Avoiding My Own Traps
The human mind is astonishingly complex. We’re still fine tuning our understanding of the mechanics of how it works and why we do the things we do. Trying to understand human behavior has been an area of fascination for people throughout history and is the core question at the heart of the social sciences. Obviously, psychology and sociology directly study the origins of human behavior, but many other fields of study boil down to essentially the same thing. Economics is basically psychology applied to distribution of resources. Political science is psychology applied to government and international relations. I tend to think of history as forensic psychology in reconstructing why people from the past reacted to their circumstances in the way they did.
Thinking Meat
When considering the problems of understanding human behavior I often think of the short story by Terry Bisson called “They’re Made Out of Meat.” In this story some highly advanced aliens discover Earth, and are astonished to discover the human creatures on this planet think with meat. It’s a pretty entertaining story, but framing humans as thinking meat creatures is useful in considering the complexity of human behavior. It’s a wonder we work at all. The fact the meat between our ears has figured out the size of the planet, the distance to the sun, mastered nuclear fusion and produced countless works of art is all the more amazing.
With all humans have accomplished, it’s easy to think of our brains as being like a computer with a CPU and hard drive, but they really are meat. They’re all different and often react to situations in inconsistent ways. We can observe patterns of behavior, but it’s an inexact science. Despite all those problems and limitations in understanding human behavior, we have made significant advances over the last 150 years of modern psychology.
I should clarify that I’m not a psychologist and don’t have a psychology degree, my degree is in history. I had two undergraduate classes in psychology and have an interest in the field, so basically, I know just enough to be dangerous. Still, having a working knowledge of basic principles of psychology is useful in understanding the world around us. The world we interact with daily didn’t just happen, it’s the result of centuries of effort by these thinking meat creatures.
Looking within
Where having knowledge of psychology starts getting weird is in understanding your own behavior. We’re usually predisposed to think of our own thought processes as logical and based on reason. These psychological principles apply to all these other weirdos running around, not to our own sound and reasonable mind. Of course, if you’re at all introspective, you probably realize that’s hogwash, but it still feels true.
There’s a myriad of factors influencing our every decision that we are largely unaware of on a conscious level. When we’re looking at our low stakes decisions, maybe understanding all the nuances isn’t that important. Perhaps if I had all the facts and perfect self-awareness of the psychological factors at play, I could make the perfect decision about which toothpaste to use. But even if buying the cheapest fluoride toothpaste at Walmart is the wrong decision, it probably won’t really matter.
But what about the big things. The decisions that can have a major impact on the rest of your life. Should I marry this person or not? Should I have children? What career should I go into? Where should I live? Can having an understanding of psychology and engaging in self-analysis prevent you from making a major life mistake? It can get pretty meta real quick. If you change a decision that resulted from a logical fallacy, are you actually falling into a different psychological trap? It gets confusing.
The Situation
The real motivation for this article is a real-world decision that my wife and I recently made to move to a new city. I already wrote an article detailing the reasons for the move, but rather than rehashing that, I’ve been thinking about the decision-making process itself. Was it a sensible decision, or did we just fuck up?
We have become increasingly dissatisfied with living in Florida in recent years. At the same time our financial situation has improved enough that moving became a realistic option. This fact occurred to me a couple of months ago and I started entertaining the possibility of making a move. I started thinking of cities I might want to move to and looking at the cost of living and school systems in some of those places. I hadn’t made any decision to move, I was just playing around with the idea.
Sunk Cost
However, even at that stage I was actively aware that I was heading towards the cliffs of sunk cost fallacy. The idea that once you’ve dedicated resources towards one option you become attached to it, and don’t want to waste those spent resources by pursuing a different option. In reality, continuing to put more resources towards a bad idea is likely a mistake. Sometimes you need to recognize the mistake and avoid throwing good money after bad.
I ended up spending several weeks researching a possible move, and the more I researched, the more that time would be wasted if we didn’t move. I mean it would be awfully silly to spend weeks researching a move, just to decide, nope, we’re going to stay right here in Florida. And that’s the hell of it, did I knowingly slow walk into the sunk cost fallacy, or did I make a reasonable well researched decision. Obviously, if moving was the reasonable thing to do, I’d have to spend some time researching the idea first, right?
Confirmation Bias
After spending all this time researching places and deciding Virginia looked like the best place for us, I was still on the fence about whether or not it was the right decision. Virginia seemed nice, but the move would be expensive and there’s a lot I like about Florida. However, after we decided to take the plunge and bought a vacant lot to build on, I could feel the confirmation bias creeping in.
Once we owned the land, it became emotionally useful to justify the decision to ourselves. To reinforce all the good things about Virginia and all the reasons we were leaving Florida. Classic confirmation bias, ignoring all the reasons for staying in Florida, and only focusing on the facts that supported our decision. That, however, doesn’t mean deciding to move was a mistake, only that it might be a mistake that we are blinded from seeing. Arrrrgh!
We could still change our minds. There is nothing stopping us from selling the land in Virginia and staying in Florida if we decided moving to Virginia is a mistake. In reality, the combined effect of the principles of sunk cost and confirmation bias made changing our mind at this point unlikely. But again, that doesn’t mean moving is in fact a mistake. There really are compelling reasons for making the move. How to come to terms with this dilemma?
Uncertainty
The final principle of psychology I’m using in my self-analysis is the uncertainty principle. Some of you might be thinking whoa there, that’s a principle of quantum mechanics, not psychology. Also known as Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, German physicist Werner Heisenberg found that there’s an absolute limit to the precision in which we can measure the location and speed of a particle. In other words, the exact location and speed of a particle can never be precisely known.
Although originally unrelated to psychology, the ideas expressed in the uncertainty principle found resonance with some in the field of psychology. Much like there is always going to be a degree of uncertainty in particle physics, the same is true in psychology. The number of factors influencing an individual’s behavior in any specific situation, including the individuals self-analysis, makes it impossible to precisely determine the behavior’s cause. There’s always going to be a degree of uncertainty in understanding human behavior.
Coming to Terms
I’m never going to know if moving is the right decision and I’m just going to have to be ok with that. In most cases there’s not a right or wrong decision, only multiple options with various pros and cons. Cognitive bias can be a useful mental technique. Once a decision has been made, focusing on the reasons you might have made a mistake would be counter-productive. It could lead to waffling back and forth and never actually deciding. That might end up being worse than making the wrong decision, but finding a way to make it work.
Former President Nixon once said, “at some point you have to shit or get off the pot.” Being mired in indecision is no way to live. We’ve made the decision to move, and one way or the other, we’ll make it work out. We probably could have stayed in Florida and made that decision work out as well. However, at this point, staying in Florida is the equivalent of the toothpaste we didn’t buy, it’s irrelevant.
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