Month: December 2020

The Necessity of Paternalistic of Choice Architects

The Necessity of Paternalistic Choice Architects

Posted on by jabittan
One of my favorite experiments to think about is a fabled study about people and jam. In an experiment, people at a store were able to sample jam. In one situation, there were only a few jams to sample, and in the other situation there was a huge selection of jams. Shoppers could try them all before making a purchase. The natural expectation (at least for me) is to assume that those who get to try more jams will be more happy with their final selection. After all, they have more jams to try and are more likely to find a jam that best suited their taste preferences. The results, however, suggest that people who only had a few jams to sample more happy with their final jam choice than the people with a bunch of jams to try.

 

This experiment reveals something interesting about how our mind works. Unlimited freedom and choice means that we are never truly satisfied with the decisions we make. We will always have a lingering doubt, and we will live with the regret of possibly making the wrong choice. The more options we have, the more likely we will feel as though we may have made the wrong decision. We might feel compelled to go beyond the standard default choice, selecting against a strawberry to go with huckleberry, even though we know we would have been perfectly content getting our regular strawberry jam.

 

The results of the jam experiment have important implications for choice architects. A choice architect is anyone who is in a position to organize, design, shape, administer, or deliver a choice to another person. Parents are choice architects when they give their children different options for toys, sports, or how to generally spend their time and attention. Your human resources benefits manager is a choice architect when they determine which health care plan types will be offered to employees. Very few of our decisions are truly free from a choice architect of one sort.

 

These choice architects have important decisions to make. In the book Nudge, authors Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler make an argument for libertarian paternalism, the idea that choice architects can nudge people into making the decisions that will be best for them. They write, “The paternalistic aspect lies in the claim that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better.” It can seem naïve and elitist to believe that  one person can make such decisions for another person, but in reality, it is imperative that people believe and act as if it is possible, and the jam experience helps show why this is necessary.

 

None of us know exactly how much each person needs to save for retirement, which health insurance plan will truly be the best possible plan for ourselves or someone else, or which jam is really going to be the one for someone else. But we can generally identify the right direction in each choice for most people. We know people typically don’t save as much for retirement as they should, so defaulting them into a retirement savings plan at 8% is better than defaulting them into no retirement savings plan or a plan that sets aside 3% of their paycheck. Young and healthy people may not believe they need health insurance, but we can auto enroll them into a standard high deductible plan if they don’t actively make a choice for themselves, ensuring they have some type of coverage in the case of a car crash or ski accident. We know most people eat jam with toast or maybe on pancakes, so most people probably aren’t that interested in purchasing a jalapeno jam during their typical weekend grocery store trip. The strawberry can stay at eye level while the jalapeno jam can stay on the top shelf and maybe get a temporary end-cap spot for the holidays.

 

The jam study also shows that people don’t want to be presented with too many options. They will have trouble making a choice and won’t be satisfied with their final decision. Narrowing the range of choices can help people better manage their decisions, and can help ensure they don’t select a plan that is wildly off course for their best interest. This is a basic first step for a choice architect, and reveals the value that choice architects can provide with only a minimal level of paternalistic interference. Choice architects can take things a step further, as Sunstein and Thaler encourage throughout Nudge, but taking a step backward, eliminating the paternalism in choice architecture, doesn’t encourage flourishing by maximizing freedom of choice, it creates paralysis, doubt, and too many options for a person to reasonably consider, especially when dealing with topics more complex than jam.
Paternalistic Choice Architects

Paternalistic Choice Architects

Posted on by jabittan
The idea of paternalism in the United States is full of contradictions, challenges, and conflicting opinions. Many people in the country don’t want to be told what to do by anyone, and don’t want to appear as though they are accepting paternalistic messages or nudges. Some people fully buy into the idea of paternalism, looking for prescribed rules and ways of living. And most of us have a mixture of people we view as leaders and role models, from whom we expect paternalistic messages.

 

In the book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein write, “In our understanding, a policy is paternalistic if it tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves” [emphasis in original]. This is the definition I am working with for paternalism. The idea is that someone else can know what is best for us, even if we don’t see it ourselves.

 

I believe that a lot of conflict in the United States today stems from the people and authority figures we are willing to accept paternalistic messages from. Some people in the United States, I include myself in this group, will accept paternalistic messages from university professors, while others will reject their messages. Leaders who we will accept messages from can be religious leaders, community elders, parents, successful business people, or even celebrities. For all of us, there is a set of people that we look to for guidance and advice. A set of people that we believe knows what might be best for us. The fact that our set of leaders can be very different and in some instances be completely discredited by others can lead to a lot of friction across our populace.

 

Nevertheless, what all these figures have in common is that they all can be in a position to be a choice architect. As Thaler and Sunstein write, “A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.” Business leaders shape the decision context for people’s healthcare, retirement savings, and many other daily choices. Religious leaders can shape the way people think about charitable giving and volunteering. Community leaders can influence the same choices and university professors can influence the way people think about certain situations. In all of these contexts, the way that choices are framed, the choices that are presented as viable options, and how people understand their agency can be influenced by a choice architect.

 

By nature then, choice architects are paternalistic. They are in charge of the form you use to sign up for healthcare, the range of volunteer and charitable activities that are available to you for consideration, and the responses that are considered appropriate for you when thinking about politics, society, and individual behaviors. Someone else presents you with options and decisions they believe are best for you.

 

Choice architects are very important because the way they frame a choice or decision can greatly influence the behaviors of many people. Presumably, choice architects want to maximize the good outcomes that arise from the choices they shape. This means that how they structure decisions, what they consider viable alternatives, and how they build decision frameworks can have huge consequences for what people actually do. A good health benefits sign-up form can influence whether people select a healthcare plan that actually fits their needs. A good sense of where volunteering can do the most good can drive a pastor or community leader to engage their followers in a meaningful way, and a university professor who can frame thoughts and decisions in a meaningful direction can help people think about problems in new and ways. Of course, in each setting, the choice architect could be wrong, and could mislead people, could make an error that hurts people financially, leads to wasted time, or frustrates people. It may be paternalistic to think that a choice architect knows what is best and can guide people toward what is best for them, but the alternative, having the choice architect pull back and not accept this paternalistic responsibility, can have even more serious consequences.
Can We Avoid Cognitive Errors?

Can We Avoid Cognitive Errors?

Posted on by jabittan
Daniel Kahneman is not very hopeful when it comes to our ability to avoid cognitive errors. Toward the end of his book Thinking Fast and Slow, a book all about cognitive errors, predictable biases, and situations in which we can recognize such biases and thinking errors, Kahneman isn’t so sure there is much we can actually do in our lives to improve our thinking.

 

Regarding his own thinking, Kahneman writes, “little can be achieved without considerable effort. As I know from experience, System 1 is not readily educable. Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.”

 

Kahneman’s book is fantastic in part because of his humility. It would be easy to take a book on illusions, cognitive errors, biases, and predictable fallacies and use it to show how much smarter you are than everyone else who makes such thinking mistakes. However, Kahneman uses his own real life examples throughout the book to show how common and easy it is to fall into ways of thinking that don’t actually reflect reality. What is unfortunate though, is how hard it is to actually take what you learn from the book and apply it to your own life. If the author himself can hardly improve his own thinking, then those of us who read the book likely won’t make big changes in our thinking either.

 

“The upshot is that it is much easier to identify a minefield when you observe others wandering into it than when you are about to do so. Observers are less cognitively busy and more open to information than actors,” Kahneman continues. While we might not be able to improve our thinking simply by knowing about cognitive errors and being aware of predictable biases, we can at least recognize them in others. This can help us be more thoughtful when we critique or gossip about others (something we all do even if we claim we don’t).

 

Beyond improving the way we gossip or judge others, Kahneman’s research and his book are incredibly valuable for anyone who is in a design focused role. If you are creating a layout for a webpage, a seating arrangement at a restaurant, or the standard operating procedures for a company, you have an opportunity to design and develop a process and flow that takes cognitive errors and predictable biases into account. Because it is easier to observe others making mistakes than to observe those mistakes in ourselves, we can watch for situations where people are led astray, and help get them back on course. We can develop systems and structures that take our biases and cognitive errors into account, and minimize the damage they may do. We can set the world up to help guide us in a reasonable way through our cognitive errors and biases, but only if we know what to look for.
Quick Heuristics

Quick Heuristics

Posted on by jabittan
I really like the idea of heuristics. I have always thought of heuristics as short-cuts for problem solving or rules of thumb to apply to given situations to ease cognitive demand. We live in an incredibly complex world and the nature of reality cannot be deduced just by observing the world around us. For the world to get to the point where I can drink an espresso while listing to music streamed across the internet as I write a blog post, humanity collectively had to make discoveries involving microscopes, electromagnetism, and electricity, none of which were easily observable or intuitively understandable to our human ancestors.

 

To cope with a complex world and a limited ability to explore and understand that world, humans thrived through the use of heuristics. When faced with difficult problems and decisions, we substitute approximate but not exact answers. We can make a category judgement and reduce the number of decisions we have to make, taking a generalized path that will usually turn out well. Heuristics help us cope with the overwhelming complexity of the world, but they are not perfect, and they simplify the world according to the information we can observe and readily take in.

 

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes, “the heuristic answer is not necessarily simpler or more frugal than the original question – it is only more accessible, computed more quickly and easily. The heuristic answers are not random, and they are often approximately correct. And sometimes they are quite wrong.”

 

Heuristics are quick, which is important if you are foraging and hear a dangerous sound, if you need to pick a quick place for shelter as a storm approaches, or if you have to make quick decisions about how to behave in a small tribal group. The more fluidly and quicker a heuristic comes to mind, the more natural it will feel and the stronger people will grasp it, even if it is not true. Stories and myths contain relatable elements and extend common experiences to complex problems like how to govern an empire, understanding why storms occur, and guiding us as to how we should organize an economy. Heuristics give us short-cuts to understanding these complexities, but they are biased toward our accessible world and experiences, which means they only approximate reality, and cannot fully and accurately answer our questions. While they can get some concepts more or less correct and give us good approaches to life in general, they can also be very wrong with serious consequences for many people over many generations.
Should We Assume Rationality?

Should We Assume Rationality?

Posted on by jabittan
The world is a complex place and people have to make a lot of decisions within that complexity. Whether we are deliberate about it or not, we create and manage systems and structures for navigating the complexity and framing the decisions we make. However, each of us operate from different perspectives. We make decisions that seem reasonable and rational from our individual point of view, but from the outside may seem irrational. The question is, should we assume rationality in ourselves and others? Should we think that we and other people are behaving irrationally when our choices seem to go against our own interests or should we assume that people have a good reason to do what they do?

 

This is a current debate and challenge in the world of economics and has been a long standing and historical debate in the world of politics. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman seems to take the stance that people are acting rationally, at least from their own point of view. He writes, “when we observe people acting in ways that seem odd, we should first examine the possibility that they have a good reason to do what they do.”

 

Rational decision-making involves understanding a lot of risk. It involves processing lots of data points, having full knowledge of our choices and the potential outcomes we might face, as well as thinking through the short and long-term consequences of our actions. Kahneman might argue, it would seem after reading his book, that truly rational thinking is beyond what our brains are ordinarily capable of managing. But to him, this doesn’t mean that people cannot still make rational choices and do what is in their best interests. When we see behaviors that seem odd, it is possible that the choices other people have made are still rational, but just require a different perspective.

 

The way people get to rationality, Thinking Fast and Slow suggests, is through heuristics that create shortcuts to decision-making and eliminate data that is more or less just noise. Markets can be thought of as heuristics in this way, allowing people to aggregate decisions and make choices with an invisible hand directing them toward rationality. So when we see people who seem to be acting obviously irrationally or opposed to their self-interest, we should ask whether they are making choices within an entirely different marketplace. What seems like odd behavior from the outside might be savvy signaling to a group we are not part of, might be a short term indulgence that will stand out to the remembering self in the long run, and might make sense if we can change the perspective through which we judge another person.

 

Kahneman shows that we can predict biases and patterns of thought in ourselves and others, but still, we don’t know exactly what heuristics and thinking structures are involved in other people’s decision-making. A charitable way to look at people is to assume their decisions are rational from where they stand and in line with the goals they hold, even if the choices they make do not appear to be rational to us from the outside.

 

Personally, I am on the side that doubts human rationality. While it is useful, empathetic, and humanizing to assume rationality, I think it can be a mistake, especially if we go too far in accepting the perspective of others as justification for their acts. I think that there are simply too many variables and too much information for us to truly make rational decisions or to fully understand the choices of others. My thinking is influenced by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson who argue in The Elephant in the Brain, that we act on pure self-interest to a greater extent than we would ever admit, and we hide our self-interested behaviors and decisions from everyone, including ourselves.

 

At the same time, I do believe that we can set up systems, structures, and institutions that can help us make more rational decisions. Sunstein and Thaler, in Nudge, clearly show that markets can work and that people can be rational, but often need proper incentives and easy choice structures that encourage to encourage better choices. Gigerenzer in Risk Savvy ends up at a similar place, showing that we can get ahead of the brain’s heuristics and biases to produce rational thought. Creating the right frames, offering the right visual aids, and helping the brain focus on the relevant information can lead to rational thought, but nevertheless, as Kahneman shows, our thinking can still be hijacked and derailed, leading to choices that feel rational from the inside, but appear to violate what would be in our best interest when our decisions are stacked and combined over time. Ultimately, the greatest power in assuming rationality in others is that it helps us understand multiple perspectives, and might help us understand what nudges might help people change their behaviors and decisions to be more rational.
Biased toward periods of short, intense joy

Biased Toward Periods of Short, Intense Joy

Posted on by jabittan
In Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman writes, “The rules that govern the evaluation of the past are poor guides for decision making, because time does matter. The central fact of our existence is that time is the ultimate finite resource, but the remembering self ignores that reality. The neglect of duration combined with the peak-end rule causes a bias that favors a short period of intense joy over a long period of moderate happiness.”

 

When we think back on a vacation, we remember the beautiful waterfall that we saw, but we forget just how long and awful the drive and steep hike to the waterfall was. When we think about the work we want to do, we remember the highlights of any job experience, and we forget the hours of drudgery that may have gone with the job. We forget time when we think back on what has been positive and what has been negative in our lives, and this gives us a false sense of happiness and a false sense of what we actually enjoy, leading us to make biased decisions for the future.

 

There is research which shows that lengthy commutes and time spent in isolation are among the things that make us the most depressed and least happy. However, because of duration neglect, we don’t remember just how awful these things make us feel when we think about taking a new job or moving to a new house that is relatively far away from friends, work, and family. We put ourselves in situations that make us unhappy because they have the potential to bring us short bursts of joy that will stand out in our memory.

 

I think it is very troubling that a moderate level of happiness will become our background and will fade in our memories. The experiencing self can be quite content moment to moment, but the remembering self will seek out periods of intense joy, even at great costs to the experiencing self. This disconnect can lead people to behaviors and situations that seem like obvious miscalculations from the outside.

 

This seems to be part of what is at play when a man who is in a happy but unexciting marriage has an affair. I recognize that there are many factors at play, but part of the decision-making process can probably be explained by the brain seeking a short period of intense joy via an affair over the continued moderate happiness of a stable but somewhat boring marriage.

 

Our tendency toward short periods of intense joy is also probably a major factor in our decisions to make many of the purchases that we make. The instant we buy something we are happy, but ahead of our purchase we don’t think about all the time we have to invest in the the thing we buy, whether it is a car that needs maintenance, Christmas lights and decorations that we have to put up, take down, and box up for storage, or a fish tank that is going to require ongoing cleaning and maintenance on a regular basis.  Our decision making is influenced by how we remember the past, and those memories forget time. They also discount moderate happiness in favor of intense joy, even if the intense joy is fleeting and doesn’t actually contribute to a happy and meaningful life as much as our base level of moderate happiness would.
The Remembering Self and Time - Joe Abittan

The Remembering Self and Time

Posted on by jabittan
Time, as we have known it, has only been with human beings for a small slice of human history. The story of time zones is fascinating, and really began once rail roads connected the United States. Before we had a standardized system for operating within time, human lives were ruled by the cycle of the sun and the seasons, not by the hands of a watch. This is important because it suggests that the time bounds we put on our lives, the hours of our schedules and work days, and the way we think about the time duration of meetings, movies, a good night’s sleep, and flights is not something our species truly evolved to operate within.

 

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shows one of the consequences of human history being out of sync with modern time. “The mind,” he writes, “is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.”

 

I would argue that this makes sense and should be expected. Before we worked set schedules defined by the clock, before we could synchronize the start of a football game with TV broadcasts across the world, and before we all needed to be at the same place at precisely the right time to catch a departing train, time wasn’t very important. It was easy to tie time with sunrise, sunset, or mid-day compared to a 3:15 departure or a 7:05 kick-off. The passage of time also didn’t matter that much. The difference between being 64 and 65 years old wasn’t a big deal for humans that didn’t receive retirement benefits and social security payments. We did not evolve to live in a world where every minute of every day was tightly controlled by time and where the passage of time was tied so specifically to events in our lives.

 

For me, and I think for Daniel Kahneman, this may explain why we see some of the cognitive errors we make when we remember events from our past. Time wasn’t as important of a factor for ancient humans as story telling was. Kahneman continues,

 

“The remembering self, as I have described it, also tells stories and makes choices, and neither the stories nor the choices properly represent time. In storytelling mode, an episode is represented by a few critical moments, especially the beginning, the peak, and the end. Duration is neglected.”

 

When we think back on our lives, on moments that meant a lot to us, on times we want to relive, or on experiences we want to avoid in the future, we remember the salient details. We don’t necessarily remember how long everything lasted. My high school basketball days are not remembered by the hours spent running UCLAs, by the number of Saturdays I had to be up early for 8 a.m. practices, or by the hours spent in drills. My memories are made up of a few standout plays, games, and memorable team moments. The same is true for my college undergrad memories, the half-marathons I have raced, and my memories from previous homes I have lived in.

 

When we think about our lives we are not good at thinking about the passage of time, about how long we spent working on something, how long we had to endure difficulties, or how long the best parts of our lives lasted. We live with snapshots that can represent entire years or decades. Our remembering self drops the less meaningful parts of experiences from our memories, and holds onto the start, the end, and the best or worst moments from an experience. It distorts our understanding of our own history, and creates memories devoid of a sense of time or duration.

 

I think about this a lot because our minds and our memories are the things that drive how we behave and how we understand the present moment. However, duration neglect helps us see that reality of our lives is shaped by unreality. We are influenced by cognitive errors and biases, by poor memories, and distortions of time and experience. It is important to recognize how faulty our thinking can be, so we can develop systems, structures, and ways of thinking that don’t assume we are always correct, but help guide us toward better and more realistic ways of understanding the world.
The Focusing Illusion Continued

The Focusing Illusion Continued

Posted on by jabittan
I find the focusing illusion as described by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow to be fascinating because it reveals how strange our actual thinking is. I am constantly baffled by the way that our brains continuously and predictably makes mistakes. The way we think about, interpret, and understand the world is not based on an objective reality, but is instead based on what our brain happens to be focused on at any given time. As Kahneman writes, what you see is all there is, and the focusing illusion is a product of our brain’s limited ability to take in information combined with the brain’s tendency to substitute difficult and complex questions for more simple questions.

 

In the book, Kahneman asks us to think about the overall happiness of someone who recently moved from Ohio to California and also asks us to think about the amount of time that paraplegics spend in a bad mood. In both situations, we make a substitution. We know that people’s overall happiness and general moods are comprised of a huge number of factors, but when we think about the two situations, we focus in on a couple of simple ideas.

 

We assume the person from Ohio is happier in California because the weather in California is always perfect while Ohio experiences cold winters. The economic prospects in California might be better than Ohio, and there are more movie stars and surfing opportunities. Without knowing anything about the person, we probably assume the California move made them happier overall (especially given the additional context and priming based on the weather and jobs prospects that Kahneman presents in the example in his book).

 

For our assumptions about the paraplegic, we likely go the other way with our thoughts. We think about how we would feel if we were in an accident and lost the use of our legs or arms. We assume their life must be miserable, and that they spend much of their day in a bad mood. We don’t make a complex consideration of the individual’s life or ask more information about them, we just make an assumption based on limited information by substituting in the question, “How would I feel if I became paralyzed.” Of course, people who are paralyzed or lose the function of part of their body are still capable of a full range of human emotions, and might still find happiness in their lives in many areas.

 

Kahneman writes, “The focusing illusion can cause people to be wrong about their present state of well-being as well as about the happiness of others, and about their own happiness in the future.”

 

We often say that it is important that we know ourselves and that we be true to ourselves if we want to live healthy and successful lives. But research throughout Thinking Fast and Slow shows us how hard it can be. After reading Kahneman’s book, learning about Nudges from Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, and learning how poorly we process risk and chance from Gerd Gigerenzer, I constantly doubt how much I can really know about myself, about others, or really about anything. I am frustrated when people act on intuition, sure of themselves and their ideas in complex areas such as economics, healthcare, or education. I am dismayed by advertisements, religions, and political parties that encourage us to act tribally and to trust our instincts and intuitions. It is fascinating that we can be so wrong about something as personal as our own happiness. It is fascinating that we can be so biased in our thinking and judgement, and that we can make conclusions and assumptions about ourselves and others with limited information and not even notice how poorly our thought processes are. I love thinking about and learning about the biases and cognitive errors of our mind, and it makes me pause when I am sure of myself and when I think that I am clearly right and others are wrong. After all, if what you see is all there is, then your opinions, ideas, and beliefs are almost certainly inadequate to actually describe the reality you inhabit.
Focusing Illusion

Focusing Illusion

Posted on by jabittan
I wrote earlier about an experiment that Daniel Kahneman discusses in his book Thinking Fast and Slow where college students were asked to evaluate their life and asked to count the number of dates they had been on in the last month. When the question about dates came after the question about happiness, there was no correlation between the two answers. However, when the question about dating came before the question about happiness, those who had few dates tended to rank their overall happiness lower. Later in the book, Kahneman expands on ideas related to this finding and describes the focusing illusion.

 

Kahneman sums up the focusing illusion by writing, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

 

Our brains are limited. They can only hold so much information at one time. What you see is all there is, meaning that the things you directly observe become the reality that your mind works within. We use heuristics, make assumptions, and our thoughts are subject to biases. As a result, the things we pay attention to and think about become the center of our lives. They become more important in our minds than they really should be.

 

The dating and happiness questions help us see the machinery of the mind and help us understand how the brain works. The inner machinery of the mind really does overweight things that we happen to be thinking about. Having more or fewer dates is an important worry for college students, but making students think about their dating life before or after a question about overall happiness shouldn’t really influence the degree to which students rate their overall happiness. However, if the mind is forced to think about dating, it becomes a more important factor in the mind and begins to blend into other considerations.

 

I have seen this happen in my own life. Objectively, I have had a great life. I was raised by a great family in a safe neighborhood in the United States. But at times I was certainly one of those college students whose subjective rating of life was unreasonably influenced by things that shouldn’t have mattered very much. Whether it was not having enough dates, watching the University’s basketball team lose, or having an angry customer at the restaurant I worked at, I can look back and recognize times when I had a negative outlook on life that stemmed from small negative events that I focused on too deeply. I still do this today, but being aware of the focusing illusion and understanding that what you see is all there is has helped me to avoid focusing too deeply and giving too much important to events or opinions that shouldn’t dominate my outlook on life.
Can We Improve Time Usage by focusing on the U-Index? Joe Abittan

Can We Improve Time Usage?

Posted on by jabittan
I believe that we can come together as a society and make decisions that will help improve the world we live in. I believe we can cooperate, we can improve systems and structures, and we can change norms, customs, and procedures to help make the world a better place to live in. I believe we can reduce the U-index in each of our lives.

 

Daniel Kahneman describes the U-index, a term his research team coined, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow by writing, “We called the percentage of time that an individual spends in an unpleasant state the U-index. For example, an individual who spent 4 hours of a 16-hour waking day in an unpleasant state would have a U-index of 25%.”

 

To a certain extent, the U-index is a measure of how well people use their time. Some of us are great at maximizing our waking hours and filling our time with meaningful and enjoyable activities. Some of us are not great at it, and some of us have serious limitations that prevent us from being able to use our time in a way that would maximize our individual U-index. “The use of time is one of the areas of life over which people have some control,” Kahneman writes, but still, there are larger structural factors that shape how we can use our time. Long commutes, limited child care, poor service quality in the public and private sectors, and limited spaces for socialization and exercise can all contribute to the amount of time people spend in unpleasant states, and are largely beyond the control of a single individual. Investments in these spaces will help improve the U-index for the people who get trapped by them. They are also areas where we can make public investments, come together as communities to improve the use of public space, and pool resources to develop new technologies that can reduce travel time, create more responsive and quicker services, and reduce the effort spent dealing with unpleasant people and spaces.

 

For things we can control, Kahneman has a recommendation, “The feelings associated with different activities suggest that another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms of leisure, including socializing and exercise.”

 

Watching TV, listening to podcasts, or reading a book can be great leisure, but we are social animals, and we need some degree of interaction with others. Unfortunately, we have become more dependent on TV and other fairly antisocial and isolating forms of entertainment. As each of us retreats into our homes (during non COVID times of course) for entertainment and leisure rather than spending time in our community with others, we reduce the opportunities for and the value of social activities. The more we get out and connect, the better our lives will be collectively.

 

And that is why I believe it is important that we believe that we can make the world a better place. There is an element of personal responsibility in making better use of our time and improving our U-index through our own choices and actions. Simultaneously, there is a social and public need for investment and collective action to help us make those choices which are more active and engaging. We won’t want to get out and take part in social activities if we have a long and difficult commute. If we can’t live in the city or in an interesting place with opportunities to interact with others because we can’t afford to live close by, then we won’t make the effort to get involved. If we don’t have safe, clean, and inviting parks and public spaces where we can engage with others, if businesses and public agencies can’t provide spaces with adequate and friendly services, then we won’t want to connect with the world. Kahneman suggest that even small reductions of say 1% to our societal U-index would be hugely impactful. Anything we can do to help reduce the time people spend in unpleasant states will mean fewer suicides, less depression and anger, and fewer negative interactions between people. Making investments to speed up travel, free people from menial tasks and chores, and make public spaces more inviting will help us connect and be happier as an entire society. At that point, it becomes easier to chose active rather than passive leisure and to be more involved rather than to retreat into our homes and Netflix accounts.