Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Speaker 1: Robert Land and I'm Joe McCormick in. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: from the Vault. This one originally published on December and
Speaker 1: it is called The Toaster Not Taken. This one is
Speaker 1: about a classic finding in psychology that I remember getting
Speaker 1: really obsessed with at this time, about how our choices
Speaker 1: can later determine our actual preferences. So yeah, this one
Speaker 1: was a lot of fun. I remember we ended up
Speaker 1: talking a good bit about Metallica for some reason. Yes
Speaker 1: we did. Yes, all right, Well let's let's let's dive
Speaker 1: in Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Land and I'm Joe
Speaker 1: McCormick in. Today we're gonna be talking about choices and offerences,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to start off by looking at what
Speaker 1: I think is one of the most commonly misunderstood poems
Speaker 1: in English literature. It's a classic most Americans already know.
Speaker 1: You probably read it at some point in high school
Speaker 1: or even earlier. But it's an interesting poem because I
Speaker 1: think it usually gets interpreted to mean the exact opposite
Speaker 1: of what it actually means. So this is the road
Speaker 1: not taken by Robert Frost. Are you ready to hear
Speaker 1: it again? Yeah? Yeah, This is always a pleasure to
Speaker 1: to hear or to read, even though it's one that
Speaker 1: I think we're all hit with a lead, probably at
Speaker 1: the elementary school level, you know. I I feel like
Speaker 1: I came to a greater appreciation of just the music
Speaker 1: of Robert Frost's poems as an adult than than I
Speaker 1: had for them when I was in school. So I'm
Speaker 1: not sure exactly what changed there. Maybe I became grumpier,
Speaker 1: and he was quite a grump himself. But but here
Speaker 1: we go. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and
Speaker 1: sorry I would not travel both and be one traveler long.
Speaker 1: I stood and looked down one as far as I
Speaker 1: could to where it bent in the undergrowth, then took
Speaker 1: the other, as just as fair and having perhaps the
Speaker 1: better claim, because it was grassy and wanted, where though
Speaker 1: as for that, the passing there had warned them really
Speaker 1: about the same, and both that morning equally lay in
Speaker 1: leaves no step had trodden black. Oh. I kept the
Speaker 1: first for another day, yet, knowing how way leads onto way,
Speaker 1: I doubted. If I should ever come back, I shall
Speaker 1: be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages.
Speaker 1: Hence two roads diverged in a wood, and I I
Speaker 1: took the one less traveled by, and that has made
Speaker 1: all the difference. It's a beautiful bomb, it really is.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that that is really funny
Speaker 1: is that I think people usually interpret this poem as
Speaker 1: a sort of sellabration of unique individuality and a celebration
Speaker 1: of going your own way. It's about how if you
Speaker 1: go boldly where others have not gone before, if you
Speaker 1: remain your unique, authentic self and choose the stranger path,
Speaker 1: you'll be rewarded with a life of unique meaning. But
Speaker 1: if you read it closely, I think the poem is
Speaker 1: meant to be a quite ironic sort of perry against
Speaker 1: exactly that way of thinking, because what happens in it, well,
Speaker 1: the speaker comes to a fork in the road. The
Speaker 1: speaker evaluates the for each path for a bit, at
Speaker 1: first thinks one is more traveled than the other, but
Speaker 1: then ultimately realizes that they're about the same, then takes
Speaker 1: one road rather than the other for no major reason.
Speaker 1: They are in reality pretty much indistinguishable, then thinks about
Speaker 1: how later in life he'll be claiming that he took
Speaker 1: the bold, untraveled path and that it changed his life,
Speaker 1: even though that wasn't true. Yeah, I feel like that's
Speaker 1: something that a lot of people miss out on in
Speaker 1: the poem, and I think a lot of it sometimes
Speaker 1: comes down to um the discussions about what is he
Speaker 1: actually talking about, and people get very wrapped up in that,
Speaker 1: like what was the choice? No, no, no, not the
Speaker 1: walk in the woods? What were you actually talking about?
Speaker 1: Frost and and then you you kind of end up
Speaker 1: ignoring the mechanics of it that you're talking about here. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I think this is in a way a sort
Speaker 1: of an image poem that can be applied to many
Speaker 1: different types of choices one makes in life. Though I
Speaker 1: think it was literally inspired by him walking in the
Speaker 1: woods in New England. I'm not positive about that, but
Speaker 1: I think I've read that before. But yeah, So it's
Speaker 1: essentially a poem about a person who chose at random
Speaker 1: between two at the time pretty much indistinguishable options, and
Speaker 1: then comes up later with an ex post facto justification
Speaker 1: for his choice that it was the one made you know,
Speaker 1: made out of daring an authentic principle and that it
Speaker 1: was deeply meaningful. And I really like this ironic interpret
Speaker 1: station because it raises a number of really interesting questions
Speaker 1: about human nature. So, first of all, isn't so much
Speaker 1: of life like this? We do make life changing decisions
Speaker 1: without knowing what the outcome will be. That the options
Speaker 1: in front of us might look indistinguishable. At the time
Speaker 1: you choose between two job opportunities, you can't really tell
Speaker 1: that one is necessarily better than the other. But then
Speaker 1: later you you will have had much of your life
Speaker 1: developed on the basis of whichever choice you made, and
Speaker 1: you have to come up with a narrative of your
Speaker 1: life story that makes sense of that choice in light
Speaker 1: of its later unpredictable significance. And obviously, when you do
Speaker 1: this a lot of times you're gonna end up remembering
Speaker 1: the choice differently than it was in your mind when
Speaker 1: you made it. But then it also raises an interesting
Speaker 1: question about decision making. In the moment. When there are
Speaker 1: two options that are pretty much the same, we we
Speaker 1: often have to form a preference for one or the other. Now,
Speaker 1: there are plenty of cases where you can quite clearly
Speaker 1: see why you'd prefer one option over another. But in
Speaker 1: cases where that's not true, in the absence of the
Speaker 1: obvious superiority of one option over another, where do our
Speaker 1: preferences arise from? Why do we decide we like the
Speaker 1: left path rather than the right path if they look
Speaker 1: about the same. And for the purpose of today's episode,
Speaker 1: I want to expand beyond thinking about paths in the
Speaker 1: woods or big life decisions when it comes to the
Speaker 1: formation of any preferences, even extremely minor ones. You know,
Speaker 1: you choose between two basically equivalent brands of blender at
Speaker 1: the store. Why do we like the things that we like?
Speaker 1: Why do we have the preferences that we have. I'm
Speaker 1: probably gonna refer back to the Black Mirrorum episode the
Speaker 1: Black Mirror movie Band or Snatch a lot in this one.
Speaker 1: We did an episode about it last year, breaking down
Speaker 1: you know, the nature of choice and free will and all.
Speaker 1: But like I instantly think about the early stages of
Speaker 1: Band or Snatch. Where as you do this choose your
Speaker 1: own adventure media, you have to choose which cereal the
Speaker 1: main character is going to have for breakfast, and you know,
Speaker 1: ultimately it doesn't really matter in the context of that
Speaker 1: of that story. Uh, And it's it's more about just
Speaker 1: teaching the mechanics of choice within this um you know,
Speaker 1: computer narrative. But but it's interesting that you still have
Speaker 1: to exert a certain amount of mental energy to make
Speaker 1: that choice, to decide this serial over that one. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting how and this will tie into something we'll
Speaker 1: talk about in just a minute here. It's interesting how,
Speaker 1: at least for me, those early choices are kind of uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: When you have to pick the cereal or you have
Speaker 1: to pick the record or something, and you don't have
Speaker 1: a natural strong preference one way or another. You've got
Speaker 1: this kind of weird anxiety that lingers after your choice,
Speaker 1: like I don't know that I pick the right one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because later on you can definitely make a call like okay,
Speaker 1: this is the more dramatic choice, or well this is
Speaker 1: the more this is the moral choice. But in choosing
Speaker 1: the two cereals, aside from maybe health concerns about the
Speaker 1: sugary cereal versus the other cereal, there's not as much
Speaker 1: to go on, right. So one of the main things
Speaker 1: I want to talk about in this episode today is
Speaker 1: a really interesting fact that's been observed in a bunch
Speaker 1: of psychology studies over the years, and I'm gonna look
Speaker 1: at an early one from the nineteen fifties in just
Speaker 1: a minute. Here, we often assume that our preferences are
Speaker 1: what determine our choices. I pick this option instead of
Speaker 1: that because I like it better. But there is also
Speaker 1: significant evidence here's your AUNTI metaboli, that our choices determine
Speaker 1: our preferences. I like this option because I picked it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And one of the big early studies here, a classic
Speaker 1: study that was in the Journal of Abnormal and Social
Speaker 1: Psychology in nineteen fifty six by Jack W. Brim is
Speaker 1: called post decision changes in the Desirability of Alternatives. So
Speaker 1: so again, this is by the American psychologist Jack W. Brim.
Speaker 1: Brim had been a student of the highly influential American
Speaker 1: social psychologist Leon Festinger, who is probably best known for
Speaker 1: developing the theory of cognitive dissonance. Now, this is a
Speaker 1: term you've probably all heard before, but a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't know the experimental history surrounding it. So the
Speaker 1: simple version is that cognitive dissonance is the state of
Speaker 1: holding contradictory beliefs or values, or contradictions between your beliefs
Speaker 1: and your values and your actions observing these contradictions within
Speaker 1: yourself simultaneously. So one example that's very often sided is
Speaker 1: knowing that smoking cigarettes is harmful to your health, but
Speaker 1: smoking them anyway. But there there can be all kinds
Speaker 1: of cognitive dissonance. Our life is just full of of
Speaker 1: of cognitive dissonance. You know, you believe that your spouse
Speaker 1: is a good person, but you also know that they
Speaker 1: did something wrong. You know that they stole money out
Speaker 1: of the church collection plate or something. I think one
Speaker 1: that's probably very common appearances. You love your child, but
Speaker 1: you really honestly don't like something they did. You know,
Speaker 1: you hate the way their crayon drawings look or something. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and when you're faced with this kind of contradiction,
Speaker 1: and of course we're faced with these kind of contradictions
Speaker 1: all the time, Uh, there is a problem that arises.
Speaker 1: What Festinger argued was that the state of cognitive dissonance
Speaker 1: is experienced internally as a profound stress, and people will
Speaker 1: do almost anything to alleviate that stress. And so this
Speaker 1: this remedial action to to alleviate the stress can take
Speaker 1: many forms, but it's just some finding some way to
Speaker 1: resolve the contradiction. Really anything that reduces the internal perception
Speaker 1: of a contradiction between beliefs and values and actions. So
Speaker 1: if you're going back to the classic example of a
Speaker 1: person who smokes cigarettes but who is aware of the
Speaker 1: dangers of tobacco, they have options including they could they
Speaker 1: could change their actions so you can actually quit smoking.
Speaker 1: But of course that one is really hard, so a
Speaker 1: lot of people would instead go for one of the
Speaker 1: other options, which is change explicit beliefs. You can say, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: what are these doctors know? You know, doctors are wrong
Speaker 1: about stuff all the time. I don't know, nobody ever
Speaker 1: really proved that smoking causes cancer. That's you know, the
Speaker 1: these studies are Can you really trust these studies? And
Speaker 1: on and on you you can you can just say no,
Speaker 1: I don't believe that the risks are real, or you
Speaker 1: could change other types of beliefs, such as changing underlying
Speaker 1: beliefs that are going unspoken, because if there's an internal conflict,
Speaker 1: if there's cognitive dissonance arising over smoking, it relies on
Speaker 1: the unspoken premise that you want to live as long
Speaker 1: and be as healthy as possible. So you could relieve
Speaker 1: cognitive dissonance by explicitly rejecting that belief. And you've probably
Speaker 1: heard this before from people who say, like, yeah, I smoke,
Speaker 1: Yeah it causes cancer, but hey, who wants to live forever?
Speaker 1: That's also you know, a great example of of short
Speaker 1: term versus long term thinking, right exactly. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think there are ways of looking at things like. I mean,
Speaker 1: on one hand, like you know, people are free to
Speaker 1: to make the decisions about their own health as they choose.
Speaker 1: But I think there is a legitimate school of thought
Speaker 1: that would say that, uh, making statements like that is
Speaker 1: basically a lack of compassion for your own future self. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but statements like that can help resolve the dissonance. Uh.
Speaker 1: There there are other things people do to People can
Speaker 1: think of compensatory reasons that they would keep smoking. So
Speaker 1: they might say, Okay, I I accept the fact that
Speaker 1: smoking is bad for health. I keep doing it, but
Speaker 1: I've got some like compensatory justification in my brain. I
Speaker 1: need to smoke in order to stay focused at work,
Speaker 1: or like I need to smoke in order to stay thin,
Speaker 1: or or things like that. And so people have argued
Speaker 1: about how best to interpret cognitive dissonance theory and and
Speaker 1: they've argued around the margins over the years, but it
Speaker 1: seems to me like cognitive dissonance is pretty robust and
Speaker 1: a very lasting concept from from social psychology that explains
Speaker 1: a lot of our behaviors and cognitive processes. There's been
Speaker 1: a ton of different experiments that seem to support the
Speaker 1: idea of cognitive dissonance reduction is a major pressure driving
Speaker 1: our beliefs and behaviors. Just one I was reading about
Speaker 1: as a study by Festinger and Carl Smith from nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine that works something like this. So you have
Speaker 1: people perform something that they believe to be the actual
Speaker 1: bulk of the experiment. It's this like long, repetitive, extremely
Speaker 1: boring task I don't remember exactly what it is. Is like,
Speaker 1: you know, you put these pegs in holes for an
Speaker 1: hour or something is mind numbingly boring, and then you
Speaker 1: pay the subjects after they're done with the experiment to
Speaker 1: tell the people who are going in to do it
Speaker 1: next that it's really fun and interesting. Uh so they're
Speaker 1: gonna be lying, They're gonna be openly saying something that
Speaker 1: they know not to be true. And Festinger and Carl
Speaker 1: Smith found something interesting which is that if you pay
Speaker 1: people a larger sum of money to tell this lie,
Speaker 1: they will they will afterwards acknowledge it as a lie. So,
Speaker 1: you know, you give me a hundred bucks or whatever.
Speaker 1: I think it was twenty dollars in the study, but
Speaker 1: that was nineteen fifties money. You give me a hundred
Speaker 1: bucks or something. I say like, yeah, you know, I
Speaker 1: I lied to the next guy. I told him it
Speaker 1: was going to be really fun. If you pay somebody
Speaker 1: a pittance sum to tell the lie, you give them
Speaker 1: just a dollar, they are more likely afterwards to report
Speaker 1: believing that what they said was true. So you give
Speaker 1: somebody a hundred dollars to say this is really putting
Speaker 1: the pegs in the holes is really fun. They say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was lying, but hey, I gotta pay day. You
Speaker 1: pay people a dollar to say it, and they say,
Speaker 1: actually putting the pegs in the holes was pretty fun.
Speaker 1: And the reasoning here is that, in the absence of
Speaker 1: a large sum of money to internally justify the lie
Speaker 1: in order to basically relieve the cognitive dissonance, give you
Speaker 1: a reason and in your mind for having said it.
Speaker 1: The easiest way for people to reduce cognitive dissonance is
Speaker 1: to change their beliefs, change what they believe about what
Speaker 1: they were doing, so that what they were saying actually
Speaker 1: wasn't a lie, it was true. Yeah. But yeah, the
Speaker 1: pigs and the holes. It's great. Yeah, I um, I
Speaker 1: agree with what you said said earlier. I think this
Speaker 1: helps to explain a lot of what goes on in
Speaker 1: our heads, cognitive dissonance, both specifically as it applies to
Speaker 1: contradictory opinions and beliefs that that we we hold at
Speaker 1: once in our minds, as well as just more broadly
Speaker 1: getting it the lack of a congruent self. You know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean human life, You're you're just gonna be
Speaker 1: full of contradictions. I mean, there is no way a
Speaker 1: human can be consistent all the time. Uh, You're you're
Speaker 1: going to have pressures that are acting on your mind
Speaker 1: and going in multiple directions and and most of the
Speaker 1: time these contradictions can exist within you without you really
Speaker 1: being aware of them. But once you become aware of them,
Speaker 1: I am pretty convinced that, Yeah, it does manifest as
Speaker 1: this type of stress that you've got to do something
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, Like you often see people using sort
Speaker 1: of like self defining mantras, you know, like I am
Speaker 1: this first, this second, this third, or you know I
Speaker 1: am this and this and this or you know, you
Speaker 1: define yourself and your your profile on social media as
Speaker 1: being as being this or that or the other. But
Speaker 1: you know, ultimately, if we're being honest, a lot of
Speaker 1: times it depends on on what time of day it is,
Speaker 1: when we last had a little boost of sugar caffeine.
Speaker 1: You know, how tired we are, um, how much sunlight
Speaker 1: we've been exposed to during the day, that's sort of thing,
Speaker 1: how much exercise we've had. Uh, those are some just
Speaker 1: some of the factors that can influence the ranking of
Speaker 1: those little um uh, those little phrases that we used
Speaker 1: to define ourselves and and and even incorporating different phrases
Speaker 1: that we might not we not not have on the list,
Speaker 1: uh normally or certainly when we're you know, outward facing
Speaker 1: and dealing with other people. Yeah, a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of our lives are concerned with trying to create
Speaker 1: a consistent narrative about ourselves, and in fact ourselves they're
Speaker 1: just not that consistent. Yeah, and been really now, I mean,
Speaker 1: neither is our understanding of the past, our memory of
Speaker 1: the past or anything. I mean, it it's just it's
Speaker 1: it's so ridiculous the more you unravel it, Like, we
Speaker 1: were so obsessed with our our personal narratives and where
Speaker 1: we fit into it, when in reality, there is no past,
Speaker 1: you know, we are we are creatures of the present,
Speaker 1: traveling into the future. And uh and yet we end up,
Speaker 1: you know, spending all this time fretting about things that
Speaker 1: are essentially fiction because all we have is just this, uh,
Speaker 1: this cople together false memory of what we were. Uh.
Speaker 1: This ties back to previous episodes that we've done on
Speaker 1: the phenomenon of fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people
Speaker 1: to overestimate the role of like internal agency and character
Speaker 1: and underestimate the role of just external situations and forces
Speaker 1: in guiding what human behavior is. It turns out people
Speaker 1: are more malleable and more changeable based on situations than
Speaker 1: we normally like to think. We like to think in
Speaker 1: terms of like, you know, consistent solid psychological storytelling where
Speaker 1: John snow always stands for right and he just always
Speaker 1: does what is perfectly consistent with his character and it's
Speaker 1: explained by who he is. But in fact, what we
Speaker 1: do a lot of times is just explained by what's
Speaker 1: going on around us. But anyway, to come back to
Speaker 1: the cognitive dissonance question, one implication of cognitive dissonance is that,
Speaker 1: in fact, our beliefs are quite malleable. When beliefs are
Speaker 1: dissonant with one another, it looks like, you know, it's
Speaker 1: people don't want to think this about themselves, but it
Speaker 1: seems to be true. We quite often and quite readily
Speaker 1: just change one of our beliefs. We just believe something
Speaker 1: different to get him in line. So anyway, the study
Speaker 1: by Jack Brim looked at the question of whether cognitive
Speaker 1: dissonance might be a motivator even when people are evaluating
Speaker 1: their own preferences, their own personal desires, just likes and dislikes,
Speaker 1: even with regards to very minor things like do you
Speaker 1: like this appliance or not? How much do you like it?
Speaker 1: So the basics of the study, you present people with
Speaker 1: a selection of different household items and appliances ranging in
Speaker 1: retail value for from fifteen dollars to thirty dollars, but
Speaker 1: that was at the time that teen fifties dollars um
Speaker 1: And then you asked the people to rate each of
Speaker 1: these items in terms of desirability, how much would you
Speaker 1: would you like to own this item on a scale
Speaker 1: of one to ten, from extremely desirable to definitely not
Speaker 1: desirable at all or sorry, I think I said one
Speaker 1: to tend it's one to eight, um, so you know
Speaker 1: you really want the eights, you don't really care about
Speaker 1: the ones. Uh. And the items included things like an
Speaker 1: automatic coffee maker and electric sandwich grill, a silk screen
Speaker 1: reproduction and automatic toaster, a fluorescent desk lamp, a book
Speaker 1: of art reproduction, a stop watch, and a portable radio.
Speaker 1: And so, if I'm subject in this experiment, I go
Speaker 1: down the list, I do my ratings. I might rate
Speaker 1: the stop watch at a three out of ten, I
Speaker 1: don't really care about that much, maybe the sandwich grill
Speaker 1: at a five, the coffee maker at a six, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And then after I'm finished with my ratings and they're
Speaker 1: taken away, the experiment er tells me that as part
Speaker 1: of my payment for participating, I'll get to take home
Speaker 1: my choice of one of two items from the list.
Speaker 1: But the experiment or picks what the two are. So
Speaker 1: maybe he tells me that I can take home either
Speaker 1: the toaster or the coffee maker, which I rated equally,
Speaker 1: giving both a six. But I have to pick one,
Speaker 1: so I picked the coffee maker and I reject the toaster.
Speaker 1: Then some other conditions take place. Uh, there were various
Speaker 1: other control conditions, but the experiment ends at some point
Speaker 1: with ME re rating the original objects again for desirability
Speaker 1: without being able to refer to the things I had
Speaker 1: already made. And what the researchers found was, on average,
Speaker 1: if I was forced to pick between two objects, my
Speaker 1: desirability rating for the object I picked would go up,
Speaker 1: and my rating for the object I rejected would go down.
Speaker 1: So maybe I initially rated the toaster and the coffee
Speaker 1: maker both as a six. But then if I'm forced
Speaker 1: to pick between them and I picked the coffee maker, afterwards,
Speaker 1: I might rate the coffee maker is a seven and
Speaker 1: the toaster is a four or something like that. Now
Speaker 1: why would that be? Yeah, this is interesting because one
Speaker 1: of one of the possible examples that came to mind
Speaker 1: when I was thinking about this was to go back
Speaker 1: to a previous episode that we recorded, thinking about how,
Speaker 1: you know, back when when I was younger, you had,
Speaker 1: you know, like maybe twenty bucks to blow on a
Speaker 1: CD during the course of a month, and you made
Speaker 1: your pick, you bought it, and then even if it
Speaker 1: wasn't that great, you kind of found found a reason
Speaker 1: to like that album as you listen to it over
Speaker 1: and over again, you found at least one song. But
Speaker 1: in those cases, you have sunk cost in the situation,
Speaker 1: like I spent money on it um in addition to time,
Speaker 1: whereas in this scenario, uh, it's there. Their money is
Speaker 1: not the issue. There's like I guess there's sort of
Speaker 1: a sunk cost in time, but we don't have that
Speaker 1: that financial aspect of the scenario, right, so the sunk
Speaker 1: cost fallacy does seem to be real, Like we make
Speaker 1: choice supportive, biased judgments in favor of stuff that we've
Speaker 1: already invested time and money and all that into. But
Speaker 1: here it's just like, well, you're gonna get one or
Speaker 1: the other. Which one do you want? And it seems
Speaker 1: like once you pick one out of the two, the
Speaker 1: one you didn't pick looks like junk, and the one
Speaker 1: you did pick, oh that's pretty great. I do find this.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, there's just you know, me thinking
Speaker 1: back on past experiences, But I feel like this with
Speaker 1: ice creams sometimes, like Ultimately, most of the ice creams
Speaker 1: at the n Ice ice cream place, you know they're
Speaker 1: gonna be great. I'm gonna enjoy them. They're just gonna
Speaker 1: be varying degrees of sweetness and uh, you know, complex
Speaker 1: flay or I guess. But I'll often find myself thinking,
Speaker 1: like you know, afterwards, I I'm there with my family,
Speaker 1: will all, you know, sample each other's ice creams, and
Speaker 1: I'll generally go, Yep, I made the right choice. This
Speaker 1: is the ice cream for me. Yep. Now there could
Speaker 1: be multiple reasons for that. One reason is extremely straightforward.
Speaker 1: One reason is you just picked the one you actually
Speaker 1: wanted most. You know what your preferences are and you
Speaker 1: acted them out. But there could be Yeah, there could
Speaker 1: be other things at work too, And so the underlying
Speaker 1: explanation based on cognitive dissonance for what was observed in
Speaker 1: the study, It goes something like this. When you evaluate
Speaker 1: how much you want to potential possessions, you think in
Speaker 1: a general way about the pros and cons of each,
Speaker 1: What do you like about them? What do you dislike
Speaker 1: about them? Then, if you are forced to choose between
Speaker 1: two options for which you see roughly similar amounts of pros,
Speaker 1: and cons it creates one of these mildly stressful states
Speaker 1: of cognitive dissonance. And again that sounds funny because like,
Speaker 1: how could that be stressful? But it looks like this
Speaker 1: just does manifest a stress in our brains, even though
Speaker 1: it doesn't really make a lot of sense that it would.
Speaker 1: So you didn't choose the toaster, even though there are
Speaker 1: things that you like about the toaster, etcetera. And this
Speaker 1: uncomfortable state of cognitive dissonance has a name actually, when
Speaker 1: it's applied to expensive purchases, when you've spent money on it,
Speaker 1: it's known as buyer's remorse. Right, Okay, I need to
Speaker 1: buy a lawnmower, But you know, what the hell do
Speaker 1: I know about lawnmowers. I can't tell one from the other.
Speaker 1: They cost a lot of money, but I need one,
Speaker 1: and I can't really tell them apart. So I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna have to pick one of these here at the
Speaker 1: store and buy it so I can cut the grass.
Speaker 1: But after you've made a purchase like this, okay, big
Speaker 1: dollar item, you've spent a lot on it, you you
Speaker 1: just picked one, people often experience a sinking feeling. This
Speaker 1: form of stress and psychological discomfort did I buy the
Speaker 1: right one? And you think about what might have been
Speaker 1: good about the ones you didn't buy, and you think
Speaker 1: about what might be wrong with the one you did buy.
Speaker 1: So to eliminate the stress of this dissonance, the theory
Speaker 1: goes that your brain simply changes your beliefs. You change
Speaker 1: your beliefs about what you prefer and what you want,
Speaker 1: emphasizing the pros and de emphasizing the cons of the
Speaker 1: option you chose, and vice versa for the option you rejected.
Speaker 1: And it makes sense in a weird way, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: we often think of that our beliefs should be these
Speaker 1: these core and just fix things about ourselves, you know.
Speaker 1: Uh that you know, although the wind and the raging
Speaker 1: of the world just move around. But uh, you know,
Speaker 1: from from the mind standpoint, it's like, well, uh, this
Speaker 1: is causing a problem. Let's let's change this circuit here
Speaker 1: because we're getting some some feedback that that is not
Speaker 1: optimal for the system. Right. Um. Now, I will note that,
Speaker 1: of course, as always, these these results apply on average,
Speaker 1: and it's interesting to think about other ways that some
Speaker 1: people might reduce cognitive dissonance in this kind of situation
Speaker 1: without changing their original preferences without changing their opinions about
Speaker 1: what's desirable. I think one very common adaptive strategy is
Speaker 1: the adaptive strategy of internally de emphasizing the importance of possessions,
Speaker 1: which in fact, in reality, which you know moment to moment,
Speaker 1: reduces the cognitive dissonance that arises from making choices about possessions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sort of realizing, well, lawnmowers don't really matter. It doesn't.
Speaker 1: It's just the thing, and I'm going to spend a
Speaker 1: certain amount on it. It's just I'm gonna spend what
Speaker 1: it costs. I'm gonna get whichever one is just easiest
Speaker 1: to obtain. In the smoking example, I think this is
Speaker 1: kind of the This is equivalent to the like who
Speaker 1: wants to live forever option, but thinking about you know,
Speaker 1: consumer items instead of your life, Like, I'm not reckless
Speaker 1: with my health, I'm just very zen about this whole
Speaker 1: smoking thing, right, I think it makes more sense to
Speaker 1: try to do the zen path about the lawnmower material possessions.
Speaker 1: But hey, I mean that's hard. I mean we shouldn't
Speaker 1: just like blithely say everybody should do that, But I
Speaker 1: mean it's difficult to do that. People you're spending your money,
Speaker 1: that is your labor. You're you're thinking, oh God, did
Speaker 1: I did I get it right? Um and And the
Speaker 1: same even manifest when you're just making a decision about
Speaker 1: what appliance you want to take home after spending an
Speaker 1: afternoon doing an experiment. Um and. And I should also
Speaker 1: note that there have been some competing explanations for this phenomenon,
Speaker 1: but it seems like cognitive dissonance is favored by the
Speaker 1: experts and supported by a lot of other experiments. Um. So,
Speaker 1: I wanted to note in this experiment there were a
Speaker 1: couple of interesting control conditions and additional hypotheses tested that
Speaker 1: ended up not receiving support from the data, So I'm
Speaker 1: not going to get into those, but I did want
Speaker 1: to mention one control condition, the gift condition, and this
Speaker 1: provides an interesting variation on what they found. So there
Speaker 1: is some indication that owning something makes people see that
Speaker 1: thing as more desirable. So what if it was the
Speaker 1: effect of ownership of this appliance they received that made
Speaker 1: the difference, rather than reduction of cognitive dissonance arising from
Speaker 1: your choices. Well, to control for that in this gift condition,
Speaker 1: the subject did not get to choose which item they
Speaker 1: would receive. It was just picked for them and given
Speaker 1: as a gift by by the experiment er. And what
Speaker 1: Brim found is that this control condition did not produce
Speaker 1: effects to challenge the main finding. So it really did
Speaker 1: look like, at least from this experiment, that people's ratings
Speaker 1: were actually changed by the choices they made, and not
Speaker 1: just by feelings associated with ownership or feelings from what
Speaker 1: you're taking home. It wasn't the fact that you have
Speaker 1: the coffee maker that makes it seem better. It was
Speaker 1: the fact that you chose it. You know, when this
Speaker 1: is this gets more complicated, and perhaps it's it's looked
Speaker 1: at more in the appropriate literature surrounding it. But I'm
Speaker 1: instantly reminded of some of the advertising mechanics that have
Speaker 1: encountered recently on YouTube where I'm watching a show that
Speaker 1: that I that we regularly watch, and then I'll instead
Speaker 1: of just being served an ad, I get served a
Speaker 1: little choice that says, which of the following ads would
Speaker 1: you like to risk? Steve most I wonder if that
Speaker 1: is a mechanic that's playing into some of this. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: so like if you choose it, maybe the ideas you'll
Speaker 1: actually be uh less resentful of the ad and more
Speaker 1: likely to pay attention to it and listen all the
Speaker 1: way through. I wonder, Yeah, maybe, because I know the
Speaker 1: choice is never like, um, it's never a wonderful like
Speaker 1: an easy choice. It's not like do you want to
Speaker 1: see an ad for the new Star Wars TV show?
Speaker 1: Or do you want to watch an insurance commercial? Now,
Speaker 1: it's always like which insurance commercial would you like to watch? Well,
Speaker 1: it's got to be the one with that really nice lady.
Speaker 1: Was one with a really nice lady who's always really nice? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I like the weird ones, give me the
Speaker 1: give me the real yeah, the gecko ones c g
Speaker 1: I gecko, Yeah, make me not realize it was for
Speaker 1: insurance and and never think twice about what the product
Speaker 1: actually was. Okay, So, just to read the top line
Speaker 1: from the conclusion of brim study quote, the results supported
Speaker 1: the prediction that choosing between alternatives would create dissonance, and
Speaker 1: it tempts to reduce it by making the chosen alternative
Speaker 1: more desirable and the unchosen alternative less desirable. Yeah. This
Speaker 1: reminds me of another paper, Joe, that I think you're
Speaker 1: familiar with Love the one You're with by Stephen Stills
Speaker 1: at All. Yep, when you know when you're down, when
Speaker 1: you're confused and you don't remember how you rated the
Speaker 1: items originally now uh more. Seriously though, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if this completely sticks, but I instantly looking over all this,
Speaker 1: I started thinking about the still relevant divide over gaming systems.
Speaker 1: So back when I was a kid, Like the first
Speaker 1: major choice I think I had to make because I
Speaker 1: was an ne Ne Ne s kid, and then came the
Speaker 1: choice Super a ne S or Saga Genesis, and then
Speaker 1: eventually later comes to PlayStation Xbox Divide, and I think
Speaker 1: that's that's still very much alive today. But but basically,
Speaker 1: you know, one often has to make a choice which
Speaker 1: prices system they're going to vest in. And this also
Speaker 1: impacts certain console exclusives, right like, if you're a Nintendo White,
Speaker 1: then you're gonna get Mario and so you can end
Speaker 1: up on Team Mario. If you're a Sagatarian, then you're
Speaker 1: gonna you're gonna be a follower of Saint Sonic the
Speaker 1: Hedgehog and may you know, maybe Saint Alter Beast. Xbox
Speaker 1: you're gonna get Gears of War in Halo PlayStation, you're
Speaker 1: gonna get Gods of War and or God of War
Speaker 1: whatever it was, and the last Office so um. You know,
Speaker 1: on on one level, on like a very rational level,
Speaker 1: you engage with in some decision making You're like, well, uh,
Speaker 1: I know this franchise as a console exclusive, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go this direction. But in other cases I do looking back,
Speaker 1: I do find myself having engaged in some of that,
Speaker 1: you know, like I didn't really have a huge opinion
Speaker 1: on the whole Mario Sonic divide, and yet I found
Speaker 1: at times someone like today we'll bring up Mario and
Speaker 1: Sonic can be like, oh, well, you know, Mario was cool,
Speaker 1: but Sonic was a bit lame. Sonic was a bit
Speaker 1: a bit of a poo a Pucci, and I realistically
Speaker 1: have to agree with them. But I have this impulse
Speaker 1: to defend Sonic because I was a Saga player, because
Speaker 1: I had the Saga Genesis, and even though I didn't
Speaker 1: really love Sonic the Hedgehog like he was, still I
Speaker 1: was still on that team, you know. So I'm still
Speaker 1: reeling from Sonic being a Pucci, which I think is
Speaker 1: highly accurate. I'm sorry it is, no I I agree,
Speaker 1: I rationally agree with you, but I have this irrational response,
Speaker 1: this knee jerk reaction to defend him for some reason,
Speaker 1: even though I I never completed a Sonic game and
Speaker 1: ultimately don't have a real strong opinion on Sonic versus Mario.
Speaker 1: I didn't. I played both of them at some point
Speaker 1: or another, and I didn't particularly you know, I don't
Speaker 1: really rationally love one more than the other. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think ideas like which video game console you buy
Speaker 1: that that goes in the same direction as a lot
Speaker 1: of these sort of like consumer options that people choose between.
Speaker 1: We're I think clearly like both kinds of considerations are
Speaker 1: going to be feeding in. Like there are some just
Speaker 1: gin you and preference differences, like you can look at
Speaker 1: like which games you can get on each one and
Speaker 1: have a genuine desire to play one more than the other.
Speaker 1: But then there's also probably some choice supportive bias kicking
Speaker 1: in and how you retrospectively think about making the choice
Speaker 1: and which one you'd like better. And I guess I
Speaker 1: should say that a less favored but also possibly viable
Speaker 1: explanation for for this phenomenon um, like observed in brim study,
Speaker 1: is known as self perception theory. Basically, this is an
Speaker 1: alternative to cognitive dissonance theory that comes down to the
Speaker 1: principle that people form their internal perceptions of the self
Speaker 1: by observing external actions. So how do you decide what
Speaker 1: your preferences are? Will you actually decide them by observing
Speaker 1: what you choose? And so if this were the correct interpretation,
Speaker 1: this would also explain choice induced preference change, which is
Speaker 1: what the phenomenon would come to be known as choice
Speaker 1: induced preference change. You make the choice and that changes
Speaker 1: is retrospectively what you think your preferences are. And Brim's
Speaker 1: results have been replicated many times across many studies. Uh,
Speaker 1: there are there are some disagreements, but it appears to
Speaker 1: me to be a pretty solid conclusion that not only
Speaker 1: do our preferences influence our choices, but our choices really
Speaker 1: do influence our preferences. And this probably happens in both
Speaker 1: positive and negative directions. So again, just like in that
Speaker 1: first study, our preferences for options that we choose increase
Speaker 1: and our preferences for options that we reject decrease. And
Speaker 1: I think the second condition is especially interesting. It explains
Speaker 1: something that I've often observed anecdotally that so many things
Speaker 1: in life are once discarded despised. Almost as soon as
Speaker 1: you have committed to rejecting an option, you can suddenly
Speaker 1: think of all kinds of reasons why that option was bad. Anyway,
Speaker 1: The cons just boil up into your brain. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is interesting. Um. I thought about this in terms of
Speaker 1: video games, but then I think I thought of an
Speaker 1: even better example, and that is, um, the music of Metallica.
Speaker 1: So so I'm I'm I. I always try to be
Speaker 1: a polite person about things that I like and what
Speaker 1: things other people like. So you know, if at any
Speaker 1: point someone was to come up to me and be like, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm really excited about Metallica or you know, I'm listening
Speaker 1: to this old Metallic album where I'm trying to have
Speaker 1: this new Metallic album, I would probably be like, oh, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Metallica is cool. But if I if I'm being if
Speaker 1: I'm being honest, like there was there was a time
Speaker 1: in my life where I was super into Metallica. I
Speaker 1: was like, you know, discovering those those albums for the
Speaker 1: first time, you know, you know, you know, Ride the
Speaker 1: Lightning and so forth. For me. Eighth ninth grade for me,
Speaker 1: that was like Metallica City. Yeah, yeah, it was. I
Speaker 1: think I was. I was maybe just starting college or
Speaker 1: maybe I was finishing high school when I really started
Speaker 1: getting into them. But it was like, you know, everything
Speaker 1: from the Black album prior. I was like, this is
Speaker 1: amazing and um, and then at some point I was like, uh,
Speaker 1: basically I less. I stopped listening to them for a
Speaker 1: very long time, and then more recently I've started listening
Speaker 1: to them again and and that's like the realistic read
Speaker 1: on it. But on some level, I do feel like
Speaker 1: when I discarded Metallica, I was like, yeah, Metallica kind
Speaker 1: of sucks, Like those guys are jerks. Uh, they're newer
Speaker 1: stuff is not any good? You know, all these various
Speaker 1: things you kind of heap onto the pile, which is
Speaker 1: ridiculous because hey, I used to really like them, and
Speaker 1: then I would have to like current me would have
Speaker 1: to point out to then me, you're going to like
Speaker 1: them again. There's gonna be a come of time in
Speaker 1: where you suddenly start streaming a bunch of old Metallica
Speaker 1: albums again, and uh, and it's not gonna make sense
Speaker 1: with this current rejection of them is a is a
Speaker 1: is a is a musical entity. This is really funny
Speaker 1: because just this week I started listening to their first
Speaker 1: two albums again. Oh cool. I wonder why that happened.
Speaker 1: Is there something in common that did this come up
Speaker 1: in a previous talk we had at I don't think
Speaker 1: we've really talked about Metauga recently. I mean it comes
Speaker 1: up time to time, metal serendipity. I I find very
Speaker 1: interesting that I love the stupid ideology of their early albums,
Speaker 1: which there is presumed to be some kind of great
Speaker 1: conflict over the concept of metal. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that's great about early early albums within a genre
Speaker 1: is that they're often very much about the genre. So like,
Speaker 1: you know, like early rock music is all about what
Speaker 1: rocking is and instructing you to rock. Uh. They're like
Speaker 1: early rap songs that are about rapping and about and
Speaker 1: telling people how to wrap. And they're early metal albums
Speaker 1: that are very much all about metal, and Metallica's early
Speaker 1: albums are are all about the concept of metal and
Speaker 1: what it means to fight in the metal wars. I
Speaker 1: love this, Yeah, I have a big I really love
Speaker 1: house music as well. And of course there's so many
Speaker 1: different types of house music, so listen to but I
Speaker 1: still have a very warm place for house music that
Speaker 1: informs you that this is house music. We have a
Speaker 1: voice telling you you are listening to house music, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, that's great. I don't get enough music that
Speaker 1: is very explicit about the genre that I'm listening to.
Speaker 1: That's excellent. I wonder what age a genre mostly stops
Speaker 1: being about the concept of itself as a genre is,
Speaker 1: Like metal today isn't usually very much about the concept
Speaker 1: of metal, like early thresh metal was. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I guess it just evolves to a certain certain point. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, in all of this, you know not to
Speaker 1: get too far off the point here. I think also,
Speaker 1: you have that kind of like evan flow of nostalgia, right,
Speaker 1: So the thing you're into, then you get out of,
Speaker 1: and then you can reach a point where you look
Speaker 1: back on it fondly and get back into it at
Speaker 1: least some degree. But it's funny because I went through
Speaker 1: a cycle that exactly mirrors yours. Like I liked them
Speaker 1: when I was younger, and then after once I stopped
Speaker 1: listening to them. Wasn't a deliberate choice. I just kind
Speaker 1: of moved on to other things, and then I look
Speaker 1: back on music that I used to listen to and
Speaker 1: don't listen to anymore, and often feel this, uh, this
Speaker 1: this kind of sting, this thing like Okay, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess what's probably very much going on is I
Speaker 1: don't listen to it. I'm supporting that choice to not
Speaker 1: listen to it by changing my beliefs about it and
Speaker 1: deciding that it's dumb. Anyway, thank you, thank you. Now,
Speaker 1: following up from Brim's original study in the fifties, like
Speaker 1: I said, there have been a bunch of replications, but
Speaker 1: there have also been some interesting questions. Like one study
Speaker 1: I was looking at investigated something about the methodology of
Speaker 1: the test, so it was it was trying to see
Speaker 1: if the results stand up to challenges to Brim's original method.
Speaker 1: And the paper I was looking at here was by
Speaker 1: Tally Shiro, Christina M. Velasquez, and Raymond J. Dolan, published
Speaker 1: in Psychological Science in two thousand ten called do Decisions
Speaker 1: Shape Preference? Evidence from Blind Choice? Now, this was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: So the authors here begin by noting some papers all
Speaker 1: the ones I saw were associated with their researcher named
Speaker 1: mk Chen that noticed a potential problem with Brem's method
Speaker 1: such that it could be telling us something different than
Speaker 1: what we think it does. And the critique goes like
Speaker 1: this in Uh, in the author's chirou at all's words
Speaker 1: here quote, people's preferences cannot be measured perfectly and are
Speaker 1: subject to rating noise. Okay, true, As participants gain experience
Speaker 1: with the rating scale, they will provide more accurate ratings,
Speaker 1: such that post choice shifts in ratings simply reflect the
Speaker 1: unmasking of the participants initial preferences, which can be predicted
Speaker 1: by their choices, rather than reflecting any changes in preference
Speaker 1: induced by the choice. Uh So does that make sense? Basically?
Speaker 1: I think what they're saying is that maybe when people
Speaker 1: change their desirability ratings of two things that are initially
Speaker 1: similar after being forced to pick one or the other,
Speaker 1: what's happening is not an ex post facto reevaluation of
Speaker 1: their preferences. But people are just getting better with successive
Speaker 1: tries at expressing their genuine, pre existing preferences on the
Speaker 1: rating scale used in the experiment. It seems like a
Speaker 1: reasonable critique that that would be worth looking into. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think we can all see examples of that
Speaker 1: or find examples of that where you're just like, well,
Speaker 1: I was trying out this one musical genre, it turns
Speaker 1: out they just won my thing. Or like I think
Speaker 1: back on video games and I'm like, yeah, I eventually
Speaker 1: realized I'm just not good at real time strategy games.
Speaker 1: I just don't like them as much they don't. It's
Speaker 1: just not my deal, right, So it would be that
Speaker 1: the actual preferences in the beginning were what was revealed
Speaker 1: in the second rating, and you're just getting better at
Speaker 1: expressing them rather than changing them. So the authors of
Speaker 1: this two thousands ten studies tried to design an experiment
Speaker 1: that couldn't be subject to that problem, and what they
Speaker 1: came up with was what they called a blind choice
Speaker 1: model as opposed to a free choice model. So what's
Speaker 1: the difference. Well, in a free choice model, again, remember
Speaker 1: you would rate a number of options according to your preference.
Speaker 1: Then you'd be forced to choose between some subset of them.
Speaker 1: Then later you rate the options again. In this study,
Speaker 1: what was different was that people didn't know what two
Speaker 1: options from the list they were choosing between until they
Speaker 1: had made their choice. So you're given a hypothetical list
Speaker 1: of vacation destinations, and you rate them in terms of
Speaker 1: how much you'd like to go there for a vacation,
Speaker 1: so you know, Rome, Cairo, et cetera. Then after the
Speaker 1: initial rating task, you are asked to choose blindly between
Speaker 1: a binary subset for a hypothetical vacation, but you can't
Speaker 1: see what they are. Is you have option A and
Speaker 1: option B, but the actual locations are hidden, and you
Speaker 1: choose one. Once you choose between them, the options are
Speaker 1: then revealed, so it's like, oh, so it seems you've
Speaker 1: picked Making instead of Tuscany or whatever. Uh, And and
Speaker 1: then once it's all over, you will be asked to
Speaker 1: rate the options again. So so does that makes sense
Speaker 1: that you can't see what the options are. You're just
Speaker 1: making a choice without any information at all. It is
Speaker 1: complete blind choice. And they also included a couple of
Speaker 1: control conditions where a computer made the decision for people,
Speaker 1: so you don't get to make a choice at all,
Speaker 1: to see if the perception of personal agency was important
Speaker 1: even though the choice was made blind. And it's not
Speaker 1: just a case of like picking a door and then
Speaker 1: what's behind door number three? Because at least in that
Speaker 1: scenario you picked three but in this there's like a
Speaker 1: robot game show host that as you walk up and
Speaker 1: then it just says you're getting a toaster, right, you
Speaker 1: get what's behind door number three? Uh, that that's the
Speaker 1: difference there. And so what did the study find? Quote,
Speaker 1: We found that preferences were altered after participants made a
Speaker 1: blind choice, but not when a computer instructed the participants decision.
Speaker 1: The results suggests that just as preferences form choices, choices
Speaker 1: shape preferences. So this is confirming to some degree Brem's
Speaker 1: original results. It looks like, yes, these atias have not
Speaker 1: merely been tracking how people get better at assigning ratings
Speaker 1: to their pre existing preferences. What people want and prefer
Speaker 1: really does seem to change so that it falls in
Speaker 1: line with what they have already chosen. And this study
Speaker 1: also reveals this very interesting wrinkle. Choice induced preference change
Speaker 1: can happen even when we are not making an informed choice,
Speaker 1: but just choosing randomly between two options that are temporarily hidden,
Speaker 1: which which is very interesting. So there's some part of
Speaker 1: us that, again, if the if the cognitive dissonance interpretation
Speaker 1: of this phenomenon is correct, there's some part of us
Speaker 1: that feels a kind of agency that needs to be
Speaker 1: accounted for in what you chose, even if you didn't
Speaker 1: know what you were choosing, Even if you're just choosing
Speaker 1: you know, hats and you can't see what's inside them,
Speaker 1: or or yeah, door number three, you still feel like
Speaker 1: I picked that and I need to justify that decision internally. Huh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that is That is interesting. I'm surprised we we
Speaker 1: don't see more of this utilized in online advertising. You know,
Speaker 1: like maybe there's a version of that YouTube scenarios describing
Speaker 1: earlier where instead of giving you a choice of specific as,
Speaker 1: it says, what do you want AD number one or
Speaker 1: add number two? And maybe it's a completely false choice.
Speaker 1: You know you're always going to get the same ad,
Speaker 1: but they are going to give you the provide this
Speaker 1: illusion that you had to say. Well, this is interesting
Speaker 1: because when people do not have the illusion that they
Speaker 1: have a say, then apparently the effect does not hold
Speaker 1: because again, thing back to the computer condition. At least
Speaker 1: in this study, choice induced preference change only seems to
Speaker 1: apply if you think it's really you making the choice,
Speaker 1: not if some someone or something else chooses for you.
Speaker 1: And this mirror is what brim found in the gift condition.
Speaker 1: If you're given three options and then the computer says, Okay,
Speaker 1: of these three options, you get number three. It doesn't
Speaker 1: have you don't change your evaluations afterwards. Now to come
Speaker 1: back to the Black Mirror Bandersnatch episode, which again is
Speaker 1: a a choose your own adventure type episode where you
Speaker 1: make choices when you watch it in Netflix. Um, I
Speaker 1: remember when I rewatched it last year for our episode.
Speaker 1: I ended up being really pleased with the way it
Speaker 1: came together based on my choices. But it was because
Speaker 1: what was it? Because I actually hit on a good
Speaker 1: combo of narrative branches and this choose your own adventure
Speaker 1: world or or was it this? You know, because to
Speaker 1: a certain extent there are aspects of of of of
Speaker 1: all this, and in the blind test, you know, you
Speaker 1: don't necessarily know how the choices you make will impact
Speaker 1: the overall shape of the narrative by the time you're
Speaker 1: done with it. That's a really good comparison. I mean,
Speaker 1: I feel well, I mean thinking about how I interacted
Speaker 1: with Bandersnatch or with Choose your Own Adventure books when
Speaker 1: I was a kid. It's funny how we feel some
Speaker 1: amount of angst and personal accountability, or at least I
Speaker 1: did for how the band or snatch or to choose
Speaker 1: your own adventure choices turn out, even though there's usually
Speaker 1: no way you could have predicted the ways that they
Speaker 1: will actually play out in narrative. Merely the suggestion that
Speaker 1: you're in control seems to be enough to conjure the
Speaker 1: shadow of personal agency over the direction of the narrative,
Speaker 1: and thus I think enough to bring in the feeling
Speaker 1: of cognitive dissonance when you choose a path that goes
Speaker 1: somewhere you don't like or that feels bad or increases
Speaker 1: the tension. Yeah. So there's another study and an older
Speaker 1: study that I wanted to mention briefly, and this one
Speaker 1: is from the year two thousand ten that looks at
Speaker 1: choice induced preference change in children and non human animals.
Speaker 1: And I thought that this was very interesting because this
Speaker 1: seems to get to because you could wonder, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so it seems like this choice induced preference change thing,
Speaker 1: it really does go on. But is this a function
Speaker 1: of like like adult cognition, you know, adult pictures of
Speaker 1: the self, or would this happen at a more primal
Speaker 1: level that you would see even in you know, uh,
Speaker 1: even in four year old children and in monkeys and
Speaker 1: stuff and it, and it looks like the answer is
Speaker 1: basically yes, you do see this even in four year
Speaker 1: old children and capuchin monkeys. Now you might wonder how
Speaker 1: you could how you could create the test conditions there,
Speaker 1: because you can't like ask them to to like rate
Speaker 1: a list of appliances or something. Right, um So, the
Speaker 1: study design here for for human children. It's kind of
Speaker 1: complicated to explain, but once I read it, I thought
Speaker 1: it was actually very elegant and ingenious. So if you
Speaker 1: don't mind, I just want to read their description of
Speaker 1: their experimental set up here. Oh and sorry, I don't
Speaker 1: think I said that. This. This paper is by Luisa
Speaker 1: see Egan, Paul Bloom, and Laurie are Santos in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in two thousand ten. Um So,
Speaker 1: to read from their their methodology with the test condition
Speaker 1: involving human children, quote, the experiment are first displayed an
Speaker 1: opaque gray stocking to the child and sequentially extracted three
Speaker 1: toys described as some of the experimenter's favorite things, which
Speaker 1: were really fun, but you have to be creative with them.
Speaker 1: The toys distended the stockings such that the contours of
Speaker 1: each could be seen, but the color could not be discerned.
Speaker 1: The experiment are extracted and displayed the three toys to
Speaker 1: the child, described them as some of her favorite things,
Speaker 1: then shuffled them as she lifted them behind an occluder,
Speaker 1: and announced that she would hide the toys. She removed
Speaker 1: the occluder to display two stockings, one dotted and one argyle.
Speaker 1: The experimenter pointed out that the outlines of two toys
Speaker 1: were visible within one of the stockings, and that the
Speaker 1: outline of the third toy was visible in the second stocking.
Speaker 1: In the choice condition, the experiment are held up the
Speaker 1: stocking with two toys and asked the child to reach
Speaker 1: in without peeking and choose a toy. In the no
Speaker 1: choice condition, the experimenter reached into the stocking with two toys,
Speaker 1: pulled one closer to the mouth of the stocking, held
Speaker 1: up the stocking, and asked the child to remove the
Speaker 1: toy on top, again without peaking. In phase two, a
Speaker 1: second experiment or blind to which stocking originally contained two toys,
Speaker 1: indicated the two stockings and asked the child to choose
Speaker 1: a toy to play with. Children were instructed not to
Speaker 1: peak before making their selection. So what were the results here? Well,
Speaker 1: in the choice condition, children strongly preferred the toy in
Speaker 1: the second stocking, meaning the toy that they had not
Speaker 1: had a chance to reject from the first stocking. Uh
Speaker 1: And and they preferred sixty six point seven percent of
Speaker 1: children in the choice condition went for the new toy
Speaker 1: in the second stocking instead of the one that they
Speaker 1: hadn't grabbed from from the first stocking. But in the
Speaker 1: no choice condition, remember this is the one where the
Speaker 1: experiment or picks for the kid. The kid doesn't get
Speaker 1: to pick themselves, the effect vanished. In fact, in the
Speaker 1: condition where the toy was chosen for them, kids did
Speaker 1: the opposite, with the majority wanting to reach into the
Speaker 1: first stocking again and get the other toy. And remember
Speaker 1: that this is despite them fishing the toys out at random. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there was also a similar test on capuchin monkeys.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go into as much detail, and
Speaker 1: that one it involves skittles instead of toys, and it
Speaker 1: found the same thing. When monkeys were tricked into believing
Speaker 1: that they had a choice between two initial candies and
Speaker 1: then they were given the option to choose between the
Speaker 1: previously rejected candy of the first two and a new
Speaker 1: third alternative. They overwhelmingly preferred the new alternative instead of
Speaker 1: the one that they had not chosen in the previous choice.
Speaker 1: So again, it looks kind of like once discarded, now despised.
Speaker 1: But as with human children, this was only true if
Speaker 1: the monkeys were made to think they had a free
Speaker 1: choice between the first two. If the choice was clearly
Speaker 1: made for them and they didn't get to pick, they
Speaker 1: no longer seemed to devalue the other option from the
Speaker 1: first pair of candies. Uh. That that's very interesting to me.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting that if this man of us in
Speaker 1: children and monkeys, it seems like choice induced preference change
Speaker 1: obviously doesn't depend on any sort of like adult sense
Speaker 1: of self image or sophisticated logic logical reasoning. Based on
Speaker 1: this study, if this holds up, it appears that our
Speaker 1: choices may influence our preferences at a fairly primal level.
Speaker 1: And I want to read from a section that from
Speaker 1: their conclusion that picks up on one of the things
Speaker 1: I noted about the children's no choice condition. So quote, curiously,
Speaker 1: we observed a marginally significant effect in which children in
Speaker 1: the no choice condition. Remember that this one where they
Speaker 1: didn't get to pick the experiment or picked for them
Speaker 1: out of the first stocking, they preferred the toy that
Speaker 1: the experiment or did not give them. Although we had
Speaker 1: originally hypothesized that children would be at chance on this condition,
Speaker 1: the observed pattern of performance hence that children's preferences may
Speaker 1: change not merely because of their choices, but also because
Speaker 1: of their lack of choices. Consistent with Brims nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: six reactance theory and Brim and Wine Troubes research on
Speaker 1: reactants and two year olds, children's preferences may reflect psychological
Speaker 1: reactants when choice freedom is denied. So and the possibility
Speaker 1: uh here is that the effect is not only not
Speaker 1: present when you perceive somebody else's denying you a free choice,
Speaker 1: there could be a reverse effect. Once one of two
Speaker 1: options is denied you by an outside force. The denied
Speaker 1: option is not only not despised, it's coveted. You want
Speaker 1: that thing that you were told you couldn't have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I imagine we can a lot of us can imagine.
Speaker 1: Remember childhood examples of this, you know, like the the
Speaker 1: toy you were not permitted to have, the the book
Speaker 1: that was denied to you, that sort of thing. Yeah. Now, now,
Speaker 1: of course there are always gonna be reasons for this
Speaker 1: that make it makes sense in your brain, like they're
Speaker 1: intrinsic qualities to that toy or that book or something
Speaker 1: that seemed like that's why I really wanted. But it
Speaker 1: seems like even among toys that are identical, there there
Speaker 1: is this preference that arises from Uh. It seems like
Speaker 1: if we have had the option to pick something and
Speaker 1: we didn't pick it, afterwards, it's it becomes far less
Speaker 1: interesting to us. We don't really want it at all.
Speaker 1: But if we were presented with something as a possible
Speaker 1: option and we're not given the opportunity to get it,
Speaker 1: then we really wanted. So anyway, I was looking around
Speaker 1: for some challenges to the to the choice induce preference
Speaker 1: change phenomenon, and I was trying to find if there
Speaker 1: are any studies that found the opposite. There are a few.
Speaker 1: For example, I found this paper which criticizes the interpretation
Speaker 1: of Brim's original findings and the replications UM and it
Speaker 1: attempts a modified replication of its own. So this was
Speaker 1: by Steiner Holden Pol in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
Speaker 1: Do choices affect preferences? Some doubts and new evidence, and
Speaker 1: the author here says quote, I find no evidence of
Speaker 1: choice induced changes in prefer says after a choice between
Speaker 1: items where one was viewed as more attractive than the other,
Speaker 1: but potentially some weak evidence of changes in preferences after
Speaker 1: a choice between items viewed as equally attractive. So that's
Speaker 1: worth keeping in mind. There are some challenges to this phenomenon,
Speaker 1: and in its robustness that this does appear to be
Speaker 1: a minority finding, and in fact it doesn't fully contradict
Speaker 1: to the other results, it only partially contradicts them. But
Speaker 1: then finally I wanted to get to one last study
Speaker 1: I was reading. This was actually the one I was
Speaker 1: reading about that made me want to do this episode
Speaker 1: in the first place. It's a very recent study on
Speaker 1: choice induced preference change, this time in human babies in
Speaker 1: in pre verbal human infants, published just this year. So
Speaker 1: this is by Alex M. Silver, Amy, E. Stall Rita Loyaltial,
Speaker 1: Alexis S. Smith Flores, and Lisa Feigenson. When not choosing
Speaker 1: leads to not liking choice, induced preference in infancy published
Speaker 1: in Psychological Science this year. Some of the authors were
Speaker 1: Affilly did with Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pittsburgh,
Speaker 1: and the College of New Jersey, and again they tested
Speaker 1: for choice induced preference change in pre verbal infants across
Speaker 1: seven studies with the methodology that's uh somewhat similar to
Speaker 1: one of the ones we looked at earlier, with the
Speaker 1: ones testing with four year olds and capuchin monkeys and UH.
Speaker 1: From from their conclusion and discussion, they say, quote our
Speaker 1: findings suggests that choice induced preference change does not require
Speaker 1: extensive experience making choices, nor does it rely on advanced
Speaker 1: metacognitive ability or developed sense of self, because they found
Speaker 1: this in pre verbal infants. If pre verbal infants are
Speaker 1: changing their their preferences based on what they've chosen, it
Speaker 1: seems like it really would not require any of those things.
Speaker 1: It's happening at some lower level in the brain. And
Speaker 1: it also raises interesting questions about how preferences get formed
Speaker 1: very early in life, if they might stem from choices
Speaker 1: made at random in some sense when you're a baby. Uh,
Speaker 1: Like they say, quote, our findings add to our understanding
Speaker 1: of the role of choice in infancy, showing that infants
Speaker 1: use their own choices to shape their preferences. This work
Speaker 1: raises the question of whether other aspects of the psychology
Speaker 1: of decision making also have their roots in very early life. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that doesn't make me wonder if, like, there are things
Speaker 1: that adults are still carrying trying to keep a consistent
Speaker 1: narrative about their preferences, their likes and dislikes that may
Speaker 1: have their roots may have emerged at some point when
Speaker 1: they made some basically random decision as a pre verbal infant.
Speaker 1: Isn't that weird? That is weird. Yeah, yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: you don't want to dwell on the past and to
Speaker 1: think that you know choices in your past to find you.
Speaker 1: But what if those are baby choices? What if it
Speaker 1: all rides down to baby choices? Right? What if things
Speaker 1: that you think of as fundamental to your you know,
Speaker 1: your own idiosyncrasies, your your view of yourself, are rooted
Speaker 1: in you just trying to stay consistent with something that
Speaker 1: happened when you were two or one, even I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I picked I picked the yellow block instead
Speaker 1: of the red block, and and ever since then, yellow
Speaker 1: has been my preferred color interesting. Um, I had a
Speaker 1: I had a scenario in my head. I'm not I
Speaker 1: don't think this one necessarily applies, but perhaps you have.
Speaker 1: You have an opinion on it based on what we've
Speaker 1: discussed so far. In the movie A Christmas Story, Okay,
Speaker 1: the old man receives a major award, which of course
Speaker 1: turns out to be a lamp that looks like a
Speaker 1: woman's leg. Um, how would you um interpret his attachment
Speaker 1: to the major award? Well, clearly he he is suffering
Speaker 1: from a kind of preference bias about the major award.
Speaker 1: That's like a self flattering bias of some kind. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure best how to categorize it. I don't think
Speaker 1: it would be choice induced prefer its changed because he
Speaker 1: didn't pick the leg lamp. It was picked for him,
Speaker 1: and the studies have showed that when things are picked
Speaker 1: for you, this effect does not manifest. But I think
Speaker 1: he's doing a different kind of thing, which is Um,
Speaker 1: the leg lamp is a symbol of his intellectual prowess
Speaker 1: and victory, and thus the leg lamp is itself beautiful
Speaker 1: and good. Yes, all right? And then of course there's
Speaker 1: the added wrinkle that his wife does not like the
Speaker 1: award and does not think it should be in the
Speaker 1: front of the house, which he regards as a personal
Speaker 1: insult because he has so deeply associated this lamp with
Speaker 1: his with his personal intellectual abilities mind power. Uh. This
Speaker 1: all also made me think of another great work, um,
Speaker 1: that would be a Paradise Lost by by Milton. We
Speaker 1: have that line from Satan the mind is its own
Speaker 1: place and in itself can make a heaven of hell
Speaker 1: a hell of heaven. That's yeah, that's that's really good
Speaker 1: because I've never or interpreted this line in that way
Speaker 1: as like a reflection of an ex post facto justification
Speaker 1: to reduce cognitive dissonance. But you could absolutely read it
Speaker 1: that way. You can totally see it like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've always interpreted it I guess as um, you know,
Speaker 1: just a statement about like, you know, the power to,
Speaker 1: like Satan is asserting that he can make what he
Speaker 1: will of any situation. But yeah, you could interpret that
Speaker 1: much more in a cognitive bias way where he's saying like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I made my decisions, and my decisions led
Speaker 1: me to hell, and thus I will engage in choice
Speaker 1: supportive biased reasoning that makes me think actually, actually Hell
Speaker 1: is good. It's good, you know, you know, uh, and
Speaker 1: that reduces the cognitive dissonance within Satan's soul. What if
Speaker 1: you just had a vision of hell where everybody's in
Speaker 1: that where people are they're just all setting around, you know,
Speaker 1: being tortured or torturing each other, like this place is great,
Speaker 1: this is great. I don't Yeah, I wouldn't to be
Speaker 1: in heaven. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a fantastic image
Speaker 1: in with Yeah, we ended by justifying the ways of
Speaker 1: God demands, so it's generally what we seek to do
Speaker 1: in this uh this podcast. Wait, no, aren't we justifying
Speaker 1: the ways of Satan demand? I think that's what we did.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I guess that's all what we're doing here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: even better. Yeah, A lesser go, a lower go. All right,
Speaker 1: well we'll go and close this one out. I think
Speaker 1: this will be a fun one for listeners to reflect on,
Speaker 1: especially since I think we actually had a stocking based
Speaker 1: experiment there. Maybe you can reflect on on on on
Speaker 1: gift giving and stockings and and so forth with the
Speaker 1: holiday season that we're passing through at the moment. Uh,
Speaker 1: certainly everybody can relate on some level to some of
Speaker 1: the mental mechanics that we're discussing here in this episode.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you would like to listen to
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Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
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