Most people do not know enough about the complexities of law to be able to do that. If you asked me how unemployment benefits should be structured, I would have some kind of opinion, but the opinion is way too vague to be an option directly. That’s why we need public servants and assistants in the parliament: somebody needs to generate the actual legal text.

But one thing seems clear: openness and direct communication about our options would be good for democracy. Lobbying is small in Finland, but likely to increase in the future. The more opaque the process of option generation, the more power is given to the lobbies. If politics would be more transparent, it would be harder for lobbies to slant the option set badly. But not knowing the option set, or pretending there are no other options – that’s no good. Not for us, not for the nation, not for anyone.

The framing effect is probably one of the best known – and also one of the most interesting – biases due to its generality, hence today’s topic. Let’s start with a classic example from a classic paper:

As a decision matrix, the situation looks like this:

As it has been formulated, there is obviously no correct answer to the question – the two options are statistically equal. What framing is about is that the way the situation is described influences our decision. If we formulate the question in terms of dead people (with the same cover story):

The formulations, as one can from the tables see, are equivalent. The surprise is that people made different choices in these situations. In the first case, 72 % chose plan A, 28 % chose plan B. With the second formulation, however, only 22 % chose plan C (equivalent to A) and 78 % opted for plan D! If framing had no power over us, we would choose the same option in both cases. So it’s not that choosing A or B per se would be irrational, it’s that making a different choice just because of framing is not rational.

The classic example is not a very natural example, however. I certainly hope I will never come across a similar situation! Thankfully, there are also more down-to-earth examples about framing. For example, suppose you are looking for some new dinnerware to buy. Visiting a flea market, you find a nice set of 8 dinner plates, 8 soup bowls and 8 dessert plates. You consider that the set is worth about 32 dollars.

As you’re just about to close the sale, the owner of the dinnerware suddenly remembers that “Oh! I just remembered! I also have some tea cups and saucers for the set!”. She adds 8 cups and 8 saucers to the set. Inspecting them, you notice that 2 of the cups and seven of the saucers are broken. How much are you willing to pay now?

Now, rationally, the set if of course worth more: after all, you get an intact saucer and 7 teacups on top of what you had before. At least it cannot be worth less – you could just throw away the additional pieces (let’s assume no costs are imposed on you by getting or disposing the broken pieces).

In fact, what happened in the experiment in Hsee (1998) was the following. Those who did joint evaluation, ie. they saw both sets (with and without broken pieces) reasoned just as we did above. The set including broken items was worth a little more. In contrast, those doing separate evaluation, ie. seeing only one of the sets, considered the second set to be worth less! In their mind, they compared it to a completely intact set, and thinking “oh, but this has broken items”. Those seeing the smaller, but completely intact set, reasoned “ah, it’s all intact and therefore good”. So a different frame generated a different evaluation of the intact pieces’ worth!

You could argue that the separate evaluators were doing their best – they didn’t know about the option of a similar set with additional pieces. And of course, that is correct. However – and this is why framing is such a sneaky bias – real life consists mainly of separate evaluations. In a store you just get to see that item with some strategically chosen comparison items next to it. When evaluating a business project, you’re mostly stuck with the description that the manager offers.

The only advice I can give about framing is that awareness matters. For example, I’ve come across situations at work when someone is asking me to do a small thing, and I’m thinking if I ought to do it now, or perhaps later. What has helped me to think is recognizing that the simple now/later is just one decisions frame. Often, I felt it’s better to back up to a wider frame and ask myself what I should be focusing in the first place. Sometimes, it turns out that I ought to do something that’s much more vital than the request. And on other occasions, when there are no other critical tasks, it’s perhaps just better to get it done right away.

So, even if I’m repeating myself a bit from last week, it’s a good idea to think about the alternatives at hand – and then question them. Are these really the alternatives? Is there a wider frame with other options? And is the description of the alternatives the only and the most relevant one?

So life is not exatly “What You See is What You Get”. It’s more exactly “What You See is What You Think You’re Getting”. Reminds me of this movie (and notice that Neo didn’t really reflect much on the frame he was given):