Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [19]
As intriguing and occasionally controversial as Levitt and Dubner’s explanations are, in principle they are no different from the vast majority of social scientific explanations. However much sociologists and economists might argue about the details, that is, until they have succeeded in accounting for a given behavior in terms of some combination of motivations, incentives, perceptions, and opportunities—until they have, in a word, rationalized the behavior—they do not feel that they have really understood it.7 And it is not only social scientists who feel this way. When we try to understand why an ordinary Iraqi citizen would wake up one morning and decide to turn himself into a living bomb, we are implicitly rationalizing his behavior. When we attempt to explain the origins of the recent financial crisis, we are effectively searching for rational financial incentives that led bankers to create and market high-risk assets. And when we blame soaring medical costs on malpractice legislation or procedure-based payments, we are instinctively invoking a model of rational action to understand why doctors do what they do. When we think about how we think, in other words, we reflexively adopt a framework of rational behavior.8
THINKING IS ABOUT MORE THAN THOUGHT
The implicit assumption that people are rational until proven otherwise is a hopeful, even enlightened, one that in general ought to be encouraged. Nevertheless, the exercise of rationalizing behavior glosses over an important difference between what we mean when we talk about “understanding” human behavior, as opposed to the behavior of electrons, proteins, or planets. When trying to understand the behavior of electrons, for example, the physicist does not start by imagining himself in the circumstances of the electrons in question. He may have intuitions concerning theories about electrons, which in turn help him to understand their behavior. But at no point would he expect to understand what it is actually like to be an electron—indeed, the very notion of such intuition is laughable. Rationalizing human behavior, however, is precisely an exercise in simulating, in our mind’s eye, what it would be like to be the person whose behavior we are trying to understand. Only when we can imagine this simulated version of ourselves responding in the manner of the individual in question do we really feel that we have understood the behavior in question.
So effortlessly can we perform this exercise of “understanding by simulation” that it rarely occurs to us to wonder how reliable it is. And yet, as the earlier example of the organ donors illustrates, our mental simulations have a tendency to ignore certain types of factors that turn out to be important. The reason is that when we think about how we think, we instinctively emphasize consciously accessible costs and benefits such as those associated with motivations, preferences, and beliefs—the kinds of factors that predominate in social scientists’ models of rationality. Defaults, by contrast, are a part of the environment in which the decision maker operates, and so affect behavior in a way that is largely invisible to the conscious mind, and therefore largely absent from our commonsense explanations of behavior.9 And defaults are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. For several decades, psychologists and, more recently, behavioral economists have been examining human decision-making, often in controlled laboratory settings. Their findings not only undermine even the most basic assumptions of rationality but also require a whole new way of thinking about human behavior.10
In countless experiments, for example, psychologists have shown that an individual’s choices and behavior can be influenced by “priming” them with particular words, sounds, or other stimuli. Subjects in experiments who read words like “old” and “frail” walk