Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles

by Dan Ariely

  Food and Drinks, Value, Expectations

  ON TOPICS AND TEACHERS

  “I need you to line up by attention span.”

  {Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}

  Dear Dan,

  I am a student in middle school, and there is one subject in school that I really love, and one subject that I deeply dislike. There is also one teacher I really love and one teacher I am not very excited with. Here is the question: would I be better off if the teacher I love taught the topic I love, and the duller teacher taught the topic I dislike? Or would I be better off if the teacher I love taught the topic I dislike, and the duller teacher taught the topic I love?

  —AMIT

  What you are really asking about is the accumulation of pleasure and pain. Let’s call the approach of combining the two good components and combining the two negative components the extreme approach (since one class is going to be great and the other one terrible) and let’s call the approach of mixing a good and a bad component the average approach (since both classes are going to have some good and some bad).

  If you believe that the nature of combining experiences is asymmetric, such that every additional bit of good experience makes it better, but that once something is negative it doesn’t matter how negative it is—then you should go with the extreme approach. This way you would have at least one wonderful class to look forward to. It is also true that this approach would leave you with one really bad class, but if you believe that once a class is going to be bad, it doesn’t really matter how bad it is, then the extreme approach is the one for you.

  A very different set of beliefs about combining experiences is about the ability to tolerate extreme negative experiences. If you believe that a class with both a bad teacher and a bad topic is going to be too much to bear, that the combined pain will push you over the edge, and that this level of misery will darken your entire semester, then the average approach is the one for you.

  From my perspective I am first and foremost delighted that you like some of your teachers and topics. On top of that it is very important that you don’t stop thinking of school as a joyful, exciting place. Given that you are going to spend many more years in formal education, and then the rest of your life learning in many other ways, it is important that you love learning. Given this, I think that the average approach would be better for you. I suspect that having a class with both a bad teacher and a hated topic will be too much for you to handle, and that it might make it hard for you to love school and continue learning.

  One final point: I also suspect that if you had a class with the teacher you love and the topic you don’t, you will learn to focus on the teacher and pay less attention to the topic, while in the class with the teacher you dislike and the topic you love, you will learn to focus on the material and pay less attention to the teacher. This means that by shifting attention to the part of the class you enjoy, you might get more value and less misery from each of the two classes.

  I wish you many years of exciting and pleasurable learning.

  Education, Experiences, Motivation

  ON (THE LACK OF) SELF-CONTROL

  “When portions are this huge, I eat half now and the rest in a few minutes.”

  {Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}

  Dear Dan,

  Whenever I stay up late, I wind up raiding the fridge—and ruining my diets one after the other. During the day, I manage to resist the temptation, but at night, my self-control seems to stop working. What should I do?

  —MENI

  What you describe is a well-known phenomenon called “depletion.” All day long, we face small temptations and do our best to resist them. We maintain control over ourselves and the temptations around us in an effort to be productive, responsible people and stop ourselves from giving in to our urges to shop, procrastinate, watch that latest cat video on YouTube, and so forth.

  But our ability to resist urges is like a muscle: The more we use it, the more tired we become—until at some point, which is very likely to be at night, our willpower simply becomes too weak to stop us from giving in to temptation. This is one reason the temptation industry—bars, strip clubs, etc.—operates mostly at night: After we have been resisting temptations all day, we are depleted and ready to fail, and these temptation-institutions are ready to profit from our failure.

  One way to overcome this depletion problem is based on the story of Odysseus and the sirens. In this story Odysseus told his sailors to tie him to the mast and to not untie the ropes, under any circumstances, until they sailed past the sirens. This way Odysseus couldn’t act on his temptations, and jump into the water and swim toward the sirens’ seductive calls. The modern equivalent of this tactic? Keep all tempting food out of your house. You can hope that your future self will be able to resist temptation, buy the chocolate cake, and eat just a sliver of it every other day. But the safer bet is to realize how easy it is for us to fail, how much easier it is for us to fail toward the end of the day, and simply not keep any chocolate cake in the fridge in the first place.

  Dieting, Self-Control, Food and Drinks

  ON THREE BUILDING BLOCKS OF A BALANCING ACT

  Dear Dan,

  Why do consultants always break problems and solutions into three?

  —ALICE

  When consultants give answers, they often try to strike a delicate balance between making the answer simple and making it feel complete. I suspect that offering three things to consider strikes this sweet spot.

  Communication, Appreciation, Decisions

  ON WASTING TIME DECIDING

  Dear Dan,

  Often when I meet with my regular group of closest friends, the discussion turns out to be something like this: “Where do you want to go?” “Not sure.” “Where do you want to go?” “Not sure.” These discussions are frustrating, uncomfortable, and a waste of time. Any advice on how to move them forward and get to a decision faster?

  —MATTHEW

  When someone asks “What do you want to do tonight?” what they are implicitly saying is: “What is the most exciting thing we can do tonight, given all the options and all the people involved?”

  The problem is that figuring out the absolute best solution (the optimal solution) is very difficult. First, we need to bring to mind all the possible alternatives; next we need to figure out our preferences and the preferences of all the people in the group. Then we have to find the one activity that will maximize this set of constraints and preferences.

  The basic problem is that, in your search for the optimal activity, you are not taking the cost of time into account. You waste your precious time together asking “What do you want to do?” which is probably the worst way to spend your time.

  To overcome this problem, I would set a rule that limits the amount of time you are allowed to spend searching for a solution, and I would choose, in advance, a default activity in case you fail to come up with a better option. For example, take an acceptable good activity (going to drink at X, playing basketball at Y) and announce to your friends that, unless someone else comes up with a better alternative, in ten minutes you are all heading out to X or Y.

  I would also set up a timer on your phone to make it clear that you mean business and to make sure that the time limit is honored. Once the buzzer sounds, just start heading out to X or Y, asking everyone to come with you and telling the people who do not join you immediately that you will meet them there. After repeating this tactic a few times, your friends will get used to it and you should experience an end to this wasteful habit.

  Friends, Decisions, Coordination, Time

  ON BUFFET ROI

  “I set a goal, I met it, I proved that I could meet it, and now the hell with it.”

  {Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}

  Dear Dan,

  How should I maximize my return on investment at an all-you-can-eat buffet? Should I go for dessert first and then hit the entrees? Or should I start with the salads and then pick o
nly healthy foods from the main courses?

  —SYED

  While I appreciate this return-on-investment, or ROI, mindset, in food, as in all other areas of life we must focus on the right type of returns. In particular your mistake here is that you seem to focus on the short-term returns, and not the long-term ones. If you go into a buffet trying to maximize your short-term ROI, you might gulp down more food but then you’ll have to deal with the long-term effects of your actions. Maybe you will end up spending extra hours at the gym or maybe you will add even a little more weight to the few extra pounds that so many of us are packing. Whatever approach you pick to deal with the extra food intake, there will be some consequences to your short-term optimization.

  A different type of mistake that some of us make when we go to buffets (and this mistake also shows up in other areas of life) is to focus on maximizing the cost of the food to the buffet’s operators. The basic heuristic is that we somehow feel that we are getting a better deal when we eat food that is more expensive. But, of course our goal in life (as in buffets) is to maximize our enjoyment, and not the cost to someone else. If we enjoy good bread and cheese more than caviar, maybe we should try a bit of caviar from time to time just to be sure that we indeed don’t like it, but we should focus on the food that brings us higher enjoyment.

  And to your question: What I recommend is to mostly stick to a balanced and healthy diet. But since many buffets boast a large assortment of novel dishes, and in the spirit of the idiom that variety is the spice of life, I would make some exceptions and sample one or two delicacies that I’ve never tried before. Just for the experience.

  Food and Drinks, Long-Term Thinking, Experiences

  ON ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

  “I’m old enough to recognize a lecture disguised as grace.”

  {Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}

  Dear Dan,

  My daughter recently started dating a lazy, dumb guy. How can I tell her gently that he is wrong for her without sounding preachy, causing her to ignore me completely, or even worse, go against my advice on purpose?

  —A CONCERNED MOTHER

  Without knowing the real quality of your daughter’s boyfriend, I should point out that what you are experiencing might be the common reaction of parents around the world when their (perfect) daughters bring home their (far from perfect) boyfriend. I don’t even want to imagine my own reaction the first time my daughter (Neta, who is 9 years old) introduces me to her potential romantic partner . . .

  But let’s assume for the sake of argument that you are, in fact, correct, and that your daughter’s new boyfriend really is dumb, lazy, and up to no good. Even with these starting qualities you shouldn’t tell your daughter your true opinion. Instead you should ask her some questions—leading questions, of course. Under normal circumstances we tend to avoid asking ourselves difficult questions, but if someone else asks us questions there is a chance that these questions will be planted in our minds and become part of our inner monologue. For example, you might ask, “How do you and your boyfriend get along? Do you ever fight? What are the ten things you love most about him? What do you like least about him?” The answers to these questions are likely to be: Fine; A few times a week; I can think of three, but I can’t think of ten; His selfishness. As a result, your daughter might start paying attention to every fight, to the few things she really loves about him, and to his selfishness.

  I admit that this approach is a bit manipulative, but I hope it will get her to think in depth about her relationship with this boy and maybe she will reach the same conclusions you have.

  Family, Relationships, Opinions

  ON DOUGHNUTS AND THE LOCUS OF FREE WILL

  Dear Dan,

  If people make decisions in a way that largely depends on their environment, does that mean that there is no free will?

  —MATT

  Yes and no. Imagine that every day, I stopped by your office first thing in the morning and covered your desk with fresh doughnuts. What are the odds that by the end of the year you will not weigh substantially more? My guess is close to zero. Once the environment is set, our behaviors largely follow. But the good news is that we don’t have to be tempted by doughnuts every day. We can keep the doughnut peddlers out of our office and, more generally, we can set up our environments in ways that reduce our potential for failure.

  That’s where our free will resides—in our ability to design our environments in a way that is more compatible with our strengths and, even more important, helps us overcome our weaknesses.

  Decisions, Mistakes, Long-Term Thinking

  ON THE MOST OPTIMISTIC DAY OF THE YEAR

  Dear Dan,

  Do you believe in New Year’s resolutions?

  —JANET

  Yes. Very much. Every year for about a week: for about five days before the end of the year and for about two days after New Year’s Day.

  Habits, Self-Control, Wishful Thinking

  ON EMOTIONAL INVESTING IN THE STOCK MARKET

  “How can a fund that’s losing us money call itself socially responsible?”

  {Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}

  Dear Dan,

  How can I control myself when I feel the irresistible need to break my own rules about how to invest in the stock market?

  —GANAPATHY

  You are asking, I suspect, about what we call the “hot-cold-empathy gap,” where we say to ourselves: “The level of risk that I want to take is bound on one side by gains of up to 15 percent and on the other by losses up to 10 percent.” But then we lose 5 percent of our money; we panic and sell everything.

  When we look at such cases, we usually think that the colder, more rational voice in our head (the one that set up the initial risk level and portfolio choice) is the correct one and the voice that panics while reacting to short-term market fluctuations is the one causing us to stray.

  From this perspective, you can think about two types of solutions: The first is to get the “rational” side of yourself to set up your investment in such a way that it will be hard for your emotional self to undo it in the heat of the moment. For example, you can ask your financial advisor to prevent you from making any changes unless you have slept on the decision for seventy-two hours. Or you can set up your investments so that both you and your significant other have to sign some document in order to make any changes to your investments. Alternatively, you can try to not even awake your emotional self, perhaps by not looking at your portfolio very often or by asking your financial advisor to alert you only if your portfolio has lost more than the amount that you indicated you are willing to lose.

  Whatever you do, I think it’s clear that the freedom to do whatever we want and change our minds at any point is the shortest path to bad decisions. While limiting our freedom often goes against our ideology, sometimes limiting our ability to make decisions is the best way to guarantee that we will stay on the long-term path we intended to take.

  Loss Aversion, Stock Market, Emotions

  ON COMMUTING AND ADAPTATION

  “I’m sorry, Jim. I love you, but I hate Vermont.”

  {Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}

  Dear Dan,

  We recently got married and are having a hard time deciding where to live. Should we live in the city, close to where we work? Or would we be better off finding someplace cheaper, greener, and farther away from the city?

  —A COUPLE FROM THE CENTER

  Your decision should take a few things into account. First, most of us can get used to most things in life: different-size houses, a neighborhood that is lush or drab. And we adapt to most of these changes faster than we expect. My own personal example of this is that many years ago I suffered a serious injury that changed my life dramatically in almost every aspect. But over time I got used to these changes, and now my life is much better than I could have imagined when I was originally injured.

  While we adapt to many things rather successfully, there are s
ome things that we don’t adapt to, or at least not that easily. One of these, sadly, is commuting—that annoying daily trip from the small neighborhood where we live to our place of work in the big city.

  Beyond the fact that we have a hard time adapting to commuting, the reason that we don’t get used to it provides an important insight into the nature of the adaptation process. If we knew that we could leave home each day at 7:30 a.m. and arrive at work at 8:55 a.m., commuting would be predictable and expected, and we would quickly adapt to it. But because we never know what is in store for us in terms of traffic and bottlenecks, we never know when we might arrive at work. This uncertainty makes it difficult to get used to commuting, and it makes us start each day with a constant worry of whether we will get to work on time or not.

  This is why I suggest that you take distance from work into account as a significant factor in deciding where to live. It will likely play a larger role in the quality of your life than you expect.

  Commuting, Happiness, Adaptation