Irrationally Yours

variety really is one of the most important spices of life.

he point is that when we know something and know it well (for example, the song that we have picked), it is hard for us to appreciate the gaps in other people’s understanding—a bias that is called “the curse of knowledge.”

suspect your son is suffering from a combination of three decision biases. The first is the endowment effect, which has to do with our tendency to use our current situation as a reference point, and view any other alternative as a negative change from where we are now.

That’s where our free will resides—in our ability to design our environments in a way that is more compatible with our strengths and, even more important, helps us overcome our weaknesses.

When it comes to “comfortable,” it is useful to consider the economist Tibor Scitovsky, who argued in his book The Joyless Economy that there are two kinds of positive experiences—pleasures and comforts—and that we have a tendency to take the comfortable, safe, and predictable path way too often. This is particularly sad, Scitovsky argues, because real progress—as well as real pleasure—comes from taking risks and trying very different approaches to life and types of experiences.

When we are in social gatherings we look for discussion topics that everyone can take part in, and often these end up being about weather/sports/gossip. This, of course, also means that discussions naturally gravitate to some of the lowest common denominators—just so that everyone can be part of the exchange.

Loss aversion is one of the most basic and well-understood principles in social science. The basic finding is that losing something has a stronger emotional impact than gaining something of the same value.

This is one reason the temptation industry—bars, strip clubs, etc.—operates mostly at night: After we have been resisting temptations all day, we are depleted and ready to fail, and these temptation-institutions are ready to profit from our failure.

And since this is the established norm for these individuals, it will take focused and deliberate effort to change this pattern of behavior.

You judge your efforts by comparison to that imagined world, and, in relative terms, you feel bad about it.