CHOICE ARCHITECTURE: ENHANCEMENT OF HUMAN DECISIONS

We may assume that humans buy products because of what they are, but the truth is that we often buy things because of where they are. For example, items on store shelves that are at eye level tend to be purchased more than items on less visible shelves.

Here’s why this is important – Something has to go on the shelf at eye level. Something must be the default choice. Something must be the option with the most visibility and prominence. This is true not just in stores, but in nearly every area of our lives. There are default choices in our office, car, kitchen and in our living room. If we design for default in our life, rather than accepting whatever is handed to us, then it will be easier to live a better life. In the book Nudge, authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein explain a variety of ways that our everyday decisions are shaped by the world around us.

Designing for Default:- . . . Although most of us have the freedom to make a wide range of choices at any given moment, we often make decisions based on the environment we find ourselves in. Consider how our default decisions are designed throughout our personal and professional life. Some examples may be:

Choice Architecture

Researchers have referred to the impact that environmental defaults can have on our decision making as choice architecture. Choice architecture is the design of the different ways to present choice options to a chooser. This presentation will influence the final choice made. Lets look at this with a simple dinner party example. Suppose we are invited to a friend’s house for the evening with dinner. As the evening begins, we notice that there is a large bowl of French fries put out before us. We have three choices:

For someone with limited self-control when it comes to food, choice number C is doubtful. Choice number A and B are both plausible as well. As it becomes obvious that the French fries are being consumed in its entirety, the host removes the bowl. With the bowl gone, the guests will maintain a sufficient appetite to enjoy all of the food that will follow. The question is, how could we all possibly be relieved when our choice to eat the fries had been taken away? In the land of economics, it is against the law for us to be happy about this.

If the bowl of fries was left, all of it would have been consumed. When the bowl was taken away, we all sighed in relief over the fact we had no fries to eat. How could we change our mind in the space of say fifteen minutes or so in regards to what we wanted? Our decision was being made in an environment where there are many features – both noticed and unnoticed – influencing our final choice. In this scenario, the host architected the environment, to create new surroundings. With no fries bowl, all decide by default that choice C was the better (and healthier) option.

Choice architecture as a concept was born from the discipline of behavioral economics. This discipline shows that individuals tend to be subject to predictable biases. These common and predictable biases are termed as elements. The six choice architecture elements are:

Approaches to Enhance Our Default Decisions

Simplicity. It is hard to focus on the signal when we are constantly surrounded by noise. It is more difficult to focus on reading a blog post when you have 10 tabs open in your browser. It is more difficult to accomplish your most important task when you fall into the myth of multitasking. When in doubt, eliminate options.

Visual Cues. In the supermarket, placing items on shelves at eye level makes them more visual and more likely to be purchased. Outside of the supermarket, we can use visual cues like the Paper Clip Method or the Seinfeld Strategy to create an environment that visually tracks our actions in the right direction.

Opt-Out vs Opt-In. There is a famous organ donation study that revealed how multiple European countries skyrocketed their organ donation rates: they required citizens to opt-out of donating rather than opt-in to donating. We can do something similar by opting our future self into better habits ahead of time. For example, we could schedule a yoga session for next week while we are feeling motivated today. When the workout rolls around, we have to then justify opting-out rather than motivating ourselves to opt-in.

Designing for default comes down to a very simple premise: shift the environment so that the good behaviors are easier and the bad behaviors are harder.

Fear-Based Decision Making
Fear-based decision making is when we let our fears or worries dictate our actions (or our lack of action). Some examples may be:-

Considerations on Overcoming Fear-Based Decisions

Stepping out of the Comfort Zone is important. If we fail inside our comfort zone, it’s not really failure, it’s just maintaining the status quo. If we never feel uncomfortable, then we are never trying anything new.

Also, Just because we don’t like where we have to start from doesn’t mean we should not get started. Feelings of fear and uncertainty have a way of making us feel unprepared. Some instances are:-

Here’s a tough question that forces us to consider the opposite side: How long will we put off what we are capable of doing just to maintain what we are currently doing?

We may need to stop making uncertain things, certain. Just because someone else got rejected from that job doesn’t mean we will too. Maybe we tried to lose weight before, but that doesn’t mean we cannot lose it now.

The More We Limit Ourselves, the More Resourceful We Become

We have a tendency to see boredom as a negative influence and we often use boredom as justification to jump continually from thing to thing. One is weary of living in the country and moves to the city; one is weary of one’s native land and goes abroad; one is weary of Europe and goes to America, etc.

The assumption that often drives these behaviours is that if we want to find happiness and meaning in our lives, then we need more: more opportunity, more wealth, and more things. We start to believe that moving somewhere new will remove the messiness of life. Or, that if we just lived in a new location or had a new job, then we would finally be granted the permission and ability to do the things we always wanted to do. Sometimes the life we are looking for can be found embracing less, not more.

A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement. History is filled with examples of people who embraced their limitations rather than fought them. Ingvar Kamprad only had enough money to start a business selling match sticks. He turned it into IKEA. Richard Branson has built 400 businesses despite having dyslexia. Dhirubhai Ambani began as an errand boy at a petrol bunk. Our limitations can provide us with the greatest opportunity for creativity and inventiveness.

It can be easy to spend our life complaining about the opportunities that are withheld from us and the resources that we need to make our goals a reality. But there is an alternative. We can use these constraints to drive creativity. We can embrace the limitations to foster skill development. The problem is rarely the opportunities we have, but how we use them.

The only thing needed to begin a new life is a new perspective. The more we limit ourselves, the more resourceful we become.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

ENTROPY: BEHAVIORS THAT IMPACT OUR LIVES

Murphy’s Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”This pithy statement references the annoying tendency of life to cause trouble and make things difficult. Problems seem to arise naturally on their own, while solutions always require our attention, energy, and effort. Life never seems to just work itself out for us. If anything, our lives become more complicated and gradually decline into disorder rather than remaining simple and structured.

Why is that? Murphy’s Law is just a common adage that people toss around in conversation, but it is related to one of the great forces of our universe. This force is so fundamental to the way our world works that it permeates nearly every endeavor we pursue. It drives many of the problems we face and leads to disarray. It is the one force that governs everybody’s life: Entropy.

What is Entropy and Why Does It Matter?
One simple way to think about it could be: Imagine that we take a box of puzzle pieces and dump them out on a table. In theory, it is possible for the pieces to fall perfectly into place and create a completed puzzle when you dump them out of the box. But in reality, that never happens. Why? Quite simply because the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Every piece would have to fall in just the right spot to create a completed puzzle. There is only one possible state where every piece is in order, but there are a nearly infinite number of states where the pieces are in disorder. Mathematically speaking, an orderly outcome is incredibly unlikely to happen at random.

Similarly, if we build a sand castle on the beach and return a few days later, it will no longer be there. There is only one combination of sand particles that looks like our sandcastle. Meanwhile, there are a nearly infinite number of combinations that don’t look like it. Again, in theory, it is possible for the wind and waves to move the sand around and create the shape of our sandcastle. But in practice, it never happens. The odds are astronomically higher that sand will be scattered into a random clump.

These simple examples capture the essence of entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder. And there are always far more disorderly variations than orderly ones.

How does Entropy Connect to Our Lives?
The important thing about entropy: it always increases over time.It is the natural tendency of things to lose order. Left to its own devices, life will always become less structured. Sand castles get washed away. Weeds overtake gardens. Cars begin to rust. People gradually age. With enough time, even mountains erode, and their precise edges become rounded. The inevitable trend is that things become less organized. This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is one of the foundational concepts of chemistry and it is one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease.

In the long run, nothing escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The pull of entropy is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases.The Key: Without Effort, Life Tends to Lose Order.

We can fight back against the pull of entropy. We can solve a scattered puzzle, pull the weeds out of the garden, clean a messy room, or, importantly, organize individuals into a cohesive team.But because the universe naturally slides toward disorder, we have to expend energy to create stability, structure, and simplicity.Successful relationships require care and attention, just as successful houses require cleaning and maintenance. Successful teams require communication and collaboration. Without effort, things will decay.

Maintaining organization in the face of chaos is not easy. This insight—that disorder has a natural tendency to increase over time and that we can counteract that tendency by expending energy—reveals the core purpose of life. We must exert effort to create useful types of order that are resilient enough to withstand the unrelenting pull of entropy.

Entropy will always increase on its own. The only way to make things orderly again is to add energy. Order requires effort.

Entropy in Daily Life

Entropy helps explain many of the mysteries and experiences of daily life. Here are some just to help understand its play in our lives.

Consider the human body.The collection of atoms that make up our body could be arranged in a virtually infinite number of ways and nearly all of them lead to no form of life whatsoever. Mathematically speaking, the odds are overwhelmingly against our very presence. We are a very unlikely combination of atoms. And yet, here we are. In a universe where entropy rules the day, the presence of life with such organization, structure, and stability is stunning.

Why Art is Beautiful. Entropy offers a good explanation for why art and beauty are so aesthetically pleasing. Artists create a form of order and symmetry that, odds are, the universe would never generate on its own. It is so rare in the grand scheme of possibilities. Similarly, seeing a symmetrical face is rare and beautiful when there are so many ways for a face to be asymmetrical.Beauty is rare and unlikely in a universe of disorder.

Why Marriage is Difficult. One of the most famous opening lines in literature comes from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. He writes, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”There are many ways a marriage can fail—financial stress, parenting issues, crazy in-laws, conflicts in core values, lack of trust, infidelity, and so on. A deficiency in any one of these areas can wreck a family.To be happy, however, we need some degree of success in each major area. Thus, all happy families are alike because they all have a similar structure. Disorder can occur in many ways, but order, in only a few.

Therefore: Optimal Lives Are Designed Not Discovered.
We all have a combination of talents, skills, and interests that are specific to us. But we also live in a larger society and culture that were not designed with our specific abilities in mind. Given what we know about entropy, what could the odds be of the environment we happen to grow up in is also the optimal environment for our talents?It is very unlikely that life is going to present us with a situation that perfectly matches our strengths. Out of all the possible scenarios we could encounter, it is far more likely that we will encounter one that does not cater to our talents.

Evolutionary biologists use a term called “mismatch conditions” to describe when an organism is not well-suited for a condition it is facing. We have common phrases for mismatch conditions: “like a fish out of water” or “bring a knife to a gunfight.” Obviously, when you are in a mismatch condition, it is more difficult to succeed, to be useful, and to win.It is likely that life will not be optimal—mismatch conditions may exist. Maybe we didnot grow up in the optimal culture for our interests, maybe we were exposed to the wrong subject or sport, maybe we were born at the wrong time in history. It is far more likely that we are living in a mismatch condition than in a well-matched one.Knowing this, wecan take it upon ourselves to design our ideal lifestyle. Wehave to turn a mismatch condition into a well-matched one. Optimal lives are designed, not discovered.

Finally, returning to Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”Entropy provides a good explanation for why Murphy’s Law seems to pop up so frequently in life. There are more ways things can go wrong than right. The difficulties of life do not occur because the planets are misaligned or because some cosmic force is conspiring against us. It is simply entropy at work. It is nobody’s fault that life has problems. There are many disordered states and few ordered ones. Given the odds against us, what is remarkable is not that life has problems, but that we can solve them at all.

A closed system is one that is not taking in any energy from the outside. In other words, unless we add outside energy to keep things orderly, the natural trend of any closed system is to become more disordered. We will never be able to reverse entropy in the long run. Billions of years from now, every atom in the universe will be scattered and spread out such that entropy is maximized and nothing is orderly. But in the short run, we can create local pockets of order within our lives.The Second Law (of thermodynamics) defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. 
Another related insight here as we conclude is that we should probably quit things faster than we do. There is always a risk that we will quit too early, but of all the possible things we could be exposed to and invested in, it is very unlikely that we are currently engaged in the best thing for us. Thus, if results are not coming easily, move on.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa.