If you think about this question of defaults, what it really relies on, and
the fact that we don't really know what to do.
You know, if you grow up in a country and your parents told you to always donate
your organs or always buy jam, or always maximize your retirement funding, none of
these interventions would make sense. But the issue is that we just really don't
know what we want. And because we don't know what we want, we
use the environment as a guide to what we want.
We use the environment as the way to influence our thinking, and therefore,
change, what we end up choosing. So for now what I want to do next, is I
want us to think about the extent to which we don't know our preferences.
So think about the following. Imagine I asked half of you to think about
three reasons why you love your significant other.
And I asked the other half to think about ten reasons why you love your significant
other. Now if you don't have anybody right now,
think about somebody you want to be with, rather than somebody you left.
But think about it. Imagine you have to think about three
reasons, imagine you have to think about 10.
And I would give you maybe 10 minutes to think about one of those things.
And at the end of the 10 minutes I would say, okay, please stop.
And tell me how much do you love your significant other, on a scale from zero to
ten? And what do you think you'll buy them for
their birthday and what would you buy them for your anniversary?
And do you think you'll be together in a year, three year, five year, ten years?
What do you think, should it matter, whether I ask you to think about three
reasons or ten? Of course it shouldn't matter, because I
didn't tell you anything new. It's not as if I came to you and I said,
you know what, I just met your significant other, what a wonderful, warm, kind human
being, I was just amazed. There was no information.
I only asked you to reflect about somebody you know very, very well.
Well does it matter? Of course it does, I wouldn't present it
otherwise. So who do you think declared greater love
to their significant other? People who are asked to think about three
reasons or people asked to think about ten reasons?
Here's the thing. The reality is that it's very, very, very,
very, very difficult to come up with ten reasons.
So what happens to people who were asked to think about ten reasons?
They get stuck. They get stuck on reason six, seven,
eight, nine, ten. And as they get stuck they say to
themselves, how much possibly can I love this person?
And because of that, they reduce their understanding of how much they love the
significant other. And because of that, people who were asked
to think about three reasons, declare greater love than people asked to think
about ten reasons. By the way, just as a comment I should
say, you don't have to have ten reasons to love somebody, maybe one reason is enough.
It's not about that it's really important to have ten reasons.
But when you tell people to think about ten reasons and they fall short, the
standards make them think, that they are, some how something is not okay with the
relationships. The same thing by the way, works with
BMWs. It turns out that there are not ten
reasons to buy a BMW. And you ask people to think about ten
reasons, they get stuck, and they say, maybe I don't need one.
I don't like to admit it or not, but I use the same trick in teaching.
At the end of each class, when I teach in front of an audience, the dean likes to
see high teaching evaluations. So one of the easiest thing to do is to
just before the students fill in their evaluation for the term, I ask them to
think about 15 ways in which this class could be improved.
Presumably, 15 are too many, they run short and they come up to the conclusion
this was a fantastic class and this is how they fill the end of the year evaluation.
Now, if I did that in the beg-, in the middle of the semester, the 15 reasons,
they will probably forget. But if I do it just before they fill in
the end of year evaluation, now I can change their momentary mindset, their
momentary understanding of how good this class is, and then I can get higher
teaching evaluations.