Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Hi, Dan.

At work we have a large code base—all the source codes for our computer programs—and it’s managed by many teams around the world. We need to migrate the code base to a new version of our programming language. The expected benefits are huge, but everyone is procrastinating. What would you do to motivate people, apart from just setting a deadline?

—Alex 

Procrastination happens because there is an asymmetry between the costs that you have to pay now and the rewards you expect in the future. While the benefits of a distant goal—in this case, a better programming language—might be huge, they feel less salient when we have to do something difficult right now—such as working on the migration process.

So I would try to make the current experience more rewarding and fun. For instance, try setting up a happy hour: Every day from 2-4pm, everyone can write code together and then celebrate by having a beer together (or kombucha, depending on your company) to celebrate your progress. This approach can make the experience more communal and enjoyable.

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Hi, Dan.

Is aiming for a long-term commitment in romantic relationships really a good thing? Given that the divorce rate is about 50%, wouldn’t it be better for me to approach relationships expecting them to be short-lived, so I won’t be disappointed if things don’t work out?

—Joseph 

Love is one of the areas where prophecies tend to be self-fulfilling. If you approach relationships expecting them not to last, they probably won’t—and vice versa. Relationships aren’t static and they reflect what we invest in them.

Imagine that you made a deal with your landlord that your lease would be day-to-day. How much time and money would you invest in your home? Would you paint the walls or fix a leaky faucet? Most likely you wouldn’t, and so your pleasure in your home would be limited at best.

Similarly, if every day you wake up next to your romantic partner and ask yourself, “Should we do this for another day or stop now?” your relationship probably won’t deepen very much. It makes sense to think about the long term, since that is the only way to reap the benefits of commitment.

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Dear Dan,

Our new downstairs neighbor in our apartment building is bothered by the sound of our toddler son walking on the floors. He keeps banging on his ceiling and walls in an attempt to make us aware of how annoying the noise is. What can we do to make him stop harassing us? We cannot move, and I cannot keep my son from walking on the floors during the daytime.

—Shannon 

First, you should invest in some rugs to help reduce the noise. Then you can write to your neighbor and tell him about the effort you’ve made. Finally, invite him over for dinner; this will establish a sense of friendship and make him think twice before pounding on the walls. And be sure to serve alcohol during the dinner, as a way to break the ice and to make everyone friendlier.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Dear Dan,

I live with several roommates, and our landlord ­recently refunded some of our rent to make up for construction-related hassles in the building. What should we do with the ­money? We could divide it among ourselves, use it for house supplies or get a bigger TV to watch movies together. How should we think about this?

—Kristen 

I vote for doing something fun with the windfall—ideally something that would let all the roommates have a new experience together. Your relationships with each other are, I suspect, the biggest contributing factor to your happiness (or misery) at home: When they are good, life smiles on you, and when they are bad, you probably tend to stay out as much as possible.

Doing some activity together—say, sailing, skydiving or learning a new skill—would bring all of you closer and encourage you to be nicer to each other. You would ordinarily have a hard time asking everyone to chip in for an expensive group activity; after all, you are roommates, not standard friends.

But a refund from your landlord should feel more like free money—cash that no one planned on having and that everyone can probably manage without. That should make it easier to persuade your roommates to partake in some group-bonding activity.

Looking for the ideal skill to learn together? I would suggest a cooking class. You’ll not only have fun learning something new, but you’ll also enjoy better food—and perhaps the joy of cooking for each other for a long time.

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Dear Dan,

It has increasingly struck me that humans feel pain much more intensely than pleasure. Is this true, and is there a reason why pain affects us more?

—Brian 

Yes, we do experience pain much more intensely, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. In general, nature wants to teach us to seek things that are good for us or the species (food, warmth, sex), so these give us pleasure. Nature also wants us to stay away from dangerous things (predators, toxins, fire), so these give us pain.

One might imagine that the things nature wants us to seek would give us pleasure, while the things that we should avoid would leave us feeling neutral. But the benefits and harms of life aren’t symmetrical. A good outcome (a delicious piece of fruit, for example) can give us some modest benefit, but a bad outcome (say, poison) can kill us—which is a very significant downside.

If the evolutionary priority for us is to seek good outcomes but especially to avoid bad ones, then our tendency to focus on pain (and potential pain) is a pretty effective way to shape our behavior. Even during painful times, I’ve found that a somewhat comforting thought.

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Dear Dan,

A friend of mine from work is turning 45. What should I get him?

—Janet 

If he doesn’t have reading glasses, get him a pair. People generally delay getting reading glasses, because it is hard to recognize the slow deterioration of our vision and because it means admitting that we are aging. If you give your friend a pair, you will spare him the procrastination, and he will immediately realize that he has been living in a blurry world. He might not immediately feel deep appreciation, but it would still be a very helpful present.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Dear Dan,

My neighborhood recently suffered a horrible tragedy: A house fire, started by a faulty appliance, broke out in the middle of the night and killed two young children. I don’t know the parents, but their family has many parallels with mine: the parents’ jobs, the kids’ ages, the friends we have in common and, most importantly, the fact that we also don’t have smoke alarms in our house. I haven’t bought one for the usual list of reasons: I’m so busy, no one said I have to get one, I don’t know what kind to get, I never see them in shops anyway and so on. So how can I get myself—and everyone I’ve ever met—to buy a smoke detector?

—Tanya 

It would be nice to think that everyone will realize the important steps they need to take for basic safety and just take them. But it’s also extremely unlikely. For example, we already know that texting and driving is terribly dangerous and that overeating is bad for us, but we still let our eyes drift to our phones when we’re in traffic and we still order that burger with fries.

I also suspect that something as seemingly simple as installing a smoke detector is more difficult and confusing than we might think: There are many options, they need batteries, they may need to be installed in a tricky spot, we are not sure which brand will fit the bracket we have at home, and so on. And while none of these concerns are particularly substantial, they do increase our procrastination and indecision—leaving us in homes without functioning smoke alarms.

This is why I think that cases such as this call for some type of government regulation— something that will not assume that we’ll act in our best long-term interest and instead will make us do the right thing.

In the meantime, I suspect that many people reading this right now are realizing that they need to get smoke alarms of their own or change the batteries—and I also suspect that this feeling will last about 20 minutes and then be replaced by other urgent thoughts. So if you (yes, you) are one of these people, stop now (yes, now), go online, order that smoke detector, get those batteries and tell your household that you promise to install it by the end of the week.

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Dear Dan,

I recently attended a lecture by a well-known academic, and I was amazed and baffled by his inability to communicate even the most basic concepts in his field of expertise. How can experts be so bad at explaining ideas to others? Is this a requirement of academia?

—Rachel 

Here’s a game I sometimes play with my students: I ask them to think about a song, not to tell anyone what it is and tap its beat on a table. Next I ask them to predict how many other students in the room will correctly guess the song’s name. They usually think that about half will get it. Then I ask the rest of the students for their predictions—and no one ever gets it right.

The point is that when we know something and know it well, it is hard for us to appreciate what other people understand. This problem is sometimes called “the curse of knowledge.” We all suffer from this affliction, but it’s particularly severe for my fellow academics. We study things until they seem entirely natural to us and then assume that everyone else easily understands them too. So maybe the type of clumsiness you heard is indeed something of a professional requirement.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

Let me set the scene: It’s midway through the annual Society for Judgment and Decision Making conference in Toronto. Inside a conference room, behavioral and health scientists passionately discuss how to help people make healthier decisions while the event staff set up a snack table with coffee and huge cookies outside.

The session ends and the scientists start to exit, and I wonder what will happen next—will these scientists who are so interested in promoting health eat the cookies?

The answer is a resounding “Yes!” Every cookie is gone within minutes (even the raisin ones).

How should we make sense of these scientists’ apparent hypocrisy? It may be hard to imagine, but scientists can have difficulty following their own goals, just like everyone else. Behavioral scientists don’t just study irrationality, but live with it, too. Despite our own efforts to live rational lives, we find ourselves choosing irrationally and failing like everyone else—and this can become a large inspiration for our research.

As researchers, we understand that we have troubles with email addiction, procrastination, and blind optimism.  We look at our own lives and say, “What could have helped me be more rational or what could have helped me exert more self-control?” At others times we ask ourselves, “What could have helped me relax more?”

Behavioral scientists should arguably be the most motivated to make healthy and rational choices, because we know the consequences of our actions all too well and are aware of the mistakes we make in pursuing our goals. Yet, we still do things like reach for the cookies we know we shouldn’t eat and constantly check our email, even though we know that such cognitive switching can greatly impair our work performance.

If all this education is not enough, then we need more than just lessons. That’s why we need research to develop technologies that aid us in self-control such as choice architecture, decision aids, better public policies, and general environmental design that enables better decisions.

At the Center for Advanced Hindsight, we make efforts to create a healthy and productive environment that can protect ourselves from ourselves. We try to keep the cupboards full of easily accessible health foods to protect us from our junk food temptations. We make public social pacts to protect us from our lazy temptations. We make the lab fun and even have the peace and simplicity of the Thinking & Dreaming room to keep us protected from our inefficient overworking temptations.

Today, there are way too many cookies outside of conference rooms. We must eliminate and reduce these cookies from our environments. Rather than act as individuals and fight with our current environments, we must work to create environments that help us be great individuals together.

~Troy Campbell~

Relevant Topical Readings.

Self-Control
Depletion
Cognitive Load
Public Policy and Behavioral Economics

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Dear Dan,

I was thinking about buying a Tesla electric car, and I was very excited about it, but given the recent news, I am not sure this is a wise decision. Is it too risky?

—Karl

Indeed, earlier this month a Tesla Model S drove over a large metal object, and the object punched a hole through the plate protecting the battery, and the battery pack caught on fire. But this is only one part of the story. In August, the model S received five stars in all test categories—an unusually high rating—by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In the two days after we all learned about the crash test ratings, the stock of the company went up by 2%.

We now need to add one more data point to this body of evidence: The fire happened on Oct. 1. The share price fell by 10% over the next two days. By the way, this means that the effect of one small piece of bad news can be four times more effective than good news based on much more data. (A rare downgrade of the stock by the R.W. Baird brokerage from “outperform” to “neutral” probably also contributed to the drop.)

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, pointed out in a statement Oct. 4 that no one was hurt, that the car warned the driver to pull over, and that gas cars are in no way safer. After the statement, the stock price increased by 3%, making the overall losses 6.2% from the day before the accident.

From a psychological perspective, this overreaction to one very salient (and very sad) accident is nothing new. It is a consistent way that we react to salient news, and it is perfectly irrational.

And after all of this, my suggestion to you? If you had decided to buy a Tesla before this accident, get one now—because the event didn’t add much to the information you used to make your original decision. In fact, given that other people might have an irrational fear of buying a Tesla, maybe the prices will go down a bit.

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Dear Dan,

Why do people love to write to-do lists?

—Joe 

I suspect there are rational and irrational reasons for the very large amount of list-making activity we see around us. On the rational side, lists help us with faulty memory and allow us to share tasks with other people simply and efficiently. On the irrational side, making lists and checking items off these lists give us the false sense that we are actually making progress. The term for this by the way is “structured procrastination.” It’s an attempt to capture the momentary feeling that we are progressing—whereas in fact when we look back at the end of the day on what we achieved, we realize that we did not get much done. I also suspect that all the apps that help us make lists and then make it fun for us to check things off are reducing our collective productivity, by replacing real work and focus with structured productivity.

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Dear Dan,

I am always upset by bad news online when I turn on my computer. But negative news is pervasive, so what can I do to make myself feel better and get down to work immediately?

—Liz

One approach is to start each day with the most depressing set of news around for about five minutes and then move to the regular news. The idea here is that contrast between the highly depressing and the regular will make you feel good in comparison.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

The concept of opportunity cost can be seen in the emergent societal dilemma presented by Rebecca Black through her insightful lyrics:

“Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?”

As we can see, Rebecca must choose between kicking in the front seat and sitting in the back seat – two mutually exclusive options where her choice of either eliminates the opportunity to choose the other.

The same evaluation of opportunity cost can be seen in monetary exchanges that we make every day. In my dissertation work, I’ve focused on when consumers are more or less likely to reframe purchase decisions (like “Do I buy Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ or not?”) as allocation decisions (like “Do I buy Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday,’ or do I spend my money on something else instead?”).

Two important drivers are:
1) how constrained consumers feel
2) how much their resources bring other purchases to mind

First, I find that when consumers face more constraints, they are more likely to incorporate other purchases into their decisions. This constraint can be driven by cash on hand, annual income, or even the cycle on which you are paid. People paid weekly face less constraints on average (at least until the end of the month) than those paid monthly. As a result, those paid monthly are more likely to think “Do I buy this CD or not?” whereas those paid weekly are more likely to think “Do I buy this CD or do I spend my money on something else instead?”

Second, consumers can actually be more likely to fixate on their opportunity costs when they use resources with specific associations. Think about spending a Starbucks gift card versus a Visa gift card to buy Rebecca Black’s CD (imagining that it could be on the eclectic menu of CDs at Starbucks). The Starbucks gift card immediately makes you think about the coffee you could buy, so the decision changes from “Do I buy the CD or not?” to “Do I buy the CD or coffee?” The Visa gift card could be used to buy nearly anything but it doesn’t make you think about something else in particular, so the decision remains “Do I buy the CD or not?” What does this mean in practice? Starbucks coffee lovers are actually more likely to spend the Visa gift card than the Starbucks gift card even though the Visa gift card could be used to buy anything – including a Starbucks gift card!

Here at the Center for Advanced Hindsight, we see these factors at play constantly — and not just when spending money. At the beginning of the day, I have plenty of time (or convince myself of that at least), so the decision to write a blog post is “Do I write it or not?” but at the end of the day, the decision is “Do I write it now, or do I work on my paper, or do I watch the ‘Friday’ video, or do I go to sleep?” Some times of day have specific associations, so at 10:00am, the question may be “Do I write the blog post or not?” whereas as at 12:00pm, the question is “Do I write the blog post or do I eat lunch?” Take a guess when I finally got around to writing this… But our discussion of procrastination will have to wait for another day.

For more details, see “Opportunity Cost Consideration,” forthcoming in the December 2011 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

~Stephen Spiller~

My own worst enemy: procrastination and self-control

My problem with “Just Say No”

One of the main difficulties I face on a daily basis is an inability to say “no.”  Sometimes my difficulties bring me back to the song in Oklahoma! Where Ado Annie sings “I’m just a girl who can’t say no,” and it looks to me that I’m basically like her (granted, she and I are responding to quite different propositions).  I have always had this problem, but it used to be that nobody really asked much from me, so this weakness didn’t pose a real problem.  But now that behavioral economics has become more popular, I receive invitations to speak almost every day. Accordingly, my inability to say “no” has turned into a real challenge.

So why do I (and I suspect many others) suffer from what we might call the “Annie” bias? I think it is because of three different reasons:

1) Avoidance of regret: Regret is a very interesting, uncomfortable feeling.  It is about not where are, but where we could be. It is too easy to imagine that things could have been better. Imagine, for example, that you missed your flight either by two minutes, or by two hours: under which of these conditions would you be more upset?  Most likely, you will feel more upset if you missed your flight by two minutes. Why?  After all, your actual state is the same:  in both cases you are stuck at Newark for five hours waiting for the next flight, watching the same news report on CNN, responding to email on your smartphone, and munching on expensive and not very good food. They key is that having missed your flight by just a few minutes, you continuously think about all the things you might have done to get on the plane on time – leaving the house five minutes earlier, checking your route to avoid traffic jams, and so on. This comparison to how things could have been, and the feeling of “almost” makes you miserable.  By contrast, a two-hour delay is not as upsetting because you don’t make these kinds of regretful, “woulda, coulda, shoulda” comparisons. (Comparing your current state to some other idealized one, by the way, is a huge source of general unhappiness, especially when comparing yourself to your likeminded peers.)

Now think of a circumstance in which you don’t feel regret at the moment, but want to avoid feeling regret in the future. Let’s say you are buying an expensive new flat-screen TV. As you are whipping out your credit card to pay for it, the salesperson offers you an extended warranty for an additional 10% off the sticker price. You don’t relish the thought of paying more for this extended warranty, but the salesperson asks you to imagine how would you feel if, six months down the road, the TV stopped working and you had passed on the opportunity for the extended warranty. To make the moment even more salient, the salesperson adds that the offer is only available to you now (and only now!). With this final push, you go ahead and purchase the extended warranty – paying a premium in order to avoid the possibility that in the future you will hit yourself over the head and tell yourself that you should have purchased the extended warranty when you had the chance.

What has all this got to do with my own inability to say “no”? My version of the extended warranty is that I get invited to all kinds of stimulating conferences and meetings in amazing places, with interesting people. And the invitations always feel as if they are my only chance to see that particular place and meet those particular people.

2) The curse of familiarity: I suppose I also suffer from a form of the “identifiable victim effect” that I described in Chapter 9.  As you recall, when a problem is large, general and abstract, it is easy for us to turn our heads away and not care too much about it. But when the problem is close to home our emotions are evoked, and we are more likely to take action. Similarly, when I receive formal invitations from people I don’t know, it is relatively easy to politely turn down their offer. But when I receive invitations from people I do know, even if only superficially, it’s a different story altogether. And the better I know someone, the harder it is to say “no, sorry, you know I would really love to come, but I just can’t.”

One of the clever ways I attempt to deal with this version of the identifiable victim effect is to ask my wonderful assistant Megan to say no for me in the cases where I have to do so. This way, I don’t have to feel the pain of saying “no”, and because she is not saying “no” for herself, she has a much easier time with it than I do.

3) The future is always greener: I also find that it’s easier to say “yes” to things in the future, particularly the distant future. If someone asks me to come to an event in the next month or two, I generally have no choice but to say “no” because I’m either traveling or fully booked — there’s just no space in my schedule. [I have to admit that sometimes when someone asks me to come to an event and my calendar says that I’m already booked, I feel relieved.] But when someone asks me to do something in a year, my calendar naturally looks far emptier. (Of course, the feeling that I will have lots of extra time in the future is just an illusion – my life will likely be just as full of myriad, often unavoidable things. It’s just that the details aren’t filled in yet.

The basic problem is this: when we look far into the future, we assume that the things that are limiting and constraining us in the present won’t be there to the same degree. For me, I somehow imagine that meetings with students and administrators and colleagues, not to mention reviewing papers and so on, won’t be part of my daily life eight months in the future.

My friends Gal Zauberman and John Lynch, who have done research on this topic, recently gave me some interesting advice. They suggested that I imagine every single event I’m asked to attend will occur exactly four weeks from the present. With this exact schedule I mind, I should then ask myself whether I find it important enough to squeeze it in or cancel something else. If the answer is “yes,” then I should accept the invitation; but if my answer is “no,” I should pass. This is easier said than done, and I have not yet been able to consistently cultivate this frame of mind, but I am starting to adapt this mindset.

Perhaps what I need is to add some technological aid to Gal and John’s advice. What if I had an advanced calendar application made just for people who have a hard time admitting out how busy they will be in the future? Ideally, such an application would take all my meetings and travel from a given period and, based on that schedule, simulate what my time would look like in a year. This would allow people like me to respond to requests in a more realistic, less hopeful way. Perhaps this advanced calendar application is something I should start working on in a few months…

***

Thankfully, my own irrationalities tell me that there is still a lot of room for research and improvement.

Irrationally yours

Dan

The Magic of Procrastination

Oscar Wilde once said, “I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after.” As a university professor, I constantly see Wilde’s words put into action. Each fall students arrive to the first day of class determined to meet deadlines and stay on top of their assignments. And each fall the human weakness to procrastinate gets the best of them. After a few years of witnessing this behavior, my colleague Klaus Wertenbroch and I worked up a few studies hoping to get to the root of this problem. Our guinea pigs were the delightful students in my class on consumer behavior.

As they settled into their chairs that first morning, I explained to them that they would have to submit three main papers over the 12-week semester and that these three papers would constitute a large part of their final grade. “And what are the deadlines?” asked one student. I smiled. “The deadlines are entirely up to you and you can hand in the papers any time before the end of the semester,” I replied. “But, by the end of this week, you must commit to a deadline for each paper. Once you set your deadlines, they can’t be changed. Late papers,” I added, “would be penalized at the rate of one percent off the grade for each day late.”

“But Professor Ariely,” asked another student, “given these instructions wouldn’t it make sense for us to select the last date possible?” “That’s an option,” I replied. “If you find that it makes sense, by all means do it.”

Now a perfectly rational student would set all the deadlines for the last day of class—after all, they could submit papers early, so why take a chance and select an earlier deadline than absolutely necessary? From this perspective, delaying the deadlines to the last day of he semester was clearly the best decision. But what if the students succumbed to temptation and procrastination? What if they knew that they are likely to fail? If the students were not rational and knew it, then they might set early deadlines and by doing so force themselves to start working on the projects earlier in the semester.

You would most likely predict that the students would succumb to procrastination (not a big surprise there)—but would they understand their own limitations and would they commit to earlier deadlines just to overcome their procrastination?

Interestingly, we found that the majority of students committed to earlier deadlines, and that this ability to commit resulted in higher grades.  More generally, it seems that simply offering students a tool by which they could pre-commit publically to deadlines can help them achieve their goals.

How does this finding apply to non-students? When resolving to reach a goal—whether it is tackling a big project at work or saving for a vacation, it might help to first commit to a hard and clear deadline, and then inform our colleagues, friends, or spouse about it with the hope that this clear and public commitment will help keep us on track and ultimately fulfill our resolutions.

The thing about habits is that for good and bad they require no thinking. An established habit, whether getting ready for work in the morning or having a whiskey after, is a pattern of behavior we’ve adopted—we stick to it regardless of whether it made sense when we initially adopted it, and whether it makes sense to continue with it years later.  From a human irrationality perspective this means that something we do “just once” can wind up becoming a habit and part of our activities for a longer time than we envisioned.

To get some insight into this process, consider the following experiment:  We asked a large number of people to write the last two digits of their Social Security number at the top of a page, and then asked them to translate their number into dollars (79 became $79), and to indicate if in general they’d buy various bottles of wine and computer accessories for that much money. Then we moved to the main part of the experiment and we let them actually bid on the products in an auction.  After we found the highest bidders, took their money and gave them the products we calculated the relationship between their two digits and how much they were willing to pay for these products.

Lo and behold, what we found is that people who had lower ending Social Security numbers (for example 32), ended up paying much less than people who had higher ending Social Security numbers (for example 79).  This is basically the power of our first decisions: if people first consider a low price decision (would I pay $32 for this bottle of 1998 Cote du Rhone?) they end up only willing to pay a low amount for it, but if they first consider a high price decision (would I pay $79 for this bottle of 1998 Cote du Rhone?) they end up willing to pay a lot more.

So this is the double-edged sword of habits, they can save us time, energy and unpleasant thinking, but on the other hand, it’s all too easy to start down an unwholesome path. Now onto “ The 7 Habits Of Highly Ineffective People”…

1) Procrastination. Joys untold attend this particular bad habit. And it’s one people indulge in all the time, exercise, projects at work, calling the family, doing paperwork, and so on. Each time we face a decision between completing a slightly annoying task now and putting it off for later, battle for self-control ensues. If we surrender, procrastination wins.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with delaying unpleasant tasks at work from time to time in order to watch a (crucial) football game at the pub with friends.  But, the problem is that as we get close to our deadline we start thinking differently about the whole decision.  As we stay up all night to finish a task on time we start wondering what were we thinking when we succumbed to the temptation of the football game, and why didn’t we start on the task a week earlier.  Moreover, as with all habits one procrastination leads to another and soon we get used to watching deadlines as they zoom by.

2) The planning fallacy. This is more or less what it sounds like; it’s our tendency to vastly underestimate the amount of time we’ll require to complete a task. This hardly needs illustration, but for the sake of clarity, recall the last time you delegated time to a complex task. Cleaning your flat from top to bottom (couldn’t take more than two hours right? Wrong.); finishing the paper or project at hand (who knew the people in department X could be so impossibly slow?). The problem is that even if we try to plan for delays, we can’t imagine them all. What if the person you’re working out a deal with gets hospitalized? What if an important document gets deleted or lost? There are infinite possible delays (procrastination of course being one of them), and because there are so many, we end up not taking them into account.

3) Texting while driving. Let me start by saying that in my class of 200 Master’s students, 197 admitted not only to doing this regularly, but also to having made driving mistakes while doing so. Also, one of the three abstainers in the class was physically blind, so we should not really count him as a saint, and who knows maybe the other two were liars. Texting while driving is clearly very stupid.  If we were not intimately familiar with our own Texting behavior, we might think that it’s insane to think that anyone would knowingly increase their chances of dying 10 fold rather than waiting a few minutes to check email, but this is the reality.  Moreover, the issue here is not just Texting, it is much more general than this particular bad habit.  The basic issue has to do with succumbing to short-term desires and foregoing long-term benefits.  Across many areas in our life, when temptation strikes we very often succumb to it (think about your commitment to always wearing a condom when you are not aroused and when you are).  And we do this over and over and over.

4) Checking email too much. If it seems that there’s too much about email on this list, I assure you, there isn’t. Checking email is addictive in the same way gambling is. You see, years back the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that rats would work much harder if the rewards were unpredictable (rather than a treat every 5 times they pressed a bar, one would come after 4, then 13, etc). This is the same as email, most of it is junk, but every so often, it’s fantastic: an email from the woman you’ve been chasing for instance. So we distract ourselves from work by constantly checking and checking and waiting to hit the email jackpot. And to be perfectly honest, I’ve checked my email at least 30 times since starting writing this article.

5) Relativity in salary. The fatter a sea lion is, the more sea lionesses he has in his harem. He doesn’t need to be immense, just slightly bigger than the others (too fat and he won’t make it out of the water). As it turns out, it’s the same for salaries; we don’t figure out how much we need to be satisfied, we just want to make more than the people around us. More than our co-workers, more than our neighbors, and more than our wife’s sister’s husband.  The first sad thing about our desire to compare is that our happiness depends less on us, and more on the people around us.  The second sad thing is that we often make decisions that make it harder for us to be happy with our comparisons: Would you prefer to get a 50,000 pound salary where salaries range from 40,000-50,000 or a 55,000 pound salary where they’re between 55,000-65,000? If you’re like almost everyone, you’d realize that you would be happier with the 50,000 pound salary, but you would pick the 55,000.

6) Overoptimism. Everyone, except for the very depressed, overestimates their chances when it comes to good things like getting a raise, not getting a divorce, parking illegally without getting a ticket. It’s natural—no one gets married thinking “I am so going to be divorced in 4 years”, and yet a large number of people end up getting divorced.  Like other bad habits, overoptimism is not all bad.  It helps us take risks like opening a business (even though the vast majority fail) or working to develop new medicines (which take many years and usually don’t pan out). Ironically overoptimism often tends to work out well for society (new restaurants, cures for disease) while endangering the individuals who take them (financial ruin, stress-induced insanity).  Sadly we are often overoptimistic – my most recent example of this was just a few hours ago when I sat down to write an essay entitled: “The 7 Habits Of Highly Ineffective People.”  If I only didn’t go out last night…..

Irrationally yours

Dan

Megan made a list of songs that reflect the theme of each chapter.

Here it is: (more…)