We all would love to think about ourselves as logical creatures, but this isn’t what is really happening in real life, scientists confirmed. The new look at the situation suggests that humans may be hardwired to choose illogically.
Preference theory
Economists observed that individuals can act illogically while making selections. If it were logical from the economics point of view, individuals should be choosing identical things, in the same situations. But that’s not the case.
Occasionally buyers shift their choices, which is identified in business terms as “consumer churn.”
This was thought to be an irrational thinking and a mental error. But scientists say it’s not an error but a rational consequence of the way how we assess value, which is hard coded in the brain.
Lottery-winning phenomenon
Ryan Webb, a co-researcher of the study and a senior lecturer at Rotman Management School in the University of Toronto, provides an example in which a person may value Coke or Pepsi higher, and if this is so, then the individual should be picking the same drink every single time. But that’s not happening in real life.
Professor Webb, Vered Kurtz-David, accompanied by Professor Dotan Persitz, Dino Levy, from the University of Tel Aviv discovered how brain works in an experiment, in which respondents had to play a sequence of lotteries while being placed in an fMRI scanner. The fMRI observers neural activity by identifying fluctuations in blood flow to diverse zones of the brain.
The helpers had to select among unalike blends of signs directed to two synchronized raffles, each having a 50% possibility of winning. Every participant played the lotto several times in fast series while observed by the fMRI.
The fMRI observers neural activity by identifying fluctuations in blood flow to diverse zones of the brain.
An average brain weighs options by making erratic decisions
What the scientists discovered was surprising. The same areas of the brain were active when logical, as well as illogical picks were made.
This opposes former ideas that have advocated sensible and illogical preferences are affected by actions in different areas of our brains, or by dissimilar thought practices, a notion promoted in Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow”.
What the brain scans demonstrated was that sporadic erratic picks are essential to the way how a brain functions, irrespective of struggles to persuade individuals to stick faithfully to their normal inclinations.
Webb is now confident that every now and then people are prone to make a surprising choice that seems totally illogical.
So, every now and then people are acting with confidence making a choice that is opposite of their normal way of thinking. This could be the nature’s way of trying to make us step “out of the comfort zone”.
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There goes Game Theory right into the circular file. Even with the most powerful computers…computers that can compute with every human on earth at the same time, do it faster and with 100% accuracy…have failed to predict a single human being’s behaviors though the use of an equation.
While I agree that people do not use a standard calculus to make decisions, it seems most people share general expertise in specific areas. Experience tells me that the higher the emotional element in the decision area, the poorer people are making “good” decisions. Nonetheless, I would like the citations for the works mentioned in this article. There is some research in the USA (source: old Psychology Today issue) that average people are highly proficient at choosing the wrong partners, whether for dating or marriage. (My take: high emotional element in these areas.) My family law experience supports this. That… Read more »