I hear this a lot, "People are crazy." It gets said in a lot of different ways, but the core is people are irrational. They make bad decisions and bad decisions are irrational. For instance, people heavily invest in stock of the company that they work for. A portfolio like that leaves them vulnerable to too much risk of loss. Basically, people think the company that they work for is a safer bet than it is (as the people who worked for Enron found out).People mis-estimate risk. We are systematically wrong when guessing how risky some activity is due to what many claim are biological factors that were evolved when humans lived in pre-tribe groups. Two researchers, Kahneman and Tversky, won a Nobel prize for their work in demonstrating that people will take a risky bet when it's phased one way, but will reject the bet when it's phrased a little differently. They've also shown that people are consistently wrong when estimating how likely they are to die from various things, like car crashes for instance.
The November 2008 issue of Popular Science had a similar take on how irrational people are. They report that you are 40,000 times more likely to die in a car crash than on a roller coaster and "yet it's the amusement-park rides that scare people." We take things that seem like more immediate threats too seriously. We are afraid of flying but not pollution. There is a one in a million change that you will die in a plane crash but 40% of deaths are caused by pollution.
I think this is a little unfair though. You look at the risks (which are essentially the costs) and say that we should be doing less of the high cost activity. It's like saying, watching TV is cheaper than eating so you should really be watching TV and not eating. To say that a person should rationally be afraid of the risker/costlier activity ignores the relative benefits of the activities.
Going on a roller coaster gets you nothing but an adrenaline surge. Riding in a car allows you to see your family, get food, go to school and an array of other important activities. Even though the risks are higher the rewards are much greater. So we aren't afraid of getting in the car. The same is true of pollution versus planes. There are plenty of substitutes for long distance travel, but if you want to live a city (because of all the fun stuff there) you've got to be okay with the pollution.
Now, if only I could figure out why people are afraid of public speaking.
An interesting topic, Bryan.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I don't think the example of television and food fits well within your overall argument. For any biological necessity, the cost of inaction is death. So when deciding whether to watch television or to eat, the riskiest/costliest decision is going without food. Rationally, we should be afraid of this option. But, to anthropomorphize for a moment, nature didn't trust us enough to leave the biological necessities up to reason. So we have hunger pangs, and a whole slew of physical reminders for when it's time to fulfill a biological necessity (urinating, sleeping, etc).
If humans were rational about these things, we could have a set of gauges on our arm that informed us when it was time to eat, to drink, to urinate, to copulate, etc. But if we take away those desires, what is left of "humanity?" We would be rational agents following the dictate of our gauges. But, and this is an open question, is it rational to live such a life? What is the content of a rational decision for a creature that lacks desire?
Second, I agree that an analysis of risk shouldn't ignore the relative benefits of the activity. But this is the basic idea of a cost/benefit analysis, isn't it? We determine that the potential benefits outweigh the potential costs.
But I wonder if this is the way that people actually think. Just recently, I've started researching theories of decision-making, so my academic perspective here lacks expertise. Given what I know, however, I'm skeptical that a cost/benefit analysis is what drives people to choose cars over roller coasters and pollution over planes. Utilitarians would be thrilled if people made these kind of calculations on a daily basis - it's what they've been recommending for years. But what virtue theorists have been trying to explain is that the landscape of human motivation is much broader than such calculations.
Following from that, I think the constructive aspects of society play a dominant role in many of our decisions. Part of the constructive power of a society is its ability to set norms. This process is hardly ever intentional, but emerges from the structures and institutions within a society. Now, institutions always have our basic desires as a foundation - but different circumstances (geography, weather, neighboring tribes, etc) lead to different institutions. Once established, the influence between our desires and our institutions becomes bi-directional.
Sometimes this process leaves us with institutions that aren't particularly adept at suiting our desires. The pollution created by automobiles is a great example. We want to see our families, get food, and learn, but there are a wide variety of ways we could accomplish that. Cars are simply one way of achieving those ends. Unfortunately they also cause pollution, which isn't conducive to fulfilling our desires. But we accept it because our society has normalized travel by automobile. We accept the pollution because we "understand" that there really isn't another realistic way to get around.
Another aspect of this normalization is the minimizing of risk. Cars are the norm, everyone drives - so of course they're safe. Yes, accidents happen, but only to unskilled drivers.
Perhaps we should be afraid of getting in the car? Perhaps we shouldn't be okay with the pollution? Is it rational to accept the norms of one's society, or to look at the broader context and see the unnecessary harms? We could design our cities, communities, and neighborhoods around principles of New Urbanism or Smart Growth. Create walkable mixed-use areas. Replace dangerous automobiles with safer and more efficient public transportation. Is it rational that we, instead, continue getting into our cars?
I think people are irrational in the context of our society. It's most likely that we evolved to be concerned with what was immediately around us: cougars, fruit, mates. That proximal focus worked for us then, but it's killing us now. Most humans lack a perspective of the whole, they act in ways that are beneficial in the short-term and harmful in the long-term. But we're quite adaptable and given the right kind of education, we can shift our perspective to what I think is rational: the perspective of the whole.
Lacking that broad context, we will continue to make irrational decisions based on social and societal norms instead of placing our decision within the context of a shared existence on earth. Even those aiming towards rationality will often do so based on a notion of rationality that is dependent on (often irrational) societal norms.
(I contend, by the way, that cultural diversity creates a vibrancy to life that would be lacking otherwise. Many aspects of a culture are neither rational nor irrational, they are random or arbitrary. The more variety within these neutral aspects, the better.)
I think we're both interested in seeing rationality flourish, so I look forward to hearing your thoughts.