How To Break Anything

Thoughts and insights on culture and human behavior, living blissfully at the intersection of rationality and irrationality (but mostly irrationality) 
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July 6, 2010

Proverbial Wallet: Technology to increase the cognitive impact of increasingly abstract exchanges of value

Behavioral economists and psychologists have long been discussing the cognitive implications that naturally come with the abstraction of currencies. Cash is a more abstract form of exchanging value than physical barter/trade, and the credit card is an even more abstract form of exchange than cash. Generally speaking, the more abstract the exchange, the less cognitive impact it has on our long-term thinking and decision-making – often with negative results, as indicated by the rates of credit card debt in the US and elsewhere. As we move into virtual currencies where value is increasing exchanged via SMS, mouse click, or natural gesture motion, many design and cognitive thinkers are expressing their concern about the implications of these even more abstract methods of exchange.

The Proverbial Wallet series of concepts have these thoughts in mind, developed by a tangible interaction team at the MIT Media Lab. These concept wallets incorporate elements of physical and social feedback into the act of spending, bringing a level of cognitive impact back into the purchase process. Each gives a nod to the principles of at-a-glance information and immediate feedback, and their importance in giving people the tools to make better decisions. See below for the team’s description of these concepts:

Peacock: The wallet appears to grow and shrink using a servo to reflect the balance in your accounts. Your assets will be on display to attract potential mates.

Mother Bear: The wallet protects the money within it when you need to be thrifty with a shorted motor in the hinge that resists opening. It promotes saving to weather out financial winters.

Bumblebee: The wallet buzzes through a vibrator motor whenever your bank processes a transaction. This encourages a conscious connection between handing over your credit card and your hard-earned money being harvested from the bank, and alerts you to fraud when you get a buzz without making a purchase.

Proverbial Wallet

[via @carlablumenthal | img via Boston.com]

this post originally appeared on psfk.com

 

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Filed under  //   behavioral economics   cognitive fallacies   value  
Posted by Kyle Cameron Studstill 

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May 6, 2010

Cognitive bias video/song, and some thoughts on optimization

 

Totally love the above video @fatgator passed along to me ha.
 
At some point in life one of the questions you have to answer for yourself is this:
 
To what degree is cognitive bias a fundamentally negative part of the human condition? 
 
For example, the charge behind lesswrong.org is that bias is fundamentally wrong in the purest sense of the word; one's goal should be to become less biased, thus optimizing one's life. 
 
There's another angle that wonders what it means for the universe to even have something like "wrong in the most pure sense of the word." This has to do with the question: what does it even mean to optimize one's life?
 
The quintessential example is the machine that knows so much about you that it can perfectly 'optimize' your life (and I mean optimize in the purest sense of the word - that is to say that it is unbiased, perfectly calculating, and error-free): when it tells you in a morning email exactly all the steps to follow in order to have an 'optimized' life, do you follow it to the letter? 
 
I've only been asking this question for a couple months but I have yet to run into someone who calls this 'optimal.' 
 
In other words, even optimization strategies have optimization strategies. 
 
Just a thought, but it's what I think about when I wonder about the idea of 'better living through less bias.'  

 

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Filed under  //   cognitive fallacies   irrationality   optimaization   philosophy   rationality  
Posted by Kyle Cameron Studstill 

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March 15, 2010

Why I believe in irrationality: cognitive and physical limitations, etc

[img via Benchilada]

You may or may not be aware that I'm scheduled to write for the 3six5 project in about a month. I had a pretty insightful thought this morning relevent to what I'll be writing about so I set up a google calendar alert to remind myself about it.

Those of you who know me know I'm of the "memory is nothing close to our typical conception of it" camp, so I do things like this all the time. I set alerts constantly, and I always have a pad of paper and pen on my person.

If I could say one thing about why I believe so strongly in irrationality, it would be because I'm so aware of our cognitive limitations. Of those limitations, memory seems to be a relatively benign and acceptable one to us (though entirely pervasive), but it's our other limitations that make irrationality a dirty word.

I could go on and on about these limitations (see this list of how you could be completely wrong about everything) but suffice to say that if you tell anyone they are fundamentally irrational and far less in control of their deceisions than they think, they're inclined to argue you down about it.

This is because we tend to think of "control" and volition in terms of the things that the prefrontal cortex consciously determines, which is absurd given the ridiculously small amount of influence the PFC actually has.


Here's what's strange to me: if I tell someone that I can influence their ability to grab a box just by placing it high on a shelf where they can't reach it, they seem to be fine with that.

But if I tell them I can influence their decision between healthy fruit salad and fattening chocolate cake just by giving them some numbers to memorize beforehand, they're not so comfortable. (After all, they are in control of that decision, certainly...)

Or if I tell them that I can make them answer the question "do you like this [random, unknown] person?" either 'yes' or 'no' simply by having them hold a cup of coffee as I'm asking? Even less comfortable. (in fact, the description of the Radiolab link I just provided there even begins with the description "It's scary to think that choice might just be an illusion.")


The point being that I find it a little silly/humorous that we completely accept our physical limitations, but adamantly deny that we have cognitive ones as well. 

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Filed under  //   cognitive fallacies   irrationality  
Posted by Kyle Cameron Studstill 

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March 7, 2010

Decision-making in multiple contexts, as told by Herodotus in The Histories

[Herodotus on the Persians in The Histories]

Some of you who have talked to me recently on making decisions may know that I tend to talk about making decisions in multiple contexts. The idea is that if you make a decision once, you're assuming every fruit of that decision is going to be consumed in the exact same context in the future. This is absurd, of course.

Ideally, in order to effectively avoid regret, you'd be able to consider the outcomes of a decision in every context you might experience those outcomes in the future.

This is of course impossible, but the idea is to experience as many of then as you can as you think about your choices. Let's say you're considering whether to take a job across the country; the strategy would be to consider the proposition when excited, when depressed, when frustrated, when scared about the future, when glowing from positive feedback, and so on.

The relevant cognitive bias here is probably an iteration of the availability heuristic, in the sense that we tend to believe the way we feel right now is how we'll feel forever.

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Filed under  //   cognitive fallacies   decisionmaking  
Posted by Kyle Cameron Studstill 

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