Smart People Make This One Mistake If They Think the World is Rational
The earlier you learn what makes people (including yourself) tick, the more you make your life richer too.
A world where people are 100% driven only by logic has never existed.
Never will. Don’t believe me?
I have scientific proof.
The sooner we can accept the irrationality of people, the better all of us can accept and come to terms with the demands and expectations of life in an emotional world.
Rationally irrational
Think you’re the odd one out? Sorry — I have news. Science shows that people do not make decisions based on logic.
You don’t need me to tell you the answer, because deep in your heart, you already know.
Neuroscientist Antonio Dasmasio tells us the fascinating and bewildering case of a man named Elliot. He was suffering from an “orange-sized brain tumor that was pushing into his frontal lobes.” After the surgery to remove it, “Elliot was no longer Elliot.”
What had happened?
The surgery had damaged the central part of Elliot’s frontal lobes and affected his emotional response. Without the ability to search his feelings, Elliot couldn’t make decisions anymore.
He transformed into a completely different person, even though his ability for language and logic were unaffected.
Shocking? This proves that decision-making is driven by feelings, and not by logic — and others have similarly confirmed this.
One of the bigger demonstrators of this principle in recent years is the behavioral psychologist, Dan Ariely, who talks about the “decoy pricing” offered in an ad to subscribe to The Economist.
It goes like this:
You are given 3 subscription options:
- $59 for an annual online subscription
- $125 for a one-year subscription to the print edition of the magazine
- $125 for a one-year subscription to the print and online edition of the magazine.
Guess how many people went for the more expensive option?
You don’t need me to tell you the answer, because deep in your heart, you already know.
Did the Economist Magazine make a mistake? Perhaps they were being rationally irrational.
But think about it — how can you employ the principles of decoy pricing in your life?
Your conscious self is just a passenger
Reasons are just rationalizations and (folk) stories we tell ourselves — your conscious self knows not how your unconsciousness works.
I work in marketing as a product marketer, so I know a little bit about how the minds of consumers work. If you ask consumers why they bought a certain product over another, most of them wouldn’t be able to articulate why. You’ll start to see them come up with a post-purchase rationalization.
This is mostly borne out by the latest neuroscientific research. In an experiment published in Nature journal in 2019, researchers asked research participants to imagine an image while recording their brain activity.
Quoting directly from the paper, the researchers were surprised to find that:
“neural activation patterns were predictive of the contents of voluntary visual imagery as far as −11 seconds before the choice of what to imagine.”
The participants were not even aware of their decision, even though their brains had already kick-started the chain of events that will culminate in them making a decision 11 seconds later. Your conscious self is just a passenger, and the driver is someone else.
Who is the driver then? Does free will even exist? I’m not going to start a philosophical discussion about that now. What I know is that you can make this work for you.
As a marketer, I spend a lot of time and money (not my own, thankfully) trying to understand the emotional motivations that drive consumer behavior.
Every time I discover a new consumer insight, it blows my mind. That’s when I realize that I usually know close to nothing about how the minds of others work.
So, my advice to you is: if you have trouble intuitively understanding people, think and act like a marketer. Be curious about people. Understand what makes people tick.
Don’t assume they are like you. You might learn a thing or two. And learning about people is the start of a wonderful life.
Out of control
People are driven by desire, familiarity, memory, and other things that are simply beyond their control.
More facts: a Harvard marketing professor tells us, that 95% of consumer behavior is subconscious.
This probably explains why so many new products flop even though they were tested extensively with consumers beforehand. Remember New Coke? In repeated consumer taste tests, more than 200,000 people preferred the taste of the new Coke recipe.
Yet, when it was launched, consumers rebelled. It wasn’t the same thing. They wanted the old recipe back. Yes — consumers are fickle. But more importantly, it tells us that taste is linked to memory — and memory is linked to emotion.
It makes sense. Why do we buy fragrances? That ephemeral chemical concoction that bears no shape nor form?
A cheap fragrance reminds you of your high school sweetheart who broke your heart. A rose fragrance reminds you of a torrid affair. And a vanilla fragrance reminds you of mum’s cookies.
Perhaps we buy fragrances because they are emotion in liquid form. And emotions behave exactly like fragrance — they leave a sillage, and then disappear without a trace…
But the memory of the scent lingers, and you are forever a changed person.
Our insatiable hunger for stories
People usually prefer detailed stories to theoretical explanations. When in doubt, don’t explain. Tell a story instead.
Our love of stories is an instinct, and we hunger for them.
All living humans today — you included — are the descendants of storytellers. Our ancestors survived by cooperating. And what better way to cooperate than to tell stories of tribal unity, primordial identity, and an origin myth that stretches back to the first people?
Cave paintings in Lascaux, Southern France date to at least 20,000 years ago.
Have you heard of the theory that the cave functioned like a proto-cinema? By bringing in torchlight (fire, not electricity — unless you believe the ancient alien theories — another story!), these early Homo sapiens were able to create moving shadows.
Makes sense why Netflix is a huge business.
20,000 years later and we are still suckers for stories.
We’re addicted to this stuff and it’s certainly not white powder. They’re fairy tales made out of stardust.
Have you heard of the Hero’s Journey? It’s one of the archetypes of a great story. Perhaps our love of stories is universal. Perhaps stories are to humans what instinct is to animals.
Our love of stories is an instinct, and we hunger for it.
So — remember this, if you ever need to make an important presentation, don’t explain with theory. Don’t confuse your audience with lots of numbers. It doesn’t matter, and no one cares.
No one cares about the details. No one has the time to figure it out.
If you explicate and explain every single detail, you’ll end up confusing your audience. I know, because I had to overcome this habit when I moved from academia to the business world.
Just tell them a story or two. It might be more effective than coughing up a dry theoretical explanation.
Unless of course, you work for Amazon.
I hear they don’t buy stories.
The author is an editor of Japonica, a Japan-focused publication, but also writes on a wide variety of topics. His key topics of interest are society, culture, modern work, creator economy, and cryptocurrency, with the occasional fictional story, creative piece, or personal essay. Discover his most-read stories here.