Eye-Popping Revelations

Here’s another Peterson Park shot from Friday. This cottonwood is magnificent in all seasons but seems especially so in winter, bared to its bones. Sunny days and starry nights we’ve been having—consequently, all very, very cold!

Another early morning walk today, but not officially as early as the eastern sky was saying. I do not like “springing forward” and losing a morning hour just when dawn instead of dark is finally beckoning me outdoors. So this morning when the clock (should have, if I’d set it ahead) read eight o’clock, Sarah and I were out in the fields, and I was murmuring, It’s really only seven o’clock….

I started writing about this the other day, and here goes the rest: Near the end of his page-turner of a book, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, Dan Ariely compares the behavior of diners in an American restaurant with a similar experimental group in Hong Kong. Rather than each ordering what he or she most wanted, only the first to give an order at the table did so. Americans ordering subsequently, in order to emphasize their individuality, chose to order something different from the first person; in Hong Kong, a sense of group solidarity had subsequent Chinese ordering whatever the first person had chosen. Ariely’s point is not about cultural differences. It’s about human sameness. Whether seeking to stand out from the crowd or to be a part of it, individuals in both cultures put their own real preferences aside rather than choosing to (as the utilitarians would say) maximize their personal eating pleasure. We are, it turns out, not all that “rational,” after all. We make the same kinds of failure-to-maximize choices again and again, contrary to classic economic theory.

Now the author asks—here’s a question I really love!—“Wouldn’t economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people behave, instead of how they should behave?” Because his studies show that economics isn’t any more hard-headed or reality-based than philosophy! Economists as a group (behavioral economists like Ariely being the renegades) are as wedded to idealistic assumptions as Immanuel Kant. Supposedly more rigorous sciences are not immune, either. Medical research on efficacy of drugs and even surgical treatments is doomed unless it also takes into account the beliefs of medical practitioners and their patients, because belief can plays a role in so-called objective results.

Another group of Ariely studies had to do with the effect of exposure to certain numbers or words on unrelated tasks performed following exposure to the numbers or words. People who focused first on small numbers unrelated to price gave lower price figures when asked the most they would pay for three different items; those focused on higher numbers indicated a willingness to pay more. Experimental subjects asked to recall as many of the Ten Commandments as they could or even simply to read a short statement about an honor code were much less likely to cheat on a test given immediately afterward, even in a situation designed to invite cheating. College students given a list of words associated with old age walked more slowly when they left the building than students given a different set of words. In the face of this evidence, can anyone still maintain that constant media violence has no effect on the behavior of normal individuals? Maybe--.

Because everyone, as several of the author’s experiments demonstrate, reads expectations and beliefs into experience. Perceptions are shaped by expectations and beliefs. How can two people see “the same thing” so differently? Ariely shows there is no “same thing.” And yet… and yet….

There is in this book no acceptance of defeat. There is concern—deep concern—but also suggestions (both general and specific), and there is hope. What fun it would be to spend an evening with Dan Ariely! Well, I just did, so now it’s your turn!

Lunch at School

Had I taken a photo of this scene upon arrival rather than eating first and clicking later, you would see a big crowd! In fact, it wasn’t easy finding an empty place at a table for the soup and salad lunch, an event put on by the senior class to make money for their senior trip to Chicago. The small gym, set up with tables and chairs, was packed with students, parents and grandparents, along with plenty of local people like me with no family members in school at all. It turned out that Ryan Blessing, the senior who had come down to the bookstore on Monday to see if Dog Ears Books would contribute a prize for the raffle (yes, of course) had made the soup I chose, which was different and delicious, and if I can get the recipe from him, I'll share it in some future post. It was fun to sit with friends, fun to look around the room and see so many happy, familiar faces.

Yesterday’s lunch reminded me of the annual senior project night and graduation and all the other school events and how well attended they are by the entire community. I’ve never lived in a place where what happens at the local school is such a matter of vital concern to just about everyone in town! Some residents don’t do all their regular shopping here, and they go to any one of five different churches or none at all, but the little public school unites us. It really is the heart and soul of Northport.

When I arrived back "downtown" the sun was breaking through the clouds, and I felt much more cheerful, settling into a red leather chair (Sarah in the other) to look into an absolutely fascinating book on behavioral economics, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, by Dan Ariely, which presents a story, as Duke University puts it, “’predictably irrational’ but highly entertaining.” Here are a few of Ariely’s experimental observations: We’ll pay more just to get something (else) “Free!” We’ll pay more to avoid the cheapest of something but go for a cheaper whatever if we can compare it to another that costs a lot more, and we’ll hesitate to buy at all in the absence of any way of making a comparison. In the throes of passion, prior reasoning and resolution go out the window. Once we’ve committed to anything—bought it or even just bid on it—somehow making it our “own,” its value goes up in our eyes. (Ah, this explains the browsers who complain to me from time to time that I have a book priced too low! No one who tells me I’ve priced a book too low ever buys the book, though you’d think they’d scent a bargain and snatch it up. But no, since they paid more elsewhere, they want to go on believing that what they paid somehow represents the item’s “real worth.”) Impersonal market exchanges and personal social exchanges can be at odds with one another in surprising ways. Halfway through this eye-opening book, I already have a lot of new ideas to juggle.

And the sun is shining again today!