Wealth Inequality in America

Perform the following thought experiment. Remove yourself for a moment from your present socioeconomic circumstances and imagine that you are to be replaced randomly into society at any class level.

Now, before you know your particular place in society you are told that it is within your powers to redistribute the wealth of that society in any way that you choose.  What distribution would you choose? This famous thought experiment is the basis of political philosopher John Rawls, as outlined in his highly influential 1971 work, “A Theory Of Justice,” in which he argues that the lowest class should be made as well off as possible. But this of course assumes that we all come to the same conclusion when we perform the thought experiment ourselves. To test this, Mike Norton and I recently conducted  a study in which we asked Americans to first guess at the distribution of wealth in the United States, and then we asked them to perform the thought experiment and lay out what they think would be the ideal distribution of wealth if they were to enter society and be placed randomly in a class.

Here is what we found:

As you can see from the figure, participants rather badly estimated the current state of wealth disparity! Furthermore, they offered an ideal wealth distribution (under a “veil of ignorance”) that was even more different (and more equal) relative to the current state of affairs.

What this tells me is that Americans don’t understand the extent of disparity in the US, and that they (we) desire a more equitable society.  It is also interesting to note that the differences between people who make more money and less money, republicans and democrats, men and women — were relatively small in magnitude, and that in general people who fall into these different categories seem to agree about the ideal wealth distribution under the veil of ignorance.

Maybe this suggests that when there are no labels, and we think about the core of our morality in abstract terms (and under the veil of ignorance), we are actually very similar?

When going on a first date, we try to achieve a delicate balance between expressing ourselves, learning about the other person, but also not offending anyone — favoring friendly over controversial – even at the risk of sounding dull. This approach might be best exemplified by an amusing quote from the film Best in Show: “We have so much in common, we both love soup and snow peas, we love the outdoors, and talking and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about.”  Basically, in an attempt to coordinate on the right dating strategy, we stick to universally shared interests like food or the weather. It’s easy to talk about our views on mushroom and anchovies, and the topic arises easily over dinner at a pizzeria – still, that doesn’t guarantee a stimulating conversation, and certainly not a real measure of our long-term romantic match.

This is what economists call a bad equilibrium – it is a strategy that all the players in the game can adopt and converge on – but it is not a desirable outcome for anyone.

We decided to look at this problem in the context of online dating. We picked apart emails sent between online daters, prepared to dissect the juicy details of first introductions. And we found a general trend supporting the idea that people like to maintain boring equilibrium at all costs: we found a lot of people who may, in actuality, have interesting things to say, but presented themselves as utterly insipid in their written conversations. The dialogue was boring, consisting mainly of questions like, “Where did you go to college?” or “What are your hobbies?” “What is your line of work?” etc.

We sensed a compulsion to avoid rocking the boat, and so we decided to push these hesitant daters overboard. What did we do? We limited the type of discussions that online daters could engage in by eliminating their ability to ask anything that they wanted and giving them a preset list of questions and allowing them to ask only these questions.  The questions we chose had nothing to do with the weather and how many brothers and sisters they have, and instead all the questions were interesting and personally revealing (ie., “how many romantic partners did you have?”, “When was your last breakup?”, “Do you have any STDs?”, “Have you ever broken someone’s heart?”, “How do you feel about abortion?”). Our daters had to choose questions from the list to ask another dater, and could not ask anything else. They were forced to risk it by posing questions that are considered outside of generally accepted bounds. And their partners responded, creating much livelier conversations than we had seen when daters came up with their own questions. Instead of talking about the World Cup or their favorite desserts, they shared their innermost fears or told the story of losing their virginity. Everyone, both sender and replier, was happier with the interaction.

What we learned from this little experiment is that when people are free to choose what type of discussions they want to have, they often gravitate toward an equilibrium that is easy to maintain but one that no one really enjoys or benefits from.  The good news is that if we restrict the equilibria we can get people to gravitate toward behaviors that are better for everyone (more generally this suggests that some restricted marketplaces can yield more desirable outcomes).

And what can you do personally with this idea?  Think about what you can do to make sure that your discussions are not the boring but not risky type.  Maybe set the rules of discussion upfront and get your partner to agree that tonight you will only ask questions and talk about things you are truly interested in.  Maybe you can agree to ask 5 difficult questions first, instead of wasting time talking about your favorite colors.  Or maybe we can create a list of topics that are not allowed.  By forcing people to step out of their comfort zone, risk tipping the relationship equilibria, we might ultimately gain more.

One of the most general principles of human decision making is that we use relativity as a way to figure out how much we value things. We see a sale sign and the comparison of the current price to a more expensive past price makes us think that we are standing in front of a good deal.  We see a modestly prices sweater next to a much more expensive one and we reason that is it a better deal for the money. And so on.

Relativity is not always the right strategy for figuring out how much to value things (very often it is not), but it gives us a quick and handy tool for going about the world making decisions.

Over the years the same type of relative decision making has been shown in monkeys, birds, and bees, but now it has been shown even with very simple lifeforms — the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum

Latty and Beekman did one such test using two food sources – one containing 3% oatmeal and covered in darkness (known as 3D), and another with 5% oatmeal that was brightly lit (5L). Bright light easily damages the slime mould, so it had to choose between a heftier but more irritating food source, and a smaller but more pleasant one. With no clear winner, it’s not surprising that the slime mould had no preference – it oozed towards each option just as often as the other.

But things changed when the researchers added a third option into the mix – a food source containing 1% oatmeal and shrouded in shadow (1D). This third alternative is clearly the inferior one, and the slime mould had little time for it. However, its presence changed the mould’s attitude toward the previous two options. Now, 80% of the slime mould headed towards the 3D source, while around 20% chose the brightly-lit 5L one.  Even for slime mould relativity matters, suggesting that it is a very basic form of decision making!

The original paper is here.

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 dark side of “Productivity Enhancing Tools”

Email, Facebook, and Twitter have greatly enhanced the ways we communicate. These handy modes of communication allow us to stay in touch with people all over the world without the restrictions of snail mail (too slow) or the telephone (is it too late/early to call?). As great as these communication tools are, they can also be major time-sinks. And even those of us who recognize their inefficiencies still fall into their trap. Why is this?

I think it has something to do with what the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner called “schedules of reinforcement.” Skinner used this phrase to describe the relationship between actions (in his case, a hungry rat pressing a lever in a so-called Skinner box) and their associated rewards (pellets of food). In particular, Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times—say 100 times. Under the variable schedule, the rat earned the food pellet after it pressed the lever a random number of times. Sometimes it would receive the food after pressing 10 times, and sometimes after pressing 200 times.

Thus, under the variable schedule of reinforcement, the arrival of the reward is unpredictable. On the face of it, one might expect that the fixed schedules of reinforcement would be more motivating and rewarding because the rat can learn to predict the outcome of his work. Instead, Skinner found that the variable schedules were actually more motivating. The most telling result was that when the rewards ceased, the rats that were under the fixed schedules stopped working almost immediately, but those under the variable schedules kept working for a very long time.

So, what do food pellets have to do with e-mail? If you think about it, e-mail is very much like trying to get the pellet rewards. Most of it is junk and the equivalent to pulling the lever and getting nothing in return, but every so often we receive a message that we really want. Maybe it contains good news about a job, a bit of gossip, a note from someone we haven’t heard from in a long time, or some important piece of information. We are so happy to receive the unexpected e-mail (pellet) that we become addicted to checking, hoping for more such surprises. We just keep pressing that lever, over and over again, until we get our reward.

This explanation gives me a better understanding of my own e-mail addiction, and more important, it might suggest a few means of escape from this Skinner box and its variable schedule of reinforcement. One helpful approach I’ve discovered is to turn off the automatic e-mail-checking feature. This action doesn’t eliminate my checking email too often, but it reduces the frequency with which my computer notifies me that I have new e-mail waiting (some of it, I would think to myself, must be interesting, urgent, or relevant). Another way I am trying to wean myself from continuously checking email (a tendency that only got worse for me when I got an iPhone), is by only checking email during specific blocks of time.  If we understand the hold that a random schedule of reinforcement has on our email behavior, maybe, just maybe we can outsmart our own nature.

Even Skinner had a trick to counterbalance daily distractions: As soon as he arrived at his office, he would write 800 words on whatever research project he happened to be working on—and he did this before doing anything else. Granted, 800 words is not a lot in the scheme of things but if you think about writing 800 words each day you would realize how this small output can add up over time.  I am also quite certain that if Skinner had email he would similarly not have checked it before putting in a few hours of productive work.  Now if we could only learn something from one of the world’s experts on learning….

By Alon Nir

0. Intro

Sometimes interesting opportunities can emerge from unfavorable situations. Tense diplomatic atmosphere between Israel and Turkey in the past couple of months, brought on a cyber-attack from the Turkish side. A major Israeli apartment-listing website was hacked and so was Pizza Hut’s local website. The credentials of over 100,000 user accounts (roughly 2% of internet users in the country) were revealed and published on dubious Turkish forums. Naturally, it wasn’t long before these lucrative spreadsheets, containing usernames, email addresses and passwords became so widespread anyone with basic googling abilities could find them. One person who got his hands on these files comes from a profession no less defamed than computer-hacking. You guessed it – an economist. Me.

I took a look at the spreadsheets and after some basic analysis I was left with a few interesting insights. The data reveal the extent to which people fail to think creatively and incorporate even a touch of randomness in their username and password selection.

1. Popular Passwords

My analysis focused on a spreadsheet containing 31,588 users of the above mentioned apartment-listing website.  The reason I chose it is because that website was (evidently) particularly lenient in the registration process and didn’t even strict choices of password. One digit password? Not a problem. This leniency probably isn’t the best security policy the website could adopt, but it is valuable for our analysis as it shows what people will do when they are unconstrained.

15,820 of these 31,588 registered users (slightly over 50%!) used their email address as their username. Furthermore, 675 people (over 2%) picked their phone number as a username.  Both of these choices aren’t considered very secure, since phone numbers, and email addresses in particular, are easy to find out.

While these two bits of information give an indication on lack of creativity on the users’ part, the really interesting discovery is their selection of passwords.

The most common password was 123456 (584 users), with 1234 as the runner up (569) and 12345 coming in third (388). All in all, 1786 passwords (5.65%!) were comprised of consecutive increasing numerals. This means that one person in 18 didn’t muster the cognitive capacity to generate a password more intricate than 1234 and the like.

788 people (roughly 2.5%, or one in forty people) chose a password identical to their username.

417 people (1.32%) chose a password comprised of identical digits (e.g. 1111).

Keyboard patterns were ubiquitous, horizontal in particular: on top of the 1786 ‘123X’ passwords mentioned above, 123 passwords began with ‘qwe’ (including 25 instances of ‘qwerty’),  41 with ‘asd’, and 31 with ‘zxc’. It’s interesting to see how the frequency of these patterns falls as we go to a lower line on the keyboard. A similar distribution appears when looking at vertical lines on the keyboard, though the frequency is substantially lower (‘1qaz’ and ‘qaz’ make up 83 observations combined).

48 passwords began with ‘abc’ (e.g. ‘abcdef’, ‘abc123’, etc.).

And finally, 69 passwords had variants of the actual word ‘password’, with no less than 29 exact matches.

What’s more interesting is the fact that using this information, diligent mischiefs hacked into tens of thousands of email and Facebook accounts, which indicates that a high percentage of the people in our sample uses the same (trivial) password for different websites. It also refutes arguments that people carelessly entered an easy password because they didn’t care much for their account on that particular website.

Lastly, I looked at the spreadsheet with Pizza Hut’s users credentials hoping something will catch my eye and help me gain a better insight into password selection. I didn’t have to look for long, as roughly 200 people (out of around 70K accounts, I must mention) chose ‘pizza’ or something similar as password. This got me thinking, and I suspect that password selection might be influenced by cognitive availability. I went back to the original data and found that 89 had the name of the website as part of their password. Other passwords (though much more rare) were nouns like ‘coffee’ and brand names like ‘samsung’, ‘acer’, ‘cocacola’, ‘nokia’ and others, all of which can be attributed to physical objects just in front of the user’s eyes or in his hand. Add this to the 2,000 or so patterned passwords I mentioned earlier (visual availability on the keyboard), and you get a plausible explanation in my view.

2. Explaining the Findings

So what can account for this password picking behavior? A few possible explanations come to mind. Let me describe them by using John, an imaginary typical internet user, as an example.

One explanation is that when John first embarks on setting up a new account at a website, he knows he’ll get a blank profile when the registration process is done. Since his profile will contain no information, the ‘price’ (in terms of lost information, contacts, time, etc.) John will pay in case that an amicable hacker takes over his account is close to zero. Hence, he is reluctant to strain himself making up, and remembering, a truly unique password.

The problem starts a while later, when John’s email box is already full with valuable correspondences, and his Facebook page is populated with hundreds of friends (including a few flirtatious Janes). Then, a more difficult to decipher password is of true value, but John irrationally sticks to the password he already has. It can be because he’s a terrible procrastinator, forgetful, or even due to the Sunk Cost bias – in his mind John already “paid” the price (in terms of mental resources and time spent) for setting a password, and that’s why he refrains from going through the process again. As time passes the incentive to change password becomes greater and greater, but try telling that to John.

3. Conclusion

When I first put my hands on the coveted files, I did not expect to find such interest in password selection, but the more I go over the data, and the more I think about it, I see the value of studying the way people choose passwords. As you see from the above analysis, it’s an example of a decision making problem where behavioral and cognitive processes, and biases, come into play. Since it’s a one-shot game and the decision is kept in strict confidentiality (until, of course, someone picks up on security breaches), the setting is rather simplified and the observed behavior is of research value. In a way, we have here a form of a natural experiment; it’s just unfortunate the way the data were obtained.

If you have any other theories explaining password selection, please feel free to share them in the comments below. Don’t worry, no registration is required ….

A few days ago I had a fun interview with Miguel Barbosa.  Miguel just posted the interview on his blog.

Here is one sample question and answer:

Miguel: You touched on my next question which relates to your chapter on meaning.  Tell us about your findings on the importance of meaning in the workplace. What’s your advice for people trying to attach meaning to their jobs?

Dan: I think it’s very hard to have meaning if you are working for someone and don’t have much autonomy.  But the upside is that with a little work we can create work environments that provide people with autonomy and are more likely to lead to feelings of meaningful work. Let me tell you a story that happened to me three weeks ago.

Three weeks ago I was in Seattle where an ex-student of mine who works for a big software company. She contacted me six weeks prior and I agreed to meet with her team. Something happened at that company in the weeks before I gave the talk.  The background being that my student and a small team of people had discovered an idea which they thought was the best innovation in the “computer world.” They worked very hard on this idea for two years and the CEO of the company looked at it and said I’m canceling the project.

So here I was sitting with a group of highly creative people, who were completely deflated- In my life I’ve never seen anyone (in the high-tech industry) with a lower level of motivation. So I asked them, “How many of you show up to work on time since the project has been shut down?” Nobody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you go home early?” Everyone raised their hand. Lastly, I asked them, “How many of you feel that you should have taken the opportunity to fudge on your expense reports?” In this case, no one answered the question — rather everyone sat laughing to themselves—in a way that makes me think that they would have fudged their expense reports. So here you have a case of people who worked incredibly hard on a project and basically got rejected. Which leads me to ask how could the CEO have behaved differently if he was also trying to create a more positive feelings for the team members.  So I posed this question to the team and they came up with different answers:

1. They said senior management could have allowed the team to present the project to the entire company.

2. Management could have gone a step further and allowed the team to build a prototype.

3. Management could have taken the time to understand the technology and see the possibilities of applying it to other areas of the firm or product development.

4. They could have asked the team to write about the process of developing the idea.

So there are many approaches senior management could have taken to boost the morale of the research team. But the key is that most ideas for boosting morale require a significant amount of time. If you think of people as rats working in a maze that then there is no reason to help their motivations or explain why you said “No!”. But if you think of people as driven by internal motivation then you want to worry about internal motivation then you might want to spend some time and effort increasing internal motivation. That is something the executive did not do, and I suspect that because of this the research team will eventually dissolve.

If you want to read more, here is a link to Miguel’s blog

Here is an email that I got last week from a financial planner:

Dear Dan.

My hourly model lets clients use whatever retail custodian they like.  For various reasons, I tend to recommend the two best as Vanguard and Fidelity.  I go over the pros and the cons for each and, as soon as I mention Fidelity gives 25,000 frequent flyer miles, most clients stop me and choose Fidelity.  Some will move tens of millions to Fidelity in order to get frequent flyer miles that might have a $200 economic value (and I may be generous).  That would be the equivalent of 0.001% on a $20 million portfolio and .01% on a $2 million portfolio.

Any idea why this seems to have more impact than traditional economics might explain?

Curios.

XXX, CFP^®, CPA, MBA (name hidden)

Here is my (short) response

Dear XXX,

This phenomenon is what we call “medium maximization.”

The basic idea is that often people focus on near term concrete goals (such as frequent flyer miles), and while trying to maximize these immediate and clear goals they forget or discount the real reason for their actions — which in your case is maximizing their financial outcome. (For a great paper on medium maximization see this paper by Chris Hsee)

Why do people engage is such medium maximizations?  Because it is easy.  It gives people a clear direction for behavior — and just having something measurable within reach can redirect our motivation.  Another reason for the efficacy of medium maximization is that such immediate and concrete goals by which to measure ourselves against give us  a sense of progression ….

I am not sure whether this should make you more or less appreciative of your clients, but hopefully you can now understand them a bit better.  Or maybe it means that you should start offering them frequent flyer miles?

Irrationally yours

Dan

1.) What is behavioral economics? How is it different from standard economics?

In general, both standard and behavioral economics are interested in the same questions and topics.  The choices people make, the effects on incentives, the role of information etc. However, unlike standard economics, behavioral economics does not assume that people are rational. Instead, behavioral economists start by figuring out how people actually behave, often in a controlled lab environment in which we can understand behavior better, and use this as a starting point for building our understanding of human nature. As a consequence of this different starting point, behavioral economists usually come to different conclusions about the logic and efficacy of almost anything, ranging from mortgages to savings to healthcare in both the personal and business realms.

2.) Even if consumers make mistakes from time to time, wouldn’t the market fix these?

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?  When the Chicago economists sometimes (reluctantly) admits that people make mistakes, they claim that people make different types of mistakes that will eventually cancel each other out in the market. Behavioral economics argues that, instead, people will often make the same mistake, and the individual mistakes can aggregate in the market.  Let’s take the subprime mortgage crisis, which I think is a great example (but a very sad reality) of the market working to make the aggregation of mistakes worse.  It is not as if some people made one kind of mistake and others made another kind.  It was the fact that so many people made the same mistakes, and the market for these mistakes is what got us to where we are now.

3.) Isn’t behavioral economics a depressing view of human nature?

It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman.  So from this perspective it is rather depressing.  But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!

Take the physical world for example. We build products that work with our physical limitations. Chairs, shoes, and cars are all designed to complement and enhance our physical capabilities. If we take some of the same lessons we’ve learned from working with our physical limitations and apply them to things that are affected by our cognitive limitations—insurance policies, retirement plans, and healthcare—we’ll be able to design more effective policies and tools, that are more useful in the world. This is the promise of behavioral economics – once we understand where we are weak or wrong we can try to fix it and build a better world.

Take again the sub-prime mortgage crisis.  Imagine that we understood how difficult it is for people to calculate the correct amount of mortgage that they should take, and instead of creating a calculator that told us the maximum that we can borrow, it helped us figure out what we should be borrowing.  I suspect that if we had this type of calculator (and if people used it) much of the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe could have been avoided.  This of course is one idea to fix one problem, and there are many ways to think about how to improve our lives along many of the decisions we make every day. This is why I think that behavioral economics is so optimistic, useful, and important for our personal life and for society.

Irrationally yours

Dan Ariely

I personally find fruit and vegetables to be not only healthy, but also delicious. I enjoy cooking and preparing them, and try to eat them often. Sometimes I wind up spending egregious amounts of money getting the freshest local organic produce. Still, even when I empty my wallet at the farmer’s market, some of my fruit and veggies inevitably end up wilting or rotting in the fridge, leaving a fairly unpleasant sludge. A number of things could contribute to this waste – but I’d like to point out a few simple design flaws that I think we can fix.

1) I suspect that one of the main culprits is the produce drawer in the refrigerator.  Most refrigerators have a special drawer designed to hold produce, usually located at the bottom of the fridge.  The drawer is often just barely opaque and for some reason difficult to open. Because of these “features,” when you open the fridge door, you look straight ahead, to the leftover lasagna or apple pie (and their convenient position) come to mind, leaving the carrots and nectarines hidden and forgotten in the vegetable drawer.  If the design of the produce drawer is one of the barriers for eating the fruit and vegetables we have already purchased, what can we do about it?  For one, instead of using the crisper to store fruit and vegetables, we could put them on a higher shelf so that they are more inviting when that door is opened. We’ll smile and say to ourselves: “oh, right, I now remember I have blueberries and I want to eat some of them.”

2) Another obstacle that keeps us from eating our vegetables before they’ve gone rancid is the sense of immediacy and gnawing hunger that compels us to open the fridge in the first place. We usually go to the fridge when we are already hungry, and are looking for something to pop in our mouths right away. Because there are usually a few steps between raw vegetables and ready to eat food, we shy away from them in favor of something faster and more convenient. One way to solve this would be to wash, cut or cook them in advance so that they are already prepared at the pivotal moment of hunger.

3) In addition, these perishables don’t come with any indication of an expiration date. Until we discover the point-of-no-return, it is hard to tell how far the produce are from the end of their useful lives. We know that when we buy fish, we should eat it within the next couple of days. With milk, there is a date stamped right on the container, undisputable and in plain sight. Because we are averse to losing money (even money already spent), these expiration dates compel us to make sure that we use that pound of Mahi Mahi, eat that yogurt, and finish the milk. By leaving the produce’s expiration date ambiguous, it is hard for us to plan when to eat our produce, and we often discover that we have missed the expiration date after it’s too late. If we were to make our own expiration dates and stick them on our celery sticks, we would be more likely to use them before they’ve turned into a mushy mess.

This type of waste worries me because I think that it also prevents us from future purchases of fruit and vegetables. Imagine this scenario: You buy a bag of grapes for $7.50, throw them in the crisper drawer, and forget about them. A couple weeks later, you open the crisper on a whim and are alarmed to find that the former bag of grapes has now turned into a moldy pile of muck. You feel awful, not only because you have to clean up the mess, but because you paid seven dollars and fifty cents for this. You grumpily go for the sponge and think to yourself, “Well, I’ll never do that again.”

My general point is this: There are all kinds of reasons why we eat badly, but some are more fixable than others if we only look at our behavior and undercover the nuanced forces guiding our actions. Instead of throwing the bag of grapes into the dark drawer in the bottom of the fridge, we can save that drawer for the cupcakes and instead put some grapes in a tray on the top shelf with some mixed greens and pecans, ready to grab and go. The rest of the grapes can be prewashed and stamped with a homemade expiration sticker. If we make plans to eat them within a few days and mark them as such, we are more likely to stick to our goals. This way, we can eat more fruit and veggies and avoid wasting money or creating a mess – benefits all around!

Irrationally yours

Dan