cyberloafing is the new procrastination

Lucy Kellaway is presenting some apps today to help you reduce your online procrastination, or as it is now called, cyberloafing. She quotes an analogy by David Ryan Polgar  that compares surfing the web with eating junk food:

"He says we are getting mentally obese: we binge on junk information, with the result that our brains become so sluggish they are good for nothing except more bingeing."

So stop reading this blog, and let's get back to work.

Take stupidity into schools

I am writing this post while reading Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow", a summary of research on behavioural choice. It's a great book! And reading it actuallty makes me angry about the education system. The findings it presents, especially on cognitive biases, are of enormous importance in everybody's lives, and yet I do not recall anybody ever telling me about them. I feel this is a major deficiency.

If you haven't read the book, and if you don't have a clear idea about expressions like availability heuristic, survivorship bias, decoy effect, and framing effect, then you are not alone. Luckily though, the ideas are easy to grasp and familiar to most people. For example, the framing effect is simply the tendency of people to see identical information less or more favourably dependent on the context in which it is delivered. People are a lot more likely to endorse a certain medication when told "it will have the desired effect 60% of the time" than when told "it will not have the desired effect 40% of the time". Stupid, right? But it is a well-documented empirical regularity in human behaviour.

Now even if you didn't know the word "framing effect", you would maybe say that you know this already. Of course people get tricked all the time. But what Kahneman repeatedly notes in his book is that, although we may know about these biases, we don't think they apply to us personally. Surely, if we were presented with the 60%-40% example above, we think we won't make this easy mistake. And yet we will. Over and over again, even when presented with evidence to the contrary. In fact, in many of the studies Kahneman documents, test subjects who were shown recordings of themselves making clearly biased judgements refused to believe that the recordings were genuine!

The important point to realise, I think, is that these cognitive biases are not just curiosities that make for good cocktail party conversation. They constantly lead to us making decisions that we will regret, and for society as a whole, cause huge inefficiencies. Their effect is pervasive. Whether we are aware of them and how we deal with them matters: Each time we buy a suit. Each time we buy an insurance policy. And each time we sell a suit or an insurance policy, manage our finances, or go to a job interview. In each case, the more biases are at play, the more likely the outcome is inefficient for society, since we end up buyings things we don't need, selling things other people don't need, not getting the job we are made for, hiring someone who isn't made for the job etc.

This is not even to mention the impact of cognitive biases on election outcomes in democracies. History abounds with examples of voters electing demagogues, and every politician knows: to win votes is to exploit voters' cognitive biases. This vulnerability of the democratic system is inherent in its construction. Ultimately, the faith in democracy stems from the belief that every citizen is rational enough to be able to decide on his or her government. Seeing the citizen in this way was a major achievement of the Enlightenment. But in soem circumstances it might be too idealistic.

Fortunately, something can be done about this deficiency. We need to anchor the teaching of "practical psychology" in the school curriculum to ensure every citizen is equipped with the knowledge of his or her stupidity. By "practical psychology", I mean those insights from psychology which concern our every day lives, including the study of cognitive biases, but also best practices on how to make decisions, memorise things or rid oneself of bad habits. More remote fields such as dream interpretation, pathologies or psychotherapy would be excluded.

Is this a sensible proposal? I think it is, but there are at least four main ways to attack it.

Attack 1: Cognitive biases don't really matter. People frequently make mistakes, but they err on both sides. Sometimes they will be led to buy a bit too much and sometimes a bit too little. On average, that just washes out.
Defense: Especially economists have a deep belief in this kind of argument. Just about any economic model is built on the ideal of the rational agent with infinite information processing capacity, and the evidence presented by Kahneman and others can only be reconciled with this ideal if deviations from it are subject to some law of large numbers. But it is far from clear that these deviations really have zero mean. Sellers are usually better at manipulating buyers than the other way around. The mere existence of consumer protection testifies to this. Also, some decisions are made once-in-a-lifetime, like buying a house. The mistake you make on that one occasion is very relevant to you as an individual, even if across individuals the mistakes average out.

Attack 2: Teaching this stuff in school won't improve people's behaviour. Kahneman himself says that cognitive biases are almost impossible to overcome.
Defense: This is probably true (although apparently there exist various attempts at teaching "debiasing"). Still, this does not mean that knowledge of such "practical psychology" won't improve our society. Even though I am not able to overcome the psychological sales tactics of my banker, I can still insist to call him back about my investment decision after a good night's sleep, even if at the moment to me his case appears fully waterproof.

Attack 3: This would be a good idea, but you can't teach this in school. It is about being streetsmart, and either you get that or you don't.
Defense: This is a very powerful argument. I forgot most of my school curriculum already. So why would pupils remember cognitive biases? But I think this is so close to our lives that it would stick. We could make the teaching very practical, very example-based. Besides, I recall so many debates that we were required to make in various subjects. Had I known about the psychology behind it, the techniques of persuasion, I would have been much more interested in them.

Attack 4: You cannot teach everything in school. Because of the limited time the pupils have, choices need to be made. This is simply not as important as other subjects.
Defense: By that logic, geography doesn't belong in the school curriculum at all.

No, this is a sensible proposal with huge upside. Adolescents in school don't only need to know the facts about the world, they also need to know how not to screw up. The introduction of financial literacy courses in Britain is a step in the right direction. When people get tricked by their bankers, the solution is neither to sob about declining moral values, nor to construct a nanny-state which regulates every aspect of consumer finance, but to empower people to make better decisions (even though the usual suspects disagree).

On a broader scale, our school curriculum is extremely slow-moving, at least in my home country Germany. In many parts it still seems to represent education ideals of the 19th century. Why do they make our children remember poems by heart? Regurgitate the list of Egyptian pharaos or Presidents of the United States? You can easily find out about this on Wikipedia. What I think is more important in a world where the individual has to take on ever more decisions is to teach people from an early age that everybody around them is stupid, that they themselves are no better, and what they can do about it.