Nathan Taylor

Harvard Medical School researchers have been having a lot of fun with the bounded nature of human attention. They did so with the startling study whereby radiologist examining lung scans failed to notice the superimposed image of a man in a gorilla suit.

While radiologists are incredibly well trained to spot tiny nodules that could become cancerous before other people even seem them. This task consumes their attention and so they fail to see what they are not looking for. But the radiologists failed because they are focused on a challenging task that requires their attention, that attention is not available for other purposes. Namely spotting the blindingly obvious gorilla! In fact, 83 per cent of the radiologists missed it.

Extraordinary! Can you see it in the image below?

It is pretty obvious when you look for it.

Think you wouldn’t be fooled by such a silly test? Check out this incredible video for another absolutely ridiculous example of how we miss what is exactly in front of our face. It turns out that approximately half of people who watch the video miss the man in the gorilla suit dancing in the middle of screen!

Humans are, above all, social animals. Our social skills enable both our species and our individual survival. While I have written about how the impulse to maintain a consistent social facade can exert a strange unconscious bias on our actions. Sometimes it also makes us do very odd things consciously too!

One such situation is the recent public scandal surrounding some happy snaps of public personality Chrissie Swan. In a vain effort to maintain the social appearance of proprietary, Snow offered to pay $10,000 for some images, but was outbid by a magazine (who knew they still had money!)

To my mind there is absolutely nothing scandalous about what Snow did in smoking, or in trying to buy the images. After all, she has gone through a very public mea culpa associated with the incident. She knew smoking would have consequences for the unborn baby and was struggling not to smoke. Whatever mild damage may be done by the smoking will be more than made up for by having a parent who loves her/him.

What is interesting is the social condemnation directed at Swan for trying to hide her addiction from the public.

However, I disagree with the opinion piece by Anne Davies when she said:

“The fact is we tolerate tobacco and alcohol products despite overwhelming evidence that both pose significant health risks to those that consume them, pregnant or not.

Pregnant women face the same challenges as the rest of the community in kicking the habit and deserve support, not derision. They just happen to be easier targets for the morality police.”

The undeniable difference is when you or I scarf down a donut and bottle of rum (why not?) it is having an influence on our own state of health. A pregnant mom is an entirely different affair as the consequences fall on another party who has no control over the situation and will deal with the consequences for the rest of their life. So there is a reason for social disapproval. If that social disapproval motivates Swan and others to drop the cigarettes, all to the better for them.

Just don’t call it hypocrisy when Swan tries to buy the images.

The perception of scarcity is a major motivator to action.

Ask anyone who has stood in line on boxing-day sales to purchase something they would have walked past the week before, they will say they are there for the sales. But a key part of the motivation is simply the fact that they might ‘miss out.’

Scarcity is a huge motivator for action – just think of the market for diamonds – but it is the perception of scarcity that is equally important.

On the centennial of Grand Central Terminal in New York, this article highlighted an awesome example of inducing scarcity to change behaviour. It revealed that all the display clocks in the Grand Central Terminal all run exactly one minute early.

While this time difference is not enough to make people question it, it is enough to motivate people to get to their train on time. As a consequence, the Grand Central Terminal has the least slips, trips, and falls of any railroad in the United States.Considering it is the largest rail station, and has many marble floors to boot, that’s a very impressive outcome.

I remember having dinner overlooking the central terminal of Grand Central on New Year Eve and watching the hoards of people criss cross the station. A veritable hive of humanity. So the mistiming is certainly deliberate. Trains run through the Grand Central Terminal with a 98 per cent on time accuracy. That is not something that happens if you are so lackadaisical with timekeeping that you get it wrong by a minute consistently.

Behavioural economics is the study of the breakdown of human rationality. But this misrepresents the situation.

In my view, deviations from ‘perfect’ rationality are because we live in what we economics call a constrained world – or a world where there are limitations on our memory and ability to make decisions. Humans are not supercomputers capable of processing endless data inputs to evaluate every single decision in our life.  There is only so much mental recall we can bring to bear on a situation.

I tend to think of human thinking failures as ‘super rational’ rather than sub rational in that they are a result of a brain optimised for the world we live in rather than for an academic test case of rationality.

A wrinkle on this idea is contained in a recent study into the Marshmallows. Seriously.

A classic study using Marshmallows was conducted in 1972 and found a significant link between a kiddie gobbling up a marshmallow and later success in life. I kid you not. Apparently, the study stumbled onto a link between a child’s self-control and their future capacity to withstand temptations and to be goal orientated.

In the study:

A marshmallow was offered to each child. If the child could resist eating the marshmallow, he was promised two instead of one. The scientists analysed how long each child resisted the temptation of eating the marshmallow, and whether or not doing so was correlated with future success.

The findings were:

The first follow-up study, in 1988, showed that “preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent”.

Other results found a strong relationship between the amount of self-control a kiddie was able to exercise with:

1. Higher academic results;
2. Reduced likelihood of substance abuse; and
3. A raft of other positive outcomes for life.

The theory was that kids who could control their impulses best were more likely to be goal orientated and able to resist fleeting temptations.

A recent study has suggested that things may be more complicated because it examines whether the kids beliefs about the likelihood of getting a reward influenced their self-control. The idea being – if a kid comes from a stable home life where their parents follow through with threats and promises (ie a smack for being naughty and a sweet for being well behaved) then the kiddie is more likely to believe the promises of others.

In contrast, a child raised by less stable parents (for instance, anyone suffering mental illness or substance abuse) would be less likely to wait to eat a marshmallow. Not only is the second child less likely to believe the promise of a second marshmallow, they may have concerns the first one will be taken unless they eat it straight away!

The study tried to test this hypothesis by splitting a group of kids into two. Both groups were promised minor rewards before the marshmallow test was conducted. In one group, the experimenter gave the kids the preliminary rewards (ie good colouring in sets, nice stickers) while in the second group they failed to do as they promised.

The result was striking. Kids who had a rational belief that a promise is not likely to be fulfilled did not wait very long at all for a second marshmallow. They scoffed it almost straight away. In contrast, the other group waited almost four times as long – and many did not eat it at all – instead waiting patiently for a second marshmallow. The children’s ability to exercise self-control was influenced by their belief in the likelihood of reward for doing so.

Where kids were given reasons to trust that promises would be fulfilled, they actually were able to withstand temptation a great deal longer than in the original study!

This is not to suggest that children are perfectly rational. But sometimes what appears to be irrational actually makes sense when considered in a broader environmental context.

It’s a lot to read into a marshmallow, but by-god I enjoyed gobbling it up!

We all tend to believe that we have fixed attributes and that our abilities are absolutes. We might be bad at “doing the books” but we are great selling customers on the benefits of a new product.

Alternatively, we may see ourselves as being highly creative while also being efficiently organised. Sure, we might have a bad day and “score” a little lower in one of our skills than we generally do. But generally most of us believe we know our true potential and abilities.

Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth.

This study explored the influence of conflicting stereotypes on performance, that of being Asian with presumably superior mathematical skills with the stereotype that woman are presumably inferior in the same area (Shih, M., Pittinskyl, T.L., and Ambady, N. 1999, ‘Stereotype susceptibility: identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance’, Psychological Science, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 80-83).

The study involved one mathematical test, two surveys (one evoking the subjects femininity, the other their ethnicity), and some willing volunteers (female and Asian preferably!)

The women who were randomly assigned to the survey that reminded them of their ethnicity scored significantly higher on a math test than those who first completed a survey that evoked their gender. What this means is that the mathematical abilities of these test subjects were significantly altered by having their attention indirectly focused on a social stereotype that they may or may not believe in.

It is not like they were told, being Asian = being good at maths while being female = being bad at maths. Nor is it like these study subjects were told about the stereotypes and then told, “Hence you will be good/bad at maths” – the stereotype that directly and significantly influenced their mathematical prowess was buried in their social programming. It is not reflective of how the women in question perceived themselves.

This is a pretty incredible outcome. It means your abilities and skills are sufficiently malleable that simply having you think about a topic related to a social stereotype will significantly influence your performance. Even when the stereotype is more suitable to the 1950s than to the noughties, they still have a significant power to influence us.

The next blog will explore how race influences academic success and social interactions and the ramifications for Australia’s appalling gap in conditions between indigenous Australians and the rest of the population.

It will also suggest how women (at least the non-Asian women) can improve their inability to do maths!

In the classic showdown between pigs and sharks, it turns out pigs win hands down.

As I have discussed before, people are not very good at assessing extreme risks. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, our emotions get in the way whenever there is an unlikely but dramatic outcome. That is why we have lotto but not nuclear power plants. Our emotions get in the way of our estimation of the situation.

There are fewer things as viscerally terrifying as a shark attack. Not only is it horrifically violent and painful, there is something about being in a foreign environment and vulnerable that makes it particularly terrifying.

Perhaps this explains something a little odd that happens when I tell people I was in a team that did the Rottnest Channel Swim they inevitably ask about sharks. Seriously. Despite the fact you can almost walk from Perth to Rottnest on the back of boats and swimmers, people are always concerned about sharks.

It turns out you should be more worried about being attacked by pigs than sharks. Six times more people are killed in the USA and Canada each year by pigs than sharks kill worldwide. But we aren’t afraid of Babe are we?

In Australia the possibility of drowning is twenty times more likely than it is to be bitten by a shark. But no one asks if you have flotation devices when you go swimming.

Finally, it appears you are ten times more likely to be bitten by a human being in New York City alone than by sharks throughout the world.

Sharks are PR victims of poor human decision making.

Behavioural economics has a lot to say about human decision making around climate change. Today I will touch briefly on the influence that two aspects of our species bounded rationality has for our capacity to respond to the challenge.

First off, people have inconsistent preferences for money over time. That is to say, getting $10 today is worth more than getting $10 tomorrow to most people. What is interesting is that people show absolutely no difference in preference for getting $10 in 100 days compared to $10 in 101 days. We care about immediate payoffs far more than we do about future ones. In the words of Matthew Rabin:

A person discounts near-term incremental delays in well-being more severely than she discounts distant-future incremental delays.

I believe this time inconsistency is why so many people fail to save enough money to support themselves in their old age. It also presents a challenge to addressing climate change which involves paying substantial costs now to avoid future losses.

Another way in which we are not well set up emotionally to make decisions about climate change is because of the endowment effect. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky estimated that people put almost twice as much value on averting a moderate loss than they do to an equivalent gain. They also found that people do not care about their final value of their wealth so much as base their decisions around changes in wealth compared to the existing status quo.

This has implications about how we address degradation in the environment. We will not consider absolute changes in the climate so much as how it is changing from now. How concretely, convincingly, and plausibly climate change will influence the quality of the local environment will determine how much people will expend to avert climate change. This is critical to making a robust link between costs and benefits of actions to avert climate change.

Perhaps most importantly is the fact that emotions are triggered by change. Daniel Kahneman suggested that people feel good or bad about the changes in their level of wealth rather than in the amount of wealth they have. So, climate change of itself is likely to trigger an emotional response.

Unfortunately past degradation of the environment is not factored into our evaluation of how much to spend to avert future change. The fact that a part of the mega fauna is extinction was a result the actions of humans.

Society has got it wrong.

We focus on the bank robber when it is the bank teller who is ripping us off. The bank robber will turn up with a sawn off shot gun and demand money. They know they are crooks. The bank teller would swear black and blue that they are honest, and every lie detector test would confirm it. But it is the bank teller who walks off with the manila folder or the hole-punch who is costing the bank the most money.

Studies have shown that the vast majority of people cheat. They constantly smudge the edges of truth in their favour. We are self-interested, but within limits. In fact, only about 1 per cent of the population go the whole hog and are completely dishonest. About the same amount are completely honest. The remaining 98 per cent of us are willing to be liberal with the truth if it serves our purpose.

The amount that people ‘smudge’ the truth is highly dependent on the social situation they are in. If they see someone else cheating, and getting away with it, then the general level of cheating goes up. Reminds me of tax collection in Greece. On the other hand, if people are reminded of social norms or values, then the level of cheating drops off dramatically. For instance, if people are reminded of the Ten Commandments their morality improves regardless of whether they believe them or are atheists.

This is interesting. It suggests that our law enforcement and our corporate governance arrangements should be focused on encouraging morality among the 98 per cent rather than being entirely focused on the outliers waving sawn off shot-guns. After all, there are there are very few bank robbers but a great many more tellers.

Our society’s focus on the 1 per cent reminds me of a story from when I worked at the Reserve Bank and related to one of the few thieves to ever rob the place. Now the Reserve Bank stores the nation’s gold and millions of dollars in cash reserves. They are pretty focused on security.  So it didn’t take them long to be suspicious about a worker who left every Friday with a wheelbarrow full of rubbish. No matter how thoroughly they checked the rubbish they never found anything worthwhile. It was always full of rubbish.

Eventually security worked it out. The man wasn’t carrying off stolen loot in the wheelbarrow. He was stealing the wheelbarrows!

Human’s learn best from each other. One of the most distinguishing features is how much of our time we spend teaching each other. Unlike most other animals, humans are born with little understanding of the world and few instincts to guide us. This is our great strength. We are born with far less of a destiny than, say, salmon forced to return to their ancestral spawning grounds even though the effort kills them.

But it is also a weakness of our species. Take for example agriculture. This enabled the development of human civilisations, as people were no longer constrained by the energy available from the sun at any point in time. They could store a portion of the annual energy for future consumption, rather than having to rely on what fruits were in season or what game was wandering around.

The agricultural revolution occurred 95 per cent of the way into the total amount of time our species has spent on this small green planet. Thus far.

That means for 95 per cent of humanities history we didn’t even have the rudimentary basis for civilisation! I find it incredible!

What is particularly interesting is how the Neolithic Revolution only took place in a number of places. To be specific, archaeological data indicates that various forms of plants and animal domestication evolved independently in six separate locations worldwide circa 10,000–7000 years ago.

So, the BIGGEST invention in human history only occurred six times. That is to say, the rest of humanity, for the majority of our frail species existence, did not even have the fundamental basis of civilisation.

Despite it being ‘invented’ in only a few places. The innovations spread through copy cats.

What is interesting to me is how the internet has fundamentally transformed the human capacity to learn from each other. Now our social domain is not restricted to just the cousins and close relatives you might be wandering the African savannah with, but the entirety of the human race. Or at least those of the seven billion of us that are wired to the net.

How exciting!

For the most perfect expression of the creative potential of our species, I present to you:

INTERNET MEME!

These are fascinating expressions of collective creativity as people take a shared expression/situation or image and add a little wrinkle to the idea.

Some examples of these memes include: Rick Rolling or Ridiculously Photogenic Guy.

At heart, internet memes are shared creative endeavours. Pouring scorn/humour or attention on the irrelevancies of life.

I have developed my own, very first ever, contribution to this process via adopting the “Call me maybe” internet meme. Newsweek describes this as:

The chorus to Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen’s hit song “Call Me Maybe” goes like this: “Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my number, so call me, maybe?” Those catchy lyrics, which have propelled the poppy song to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, spawned a variety of playful images referencing various moments in history and pop culture. As it pops up everywhere from Billboard to photos across the Internet to business cards in bars, “Call Me Maybe” is crowned our Meme of the Week.

My contribution to humanities collective creativity is:

While there is every reason to suspect that this expression of a momentary meme will not achieve world wide web immortality, it was fun being involved! At the end of the day is that not a perfect summary of what humanity is about?

Classic economics assumes that we are all self-interested. It’s not a bad assumption and certainly serves to model most human behaviour most of the time. However, behavioural economics is focused on the bounded nature of humanities self-interest (and our bounded willpower and bounded rationality), with some fascinating results!

Recent studies published by Dan Ariely put some bounds on our honesty and our willingness to cheat. It turns out the vast majority of us, approximately 98 per cent, are willing to cheat if we think we can get away with it. That’s pretty interesting. What struck me is that people only cheat only so much and then they stop. They either worry about being caught or, more likely, above some threshold they are unable to hold the self-illusion they are honest.

By providing subjects a capacity to self-report how successful they were at a series of tests, Ariely was able to get a measure of their honesty. There are two particularly interesting results:

• That people’s dishonest taps out at certain levels. People were offered between 50 cents through to $10 for cheating. It turns out that when they could benefit by $10 for cheating they were actually more honest!

• Out tendency to cheat is context dependent. If it was ‘for the team’, or people were wearing fake designer clothes, or a range of factors, then they were more likely to cheat. Likewise, changing the location of their name on an insurance form (so it came before they provided answers to form) resulted in them being more honest than if they had to sign their name at the end of the form.

We are all inches away from dishonesty.

PS. Can I have my watch back please?