Tag: choice

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

White Elephant

Posted on by Jinavie

In many Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Burma, owning a white elephant has been traditionally considered a show of great opulence. To this day, white elephant are a symbol of peace and prosperity and are kept by royalties of some countries. On occasion, a monarch would bestow a white elephant upon a citizen to reward them for their service to the country. But this was regarded as a blessing and a curse, as elephants are notoriously difficult and costly to maintain.

Today, the term white elephant refers to items that are gifted that serve little practical use and take up space, such as tasteless decorations. In some cultures, “white elephant swaps” are held around Christmas where people will trade gifts, under the philosophy that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.

A related psychological phenomenon is the sunk cost fallacy. This is when a person sees that an action or investment they made has an increasingly bleak outlook, but instead of bailing, they make the irrational choice to continue. For example, you may pay $3000 for a car, which then breaks down. The mechanic bills you $1500 for repairs, which you choose to pay. The car breaks down again and this time it costs $2000 to repair. You think that since you have already invested $4500 in this car, it is worth paying $2000 to repair it. However, you have now spent $6500 on a car that may cost you even more in the future. The more you invest in it, the more you justify keeping it as you feel you are committed to the investment, resulting in a greater loss.

The sunk cost fallacy affects many aspects of our lives. A common example is relationships. Many people will settle down with someone they do not think is the “right one”. But despite many warning signs you are not very compatible with your partner, people think “well, I invested all this time with this person, I might as well see it through”. Eventually, the two end up in a bitter marriage, regretting that they did not break up earlier to find someone that they could be happy with.

The reason we fall into the sunk cost fallacy is that we do not want to “waste” the investment we have put in already. But economically speaking, you will profit far more by walking away from a bad decision as early as possible. It is a “sunk cost” which you will never get back.

Now think about your life. Are you really happy in your job or relationship? Or are you lying to yourself that it will be alright because you don’t want to face the cruel reality that you chose poorly? Knowing about the sunk cost fallacy will help you save time and money, whether it be putting down a bad book before you finish it, or learning when to walk away from the wrong commitment.

(Image source: https://xkcd.com/1768/)

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Pepsi Challenge

Posted on by Jinavie

The “Pepsi challenge” was a marketing campaign by Pepsi, where a person blindly takes sips from two different cups – one of Coke, one of Pepsi – and states which tastes better. The Pepsi challenge showed that people tended to prefer Pepsi to Coke in a blind sip test. This caused significant controversy and even led Coca-Cola to trial a change in their classic recipe, which failed disastrously.

Of course, there are many reasons why the results of this challenge may be invalid, as Malcolm Gladwell explored in his book Blink. The challenge is designed to isolate just a snapshot experience of each drink. Ergo, people tend to prefer a single sip of the sweeter, more citreous drink that is Pepsi, when they may not have enjoyed it as much if they had to drink an entire bottle.

Furthermore, multiple studies and experiments in the marketing field show a psychological phenomenon called sensation transference. This is when our perception of a sense is affected by other information such as the brand name, packaging or even the colour of the food or drink. For example, margarine was originally white but yellow colour was added to make it look more “butter-like”, greatly increasing sales.

This shows how little things that we may find insignificant can affect our decisions and first impressions. Our subconscious mind is a powerful processor that makes rapid assessments from a sea of information, while not bothering the conscious mind. We might buy a certain wine because the bottle looks more premium than another bottle. We may fall in love with someone because of a small detail like the way their nose looks. But at the same time, it can be just as easily misled as it uses only the information given to it at the time.

So the question is not how powerful your gut instinct is, but if you know yourself well enough to trust it.

Posted in Philosophy

Zugzwang

Posted on by Jinavie

Chess is a game of choice. Each move sets in motion a myriad of possible games and a single misplay can drastically turn the tables. A skilled chess player will deliberate on each move as they try to predict how the game will flow on from the decision they make, but in an infinite sea of possibilities, choosing the best outcome is extremely difficult.

However, there is one situation that is the direct opposite. Zugzwang is a state in which the most viable, ideal move is an impossible one – to not move. In zugzwang, whatever decision you make will reduce your odds of winning compared to skipping your turn. In some cases, you are even forced to make a choice that will spell your inevitable doom.

Life is similar to chess in that we are always faced with choices. What outfit will you wear today? Will you sit in the front seat or the back? Who will you ask to be your date for the ball? Should I take this job offer to change my career path, or stay in my current, stable job? Some choices are simple and appear inconsequential, yet others make us feel stressed even considering the implications. We often regret choices we made, looking back and wondering “What if?”. How would my life be different had I chosen differently?

But in the grand scheme of things, how important is it that we make “the best choice” each time? A majority of the time, it is highly unlikely that a single poor decision will completely ruin your life. Sure, your life may turn out different for better or for worse in a certain way, but we neglect to account for all of the other ways our life may change. Chaos theory teaches us that even a small change like a butterfly flapping its wings can wildly and unpredictably affect the future. For example, it could be that changing jobs results in your career progress being delayed by five years. However, by changing jobs you may meet the woman or man of your dreams, when you would have not met them had you not changed jobs.

We often trap ourselves in a state of zugzwang – pondering all the horrible ways our decisions may cause regrets in the future. Our fear of the unknown causes us to be paralysed by these choices. But as discussed above, our choices do not cause purely good or bad outcomes, but instead result in a simply different future due to the sheer number of variables that can change.

Ergo, there is no point stressing about each and every choice you make – you might as well pick one, see how it plays out and learn from the experience.

image
Posted in History & Literature

Free Lunch

Posted on by Jinavie

In the late 19th century, there was a common tradition in American bars where they would offer a “free lunch” to people who purchased a drink. Although it seems like a good deal at face value, the lunches offered were quite salty, meaning that eating it will make you thirstier for another drink. On top of that, the price of the drinks would usually more than compensate for the price of lunch, while making the patron think he or she got a “free lunch”.

This is the free lunch referred to in the saying: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Nothing in life is free. If someone tries to tempt you with a free product, there will no doubt be a string attached in one way or another, such as a hidden cost. To have something, you must trade in an equal amount of something, such as time, money or work, or take it from someone else. Because you cannot make something from nothing. Such is the way of the universe.

Every resource is finite, meaning that you must make choices on how to use these resources. Every decision comes with an opportunity cost – the cost of not being able to use your resources for a different outcome. If you have $2, you can buy a bag of chips or buy a drink, but you cannot have both.

The most useful application of this principle is time. When you procrastinate or leave your work to tomorrow, you are not having a “free lunch” in the sense of having free time to yourself. You are borrowing that time from the future, as you will no doubt pay the cost of having to work harder or end up with a less comfortable life.

If that is the case, then how are we supposed to have the time to keep ourselves happy, when we have so much work and so little time? Economically speaking, the only way you can have anything close to a free lunch is by improving your efficiency. By being efficient, you reduce the time you spend doing work and you can gain more happiness while investing less time. For example, instead of procrastinating watching television, if you engage in your favourite hobby and enter a flow state, you will achieve far greater happiness for the same amount of time.

Posted in Philosophy

Buridan’s Ass

Posted on by Jinavie

French philosopher Jean Buridan proposed the following thought experiment. Imagine a donkey that is equally hungry and thirsty. It is placed exactly in the middle of a pail of water and a stack of hay. The donkey wants to eat the hay because it is hungry, yet it also wants to go for the pail of water to quench its thirst. However, it is precisely the same distance from the food and the water, meaning it has to sacrifice one for the other. Unable to choose between the hay and water, the donkey ultimately dies from hunger and thirst.

We laugh at the stupidity of the ass, but how often are we placed in such a predicament where we try to chase two things at once and end up with nothing? How often do we miss an amazing opportunity just because we failed to make a decision?

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Choice

Posted on by Jinavie

Every day, we are faced with many choices. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the work we do, the people we love… Whether you are at work, school or home, choice is an unavoidable part of life. In fact, we put a great deal of importance in choice, stating that it is a fundamental right of a free individual to make their own choice.

So what happens when this right is taken away from us? A common reaction to this is anger and revolt. People whose freedom are taken away by a dictator will throw a revolution to choose who they want as a leader. Children throw tantrums to show that they do not want their parents to decide things in their stead. There are cases of death row inmates attempting to take their own lives because “ending my life is the one choice I have the right to”.

We like to think we are free individuals, making our own decisions in life. We mock others for being sheeple – choosing to not choose by following the mainstream decision or preference. But choice is often an illusion.
Consider how many of “your decisions” are truly from your own heart. Are you drinking Coke over Pepsi because you really appreciate the taste difference, or because of effective marketing? Are you listening to that song because you enjoy the melody, or because it is at the top of the charts and everyone is listening to it? Are you eating that menu because you were attracted to what the ingredients are, or because the waiter recommended it as “the special of the day”? You would be surprised how little choice you have sometimes, no matter how free you think you may be.

But choice has an ugly, darker side. Making a choice is often difficult, mentally taxing us as we make an internal pros and cons list to try sort things in order and determine “the best choice”. There are countless research showing that the more choice that is available to you, the harder it becomes for you to choose and the more distressed you become. It could be severe to the point that you get analysis paralysis, where you spend so long making a decision that you miss out or never take an action. Not only that, but making a choice puts the responsibility on you. For example, although medicine is moving towards a patient-oriented system where the patient makes an informed choice, the patient may feel burdened with guilt if their choice results in a poor outcome. This applies to every choice we make from day to day in the form of regret. Regret is the sinister monster that makes us think “What if?”. What if we chose differently? Regret leads to blame and blame leads to sorrow and anger at yourself.

This is the paradox of choice. It feels good to be able to express your uniqueness through choice, but at the same time, the freedom of choice can cause pain and distress just as easily. If your choice goes against the group decision, it can make you stand out and cause you to be shunned. This is why so many of us “choose to not choose” and give up our right of choice. Being social animals, we have a tendency of following groupthink while ironically shouting for the importance of free will. To fight this natural tendency and making a choice reflecting your own thoughts, beliefs and identity is a brave thing to do.

However, that is not to say that surrendering your choice is always a bad thing. A couple who met through arranged marriage may have a happier relationship than those who met through romance. People who’ve grown up in communist countries say that “it was easier when we didn’t have to choose everything”. Most importantly, reflect on your childhood where so many of your parents’ decisions – no matter how oppressive they seemed then – turned out to be the right call.

So in the end, the most important choice you can make is this: do you choose to surrender your choice or do you choose free will? Choose whatever makes you happy, because there is no point choosing something and regretting it because you are unhappy.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Process Of Elimination

Posted on by Jinavie

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” ~ Sherlock Holmes

If there is not enough evidence to come to a conclusion of what is the truth, start by removing the possibilities that cannot be true. If you hack away these impossible answers one by one, you will ultimately end up with the truth. This method is highly useful in a multiple-choice type exam, where you cross off the false answers until only one remains (or take an educational guess from whatever remains). In medicine, a process of elimination can be used to narrow down a differential diagnosis, or to reach a diagnosis of exclusion – that is, a diagnosis that cannot be proven to be true but seems to be the only one that fits since all other diagnoses do not. 

image

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Conformity

Posted on by Jinavie

We often see people who criticise others for being “sheeple” – people who blindly conform to the majority and follow someone like sheep do. They protest that as human beings, we have a right and duty to exercise free will, sticking up for one’s own opinions. However, according to an infamous experiment from the 1950’s, we know that human beings are bound by our natural instincts to be social creatures, obeying the collective will of the group we are in.

In 1953, Solomon Asch designed an experiment to study the power of conformity. He told participants that they will be taking part in a vision test with a group of people. They were shown a picture depicting lines of various lengths, asking which line on the right matched the line on the left:

It was a simple task of matching the line to another line of the same length with the answer being blatantly obvious. But as with so many psychological experiments, there was a trick. The group of “participants” were actually in on the experiment other than the one subject. During the experiment, the group would all put their hands up on the blatantly wrong answer instead of the actual correct one. How did this action affect the subject’s answer?

Although it seems clear that the answer is A in the given example, when in a situation where the majority of people put their hands up for “B” or “C”, up to 32% of the subjects gave the incorrect answer. No matter how large the differences were between the sizes of the lines, the results did not change. Although 32% is only a third of the study group, one must bear in mind that this experiment only looked at black-and-white scenarios of lines of different length. If the issue at hand was much more “grey” – such as an ethical dilemma – it can be extrapolated that the person would easily sway and conform to the majority opinion.

The reason for the level of conformity exhibited in the experiment is quite simple: it’s the one who is different that gets left out in the cold.

Posted in Science & Nature

Monty Hall Problem

Posted on by Jinavie

Imagine that you are on a game show and you are given the choice of three doors, where you will win what is behind the chosen door. Behind one door is a car; behind the others are goats, which you do not want. The car and the goats were placed randomly behind the doors before the show.

The rules of the game show are as follows: 

  • After you have chosen a door, the door remains closed for the time being. 
  • The game show host, Monty Hall, who knows what is behind the doors, opens one of the two remaining doors and the door he opens must have a goat behind it. 
  • If both remaining doors have goats behind them, he chooses one at random. 
  • After Monty Hall opens a door with a goat, he will ask you to decide whether you want to stay with your first choice or to switch to the last remaining door. 

Imagine that you chose Door 1 and the host opens Door 3, which has a goat. He then asks you: “Do you want to switch to Door 2?”

Is it to your advantage to change your choice?

image

Most people believe that as an incorrect option (goat) is ruled out, their odds of winning the car go up from 1/3 to ½ even by staying on the same Door 1 and there is no benefit to switching. However, it is better to switch doors as this will double your odds of winning the car. To illustrate this point, the following three scenarios (with the car being behind Door 1, 2 or 3) can be imagined, using the above rules of the game:

image

In Scenario 1, you have already chosen the car (Door 1) so Monty Hall will randomly open Door 2 or 3. Switching will obviously lead you to losing the car. The chance of you losing after switching, therefore, is 1/6 + 1/6 = 1/3 (as either Door 2 or 3 could be opened)

In Scenario 2 and 3, because you chose the wrong door (goat) and Monty Hall will open the door with the goat behind it, switching will lead you to choosing the car (no other choices). As the odd of either scenario happening is 1/3 each, your odds of winning after a switch is 2/3 – double the odds of winning after not switching (1/3, the odd of your first guess being right).

Of course, this is only under the assumption that the rules of the game were followed and that Monty Hall will always open a door with a goat behind it. This problem and the answer suggested was extremely controversial as tens of thousands of readers refused to believe that switching could be a better choice. However, as the above illustration shows, the Monty Hall problem is a veridical paradox – a problem with a solution that appears ludicrous but is actually proven true by induction.

Posted in Science & Nature

Duel

Posted on by Jinavie

Three gunslingers called Good, Bad and Ugly duel to the death. They each stand an equal distance from each other and shoot at the same time. Good’s accuracy is 30%, Ugly’s accuracy is 70% and Bad’s accuracy is 100%. Who has the highest chance of survival?

Common sense dictates that Bad, with the highest accuracy, will have the highest survival rate. However, when the duel begins, the following scenario will occur.

Good’s most rational decision is to shoot Bad rather than Ugly. Reason being, shooting the person with the higher accuracy improves your survival rate in the next round. Ugly also chooses to shoot Bad instead of Good as it is the best choice. Lastly, Bad shoots Ugly instead of Good. This scenario can be explained by the following diagram:

Thus, the probability of Bad being alive after the first round is (1-0.3)(1-0.7)=0.21, or 21%. This is because Ugly is killed by Bad on the first shot. On the second round, the probability of Good dying is the same as Bad’s survival rate of the first round, which is 21%. Therefore, Good’s survival rate is 79%. On the other hand, Bad’s survival rate becomes 0.21(1-0.3)=0.147, or 14.7%. 

Ultimately, the survival rate of each shooter is: Ugly 0%, Bad 14.7%, Good 21%, making Good the most likely winner. This illustrates the fundamental principles of game theory – an extremely useful theory that helps predict the many choices we make in life.