Emotions and Evolution: The Paradoxical Nature of Human Behavior and Decision-Making

This is the second part of a series that interrogates the nature of human logic.

There are four reasons we have evolved to behave illogically:

1. Signaling
2. Subconscious hacking
3. Satisficing
4. Psychophysics

We don’t have access to our genuine motivations because it is not in our interest to know. Humans are designed to self-deceive. Evolution made us that way so we could protect ourselves.

The argumentative hypothesis suggests that human reason arose not to inform our actions and beliefs but to explain and defend them to others. It’s an adaptation strategy since we’re a social species.

Feelings

What people say they want and what they actually want are two different things. We know how we feel yet we cannot accurately explain why. Nature cares about feelings, feelings drive our behavior but feelings don’t come with explanations attached - because we’re better off not knowing them.

If you asked someone why they go to restaurants they’d say ‘Because I’m hungry’. But we know that someone hungry could satisfy the urge to eat far more economically elsewhere. The real reason people go to restaurants are social connection and status.

Problems and decisions

We learn about problem-solving and decision-making through 2 lenses: market research and economic theory. Both are problematic in understanding underlying human motivation says Rory.

Market research - asking people what they want

“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.” - David Ogilvy

People don’t have access to their motivations. The issue with economic theory is that it assumes a narrow and rational view of human motivation of what it believes humans should do. The problem is that this doesn’t match reality.

Rory argues that rationalists refuse to admit there’s a psychology behind human behavior so their logic appears to be ‘Yes it works in practice, but does it work in theory (aka can we fit it on a spreadsheet)?’

As Upton Sinclair once said,

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”

Decision-making process

The context and order of choosing affect things in ways we wouldn’t expect. For example, Dan Ariely highlights the decoy effect - a phenomenon where consumers have a change in preference when presented with a 3rd option.

There usually are 3 options with one option being a decoy. The decoy option is more expensive and less valuable compared to the other two. The remaining two will seem similar but one will be a tad more expensive but infinitely more valuable (Most subscriptions are structured that way).

For example, real estate agents will show you 3 houses by first showing a decoy house to make the other 2 look better. One of the remaining two will be better value than the other and that’s the one they actually want to sell. The other house is there just to confirm your suspicion that the second house is similar but better.

Emotions

Morality works on an instinctual/emotional level yet we hastily cast rationalization for it. For example, most people feel it’s repulsive to eat dogs or horses yet they’ve no problem eating beef. If you ask people why, they will come up with a series of rationalizations and arguments to defend a socially constructed belief.

Evolution equipped us with the right emotional responses. Putting rationale on top of it is a joke. If you came back home and saw a dog’s turd on the kitchen floor, you’d clean it up immediately. When asked why you’d say well it’s unhygienic, germs, etc. But that’s a rationalization. Someone in the Victorian age didn’t know about germs but they wouldn’t have left it there would they?

Britain has no poisonous spider species and yet most people are afraid of them. That’s not rational, that’s instinctual. We adopted most behaviors thousands of years before we knew the reasons for it. Instincts are heritable whereas reason has to be taught.

Innovation

Sutherland predicts that we’ve come far technologically therefore the progress in the next 50 years will come mostly from improvements in psychology and design thinking over technology.

As an example, making a train journey 20% faster will cost hundreds of millions whereas making it 20% more enjoyable will cost almost nothing. It’s easier to achieve improvements in perception at a cheap price compared to improvements in reality (physics). Logic rules out the former and focuses on the latter.

Take Uber as an example. It didn’t make the car get there anywhere faster but it reduced the frustration of waiting for the driver to pick you up while watching it on the little map. Which would you prefer? Flight to London delayed or flight to London delayed by 30 minutes? We are more bothered by the uncertainty rather than waiting.

The only way to uncover unconscious motivations is to be willing to ask stupid and obvious questions. Such as:

• Why do people hate standing on trains?
• Why do people not like it when their plane is delayed?
• Why do people hate waiting for an engineer’s appointment?

Sutherland says that the business that asks the stupid, irrational questions is the one that survives the future.

To sum up

• Being rational is about pretending you’re solving the problem whilst being unreasonable is about actually solving the problem.

• The process of discovery is not the same as the process of justification. We tend to blaze a path and in hindsight, reason our way of getting there. With the boring, unlucky, and ‘irrational’ parts edited out of our memory.

• The modern world has it backward: it requires the discovery process to be just as neat as the solution. The space for intuition and creativity is killed at the expense of logic and rationality.

• Novel ideas don’t come through reasoning and logic they come through playing, intuition, and experimenting.