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Keeping your options open? Maybe you shouldn’t.
A new study in behavioral economics by Dan Ariely of MIT suggests that human beings will do quite a bit in order to avoid a loss (the end of an option). Three examples are given:
1. You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case.
2. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.
3. Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.
Those all sound familiar to me. It seems like one of those aphorisms of daily life (Keep Your Options Open!) may just be a time-and-energy-suck.
If you’d like to play a model of the game used in the study, click here.
Hmm. I wonder if this is behavior that is hardwired into us as part of evolution, or if it’s just the result of decades of advertising?
There’s a lot of good things about having lots of options - being able to adapt to changing (and sometimes harmful) situations, being open to opportunities, willingness to take risk. I don’t know how important options are when we walk into the grocery store (do we really need 20 types of chocolate chip cookies? who is willing to give up their favorite?), but one thing we can probably do is choose what things we are going to “choose” and what things we will just repeat. For my part, I almost always order the same meal at restaurants. Why complicate life any more than I need to? =)
Comment by h sofia 02.26.08 @ 4:32 pmAnd all the time I thought I was being lazy and/or incautious. Right all along!
Comment by Comrade Kevin 02.27.08 @ 3:31 pmLeave a comment
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