House of Lords attacks nudging ???

Baroness Neuberger, chair of the House of Lords Science and Technology Sub-Committee,  was on the Radio 4 today programme. yesterday.  Her thesis seemed to be that nudging techniques alone are not sufficient to tackle some of the huge challenges that our country faces, such as climate change or obesity. 

Well that was the headline anyway … Firstly, the report didn’t actually attack nudging, only that it shouldn’t be applied in isolation and secondly the media reports seem to miss the fact that the select committee’s report was based on two case studies. One of those case studies was all about encouraging a significant reduction in car use, if we are to have any chance of meeting agreed carbon reduction targets. However, I’ve not seen any significant press coverage on this point.

The Baroness’ select committee report, apparently, at least attacks civil servants for their interpretation of the steer that they are getting from their political masters, or possibly the policies themselves.  On one hand, the Government are stating a preference for the consideration of behaviour science techniques (which the scrutiny committee applauded);  but at the same time, they are also taking away the financial freedoms for Government Departments to be able to do anything else anyway. The select committee argues that the nudge alone is not enough.

On the Today programme, the Times columnist, Philip Collins, argued that there is an ideology behind nudging: “There’s a feeling that it’s better if things are done in a voluntary way, rather than through regulation and the state.”  But, both agreed that nudging was only part of the solution. Philip trotted out defaults the classic examples of auto-enrolment on pensions, organ donation and “save more tomorrow schemes”. 

The truth behind the headlines, as ever, is more balanced. For instance, one of the key recommendations from the select committee report  is that the Government should appoint an independent Chief Social Scientist to provide them with robust and independent scientific advice and to advise and shape the development of such policies. If the Sub-Committee really felt that these policies had no part to play then what would be the point of such an advisor. The BBC was just trying to make a headline, along with previous ones such as “Nudge or Fudge ?”.

That isn’t to say that nudges are the ultimate panacea. Of course, many times we will need to consider the environment (such as regulation) within which  nudges will sit. If you’ve read Thaler’s book, you’ll know that the first “[i]N” in Nudge stands for incentives – he never saw “pure social science” standing alone. However, what is important with the behaviour science approach is to design the overall package of measures together so that they can be mutually re-enforcing. We all know what if we hear nine pieces of advice that we don’t like, but just one that we do like; then we’re much more likely to take comfort in the tenth piece of information as it sits nicely with our current world view and gives us an excuse not to have to change.

Baroness Neuberger also challenged whether there was any catalogued evidence that nudging works, at a societal level.  She felt the case had only been proven at an individual level.  She argued that you may get a marginal difference in individual behaviour; but the Government are not doing the evaluations correctly when applied to a population.  With organ donation, she argued that actually the thing that would make the difference was training of the staff.  (It is that classic problem that in the real world, you can never set up an “experiment” such that you can only change one thing at a time – not at a realistic level, for a topic that matters quite so much – and hence you can never be quite sure which of the interventions that you made that be be credited with causing the difference.)

Of course, there is a massive “Catch 22” situation in this argument. Unless we undertake the interventions then we’ve got no chance of being able to gather the appropriate evidence. Also, it is a brave project manager, who cancels something essential for his own project in favour funding the evidential framework in order to assess whether the intervention worked in practice and support future projects. (The solution, by the way, is for the programme manager to set the context and mandate the use of the appropriate evidential frameworks and to give the project manager freedom to set financial priorities within his project.  It also takes the right culture for the project manager and the programme manager to be prepared to willingly cut entire projects – even their own – because there aren’t sufficient funds to do “everything necessary” and it is better to do everything necessary on a smaller number of projects than it is to do a large number of parts of projects.  Unfortunately, such cuts don’t necessarily make the best PR when communicating this approach.)

Completely missing from the headlines was the fact that one of the two case studies that the Select Committee looked at was: reducing the reliance of the British public on the car.

One of their specific recommendations from the Select Committee was that the Government should:

(a)  establish and publish targets for a reduction in carbon emissions as a result of a reduction in car use;

(b) publish an estimate of the percentage reduction in emissions which will be achieved through  reducing car use and  the timescale for its achievement; and

(c) set out details of the steps they will take if this percentage reduction is not achieved by this time.

You can listen again to Tuesday’s Radio 4 Today Programme (at 07:50) at: bbc.

You can see a slightly longer video report by the Baroness on the www.parliament.uk site.

You can also download the reports there at:

Report: Behavour Change

Report: Behaviour Change (PDF)

Inquiry: Behaviour Change

Science and Technology Sub-Committee I

So what is wrong with volleyball ?

Were you successful in the ticket ballot for the London 2012 Olympics ? First time around or in the second chance round that started yesterday at 6am ?

As I write this, the remaining tickets are for a handful of sports including: volleyball,  football, women’s boxing, women’s weightlifting and wrestling. This got me wondering on the subject of my last blog post which was all about how humans make decisions, not in an absolute way but instead they apply heuristics (or short-cuts) based upon relativity.

The London Games provide a great example of this. Take a sport like volleyball – a pretty exciting sport. A team game that is great to watch. Why did it fare so badly in the popularity stakes ? One answer is relativity. There is another sister sport:  beach volleyball which is basically very similar and where the sessions are priced very similarly.  For both category E tickets are priced at about £20 to £65 and category A tickets span the £100 mark.

The differences are that for virtually no cost, you can get a “super-improved option” in which volleyball gets “souped up”.  Add a bit of glamour, add an iconic venue in Horseguards parade, add a bit of sex-appeal .. and the beach volleyball tickets go like hot cakes. What is weird though is the volleyball tickets actually fare much worse, just because they got “bench-marked” against their sexier cousin. If they’d been compared to other similar sports like basketball or handball, then perhaps the tickets would have sold more quickly; however the comparison is harder to make so the simple human brain sticks with the easy comparison. What could be easier to compare than the addition of “beach” on the front of the name of the sport ? Luckily, for athletics, there weren’t options for  “beach decathlons”, “beach marathons” or “beach discus”.

There is, of course, an element of “herd mentality” in here too.  Beach volleyball tickets were selling like hot-cakes; therefore they sell even faster. Perhaps there is something to do with a (logical) view that their re-sale value will be higher; but mostly likely it is human instinct for humans to join to herd and go for the tickets that their peers are buying to.

There we go … …. Behavioural science, even in the selection of Olympic tickets.

Another excellent video from Rory Sutherland

This video is a cracking watch … Rory, described as a thinking man’s Boris Johnson, discusses “interventions for the good” and transport decision-making gets a special mention.

Rory describes that the problem is that most train journeys start with a car journey.  Hence,  he describes modal shift as an “asymmetric decision” because the vast majority of time, you take the decision on whether to get the train when you’re already in a car. There is all sorts of extra anxiety such as “When is my train ?”, “Is it running on time ?”,  “Will I get a parking space ?”, “Will the car be safe ?”, “Have I got change to buy a parking ticket ?”.  Hence, it is much easier to stick with the status quo and stay in that warm comfy car.

Hence, the technological solution – the journey planner – can help lift the decision-making into a fair playing field. Journey planners, such as Transport Direct, allow the would-be traveller to make the decision on how to travel before they set out.  The best course of action might still be the car, but at least the options are more likely to be considered fairly.

Quick link (whilst I sort out the embed feature).

When is a quote not a quote ?

The theme of this post is on “sound-bite culture” and whether it is a good or a bad thing. I believe that social media (and possibly Twitter itself) are going to radically shake up the traditional  transport industry, just as it has done for many other industries. The problem is I’m not 100% sure when yet.  Every idea has its time and I’m just not sure whether it is the time for Twitter, in the pretty conservative transport industry.

Undoubtedly, it can really help for your idea to be “sticky” so that it catches on, and hence it helps if you are able to articulate it quickly and succinctly. Thus, there are a lot of benefits to a sound-bite culture and some would argue that it is an absolute necessity.  I’ve previously blogged about memes and their importance in behavioural change.

Today’s post was penned on AV referendum day (or super-Thursday as it has been coined) has largely been cribbed from the Independent with my own slant added. Two related stories caught my attention, because they cast doubt on whether social media is 100% a good thing and how we need to exercise caution when quoting others. The two articles were:

• How the No campaign twisted Clegg’s words, and
• Credit where credit is not due.

The conspiracy theorist in me then got wondering whether the two articles were connected … …

1) “AV is a dirty little compromise” – This is a true quote from Nick Clegg, one which he probably regrets, but he did say it. The No campaign have certainly capitalised on it.  My first key point is  about quoting other people.  Even if the quote might be perfectly accurate, it doesn’t mean that it is set within the right context. In this case, it is important to both look at the context of within which Clegg actually made this statement and the wider context at the time. I think this is a general danger for quotations and dealing with the media, who both like to boil a subject down to its essence and also turn it into something newsworthy. After all, they have to “sell copy”. (Equally, we have to sell our ideas in behavioural change campaigns.)

In this case, the wider context was mid the live US-style television debates for the last election, which resulted the coining of the phenomenum Cleggmania. The Liberal Democrats were being courted by both Labour and Conservatives alike, but at the time, still during the election, Clegg was rightly sticking to his guns on what his party stood for.

The full quote is:

“AV is a baby step in the right direction – only because nothing can be worse than the status quo.  If we want to change British politics once and for all, we have got to have a quite simple system in which everyone’s votes count. We think AV-plus is a feasible way to proceed.

The Labour Party assumes that changes to the electoral system are like crumbs for the Liberal Democrats from the Labour table. I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour Party.”

I think you’ll agree that the full quote puts quite a different context onto what Clegg actually said, especially when it is viewed in the context of the time and the on-going electoral hustings. For instance, who at that time, would have predicted a Conservative / Liberal Democrat Coalition ?

We’ll have to wait for the votes to be counted to see whether the Yes or No campaigns won the argument with the public.

2) The second piece was  by Natalie Haynes in Viewspaper and had the headline:  “Credit where credit is not due?”.  There were three or four social media angles to the death of Osama Bin Laden that Natalie could have taken. Firstly, the news was apparently first broken on Twitter.  Secondly, we watched the viral effect of news headlines in which the typo: “Obama Bin Laden” was spread around the world even in traditional news media.  However, Natalie’s article focussed on the apparent quotation from Martin Luther King, which spread like wild fire on the Twitter-o-sphere: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

For those people concerned about the glorification of another person’s death, the quotation seemed to capture the moment and was tweeted around the world. The only problem was that Martin Luther King never actually said it, instead it was traced to an English teacher working in Japan. I’m not sure that quoting the previously unknown Jessica Dovey has quite the same cache, but nevertheless the captured the mood of a significant proportion of the Western population.

The second key point is that things that are catchy might not necessarily be fully accurate, but perhaps they are “good enough” for their purpose?

Out of interest, King’s actual quote was (although there will be a real irony, if I get this wrong, especially as I have just copied it from the internet):

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.”

Dovey’s quote got added in to King’s words, then for reasons of space in Twitter’s 140-character limit, her quote became King’s. Except he never said it. Twitter is just an exaggerated case of how our stories get truncated and simplified, if they are to spread.

Above I mentioned the possibility of a conspiracy theory – perhaps, the editor of the Independent was seeking to re-enforce the meme that “memes are flawed” in that edition of the paper, because he felt that the largest AV meme was currently not pro-AV and hence was detrimental to his message. He might have wanted to change the media landscape.

However, if there is a choice, I nearly always plump for the cock-up theory over and above the conspiracy nature. It’s just inherent in our human nature. We make mistakes. We are flawed.

Mind the Gap – Between the harsh world of economics and the social world that I’d like to live in

Professors Uri Gneezy (from the University of California in San Diego) and Aldo Rustichini (from the University of Minnesota) got the opportunity to establish a series of experiments to explore the transition from social norms to market norms and back again. They wrote their results up in a paper called “A Fine is a Price” in the Jounal of Legal Studies in 2000.

They had been invited in to study a day care centre in Israel to discover whether the introduction of a fine for parents arriving late to pick up little Jonny would act as a useful deterrent. They concluded that the fine wasn’t a very effective deterrent and worse than that it has long-term negative effects. Before the introduction of the fine; there was a social contract in place and hence there were effective social norms about it being unacceptable to keep the carers waiting and in standing out so far from the other crowd of timekeeping parents. In this case (in Israel), the guilt from keeping people waiting, made parents think twice before doing it again. Persistent offenders found the peer pressure from the other Mums (and Fathers) unacceptable. However, after the introduction of the fining system, the nursery inadvertently replaced the social norms and the social contract with market norms and a market contract. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they could now make a judgement as to whether the impact of them having to leave on time outweighed the fines that they knew would be imposed. The number of cases of parents arriving late increased, not decreased, after the introduction of the fine. (Perhaps, they set the value wrong; but I’ve got no information on that.)

However, the story then took an interesting turn for the worse. Recognising the error of their ways, the nursery then decided to remove the fine. They figured that they would then be back to the social contract. Right ? – Wrong ! Once the fine was removed, the behaviour of the parents did not reverse. In fact, when the fine was removed there was a further slight increase in the number of late pick-ups by parents. After all, both of the social restorative effect and the market force had been removed.

The moral of the story is that once a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to re-establish.

My next post applies this behavioural economics to the implementation of road pricing in the UK and cautions transport policy makers to “mind the gap”.

Will London grind to a halt on the 4th January 2011 ?

On the 4th Jan 2011, London will turn off the Western Extension Zone (WEZ) of the London Congestion Charging Zone. Will London grind to a halt ?

It was mostly a political decision and an electoral campaign pledge but Boris has consulted widely and the result was that the central congestion charging zone should stay, but the western extension zone should go. London joins an elite band of cities who have actually implemented road pricing and then decided to turn it off. In the rest of the country, many cities have struggled to even get on the band wagon: Manchester, Edinburgh and Cambridge all had negative referenda and voted against road pricing (or, in Manchester’s case, against a £1.6bn investment in the transport infrastructure of the City). However, London is now prepared to jump off the band wagon, or at least within one foot anyway. So what happens when you jump off the wagon ?

On hearing a talk from TfL about the forthcoming changes to the zone, I was reminded of some great behavioural science about a nursery in Israel which decided to fine parents who turned up late to pick up their children. What’s interesting in that case is what happened when they decided to take the fine away.

Professor Dan Ariely describes it really eloquently in his book: “Predictably Irrational”. We live in one of two worlds. One world is characterised by social exchanges, the other is characterised by monetary transactions. Unfortunately, these two worlds cannot co-exist. Imagine that you’ve been invited around to your first Christmas meal with your new girlfriend and her family. Her mum cooks up a sumptuous feast and there is everything there that makes the meal special: sausages in blankets, your favourite stuffing, both turkey and ham interlaced together … You get the idea. But, imagine the sound of the “scratching of the record”, as you get up and stretch and proclaim what an amazing dinner that was. However, instead of offering to wash the dishes, instead you break open your wallet and offer to pay for your share of the meal. This approach just doesn’t sit well within the social world. It jars and it grates and it destroys any social relationships. The world of social exchanges, where people amicably take it in turns, return favours and think of each other; and the world of monetary exchanges where we expect hard-nosed contractual arrangements just cannot co-exist. And, the policy-maker who tries to combines these two worlds in his policies does so at his peril.

Unwittingly, the nursery in Israel broke the social norms by introducing the fining system in the first place, and then when it didn’t work for them, they ended up with the perception of a fine that just happened to be set at zero. Social relationships are not that easy to re-establish. As Professor Ariely puts it “once the bloom is off the rose, or once the social norm is trumped by a market norm, it will rarely return.” The owners of the Israeli nursery found that they then had a double whammy working against them and the parents became even more tardy at picking up their children. After all, there was now no social contract and the economic contract had also been taken away.

So the question is: Will London’s road system grind to a halt on 4th January 2011 ?

Some habits are 35 million years old …

I love TED and I hope you’ll enjoy this particular video on there. TED is a kind of thinking man’s Coronation Street, or brain food. Quite a few people have been on there talking about the concepts of behavioural economics from Rory Sutherland (who’s now on TED twice) and Dan Ariely (of Predictably Irrational). Laurie Santos brings a bit of a different slant to a similar (but still fascinating) subject. Her study was into primate psychology and has been dubbed monkeyonomics (after the wonderful freakonomics).

What’s different about Laurie’s talk is the idea that some of our terrible human habits might be 35 million years old. The basis for some of why we eat too much, smoke too much, munch our way through stale popcorn at the cinema, don’t save up for the future etc. etc. can lie in some behavioural traits that date back to when we were primates. Our travel habits, such as the heads-down commute, have the same genesis and hence there is no wonder when we have 35 million years of baggage that perhaps we have trouble shaking off some of our old habits. There’s truth to the adage that old habits die hard. But I hadn’t quite realised how old some of these habits are. The dice are loaded against us, so no wonder we need quite a lot of help to help ourselves.

Hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

The mind of a five year old

In an earlier post, I talked about story-telling being the key to influence and leadership and re-cast some of the work of Gardner. One of the concepts that Gardner introduced me to is the “mind of the five year old” or the “unschooled mind”.

Gardner asserts that it is essential for a leader to be able to speak directly to the “unschooled mind”. Gardner draws the contrasts between the “five-year old mind”, that of a school child, “the ten-year old” mind and the adolescent “the fifteen-year old mind”. The five-year old sees matters in black and white. In many ways, the mind of the five-year old is wondrous. It exhibits an adventureousness and is open to new possibilities. (And, in a previous blog I discussed how a little fun always appeals.) Yet, in an uncomfortably large number of cases, the five year old has already made up his mind on a key number of issues. For a direct leader, who is often communicating to a wide diversity within their audience, the leader needs to traffic mostly in theories and views already possessed by the five-year old, then he should be able to bring about a modest change. To illustrate, one especially common story, dubbed the Star Wars story, is a protacted struggle between A and B, a struggle between good and evil. The mind of the five year old “gets” the Star Wars story.

But when a leader seeks to promulgate a story that is more sophisticated, he can exceed only if he educates the unschooled mind.

Whilst the five-year old mind sees matters in black and white; the ten –year old mind is fair to a fault. He takes on a much more measured and even-handed view of events and is able to accept that a single character may be able to harbour elements of good and evil at the same time.

The adolescent revels in relativism and superbly appreciative of the multiplicity of interests and perspectives. Not matter how strongly a personality may be promoted as an authority figure, the fiftteen-year old remains sceptical of that perspective. Even Gods have flaws in their eyes and devils harbour virtues.

For Gardner, adults (and not all adults reach ‘adulthood’ or even ‘adolescense’ in this model) have achieved a personal integration. They can see the pros and cons of the argument, but they still come down on one side with their own personal logic for why action is required.

Crucially for Gardner, it isn’t just the stories that the leaders tell; it is also the story that they embody.

Some story tellers are so skilled that they are able to create narratives that appeal to people at different developmental levels, through the choice of words, selection of examples and the use on non-linguistic clues, a leader may be able to convince his followers that he is on their side. (Maybe I’ll blog on NLP in the future.)

Throughout life individuals hear stories and have to evaluate their merits consciously and unconsciously. Gardners argues through abundant evidence that, more often than not, the less sophisticed story remains entrenched – and the “unschooled mind” triumphs.

Piggy-backing on entrenched stories has often proved to be an effective way to Presidency or Prime Ministership. This tack permits ‘ordinary’ (as ‘opposed to ‘innovative’) leaders to achieve their ends.

In much the same way as Dawkin’s concept of memes, Gardner sees the stories as vying for each other for supremacy. Dawkins sees memes as vying for brainspace. Gardner similiarly, but is perhaps also talking about how a story achieves a space in our collective conscience and that is only if people are talking about the leaders, the stories that they peddle and what they stand for.

The challenge for the storyteller then becomes clear: If he creates too familiar or formulaic story, then it will be ready assimilated. No one will object to it, but its distinctiveness and power will prove minimal. Creating a new story bears the opposite set of risks – that it won’t appeal and won’t get listened to and if it does, that it will get assimilated into an existing story and the point of the story will be lost.

So, if we’re busy trying to influence transport policy or we’re trying to influence the way that people travel, what story are we telling? Does our story appeal to the mind of a five year old? Are we trying to create a new story and how will that play out in the competitive “idea space” – will it ever grab any brainspace above and beyond existing stories?

Gardner’s work certainly puts a different spin on behavioural change.

Influence through story telling

Howard Gardner’s exploration of “Leading Minds – an anatomy of leadership” could easily, and nearly was, called an exploration of influence. This got me thinking about the recent British-first election debates between Brown, Cameron and Clegg. More on this later …

Gardner draws a distinction between direct and indirect leaders. Direct leaders such as politicians, military men and business gurus seek to exercise power and influence people; whereas indirect leaders such as scientists, novelists and painters lead indirectly through their work and seek to influence people through the creation of symbolic products. Gardner reveals the key to leadership for both direct and indirect leaders: the ability to create a story that affects the thoughts, feelings and actions of others.

Harry Truman said: “A leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it.”

Gardner’s thesis is that leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the stories they relate, not just the stories that they tell. In addition to communicating these stories, leaders often embody these stories themselves. The way in which direct leaders conduct their lives – their embodiments – must be clearly perceptible to those they are trying to influence.

Gardner also categorises leaders according to the innovativeness of the stories that they try to tell. The ordinary leader, by definition the most common one, simply relates the traditional story of his or her group as effectively as possible. He does not seek to stretch the consciousness of the contemporary audience. The innovative leader takes a story that is latent within the population and gives it a fresh twist. Often they may be revising themes and forms that have fallen into disuse. By far the rarest individual is the visionary leader. Not content to relate a current story or to reactivate a story drawn from a remote or recent past, this individual actually creates a new story. One may quarrel with the categorisation of Thatcher as innovative, whilst Gandhi may earn the title of visionary. Indeed Gandhi, in his characteristic magnanimousness, is reputed to have said something like: “I merely stood in front of a crowd of people that was going somewhere”. [Anybody know the actual quotation ?]

Nick Clegg appears to have done well out of the first round of TV debate. What kind of story was he trying to relate ? For me, the simplest message of all was: [my paraphrase] “Politics as you’ve seen it is broken and discredited, that was the other two parties – I am a credible alternative for change.” Nick Clegg even opened the debate with statement:

“I believe the way things are is not the way things have to be. You’re going to be told tonight by these two that the only choice you can make is between two old parties who’ve been running things for years. I’m here to persuade you that there is an alternative. “

Clegg went on to talk about it’s no good politician’s talking about change, they’ve got to start delivering.

The infamous “wiggle meter” shot through the roof when Clegg talked about the expenses debacle.

Only time will tell whether the wiggle meter continues to keep rising. But, one thing is certain we now, at least for this election period, are into a true period of three-party politics.

More on Gardner in a future blog post …

How to pull ? – According to a behavioural scientist …

I’ve previously blogged on how it is a bad assumption to assume that everyone is rationale. In fact Professor Dan Ariely argues in his book “Predictably Irrational” that it is a far better assumption to ‘veer off’ for certain known biases in the way we approach things as human beings. We might like to think we are very rationale or Spock-like; but actually we are much more like Homer Simpson when it comes to taking decisions.

I recently did a radio show on Radio Hartley Wintney on this topic. I tempted the listeners that I might cover “how to pull, according to a behavioural scientist“. However, unfortunately I ran out of time. (Time seems to flow at a different speed inside that radio studio). So I decided to blog about it instead. If you felt like you missed out, it’s well with watching Dan Ariely on TED, a regular contributor to Wired magazine, cover this topic.

A few of the key points that we can learn:

1) Firstly, you should share your night out with a few mates, but not too many of them.

Three is an ideal number to give the prospective partner a choice but not too big a choice to confuse. There’s evidence from scientific studies of the optimum number of jams to display in the supermarket that too much choice can actually confuse the decision-maker to such a degree that it becomes “all-too-complicated” to buy jam at all and instead sales are actually reduced when there is too much choice. So much for the Western dogma, that consumerism is all about providing choices. (And, yes, isn’t it incredible that there are ‘scientific studies’ on the selection of jam !).

2) Providing a third decoy choice to tip the balance in your favour -

There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that a carefully selected set of three people could be an ideal number, if you’re hoping to get lucky with the opposite sex. However, you do have to pick the other two very carefully. Let’s assume that you want to “load the dice” to improve your chances of getting lucky. One set of scientific studies show that you want to set things up so that there is a difficult choice between two out of the three people out that night – let’s call them A and B. Perhaps, A is fun to be with, whereas B is more classically good-looking. We’ll set this up such that there are two attributes that are typically difficult to choose between and tend to be more a case of personal choice. You might think that it is just a matter of luck, as to whether you find the right girl who is more predisposed to one of these two qualities. Wrong !

In this case study, let’s assume that you are person A and you want to be be selected. According to the study, the best way to subtlely engineer things is to add a third choice, who I call the “decoy choice”: choice C. Weirdly, the absence or inclusion of this third choice makes a significant difference to the percentage of people who select either A or B, even if no-one actually selects C. How strange is that ?

Let’s imagine that things are set up “fairly” and an even proportion of the female population select A or B, when there are just two choices i.e. when you go on the pull with just one other mate. The way to engineer the situation is that the decoy choice, option C, should be engineered to be very similar to yourself; but have a clearly obvious “defect”. Hence, option C might be better described as “Option A minus”. I know, at first sight, it appears irrational; but the existence of the third option can significantly effect the proportion of people who select option A over and above Option B.

So the question in this hypothetic example is: Do you have a slightly uglier brother? Taking him along on your expedition could seriously increase your chances of pulling. It is, as if, the brain shies away from the relatively difficult choice of A or B, which might tax the brain and force it to do some difficult kind of analysis. Instead, the brain focuses on the easier part of the challenge and identifies that “A” is better than “A minus” and does less thinking about the harder question of whether B is prefererable to A (or A minus). It appears as if the mind has already been made up that A must be better, because it is better than A minus.

If you like: the evidence suggests that our brains work much more like Homer Simpson than Spock.

Tests show that the percentage of people favouring A over B (which we previously set at 50-50%) now swing over in favour of A. Perhaps sub-consciously and instinctively we are first voting for “A minus” but then realise that we can “upgrade” from an “A-minus” to an “A”. There is no strong evidence for this particular explanation, but the numbers do eerily seem to suggest it might be true.

Perhaps, even wierder than the fact that social scientists do experiments on our selection of jam in the supermarket shelves is the fact that they also do experiments on our selection of partners in a night-club ! Perhaps, I picked the wrong discipline to study ?