Like most men living in an otherwise all-female household, I was driven practically insane by repeated exposure to Sex and the City. I became convinced that all four protagonists could have settled down in a happy relationship a decade earlier were it not for their hopeless tendency to overthink things, and their tedious habit of endlessly enumerating and comparing their conquests' attributes on some mental spreadsheet like Warren Buffett assessing a takeover opportunity. "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
That's the 18th-century philosopher David Hume. I agree. I love my instincts -- and, the more I read about decision science, the more sceptical I become about reasoned judgements. In business, I find, there are two kinds of decisions -- good decisions and decisions that are easy to explain and defend. They are not the same. The use of reason massively weights people towards the second type.
Unfortunately, the need to explain or defend a course of action may lead to a worse decision, because our natural instinct for arse-covering requires that we must then base our decision only on those few factors accessible to measurement or to numerical expression.
Take the two sentences "It was love at first sight" and "He persuaded me to sleep with him". The second decision involves more conscious deliberation and appeal to reason, but I would strongly suspect that the first relationship will be more rewarding and long-lasting.
This raises an interesting question. Are there decisions or actions that are better taken without any recourse to conscious thought? Well, emergency braking, for one thing. But what are the others?
My contention -- which may constitute the most peculiar defence of capitalism ever written -- is that good deeds often fall into this category. When we perform actions that ultimately benefit other people, it might be better if we are not made aware of the fact. In other words, behaviours that benefit others may be best performed either unconsciously, instinctively or under the assumption that they are motivated by self-interest alone. And that, as religions have long known, highly self-conscious altruism is rather dangerous and should be treated with healthy suspicion.
If I am allowed to advance a fictional character as evidence, it would be Ron Swanson, the libertarian head of the Parks and Recreation Department of the fictional Indiana town of Pawnee.
Swanson sincerely believes himself to be -- and presents himself as -- a ruthless, rugged individualist who wants the town's parks to be run by a private corporation "like Chuck E Cheese". His behaviour, however, reveals him to be honourable, loyal and ultimately kind-hearted. Is the world made a better place by people like this than by the obverse: deep-seatedly mean people who nonetheless pay a lot of attention to altruism?
And to what extent is that conscious part of our brain we believe to be the seat of reason in reality a kind of marketing function that may have little connection to underlying motivation and behaviour?
The evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposes a model of the human mind that is like a rider on an elephant. The rider represents conscious thought, the elephant our unconscious, autonomic, visceral instincts (the two roughly correspond to Daniel Kahneman's System Two and System One modes of thinking, meaning deliberative contrasted with instinctive). But his is not the simple Platonic or French Enlightenment duality, where it is the job of "reason" to keep the passions in check: it is a much more nuanced model than that.
In Haidt's analogy, the rider is sometimes capable of curbing or discouraging the worst excesses of the elephant, but is also prone to astonishing feats of self-delusion, inclined to use reasoning self-servingly as a defence lawyer or press secretary would: hastily contriving plausible but inaccurate narratives to defend or post-rationalise instinctive actions. Our beloved "reason", in other words, is a bit of an Alastair Campbell.
Acknowledging these aspects of Haidt's mental duality may be vital in fields as varied as advertising, foreign affairs and government policy-making. Too often we find ourselves "writing software for the wrong operating system" -- talking to the rider when we need to engage with the elephant.
This is not to say the elephant is perfect: you can certainly delude the elephant. Joseph Goebbels knew this: "The most effective form of persuasion is when you are not aware you are being persuaded," he said. So too did the makers of stripy toothpaste.
When you think about it, stripy toothpaste is jolly odd. Two or more ingredients are manufactured separately, in different colours -- originally just red and white. These two colours remain isolated from one another, in special packaging, all the way from the factory to your home. Then, squeezed on to your brush, they retain their distinct and separate identity -- right up to the point when you put the toothpaste in your mouth, and mix it all up into a homogenised pinky goo.
Why couldn't the toothpaste just be made pink to begin with? I think it reveals something telling about the human mind that, although thousands of internet pages answer the question "How do they put the stripes into toothpaste?", almost nobody seems bothered to want to know the reason why.
If you must know, there are a few reasons, psychological not chemical. First of all, the stripes enable the maker more credibly to claim that the toothpaste does two or more good things. I know, I know... there is no reason why pink toothpaste could not both remove plaque and freshen breath, but the elephant finds this claim easier to believe if there are two visually distinct components.
Second, if we find squeezing out multi-coloured toothpaste enjoyable, we are more likely to clean our teeth regularly. Lastly, we just tend to assume that more intricate products are more effective. It may be a consumerist example of Amotz Zahavi's "costly signalling" theory in evolutionary biology: our unconscious inference is that, since it has involved more effort and cost to make the toothpaste stripy, then presumably it's better in some way.
It's a kind of effort-reward heuristic. In the same way we assume washing powder is more effective if it has coloured flecks in it, and we think Araldite is a better adhesive because you have to mix it from two tubes. And it's why, back in the 80s, we all chose cassette players in Dixons by pressing the eject button then assuming the overall quality of the whole device could be judged from the elegance of the mechanical action with which the cassette holder whirred open.
This is the kind of thing that drives rationalists (and consumer protectionists) almost crazy. It's seen as preying on people's weaknesses and innate mental "heuristics and biases".
Having said that, in many real-world situations, product intricacy and packaging design probably aren't bad heuristic proxies for product quality. Someone who bothers to put flecks in washing powder or who designs a beautiful hydraulic movement for a cassette player has, in all likelihood, devoted at least some attention to the quality of the product overall. Someone who employs a good package-design agency is also likely to employ a few scientists and a quality controller or two. It's not an infallible guide -- but a well-packaged product is unlikely to be rubbish, and is probably more enjoyable to use.
In any case, there's no point in debating these mental processes, unless you want to reverse a few million years of evolution or attempt to rewire the human brain from scratch. It's simply how our brains work. Most real-world decisions require choices to be made quickly on the basis of only limited or imperfect information, and that is what these instincts allow us to do.
But could understanding these unconscious heuristics also be used to do good? And precisely because they are unconscious?
Because they allow people to do good, altruistic things obliquely, without being aware of the fact.
For instance, let's assume you are a manufacturer of dishwashing powder who, for environmental reasons, wants to reduce the volume of powder you have to transport and the amount of packaging you use. You could produce a concentrate. But the bottle will be smaller, and appear to be worse value for money; it will be less prominent on the supermarket shelf; every time people use less powder, they feel it's doing less of a good job.
Plan B is to make a direct appeal to people's altruism, and label the new product as ecologically friendly. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of people are principally motivated by ecological concerns, and even among those people the phrase "ecologically friendly" may trigger a sense of compromise -- since deep in our lizard brains the word "ecological" may trigger the default message "not nearly as effective as those mean and nasty powders". We assume there's a trade-off somewhere, even if there isn't.
Or there's Plan C: you replace the powder with tablets: these are much smaller in volume than the powder, but they are quite extraordinarily intricate. There is a red "Powerball" embedded in the top, and two separate other components, a powder and a gel, arranged in a kind of yin-and-yang formation around the ball. This pretty much describes the Finish Quantum dishwasher tablets I have in my kitchen right now. I am using less product and less packaging, but I am completely unconscious of any reduction in efficacy as a consequence of the reduced volume. In fact, I think they are better than powder. I also pay more for them. Job done.
And no need to appeal to altruism at all. You just allow people to do good while remaining blissfully unaware of the good they are doing -- through an appeal to their instinctive self-interest.
Most of you are now getting slightly uncomfortable with this.
Surely an appeal to altruism is more noble? We need to educate people so they become ever more committed to helping the environment out of the goodness of their hearts, through an act of will, not as a by-product of self-interest. And surely we should repeatedly remind people of the good they are doing, so that they are ever more conscious of it?
I used to think this too. Now I'm not so sure. You see, I'm beginning to think that appeals to conscious altruism may be rather dangerous. Working on similar projects for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather's behavioural-change arm, we have twice now recommended that the immense ecological benefit of a new product should be kept hidden from its users. Why?
Well, perhaps, to paraphrase Goebbels, "The best form of altruism is when people don't know that they are being altruistic."
If you read the best evolutionary theorists, you'll find they are a bit sceptical about the idea of pure, self--sacrificing altruism. There is usually a genetic or reputational pay-off somewhere, or some unvoiced expectation of reciprocation. Our success as a social species may arise more from our skill at co-ordinating our self-interest with the self-interest of others rather than from subordinating it. And the motivations behind displays of altruism may be highly self-serving.
I'm married to a curate in the Anglican church. And one thing you learn from old religions is that they are highly alert to the possible dangers of self-conscious beneficence. The story of Jesus and the widow's mite is in part an attack on ostentatious generosity. In the 17th century, the Quaker Margaret Fell was already highly critical of Quakers who were adopting plain dress for status, not for modesty. And, as we are repeatedly reminded, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." There is even a saying among vicars that "The devil enters the church through the kitchen and the belfry" -- recognising that groups of volunteer cake-bakers and bell-ringers who are ostensibly doing you a favour often become highly political and divisive.
Interestingly, modern environmental and political movements have little such self-awareness, no --equivalent of this self-critical, introspective tradition -- so pious displays of high-mindedness are often received with unquestioning enthusiasm. A few of the more happy-clappy TED talks resemble nothing so much as a religious meeting without the doubt. There is no 21st-century poem to match Robert Burns's damning Address to the Unco Guid -- a warning to the sanctimonious.
So, I would just like you to consider a few possibilities before we approach environmental problems with direct appeals to the better angels of our nature.
Firstly, there may be negative unintended consequences to the branding of a behaviour as altruistic. Cyclists were perfectly reasonable road users until they were told that they were saving the planet. It was only at that point that a percentage of cyclists suddenly felt entitled to treat all other road users with self-righteous disdain and effrontery -- something that may have harmed cycling overall.
What if, as some people now believe, there is a kind of moral homeostasis in the human mind, where the -conscious performance of an act of altruism in one field provides a moral licence for people to behave more selfishly in another field? That perhaps modern man, no longer expecting his reward to be in heaven, unconsciously lays claim to it right here on Earth? (And have you noticed how all so-called eco-tourism seems to involve a long-haul flight?)
There is quite a lot of evidence for such homeostasis in human behaviour. Mandatory seat belts have made people drive slightly more dangerously than before. Jogging for half an hour makes people feel entitled to a larger burger. Speed cameras may cause people to drive faster on unprotected stretches of road. The claim of working in the "public interest" brings with it a strong sense of entitlement.
It may not be only fossil fuels that should be used sparingly.
We should also treat conscious altruism as a finite resource -- and avoid drawing on it where possible. So, instead of asking people to turn down the temperature on their washing machines as a favour to their fellow human beings, we should simply ask the machines' manufacturers to label 30C as "normal", create a 20C setting labelled "eco" (which no one uses, but which makes 30C seem hotter by comparison), then label 40C "Extreme Soiling" and then name all hotter settings something unpleasant -- "Absurdly Hot" or "Murder-Scene Clean-Up". You've then solved the problem of energy waste without the possible --spillover effects caused by making people feel good about what they've done.
And perhaps we should be altogether more sceptical about knowingly altruistic acts and follow Fell in being concerned about benign behaviours being adopted a little too consciously and conspicuously. It may seem the mark of the most monstrous cynic to ask "Yes, but what's the real motivation?" of every generous act.
But sometimes your inner cynic may be right.
For instance, you will have heard of conspicuous consumption.
What you may not know is that there is also a status-seeking behaviour called conspicuous non--consumption. The behaviour is sometimes called counter-signalling and interestingly is confined -- so far as anybody knows -- exclusively to human beings. (There are no records of really cool peacocks deciding to display small, dowdy brown tails to show how desirable they are as mates in other dimensions.)
In a paper entitled "Too Cool for School? Signalling and Countersignalling", authors Nick Feltovich, Richmond Harbaugh and Ted To explain it as follows: "In signalling environments ranging from consumption to education, high-quality senders often shun the standard signals that should separate them from lower-quality senders." Or, put another way, it's quite easy for Lord Layard to disparage consumerism. After all, who needs a 5-Series BMW if you've got a peerage?
There is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that certain environmental behaviours are, in fact, --countersignalling. They are behaviours adopted by individuals who already have comfortably high -status in one dimension (a high level of education, celebrity, power) and who therefore seek to disparage status markers in other dimensions by deliberately and visibly eschewing them. Or they may denigrate the status markers of the class immediately below their own, as a mark of their confidence in their own superiority. As a taxi driver remarked to my brother-in-law when driving through Shoreditch: "What is it with this place? It used to be all cockneys here; now it's just rich people pretending to be tramps."
How much conspicuously green behaviour (from Boris Johnson's bicycle to the stream of Priuses outside the Oscars) is really just old-fashioned status-seeking in disguise? Bassists can be smelly and wear scruffy clothing and still pull girls -- and don't they love to prove it? Does this even matter?
I think it does, because it suggests that the conspicuously green and altruistic behaviours that are cherished by an elite may unconsciously be beloved of their practitioners precisely because people --situated just below them on the social scale (the slightly less educated, less wealthy or less famous) find those activities and attitudes almost impossible to adopt.
They are, as a result, behaviours that don't scale.
Countersignalling, like that 70s aftershave Denim, is "for men who don't have to try too hard". But there is a very big difference between the feeling you get cycling to work as the Mayor of London and doing so because you can't afford a car.
Two things occur to me at this point. The first is that we are far too preoccupied with motivation and intent in judging human actions, rather than considering outcomes. We celebrate the people paving the road to hell precisely because they are well-intentioned. And we hold them to much less rigorous account.
Hence, precisely because they are not motivated by profit, we see the NHS and the Post Office as almost like semi-charitable institutions, and so are surprisingly ready to forgive them for their inflexibility -- for instance, for the fact that the Post Office is the only retailer on the planet that closes early on a Saturday.
Equally, we may be too reluctant to consider any good done to others as a by-product of self-interest. Last month, I visited a charity based in a retail park in Tunbridge Wells which seeks to reduce the problems of low self-esteem in young people by liaising with the manufacturers of designer brands to supply them with leftover stock at bargain prices. Nearby was a social enterprise that provides high quality food at remarkably low prices to serve the local community. Gosh, you're thinking, I can't wait for these folks to give a TED talk or be the subject of a documentary on Channel 4.
Except, oh, I forgot to say. What I actually visited was a branch of TK Maxx and the nearby Asda. They aren't, strictly speaking, charities. Suddenly, once you know these organisations exist to make money, you don't like them quite as much, do you? But the ends are exactly the same -- you were judging them on intent, not on outcome.
Appeals to altruism are dangerous precisely because they absolve the practitioner from too much criticism or sceptical questioning about the real consequences of their actions, focusing instead on the spirit in which they are carried out. This may explain why we hate Nazis so much more than we hate Maoists or Stalinists: unlike the latter two mass murderous groups, the Nazis didn't even pretend to be well-intentioned.
Ostensible altruism may be dangerous precisely because we are so inclined to forgive, forget or wilfully ignore its negative consequences. Perhaps the best way to save the world is by stealth.
Or by appealing to other innate instincts -- for fairness, or reciprocity or via appeals to loyalty to a defined group, through social norms or reputational shame (see the work of Elinor Ostrom for more on this). "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good." Adam Smith was a bit harsh here. But he had a point. And it seems I am not alone in this belief: a book has just been published with the title Pathological Altruism, a collection of essays edited by, among others, Barbara Oakley (who coined the phrase) and David Sloan Wilson. If you want to buy a copy, I know of a wonderful community service that will deliver it to your home for nothing. It's called Amazon.
Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK. He wrote about how to save marketing in 06.13
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
