Behavioral Economics For Habit-Hacking
How to redesign our expectations and override conditioning to nurture our success habits.
How objective are we about our own experiences?
According to Dan Ariely, author of the critically acclaimed book ‘Predictably Irrational’, we’re not objective at all. Our conditionings plus our expectations shape the way we experience our lives. Let’s break it down.
Conditionings are shortcuts to make sense of our surroundings and our place in the world. They are the stereotypes we inherit, including your education, income class, gender and place of birth. If you are a woman straight out of high school in South America, chances are you will not study math because you’ve been marked by two stereotypes: 1. Women are bad at maths and 2. Women are caregivers. You’re statistically much more likely to take on a profession where you tick this identity box, despite having a knack for multiplication.
Expectations are ways of categorizing information into predicted experiences. For example, simply reading the word vomit and bananas in the same context will cause an immediate physiological response that makes you temporarily averse to bananas (Don’t worry, it’ll pass). If you assume that an experience is risky or distasteful before trying it, you are more likely to have an unpleasant experience once you do. This isn’t because of your objective experience, but because of the expectations of it.
One famous experiment at MIT tested a group of student’s response to two different kinds of beers. The first one was an unadulterated Budweiser, the second had been laced with two drops of balsamic vinegar. Without full knowledge of the quality of the beers they were tasting, most students in the first group chose the MIT brew with 2 drops of balsamic vinegar. The second group had been told about this beforehand and chose the unadulterated Budweiser.
“Knowledge and beliefs don’t simply inform us, they actually influence our sensory perceptions to align with this previous knowledge.” — Dan Arielly.
Lessons from The Maiden
I recently watched a brilliant documentary on Netflix called Maiden. The movie follows Tracey Edwards, the captain of the first all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Round the World yacht race onboard the Maiden. Maiden placed second in the race, but she and her crew were welcomed home to great acclaim, opening the door to many more women in sailing and other sports.
Conditionings
Edwards conditioning was marked by several factors: early childhood experience, traumatic teens, (lack of) education titles, and gender. Edwards describes her childhood as idyllic. This likely gave her strong emotional foundations during the period that early childhood psychologists describe as being the most critical years in a child’s development (ages 1–5).
This changed when she lost her father at age 10, and her mother remarried to an abusive alcoholic. This culminated in her being expelled from school at the age of 16. Her teens were the determining factor leading her to opt for a risky but satisfying sailing job where neither her education nor her background mattered much. Sailing gave her freedom on one hand but also exposed her discrimination.
She faced intense sexism from some men, but many others acted as mentors, showing her the ropes, so to speak. This mix of foundational strength from a stable childhood, professional limitations resulting from trauma and gender discrimination positioned her as an underdog early on. They created the framework for the rest of the story to unfold.
Expectations
Edwards discovered the Whitbread Round the World Race and met King Hussein of Jordan, who encouraged her to sign on as the only woman on the crew of a yacht that competed in the 1985–86 race. She vividly recalls him telling her she could do anything she set her mind to.
Despite widespread skepticism, Edwards announced she was putting together an all-female crew for the next round-the-world race in 1989–90. Hearing the right words of encouragement from the right person allowed Edwards to overcome her conditionings and take a bet on herself, even as the rest of the world mocked her in disbelief.
When Expectations Override Conditionings
Despite having many reasons to believe in your own ability to succeed, why is it you choose to focus on your failure?
Conditionings can’t be changed. They are a product of a somewhat random chain of events in our past that led to us to be born in a specific place, to a single family with certain resources. Conditionings become our identity. They also become the way the rest of the world sees us. The Nobel laureate economist Daniel Kahneman has shown that when people are aware of their own stereotypes, they are more likely to behave according to them (2008).
Women who were reminded of their gender before taking a math test performed worse in maths than those who were primed by racial reminders (i.e. women are bad at maths vs Asians are better at math than the rest). Conditionings shape our beliefs and behaviours to a certain extent, but this doesn’t mean we can’t invest in changing those beliefs.
Expectations, unlike conditionings, are dynamic and circumstantial. They change depending on how we subjectively perceive our lived experiences. For most of us, our conditionings seep into our expectations of what we can or cannot achieve. But in Edward’s case, it took one comment from a powerful individual to allow her to transcend the limits of her gender and education. This comment allowed her to tap into a source of confidence that had been there since she was a child, and motivate her to embark on a trans-atlantic odyssey.
Designing our own priming effects to alter pervasive beliefs
Priming effects are a term frequently used in behavioural economics. It refers to the use of an idea or object to prime certain behaviours. For example, an experiment conducted by Kathleen Vohs in 2006 found that an irrelevant stack of monopoly cash caused participants to distance themselves physically from their peers and act in more self-interested ways. Simply being reminded of money alters the way we react to certain tasks and can replace altruistic motives with market incentives. However, primers can also drive positive behaviour changes.
Priming for Success
The purpose of the following exercise is to re-write your own narrative and turn limitations into tools for success.
- Identify: In a piece of paper, write all the obstacles to your success. They could be conditionings like inherited stereotypes and traumas, or negative habits like negative mental dialogues when you wake up in the morning. What identity are you holding on to, and how is it limiting your development?
- Narrative Restructuring: Alter your own narrative. Re-write your limiting conditionings into your own framework for success. Limitations delineate the framework in which we operate, and they allow us to focus on the resources that are available to us. How can you turn your disadvantage into an advantage? Which strengths have you developed from hardship?
- Expectation reset: Take the strengths you’ve identified and place them on a little sticky note on your mirror. Prime yourself for success daily by reminding yourself of the tools you have at your disposal to succeed in what you set your mind to.
Becoming aware of our conditionings and inherited stereotypes can change the way we perceive our experiences. Designing new ways to prime positive mental habits can ultimately change how we react to new challenges and opportunities in the future. How we invest in our beliefs matters, and we don’t need the King of Jordan to tell us we can make it big.