If You Were to Have an Affair, You’d Very Likely Pick Two Entirely Different Kinds of Partners
Or, the psychological dilemma between conformity and complementarity
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
It’s one thing to say something. But it’s a completely different thing to actually hit your audience in the head with a brick when you say something. The second one, for reasons obvious, is much much harder.
For example, we humans are not good at judging the size of large numbers. Even when we know one is bigger than another, we don’t appreciate the size of the difference.
How big is a trillion from a billion? Shouting, “It’s really big!” doesn’t really cut it. Remember, your goal is to hit your audience in the head.
A good method is comparing big numbers to time. We know a million, a billion, and a trillion are different sizes, but we often don’t appreciate the staggering increases between them. A million seconds from now is just shy of eleven days and fourteen hours. Not so bad. I could wait that long. It’s within two weeks. A billion seconds is over thirty-one years.
However, a trillion seconds from now is after the year 33,700 CE.
The gap between a trillion and a billion feels about the same as the jump between a million and a billion — because both are a thousand times bigger. In reality, the jump to a trillion is much bigger: the difference between living to your early thirties and a time when humankind may no longer exist.
Did you feel my imaginary brick hitting your head yet? Either way, a very happy Diwali to you and your loved ones from Bangalore! 🎉
One more thing. If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart above? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍
Q: What do decision makers not understand about human behaviour?
Imagine you have ten roles to fill at your office, and you ask ten colleagues to each hire one person. Obviously each person will try to recruit the best person they can find — that’s the same as asking one person to choose the best ten hires he can find, right? Wrong!
Anyone choosing a group of ten people will instinctively take more risk than someone hiring one person. The reason for this is that with one person we look for conformity, but with ten people we look for complementarity.
If you were only allowed to eat one food, you might choose the potato. Barring a few vitamins and trace minerals, it contains all the essential amino acids you need to build proteins, repair cells and fight diseases. Eating just five a day would support you for weeks.
However, if you were told you could only eat ten foods for the rest of your life, you would not choose ten different types of potato. In fact, you may not choose potatoes at all. You would probably choose something more varied — some for nutrients and some for taste.
The same applies to hiring (along with many other similar decisions). We are much more likely to take risks when hiring ten people than when hiring one.
Today, let’s talk about human behaviour. More precisely, let’s talk about what most people, especially decision makers, policy makers, statisticians, economists don’t understand about the psychology of decision-making.
If you wonder why most people in your office and most politicians in your country look and behave the same; or if you want to know what kind of person you should have an extramarital affair with; or if you want to know the psychological reason (which is often more convincing than the logical reason) behind diversifying your investments; or if you wanna know why, sometimes, making multiple decisions at once is better than making a single decision, don’t skip this essay midway.
Let’s crack on!
But first, let’s go back to the hiring example one more time. If you hire ten people, you might expect one or two of them not to work out. You won’t risk your reputation if a couple of them leave after three months, or if one of them is fired for stealing staplers.
But if you hire one person and they go rogue (for example, they start photocopying their bottom after getting drunk at the office party), you have visibly failed.
So individuals who are hiring individuals will be needlessly risk averse. In other words, they will hire potatoes.
Like many endeavours, when hiring, we should understand that unconscious motivation and rational good sense do overlap, but they do not coincide.
A person engaged in recruitment may think they are trying to hire the best person for the job, but their subconscious motivation can subtly nudge them towards a different outcome.
Yes, they want to hire a candidate who is likely to be good, but they are also frightened of hiring someone who might turn out to be bad. And as we all know, human beings are generally loss averse.
The downside of making a bad hire is much much more than the upside of making a good hire. Therefore, a low variance (someone more conventional and less risky) would be as appealing as a slightly-above-average performer to the recruiter. And, for obvious reasons, your office will be filled with walking potatoes.
This mechanism is observed in several personal endeavours as well. One of them is house hunting.
If you have the budget to choose one perfect house for your family, you would have a very clear idea of what to buy. There’s a good chance it would be something boring and typical.
That’s because when you have only one house to live, it cannot be too weak in any one dimension: it cannot be too small, too far from work, too noisy or too weird — so you’ll opt for something conventional and average. Surprisingly, this wouldn’t be any different from what your friend (or a friend of this friend) would buy.
This is the reason apartment buildings are a rage. They all look and feel the same, with similar facilities and amenities — nothing too weird or eccentric or out of the ordinary.
On the other hand, if you had double the budget and you decided to buy two houses, your pattern of decision-making would be very different.
You would now be looking to buy two significantly different properties with complementary strengths — perhaps an apartment in the city and a house in the countryside.
While the apartment would be conventional, there’s a good chance the house would be anything but. Chances are, you would design it yourself (or commission it to an eccentric and unconventional architect). Chances are, it might be on top of a hill, or beside a stream — even though you would have to walk ten kilometres to reach the nearest shop.
People who engage in extramarital affairs don’t often pick two similar kind of partners. While they settle down with a conventional spouse — one who is stable, reliable, and dependable — the other partner is often polar opposite. They are never two types of potatoes.
One is a potato, while the other is something exotic and foreign — may not be a good first choice, but definitely a great second choice.
The same logic applies to investing as well. If you were to choose only one kind of investment, you would probably choose the least volatile one. But if you have the option to distribute your wealth into all kinds of investment, you would probably put a bulk of it — I suggest 90% — in conventional funds (such as gold or government bonds), while playing extremely risky games with the rest (like investing in crypto).
It’s easier to understand this rationale better in terms of investment, since it’s easily quantifiable. If you lose your risky bets, you would lose only 10% while still having a strong core with your conventional bets. But if you win, you win massive.
Similarly, if your house on top of the hill (or your unconventional extramarital partner) doesn’t turn out to be as good as you had expected — you still have a house in the city (and a spouse, provided you haven’t already been caught) to fall back on. But if it works out, it works out great!
If you are voting for a member of parliament, the safe option is to pick an experienced and presentable candidate, yet no one voting for ten candidates would pick ten of those — they’d throw in a few wild cards as well. Perhaps someone who’d had a proper job, someone from a poorer background, and someone with a science degree.
Once you understand this, the potential to increase the level of diversity in employment, politics, and even education rises as people are chosen in batches.
Everyone worries about declining social mobility, rising inequality, and the hideous homogeneity of politicians. Yet it is possible these have arisen from our well-meaning attempts to make the world fairer.
The moral dilemma is that you can either create a more equitable society, with opportunities for all, but where luck plays a significant role; or you can create a society which maintains the illusion of complete and non-random fairness based on merit, yet where opportunities are open to only a few.
The problem is that when the rules are the same for everyone, the world doesn’t change for the better. The same boring folks win every time. By applying identical criteria to everyone in the name of fairness, you end up recruiting only potatoes.
The idea that you should sometimes try making the rules less fair outrages people. But it’s worth remembering that there is an inevitable trade-off between fairness and variety. Also, making something less fair isn’t the same as making it unfair.
Variety needs a few wildcards to add some randomness to the system. And randomness, as we all know, has no sense of fairness or unfairness.
Once you understand this, the potential to increase the level of diversity in employment, investment, education, and even personal decisions rises as you choose in batches and subconsciously optimise for complementarity.
Timeless Insight
It’s a common belief that our ideas shape our actions, but often our actions shape our ideas as well.
People often develop their attitudes by observing their own behaviour and concluding what attitudes must have caused them.
Often you’ll see yourself doing something very much unlike you and, being unable to pin down a motive behind it, you might try to make sense of it by constructing a plausible story around your action. Then you form beliefs about yourself based on the story you just fabricated.
To put it in context, if you dislike somebody, and yet you do a favour to that person, you experience cognitive dissonance. And to ease this, you try to find a way to justify your actions. But since your actions cannot be changed, you tweak your thoughts and beliefs to justify your actions.
If you just did a favour, maybe you aren’t really appaled by that person after all.
What I’m Reading
Shrink the humanity of your enemy, and the fighting must seem easier, more just, less complicated. Warfare consists of several psychological tricks, not least the ones you play upon yourself.
— Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island
Tiny Thought
The irony of modernity is that we live longer but we age prematurely.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋