On Second Thought-Outsmarting Your Mind's HardWired Habits by Wray Herbert

Author:Wray Herbert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Psychology, Science
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

11

The DECOY Heuristic

PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME CHOOSE

YOU’VE JUST MOVED to town and need a place to live. You’ve narrowed your choices to two apartments that seem suitable. The first is spacious, 800 square feet, but it’s a good fifteen miles from your new job. That’s a long daily commute. The second is much closer, only about seven miles away, but at 450 square feet the space is a bit cramped. It’s a trade-off, and you’re torn.

Then you open up your newspaper to the classifieds and notice a third apartment, newly available. This one is 350 square feet and ten miles from work. Now you’ve got three choices, but you have to make a choice pronto. You start your new job in a week. Which do you choose?

Well, if you’re like most people, you will choose the second apartment. That may be a perfectly fine choice, and chances are you’ll be happy there. But it’s not a completely rational choice, and here’s why: Eliminating the third apartment is a no-brainer. Just compare it to number two. It’s both smaller and more remote. So that should still leave you with a toss-up between two decent places, and you should be just as likely to choose one as the other. But you’re not. Because you compared it to number two, you are still swayed by that comparison. You pick the second not because it is better than the spacious apartment, number one, but because it’s superior to the loser apartment, even though you ruled that one out.

Cognitive psychologists call that third apartment a “mental decoy.” It is so clearly inferior to the other two, neither spacious nor well located, that it really shouldn’t even be in the mix, but dinging it does not make it go away entirely. It exerts what psychologists call an “attraction effect,” lingering in your mind, tugging you toward apartment number two. The decoy heuristic is a potent choosing tool, even if it is flawed and illogical. We make choices like this every day, some trivial but some momentous. We decide what to have for dinner, which movie to see, where to go to college, even whom to date and marry. And a lot of the picks we make are irrational, influenced by irrelevant decoy information.

Nobody knows for sure why the heuristic brain operates this way, but there are theories. Think about that same apartment dilemma pushed back a couple of million years in time. You’re an early hominid, part of a primitive tribe, and you’re trying to secure your place in the group. Should you put your energy into claiming the plot of ground near the river, the water supply? Or the smaller one on the ridge, which offers a better view of approaching threats? Which one makes you safer overall? Which gets you closer to the seat of power? Perhaps you should opt for the small one right in the middle of the neighborhood. It’s clearly the safest.

Choices matter. Some matter a lot, and they mattered even more back when our minds were adapting for survival.

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