Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World. Noreena Hertz
all this when you’re leafing through a pile of CVs, choosing what to buy for dinner in a supermarket, or deciding who to vote for. Or indeed if you are a doctor diagnosing patients. A British study told two groups of psychiatrists the same story about a young man who had attacked a train conductor. The only difference was the attacker’s name. When it was ‘Matthew’, psychiatrists were more likely to diagnose him with schizophrenia; when it was ‘Wayne’, they were more likely to diagnose him with a personality disorder or a drug problem.10
This may seem surprising, or shocking, but time and time again studies have shown that anything, from a single pernicious word to a scientific-sounding formula, from a company’s name to that of a person, can fundamentally affect the way we process information and choose what to do.
So, whether you’re someone who thinks of yourself as a measured decision-maker, or as more of a gut thinker, be aware that such semantic factors may be what is actually driving your decisions.
World-weary and supposedly savvy, we may all think we are well attuned to these linguistic attacks on our ability to think and decide, but the truth is that we remain acutely vulnerable, whether in the supermarket aisle or the polling booth, whether sitting in the classroom, the office or the courtroom.
Beware of Anchors When Buying a House
In Germany, a group of 177 senior trainee lawyers were asked to put themselves in the position of a trial judge having to pass sentence in a rape case.11
They were given key aspects of the case to evaluate, including witness statements, expert appraisals and copies of the penal code related to the incident.
However, there was a twist. As they were appraising the case in the courtroom environment, the ‘trial judges’ were interrupted by a heckler. Although this is a common occurrence in emotionally charged legal cases, in this case it was a set-up. The heckler was an actor. And the judges were exposed to one of two types of heckler.
The first pretended to be a boyfriend of the victim, and shouted out to the court, ‘Give him five years!’ The second acted as a friend of the accused, and yelled, ‘Let him go free!’ The judges were then asked to reflect briefly on the interruption and pass sentence.
The results were pretty astonishing.
Even though our judges knew that they should ignore the heckler’s interruption – especially as they understood that it was a biased opinion, with the heckler pushing either for leniency or for harsh sentencing depending on his supposed relationship to the accused or the victim – there was a marked variance in response between the judges who were exposed to the ‘Give him five years’ heckler and those interrupted by the ‘Let him go free’ one.
Judges who were confronted with the ‘Give him five years’ remark pronounced on average a sentence of thirty-three months. Those who were confronted with the ‘Let him go free’ remark pronounced on average a sentence of twenty-three months – almost a third less in length.
The judges had ‘anchored’ their sentencing decisions around a biased interjection from a heckler, and had set aside much of the other information provided to them.
If even such highly trained information evaluators can make mistakes like this, it’s not surprising to learn that we are all prone to similar ‘anchoring’ errors.12
People asked to write down the number formed by the last two digits of their social security number, for example, and then asked what bid they’d be willing to make in an auction, anchored the bid around that number.13 Even though the number couldn’t possibly (except by coincidence) be connected to the value of any object in the auction, they unconsciously based their bids on it. Decisions as varied as the amount people are willing to pay for a house or bid in an auction, and the amount of damages juries award, have also been seen to be affected by similarly spurious numerical considerations.
In each of these cases, the higher the number people unconsciously fixated on, the higher the number they gave as their decision. This is why real-estate agents will usually show you the most expensive house first – so that others will seem cheap by comparison; or, more pertinently, will seem cheap when compared to the ‘anchor point’ they have established in your mind.14
So how can we avoid unwittingly basing a decision on an inappropriate number? For we are often asked to make decisions that, whether by manipulation or chance, involve anchors lodged in our minds.
First we need to reflect upon whether a number is actually the right thing to be focusing on at all – to remember one of the lessons in the previous Step: not everything that can be counted, counts.
Assuming that in this case the number is relevant, one thing you might want to try is to ask yourself whether there is anything you might be anchoring your decision on. And if there is, whether that anchor might be inappropriate or misleading. Studies show that simply by asking ourselves this question we are able to override the anchor’s effects.15
The Strange Case of Mr Jones
There’s another strange human quirk relating to numbers that it is useful to be aware of. We process the same number in different ways, depending on the way it has been presented to us.
You may already know that you’re more likely to buy meat that is labelled ‘85 per cent lean’ than meat labelled ‘15 per cent fat’ (autistic people, interestingly, do not make this common mistake16). But did you know that you are very likely to evaluate fractions differently from percentages?
‘Mr Jones’ would wish this were not so.
When two groups of forensic psychologists and psychiatrists were asked to decide whether to recommend the discharge of a ‘Mr Jones’, a patient at a high-security mental institution, they were given one of two pieces of information on which to make their assessment. The first group was told that ‘Twenty out of every hundred patients similar to Mr Jones are estimated to commit an act of violence against others.’ The second group was informed that ‘Patients similar to Mr Jones are estimated as having a 20 per cent chance of committing an act of violence against others.’
Although these two ratios are of course equivalent, they triggered very different responses. Forty-one per cent of the mental health experts who were given the findings in relative terms (‘twenty out of every hundred’) recommended that the patient should not be discharged, while only 21 per cent of the group who’d been given the information framed in percentage terms did so.
Why should this be? It seems that for many of us there is a distinct difference between the way we perceive fractions and percentages. When we are given numerical information in the form of a frequency – i.e. twenty out of a hundred patients – we see clear, and in this case frightening, images before us. A percentage doesn’t prompt a similarly clear emotional response.17
So, if your doctor tells you that there is a one in ten chance of you having complications from a particular operation, before you freak out, reframe this as a 10 per cent chance. Does that make it sound less bad? And does it therefore impact on your decision whether to have the surgery or not?
See, Hear, Touch, Smell: Why a Waitress Wearing Red Gets a Bigger Tip
Numbers and words are not the only factors that can subconsciously affect our decision-making.
A whole host of environmental cues can affect the decisions that we make, often without us having any idea of them.
Imagine you are at the doctor’s surgery for a routine visit. The