Tag: decision making

Unconscious Rules of Thumb

Unconscious Rules of Thumb

Posted on by jabittan
Some of the decisions that I make are based on thorough calculations, analysis, evaluation of available options, and deliberate considerations of costs and benefits. When I am planning my workout routine, I think hard about how my legs have been feeling and what distance, elevation, and pace is reasonable for my upcoming workouts. I think about how early I need to be out the door for a certain distance, and whether I can run someplace new to mix things up. I’ll map out routes, look at my training log for the last few weeks, and try putting together a plan that maximizes my enjoyment, physical health, and fitness given time constraints.

 

However, outside of running, most of my decisions are generally based on rules of thumb and don’t receive the same level of attention as my running plans. I budget every two weeks around payday, but even when budgeting, I mostly rely on rules of thumb. There is a certain amount I like to keep in my checking account just in case I forgot a bill or have something pop-up last minute. Its not a deliberate calculation, it is more of a gut feeling. The same goes for how much money I set aside for free spending or if I feel that it is finally time to get that thing I have had my eye on for a while. My budget is probably more important than my running routine, but I actually spend more time rationally developing a running plan than I spend budgeting. The same goes for house and vehicle maintenance, spending time with friends and family, and choosing what to eat on the days we plan to do take-out.

 

The budget example is interesting because I am consciously and deliberately using rules of thumb to determine how my wife and I will use our money. I set aside a certain amount for gas without going to each vehicle and checking whether we are going to need to fill up soon. I am aware of the rules of thumb, and they are literally built into my spreadsheet where I sometimes ask if I should deviate, but usually decide to stick to them.

 

I also recognize that I have many unconscious rules of thumb. In his book Risky Savvy, Gerd Gigerenzer writes the following about unconscious rules of thumb:

 

“Every rule of thumb I am aware of can be used consciously and unconsciously. If it is used unconsciously, the resulting judgment is called intuitive. An intuition, or gut feeling, is a judgment:
  1. that appears quickly in consciousness,
  2. whose underlying reasons we are not fully aware of, yet
  3. is strong enough to act upon.”
I have lots of intuitive judgements that I often don’t think about in the moment, but only realize when I reflect back on how I do something. When I am driving down the freeway, cooking, or writing a blog post, many of my decisions flow naturally and quickly. In the moment the decisions seem obvious, and I don’t have to think too deliberately about my action and why I am making a specific decision. But if I were asked to explain why I made a decision, I would have a hard time finding exact reasons for my choices. I don’t know exactly how I know to change lanes at a certain point on the freeway, but I know I can often anticipate points where traffic will slow down, and where I might be better off in another lane. I can’t tell you why I chose to add the marsala wine to the mushrooms at the precise moment that I did. I also couldn’t explain why I chose to present a certain quote right at the beginning of a post rather than in the middle. My answer for all of these situations would simply be that it felt right.

 

We use unconscious rules of thumb like these all the time, but we don’t often notice when we do. When we are budgeting we might recognize our rules of thumb and be able to explain them, but our unconscious rules of thumb are harder to identify and explain. Nevertheless, they still have major impacts in our lives. Simply because we don’t notice them and can’t explain them doesn’t mean they don’t shape a lot of our decisions and don’t matter. The intuitions we have can be powerful and helpful, but they could also be wrong (maybe all this time I’ve been overcooking the mushrooms and should add the wine sooner!). Because these intuitions are unconscious, we don’t deliberately question them, unless something calls them up to the conscious level. The feedback we get is probably indirect, meaning that we won’t consciously tie our outcomes the to the unconscious rules of thumb that got us to them.

 

I am fascinated by things like unconscious rules of thumb because they reveal how little we actually control in our lives. We are the ones who act on these unconscious rules of thumb, but in a sense, we are not really doing anything at all. We are making decisions based on factors we don’t understand and might not be aware of. We have agency by being the one with the intuition, but we also lack agency by not being fully conscious of the how and why behind our own decisions. This should make us question ourselves and choices more than we typically do.
Probability is Multifaceted

Probability is Multifaceted

Posted on by jabittan
For five years my wife and I lived in a house that was at the base of the lee side of a small mountain range in Northern Nevada. When a storm would come through the area it would have to make it over a couple of small mountain ranges and valleys before getting to our house, and as a result we experienced less precipitation at our house than most people in the Reno/Sparks area. Now my wife and I live in a house higher up on a different mountain that is more in the direct path of storms coming from the west. We receive snow at our house while my parents and family lower in the valley barely get any wind. At both houses we have learned to adjust our expectations for precipitation relative to the probabilities reported by weather stations which reference the airport at the valley floor. Our experiences with rain and snow at our two places is a useful demonstration that probability (in this case the probability of precipitation) is multifaceted – that multiple factors  play a role in the probability of a given event at a given place and time.

 

In his book Risk Savvy, Gerd Gigerenzer writes, “Probability is not one of a kind; it was born with three faces: frequency, physical design, and degrees of belief.” Gigerenzer explains that frequency is about counting. To me, this is the most clearly understandable aspect of probability, and what we usually refer to when we discuss probability. On how many days does it usually rain in Reno each year? How frequently does a high school team from Northern Nevada win a state championship and how frequently does a team from Southern Nevada win a state championship? These types of questions simply require counting to give us a general probability of an event happening.

 

But probability is not just about counting and tallying events. Physical design plays a role as well. Our house on the lee side of a small mountain range was shielded from precipitation, so while it may have rained in the valley half a mile away, we didn’t get any precipitation. Conversely, our current home is in a position to get more precipitation than the rest of the region. In high school sports, fewer kids live in Reno/Sparks compared to the Las Vegas region, so in terms of physical design, state championships are likely to be more common for high schools in Southern Nevada. Additionally, there may be differences in the density of students at each school, meaning the North could have more schools per students than the south, also influencing the probability of a north or south school winning. Probability, Gigerenzer explains, can be impacted by the physical design of systems, potentially making the statistics and chance more complicated to understand.

 

Finally, degrees of belief play a role in how we comprehend probability. Gigerenzer states that degrees of belief include experience and personal impression which are very subjective. Trusting two eye witnesses, Gigerenzer explains, rather than two people who heard about an event from someone else can increase our perception that the probability of an unlikely story is accurate. Degrees of belief can also be seen in my experiences with rain and our two houses. I learned to discount the probability of rain at our first house and to increase my expectation of rain at our new house. If the meteorologist said there was a low chance of rain when we lived on the sheltered side of a hill, then I didn’t worry much about storm forecasts. At our new house, however, if there is a chance of precipitation and storm coming from the west, I will certainly go remove anything from the yard that I don’t want to get wet, because I believe the chance that our specific neighborhood will see rain is higher than what the meteorologist predicted.

 

Probability and how we understand it and consequentially make decisions  is complex, and Gigerenzer’s explanation of the multiple facets of probability helps us better understand the complexity. Simply tallying outcomes and predicting into the future often isn’t enough for us to truly have a good sense of the probability of a given outcome. We have to think about physical design, and we have to think about the personal experiences and subjective opinions that form the probabilities that people develop and express. Understanding probability requires that we hold a lot of information in our head at one time, something humans are not great at doing, but that we can do better when we have better strategies for understanding complexity.
Navigating Uncertainty with Nudges

Navigating Uncertainty with Nudges

Posted on by jabittan
In Risk Savvy Gerd Gigerenzer makes a distinction between known risks and uncertainty. In a foot note for a figure, he writes, “In everyday language, we make a distinction between certainty and risk, but the terms risk and uncertainty are used mostly as synonyms. They aren’t. In a world of known risks, everything, including the probabilities, is known for certain. Here statistical thinking and logic are sufficient to make good decisions. In an uncertain world, not everything is known, and one cannot calculate the best option. Here, good rules of thumb and intuition are also required.” Gigerenzer’s distinction between risk and uncertainty is important. He demonstrates that people can manage decision-making when making risk based decisions, but that people need to rely on intuition and good judgement when dealing with uncertainty. One solution to improved judgement and intuition is to use nudges.

 

In the book Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler encourage choice architects to design systems and structures that will help individuals make the best decision in a given situation as defined by the chooser. Much of their argument is supported by research presented by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, where Kahneman demonstrates how predictable biases and cognitive errors can lead people to making decisions that they likely wouldn’t make if they had more clear information, had the ability to free themselves from irrelevant biases, and could improve their statistical thinking. Gigerenzer’s quote supports Sunstein and Thaler’s nudges by building on the research from Kahneman. Distinguishing between risk and uncertainty helps us understand when to use nudges, and how aggressive our nudges may need to be.

 

Gigerenzer uses casino slot machines as an example of risk and for examples of uncertainty uses stocks, romance, earthquakes, business, and health. When we are gambling, we can know the statistical chances that our bets will pay off and calculate optimal strategies (there is a reason the casino dealer stays on 17). We won’t know what the outcome will be ahead of time, but we can precisely define the risk. The same cannot be said for picking the right stocks, the right romantic partner, or when creating business, earthquake preparedness, or health plans. We may know the five year rate of return for a company’s stocks, the divorce rate in our state, the average frequency and strength of earthquakes in our region, and how old our grandfather lived to be, but we cannot use this information alone to calculate risk. We don’t know exactly what business trends will arise in the future, we don’t know for sure whether we have a genetic disease that will strike us (or our romantic partner) down sooner than expected, and we can’t say for sure that a 7.0 earthquake is or is not possible next month.

 

But nudges can help us in these decisions. We can use statistical information for business development and international stock returns to identify general rules of thumb when investing. We can listen to parents and elders and learn from their advice and mistakes when selecting a romantic partner, intuiting the traits that make a good (or bad) spouse. We can overengineer our bridges and skyscrapers by 10% to give us a little more assurance that they can survive a major and unexpected earthquake. Nudges are helpful because they can augment our gut instincts and help bring visualizations to the rules of thumb that we might utilize.

 

Expecting everyone’s individual intuition and heuristics to be up to the task of navigating uncertainty is likely to lead to many poor choices. But, if we help pool the statistical information available, provide guides, communicate rules of thumb that have panned out for many people, and structure choices in ways that help present this information, then people can likely make marginally better decisions. My suggestion in this post, is a nudge to use more nudges in moments of uncertainty. When certainty exists, or even when calculable risks exist, nudges may not be needed. However, once we get beyond calculable risk, where we must rely on judgement and intuition, nudges are important tools to help people navigate uncertainty and improve their decision making.
Asymmetric Paternalism

Asymmetric Paternalism

Posted on by jabittan
While writing about the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, I have primarily focused on an idea that the authors call Libertarian Paternalism. The idea is to structure choices and use nudges (slight incentives and structural approaches) to guide people toward making the best possible decision as judged by themselves. Maintaining free choice and the option to investigate or chose alternatives is an important piece of the concept, as is the belief that we will influence people’s decisions no matter what, so we should use that influence in a responsible way to help foster good decision-making.

 

But the authors also ask if it is reasonable to go a step beyond Libertarian Paternalism. Is it reasonable for choice architects, governments, and employers to go further than gentle nudges in decision situations? Are there situations where decision-making is too important to be left to the people, where paternalistic decision-making is actually best? Sunstein and Thaler present an introduction to Asymmetric Paternalism as one possible step beyond Libertarian Paternalism.

 

“A good approach to thinking about these problems has been proposed by a collection of behavioral economists and lawyers under the rubric of Asymmetric Paternalism. Their guiding principle is that we should design policies that help the least sophisticated people in society while imposing the smallest possible costs on the most sophisticated.”

 

This approach is appealing in many ways, but also walks the line between elitism, the marginalization of entire segments of society, and maximizing good decision-making. I hate having to make lots of decisions regarding appropriate tax filings, I don’t want to have to make decisions on lots of household appliances, and I don’t really want to have to spend too much time figuring out exactly what maintenance schedule is the best for all of my cars. However, I do want to get into the weeds of my healthcare plan, I want to micromanage my exercise routine, and I want to select all the raw ingredients that go into the dinners and lunches that I cook. On some decisions that I make, I want to outsource my decision-making and I would often be happy with having someone else make a decision so that I don’t have to. But in other areas, I feel very sophisticated in my decision-making approach, and I want to have maximum choice and freedom. Asymmetric Paternalism seems like a good system for those of us who care deeply about some issues, are experts in some areas, and want to maintain full decision-making in the areas we care about, while exporting decision-making in other areas to other people.

 

Of course, prejudices, biases, and people’s self-interest can ruin this approach. What would happen if we allowed ourselves to deem entire groups of people as unworthy of making decisions for themselves by default? Could they ever recover and be able to exercise their freedom to chose in important areas like housing, retirement, and investment spaces? Would we be able to operate for long periods of time under a system of Asymmetric Paternalism without the system devolving due to our biases and prejudices? These are real fears, and while we might like to selectively trade off decision-making when it is convenient for us, we also have to fear that someone else will be making decisions for us that are self-serving for someone other than ourselves.

 

The point, according to Sunstein and Thaler, would be to maintain the freedom of decision-making for everyone, but to structure choices in a way where those with less interest and less ability to make the best decisions are guided more strongly toward what is likely the best option for them. However, we can see how this system of asymmetric paternalism would get out of control. How do we decide where the appropriate level is to draw the line between strong guidance and outright choosing for people? Would people voluntarily give up their ability to chose and overtime hand over too many decisions without an ability to get their decision authority back? Transparency in the process may help, but it might not be enough to make sure the system works.
Too Many Options - Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler - Joe Abittan

Too Many Options

Posted on by jabittan
Writing specifically about new employee enrollment in retirement savings plans, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book Nudge write, “One study finds that the more options in the plan, the lower the participation rates. This finding should not be surprising. With more options, the process becomes more confusing and difficult, and some people will refuse to chose at all.” The important lesson that Thaler and Sunstein present with this quote is that getting people to do things that they want to do and know is in their best interests is challenging, even when it shouldn’t be. Additionally, people have ideas of what they should be doing and have goals for where they want to be, but don’t often have a great sense of the best way to get there. When that is the case, such as saving enough for retirement, making the path simple is more important than ensuring that the path leads to the most optimal choice or maximizes the individual’s choices.

 

One size fits all approaches and solutions usually are not great. They typically get the job done, but usually don’t lead to the best outcomes for most people. This is true with health insurance plans, retirement savings accounts, and special event t-shirts. One size fits all health plans cover general health needs, but might not work well for someone who needs expensive asthma medicine. Generalized retirement savings accounts help people get started on the path to saving for retirement and ensure that people at least have something banked when they get to 65, but they often fall short and have minimal risk taking approaches that prevent losses, but limit growth. And unisex t-shirts fit everyone, but aren’t the most comfortable and certainly are not form fitting to match current fashion trends. However, despite their inadequacies, these examples are often good first steps in helping people make a decision and get started with a plan.

 

It would be great if every person could pick the perfect healthcare plan, could find the optimal investment strategy for retirement, and have perfectly tailored clothes for every special occasion, but it isn’t realistic everyone to make great choices in all of these situations. No one knows exactly what their healthcare demands will be for the upcoming year. Our risk tolerance and savings needs and abilities will change throughout our lifetime, and no one can mass produce special event t-shirts that are tailored to every participant. Information is lacking, preferences don’t stay the same, and resources are constrained.

 

Getting people (or products) started is the first step toward ensuring healthcare coverage, retirement savings, and having race-day t-shirts for a charity run. Given the constraints I mentioned above, the initial choices need to be simple. Presenting an individual with 20 healthcare plans is going to be confusing and frustrating. The same is true for retirement options, and people looking to coordinate clothing for a special event can’t spend the too much time arguing between thousands of combinatorial options for their shirts. Rather than making a selection, people risk dropping out if they face too many choices. When there are too many options, people become frustrated, and if they don’t walk away, might select the first option they see, making suboptimal choices.

 

A solution is to take a one size fits all approach that can be adjusted and customized at a later point. Getting people started with something simple and generalized can avoid the frustrating paralysis that presenting too many options can create. Helping people understand how to make changes and learn between selections will help people improve their decisions over time and better identify healthcare plans, retirement savings plans, and custom t-shirt options that match their needs, preferences, and constraints. It is possible to present people with a few options initially, and allow them to explore additional options later on if the initial options are not a good fit or if the individual wants to explore more nuanced and complex options.
Learning and Exploratory Nudges - Joe Abittan

Learning and Exploratory Nudges

Posted on by jabittan
So far, a lot of the nudges I have written about assume that there is a known best option for an individual and that a choice architect can help direct people toward that best option. In situations like retirements savings, healthcare benefits selection, and other complicated, structured, and somewhat formulaic choice scenarios, it is relatively easy to take a rational approach to use nudges to help people select an option that will be a good choice for them. But nudges don’t have to direct people toward an already known option. Nudges can be more exploratory in nature and directed toward learning.

 

In some situations, write Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their book Nudge, “it’s good to nudge people in directions that they might not have specifically chosen in advance. Structuring choice sometimes means helping people to learn, so they can later make better choices on their own.”

 

Helping people learn can be better than always trying to give people the right answer. Libertarian paternalism accepts that choice architects don’t know everything about another person’s preferences or self-interest, but assumes someone can generally know the right direction to point other people in. Using nudges to provide more feedback, encourage people to consider appropriate information, and help people better sort through their options can help people understand how to think and approach similar choices. When the goal of a choice architect is to maintain a maximal choice level while providing people with valuable information and alternatives, nudges that encourage learning are incredibly useful.

 

Additionally, nudges that encourage more exploration are helpful for people when it comes to things like listening to music or dining out. Nudges can direct people back toward things they already like, but they can also direct people toward new things that similar people like. Many algorithms on Amazon, music streaming services, and clothing subscription services work in these ways. While they are ultimately designed to keep you engaged or convince you to buy something else, they do employ exploratory nudges to help people find new likes. A company could continue suggesting you buy the same pair of shoes, but they might be able to get you to buy another pair if they show you one that other people also like. Helping people explore new genres of music, new authors, and new styles of clothes can provide real value to the individual, beyond the value to the company in convincing someone to buy something new. The individual still learns if they get feedback from their exploratory choices and gain new insight into finding new alternatives.
A Limitation on Nudges

A Limitation on Nudges

Posted on by jabittan
“Rare, difficult choices are good candidates for nudges,” write Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Throughout their book Nudge, Sunstein and Thaler try to encourage limitations on nudges. They acknowledge that anytime people are in a position to influence decision-making by determining how choices are designed and structured, they will be providing people with nudges, regardless as to whether their nudges are deliberate or inadvertent. However, the authors don’t encourage people to step beyond nudges and truly limit people’s choices or prevent them from making decisions, even if those decisions are ones the individual would deem bad for themselves.

 

Nudges are helpful in rare and difficult choices because we are likely to make mistakes in those areas. We don’t make large investment decisions on a regular basis, we only enroll in healthcare plans once a year (and usually we just let ourselves roll into the same plan as last year), and we hopefully never have to make major life altering medical decisions. When we don’t get immediate feedback on a decision, when we don’t have an opportunity to practice and improve decision making in certain contexts, then we are likely to make mistakes. We won’t use appropriate discount rates, we will be influenced by irrelevant factors, and we will not consider all of the necessary information when making our selection. Nudges can help overcome all of these factors.

 

But we don’t necessarily need direct nudges in every decision situation, and we don’t need people to go beyond nudges and actually limit choices in most of our decisions. Buffets can nudge us by placing salad at the front of the line, so that we load our empty plate with more salad and have less room to pile on the tri-tip at the end of the line. This can be a useful strategy for buffets to save money by encouraging people to eat cheap fillers and could be a useful strategy for school cafeterias to encourage more healthy eating. But placing tri-tip under a cover that requires that we press a lever with one hand and open the lid with a second hand is beyond a reasonable nudge. Sunstein and Thaler believe that nudges should be easy to avoid or bypass for those determined to make their own choices, even if it isn’t what is generally understood to be in their best interest. A limitation on nudges, in the authors view, is a good thing, and helps protect nudges for situations where they are truly helpful and meaningful.
The Time for Nudges

The Time for Nudges

Posted on by jabittan
One of the most common examples for why nudges should be used by governments, employers, parents, and grandparents is the example of using nudges to encourage financial savings, especially for retirement. People don’t save enough for retirement, and are often quick to spend their money before they even have it, leaving themselves financially vulnerable to job losses, car breakdowns, and severe weather events. Governments can offer tax breaks for savings, employers can default employees into retirement savings accounts at high levels, parents can teach children to save allowances, and grandparents can start long-term savings vehicles for young children and nudge them to use the money wisely at a reasonable age. What the retirement nudge examples all show, is the importance of thinking about time when considering nudges and behaviors.

 

In their book Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler write, “Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time.” Nudges, the authors explain, are incredibly valuable when time is an important factor. When our behaviors and actions provide small immediate rewards at the cost of larger later returns, then nudges can play a huge role.

 

Teaching children self-control, and encouraging them to show restraint and save their weekly allowance for a larger purchase that will last longer than some gum or candy does the same thing as helping employees contribute more than 5% of their paycheck to a retirement account. In the present moment it would be nice to have a dopamine hit from a candy bar, but a new Gameboy game is going to provide hours of entertainment after the candy bar is gone. Similarly, a lease on a new sports car might be affordable, but an earlier retirement, sending a kid to college without saddling them with debt, and surviving a costly MRI during an unemployment spell in an economic downturn is much more important than impressing the neighbors.

 

Self-control is easier when there is a short time period between our action the consequences we will face. If I know that yelling at someone on the phone while I’m in the presence of my boss could cost me my job, I’ll probably be able to hold back. But many of our self-control requirements have much longer time spans for the benefits or costs to become apparent. While it doesn’t feel like we lose anything by scrolling through Twitter for a few minutes after lunch each day, those minutes add up, and could be the difference between a promotion a year from now and missing out on a big break for career advancement.

 

Nudges are helpful because they can help us better understand costs, use better discount rates for the future, and make the difficult decisions that payoff in the long run.  This is why the retirement examples are so common when discussing nudges, because they are the precise examples of where our brains make cognitive errors that could harm us in the future, and they are spaces where small actions can help us overcome poor decision-making, impulsive behaviors, and short-term thinking to behave in ways we would chose if we were acting more rationally.
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.
The precautionary principle in governance

A Factor for Paralysis in Regulation & Legislation

Posted on by jabittan
A common complaint today in the United States is that nothing gets done. We are frustrated by political leaders who can’t pass important legislation. We dislike how slow local governments are to update infrastructure, adopt new technologies, and make improvements in the places we live. Gridlock has become the norm, and the actions that governments take seem to be too little too late.

 

But is this criticism really fair? Is the problem slow governments, ineffectual legislators, and inept public officials? Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow highlights a basic aspect of human psychology that might be one of the major contributing factors to the paralysis we see in governance today, and it has nothing to do with the quality of officials and legislators, but instead is all about the structures and systems of incentives that elected officials and policy actors respond to. The precautionary principle, a side effect of our general tendency toward loss aversion and our general stance against taboo tradeoffs drives our paralysis, and it is a logical response to the structure of many of our governing institutions.

 

Governments are necessary parts of human society, helping us establish rules for how we will live, interact, and make decisions collectively. Governments make investments, determine safety and efficacy standards, and help allocate resources across populations. In each of these functions of governance there is a possibility for error, a possibility for failure, and risk involved in the decisions. This is where the precautionary principle comes in. Kahneman writes,

 

“In the regulatory context, the precautionary principle imposes the entire burden of proving safety on anyone who undertakes actions that might harm people or the environment. Multiple international bodies have specified that the absence of scientific evidence of potential damage is not sufficient justification for taking risks. … the precautionary principle is costly, and when interpreted strictly it can be paralyzing.”

 

When risk is involved in decision-making processes, elected officials and public leaders are held responsible for any the bad outcomes that come to pass. There will always be a chance that a government investment fails, and no public official wants that failure to reflect poorly on their decision-making. There is always the risk that allocated resources could be misused, and it is often the official who approved the resource allocation (as well as the bad actor themselves) who faces consequences. When there is a deliberate decision to trade-off some level of safety or to accept an increase in risk in exchange for improved economic performance, faster traffic flows, or reduced government spending, public leaders and elected officials are the ones who look bad when something goes wrong.

 

The way our governance operates today encourages the precautionary principle. Risk is incredibly dangerous for public leaders, so the safer and more costly approach feels like the right choice in each individual decision. Over time, however, the costs add up, the paralysis becomes suffocating, and the public becomes dissatisfied and cynical. The answer might not be to completely cut out the regulation and safety apparatus of the government (that didn’t work well for President Trump who eliminated the NSC directorate for global health and security and bio-defense). The answer will be new structures for governance, new ways to allow government to take risks, and new ways to understand the risks that we all take in our lives. None of these are easy or simple transitions, but it is likely what we need in order to survive in a more complex and turbulent world.