The Guinea Pig Diaries (12 page)

So that’s a winner in taste. But what about the other factors? Whitening. Cavity-fighting power. Price. The dispenser. The ethics of the manufacturer.

I could spend days researching and testing this decision. I feel like Buridan’s ass. This is a donkey in a philosophical parable: He’s hungry and thirsty and standing equidistant between a bucket of water and a bucket of food. He dies deciding.

The Internet has dozens of articles on comparative toothpaste studies. I consult Consumersearch.com, which aggregates reviews from other consumer sites. “Colgate leads the pack,” it reports. “Experts recommend Colgate Total most often.” Okay. So maybe Colgate Total will be my pick.

But here’s another key sentence: “Even the sites and publications which do make recommendations acknowledge that any approved toothpaste will benefit the consumer. Choices based on taste or consistency preferences are valid, and will not greatly affect oral health.”

Okay, so taste it is. Apricot is the way to go. Then I look carefully at the apricot tube—there’s no mention of ADA approval.
I call the 800 number and find out approval is still “pending.” Ugh. I call Thaler.

“I hate the taste of toothpaste,” says Thaler. “If there’s one that tastes like apricot, I’m there.”

I promise to e-mail him the info.

“We don’t want to make the mistake that only quantifiable things—like number of cavities—go into a rational decision,” he says. “Rationality is all about trade-offs. Say I get a cavity once every decade. And with this toothpaste, I get a cavity once every nine years. The pleasure of the daily toothbrushing might make apricot the rational choice. Put it this way: if you choose the safest car even if it’s ugly and no fun to drive, then it might not be rational.”

That makes me feel better. Sort of. Now I’m worried I’ll never find the line between rationality and rationalizing.

THE TEXAS SHARPSHOOTER FALLACY

Two weeks in, and I’m turning into a bit of a pompous ass, it seems. I can’t resist pointing out other people’s cognitive biases.

My aunt Kate, an Orthodox Jew, sent me a viral e-mail today titled “God’s Pharmacy.” It’s about how the shapes of food contain clues from God about nutrition.

“A sliced carrot looks like the human eye . . . science now shows carrots greatly enhance blood flow to the eyes.”

“A tomato has four chambers and is red . . . the heart has four chambers and is red. Research shows tomatoes are loaded with lycopene and are indeed pure heart and blood food.”

And on it went, with walnuts connected to brains and rhubarb resembling bones.

I reply, “
Thanks, Kate
!” I thought I’d start out polite, at least.
“This seems like it’s an example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.” (This is a logical fallacy, as described on Wikipedia, in which information that has no relationship is interpreted or manipulated until it appears to have meaning. The name comes from a story about a Texan who fires several shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.) “
I’m not saying God doesn’t exist, just that this food-shape idea is seriously flawed.
”

I press
SEND
. I try not to feel smug. It’s just that these biases have given me a handy lens through which to view human thought. Simply being able to give a name—especially a cool one like Texas Sharpshooter—orders the chaos.

Kate replies that God designed the world in an infinitely subtle way to preserve our independence. So we must look deep to discover hidden truths.

I e-mail Kate again to say that the “God’s Pharmacy” e-mail is related to another brain quirk. This one is called the Law of Similarity. If X and Y look similar, humans believe they are somehow related, whether they are or not.

This can be seen in my favorite experiment of all time: Psychologists asked students to eat a piece of fudge shaped like dog feces. The students couldn’t do it—even though they knew rationally that it was just sugar, milk, butter, and cocoa. (This experiment, by the way, ruined my business plan for turd-shaped truffles.)

No response from Kate.

THE NARRATIVE FALLACY

I’m all cocky with Kate. But it’s not like I’m in much better shape. Rationality is an elusive goal.

Today, my son Zane threw a monster tantrum. (I have three
sons now—my wife gave birth to twin boys soon after the Radical Honesty experiment.) Half an hour of flying arms and screaming (punctuated by his occasional pauses to look up and make sure we were watching his epic flailing). Julie blames all our kids’ tantrums on lack of sleep. I blame them on lack of food. He’s overtired. No, he’s overhungry. Same debate every time. Rationally, I know we’re both oversimplifying. There are probably a dozen factors. But we humans like to tell a story. X happened because of Y. The end.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about this in his depressing but eye-opening book
The Black Swan.
When the newscasters report on the Dow dropping, they always have some explanation. Housing starts were slow, so the Dow dropped. IBM reported lower-than-expected profits, so the Dow dropped. Bernanke’s taking goiter medication, so the Dow dropped. Truth is, they have no clue. The actual causes are way too complex. A thousand factors played into the drop.

The same goes for the opposite direction. We like to take a simple incident and think we can predict its effect far into the future. We see a butterfly flap its wings in Jersey, and we think we can figure out whether it’s going to snow in Wyoming.

This I battle every day. Fatherhood has taken it to unhealthy extremes. As an overprotective dad, I analyze every little thing my kids do. I say to myself, “What will the consequence of that be in five minutes? In five years? In twenty years?”

Jasper got a DVD of the movie
Surf’s Up
for his fourth birthday. It’s about penguins who surf. My irrational thinking went like this:

Surfing is dangerous.

If he watches
Surf’s Up,
he might take up surfing later in life.

If he takes up surfing, he might suffer a serious injury.

So I hid the DVD. Julie foraged around for it for several days before I fessed up.

“I think it might be in the closet with the winter coats,” I said.

“Why might it be there?”

I knew the logic was flawed. My inner Tipper Gore had gone nuts. I was aware of that, and yet I still hid the DVD. I willfully ignored a hundred other variables: The joy Jasper might get from watching
Surf’s Up.
The millions of
Surf’s Up
viewers who won’t end up surfers. The millions of surfers who don’t end up in intensive care. I’m wasting a lot of mental energy.

Then again, believing you have control—even if that control is an illusion—does make people happier. One study found that oldsters in a retirement home were happier when they thought they were controlling the heat, even when they weren’t. So maybe you have to balance two things: the unpleasant feeling I get from worrying about future surfing accidents versus the good feeling I get from at least trying to influence my kid’s future.

And now I have just given myself a headache.

SPONTANEOUS TRAIT TRANSFERENCE

I’ve been struggling with a work dilemma. The problem is, I’ve become what is officially known as a “blurb whore.”

Since I’ve written two books about going on unlikely quests (one about reading the encyclopedia, the other about living by the Bible), I’m now linked to the genre. So I’m getting sent a lot of manuscripts with titles like “Top Brass: One Man’s Humble Quest to Master the Flügelhorn.”

Unless I really dislike the book, I try to say something nice about it, even if it’s to compliment the choice of typeface.

But now I’ve been asked to endorse a bunch of books that hit
shelves at the exact same time as the paperback of my Bible book. And these books are about religion. Should I really be cannibalizing my own sales?

I think I’m going to have to be a jerk and say no. Which gives me a stomachache. Until I read about a cognitive bias called Spontaneous Trait Transference. This is a fascinating fallacy with huge implications.

Here’s how author Gretchen Rubin, of Happiness-project .com, describes it:

People will unintentionally associate what I say about the qualities of other people with my own qualities. So if I told Jean that Pat is arrogant, unconsciously Jean would associate that quality with me. On the other hand, if I said that Pat is brilliant or hilarious, I’d be linked to those qualities. What I say about other people sticks to me—even when I talk to someone who already knows me. So it behooves me to say only good things.

This has got to be the most wonderful brain quirk around. It’s built-in biological karma. You trash-talk someone, it boomerangs back on you. You say kind things, you become a hero. So calling a book “ingenious” actually makes people think
I’m
ingenious. Being a blurb whore is good business.

Of course, I know, rationally, I could find good reasons why blurb whoring is terrible for business. But I don’t want to. So I stop while I’m ahead.

THE MIRROR EFFECT

Julie and I made a trip to the grocery. Nowadays—three weeks into Project Rationality—I’m hyperaware of other people’s attempts
to take advantage of my brain. For instance, I know that groceries position the high-profit items at eye level, because we lazy humans are more likely to buy the first thing we see. Not me. I’ve started to shop with my knees bent and crouched down low, like a major league catcher, waddling through the aisles, a diminutive bargain hunter.

I know that grocery stores often pump out the artificial smell of baking bread throughout the day, because it makes customers hungrier and more likely to load up their carts. So I shop while breathing only through my mouth.

Julie laughs at me.

“You don’t have to do that in our grocery store.”

I take a sniff. She’s right. Our local market smells like the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo, which doesn’t do much for the appetite.

The point is, the human brain is easy prey for influencers. I should clarify, though: I’ve got no qualms about tricking the brain. The key is, the influence should be for the good, not to sell us more breadlike substances with high-fructose corn syrup.

I try to trick my own brain into being better. At home, I’ve put a mirror next to my computer screen. I did this because studies show people behave more virtuously when a mirror is present. They can see themselves sinning, and they stop. I swear it’s cut down on the number of times I check media gossip websites.

And even better than mirrors—eyes. Studies show that people behave more ethically when there are pictures of eyes on the wall. You don’t even need real eyes. Just pictures of eyes. People unconsciously think they’re being watched and judged.

I’ve snipped out dozens of eyes from magazines—Sela Ward’s eyes from a clothing ad, John Malkovich’s from an
interview—and taped them around the house. I put a stern-looking set of eyes (Lynne Cheney’s) on the cabinet where the fruit snacks are kept. I taped a dozen pairs of eyes in the kids’ room. Is it working? Hard to tell. My son Lucas hasn’t thrown a tantrum about sharing his Hot Wheels jeep in a week. But I’d need a more rigorous study to be sure.

I do know this: Zane enjoys engaging in staring contests with the eyes. He’ll get his face up real close and stare for several minutes, trying, I suppose, to make John Malkovich blink. So that keeps him out of trouble.

THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT

To get inspired, I’ve been watching Spock on YouTube and reading
Star Trek
scripts. Like this exchange:

Bailey: I happen to have a human thing called an adrenaline gland.

Spock: It does sound most inconvenient. . . . Have you considered having it removed?

It’s a joke. But I actually think it’s not a bad idea. At least for those of us who never go hiking and don’t need to flee from grizzlies. I’ve become more and more wary of emotion. Scientists talk about System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the more ancient part of the brain and roughly corresponds to the “gut.” System 2 is the more recent, evolutionarily speaking, and roughly corresponds to reason or the mind.

System 1 is Homer. System 2 is Spock. Some commentators have compared it to a monkey controlling a wild elephant. Gary Marcus, author of the book
Kluge,
puts it this way: System 2 is “deliberative” and reflective. It’s not always rational, but at least
it tries. System 1 isn’t always irrational, but it’s “shortsighted” and “ancestral.”

I realize Project Rationality is my attempt to live completely under System 2 and override the unstable lizard brain that is System 1.

This is disorienting to other people. Humans crave melodrama. Julie got upset with me today for not getting upset enough. I had done something dumb. I’d left our son’s stroller in the back of a cab. It was a cheapo stroller, but still.

“Well, that was a mistake,” I said when we realized it. “I will try not to do that again.” (I do notice I’m using fewer contractions. Getting too into this Spock character?)

“That’s it?” she asked.

“What do you want?”

“You’re so blasé.”

“You want theatrics?”

“I want you to say something like ’Oh no, that’s terrible. I can’t believe I did that. I feel horrible.’”

I explained that I didn’t feel that way. I felt annoyed at myself, and I vowed to try not to do it again. But I will probably forget other things in the future, so she should be prepared. In either case, throwing a hissy fit wouldn’t get the stroller back nor help reform my behavior; it’d just create negative emotions. Plus, we overestimate the value of things we own—it’s called the Endowment Effect.

My wife said our son needs to understand the value of objects.

I paused. “Point taken,” I said. Our son is still a System 1 creature. “Next time, I will put on a show for our son.”

My wife stomped out.

LAKE WOBEGON, PART 2

When I started this project, I thought I’d come to the conclusion that System 1 and System 2 are equally necessary. We need volcanic emotions as much as reasoned logic. But I’ve become more leery of System 1 every day. True, occasionally we need it. When we lose our balance and grab for the subway pole, that’s instinct. We short-circuit the rational brain because there’s no time for reason to get involved. But that’s the exception. If I had to guess, I’d blame System 1 for 90 percent of wars and murders.