Bikes, cars and heuristics

On Friday, I was hit by a car. Actually I got hit by the door of a car. That's not the point of this article. The point is what happened next.

Daniel Kahnemann

Most people when confronted with a situation like that would react according to a heuristic. Heuristics are rules of thumb, and they were studied in detail in the 1970s by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann in their groundbreaking work.

Heuristics make many decisions in life a lot easier. If you didn't have a heuristic for  putting your clothes on, there are so many possible combinations that you'd never get out of the house on time.

So when I landed on the ground, with various amounts of pain, most people would have a heuristic to handle it. But my brain doesn't work that way. I'm an analyst, so in a situation that I'm not familiar with, my brain started to piece together what had happened and what comes next.

Focus on what's most important

The range of issues my brain started to consider was rather broad. Message for the future: there is a time and place for broad thinking and a time and place for narrow thinking. This was the latter.

Rather than just focusing on exchanging contact details and going home or to a hospital, my brain started thinking about a whole raft of less important items. As a result - it got stuck!

When heuristics go wrong

By now, if you are a person who makes great snap decisions, you are patting yourself on the back. Unfortunately, Tversky & Kahnemann's research found that heuristics can go badly wrong. Luckily for me, with more complex processes, it seems my brain is well suited to breaking down a problem into its component parts and putting it back together in a sequential order that works.

So how did it all turn out?

Thankfully, my nearest and dearest is very good with heuristics and took my to the local hospital where I got well taken care of.

The moral of the story: If you're not strong in a thinking style, find someone who is. 

 Let me know what you think

Mark S

Affairs are matters of the heart, not matters for the State

How can acts that make some people feel bad be acceptable?

Let's take the thorny issue of affairs. One perspective is that once two people have committed to a relationship then any breach of that bond through a romantic connection to another person is wrong and should be prohibited.

A social liberal doesn't agree with this hard and fast rule.

First, let's pass this action through the "physical harm to person or property" test.

Jenny and Fred are married. Jenny has an affair with George. Fred doesn't find out about it and notices no change in their marriage. Has Fred been hurt physically - no.  This action has not breached the harm test.

What if Fred does find out about it when he sees an expose on the television about his wife's affair? Jenny's action didn't change - there was no physical harm to Fred.  But what about emotional harm?

This is where the context is all important. Let's develop a scale to measure the context.

Relationship monogamy scale
(modified from the original Kinsey Scale)
1 - Totally monogamous, no incidental emotional contact with others permitted
2 - Monogamous, incidental emotional contact with others is accepted
3 - Monogamous, more than incidental emotional contact with others is accepted
4 - Partly open, sexual contact outside relationship permitted in certain circumstances
5 - Mainly open relationship, one committed relationship with other sexual contact permitted with conditions
6 - Totally open relationship, one committed relationship with sexual contact permitted with others
7 - Polyamorous, no conditions attached to any relationships

If Fred and Jenny's relationship is a 6, Fred will have no problem with this TV revelation. He would accept the sexual contact with George as being perfectly normal.

But if their relationship is a 2, he will view the contact as breaching their marriage agreement.

This is where it gets interesting. Fred can view this breach of their marriage in a variety of ways. He can choose to feel hurt and betrayed. He can choose to treat this as a fundamental breach and leave the marriage.  He can choose to be surprised by the revelation and ask Jenny to enter into counselling. Or he can choose to accept Jenny's actions as a minor infringement and continue as normal, resuming their previous agreement.

He can CHOOSE?? Are you serious?? Yes, this is exactly what he can do. Indeed, with most statistics citing that 25-50% of married people have an affair, this is a decision that is being made very often.

Does this condone Jenny's behavior? If their relationship was a 2, no it doesn't. But that is a private matter between Fred and Jenny.

Without demeaning the personal side, it is much like a commercial agreement - if there is a breach by one side, there may be consequences. In a breach of a personal relationship, there may also be consequences - and as sad as the consequences may be, that is OK for those consequences to play out in whatever way they will.

Providing the harm test is not breached, people should be at liberty to act in whatever way they wish - they just need to accept that there will be consequences of any action.

Groups of people are free to impose social norms on themselves, but breaches are civil matters between those individuals, they are not a matter for the State.

(Clarification: having a secret extramarital relationship is no different to having a relationship when the other party finds out.  If the action would not be acceptable if it was learned about, it wouldn't be acceptable if they didn't find out.)

Let me know what you think


Mark S

Some statistics on infidelity:
Peter Fox
Kinsey studies