Myrtle Street Labs » human behavior

street cam video during our house party

sstave — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:16:12 +0000

We had a fun house party, the West Oakland Social Democrat Party, at the physical location of Myrtle Street Labs this last Saturday. Here’s the street cam footage from 7pm until 3am after the party.

Thanks all to everybody who came out, especially to our fabulous djs Mike Evans and Steve Best, and Erik Gilling who supplied the sound system.

cognitive bias and the case for health care reform

sstave — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:16:57 +0000

An excellent short article in this week’s New Yorker, in the Talk of the Town section, explains how two cognitive biases make the case for health care reform difficult to make with the American public. I recommend you read the article yourself, but I will summarize its major points here.

The combination of two human foibles, the endowment effect and the status-quo bias are combining to make fixing our health care system particularly difficult. The endowment effect describes the tendency of people to overvalue something they already have. The status-quo bias is the fancy cognitive psychology term for humankind’s deep-seated resistance to change. This resistance is driven by our fear of loss. As explained in the article,

Behavioral economists have established that we feel the pain of losses more than we enjoy the pleasure of gains. So when we think about change we focus more on what we might lose rather than on what we might get. Even people who aren’t all that happy with the current system, then, are still likely to feel anxious about whatever will replace it.

You can predict the result of combining the endowment effect and the status quo bias with regards to our health care system: people who currently have coverage overvalue the coverage they have, and fear any change to the system will leave them worse off.

Unfortunately, if they’re lucky enough to have good health insurance, people tend to fail to see how tenuous their coverage actually is. Since most people’s insurance coverage is linked to their employment, losing one’s job (something increasingly probable in today’s economy) leaves one without any health insurance coverage at all. Further, the insurance industry practice of rescission, or the retroactive cancellation of an insurance policy, means everybody has a small but very real chance that the coverage one thinks one has will be yanked away just when it is needed most.

In other words, as the New Yorker helpfully explains, to keep the status quo of existing coverage, we’re going to have to have to change the way the system works. This paradox goes a long way towards explaining why the case for healthcare reform is so difficult to make with the American public.

incompetent people generally don’t know it

John Blair — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:00:04 +0000

You had probably already figured it out for yourself, but science has proven it. There exists a cognitive bias which causes people who are incompetent in a given skill to overestimate their own ability in that skill. This bias is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, after Justin Kruger and David Dunning, of Cornell University, who confirmed the following hypothesis in 1999:

Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

They also identified the perverse result that people with less competence in a given skill area rate their own ability higher than people who are actually competent in that skill.

I’ve fallen into this trap myself. 10 years ago I thought I was a pretty hot software developer. Now, after 10 years of “substantially improving my own skill level” I understand more clearly just how much I still have to learn. I’m also struck by how well these behaviors describe typical adolescent behavior. In fact, “overestimating your own skill level” is pretty much the definition of sophomoric. This makes sense; adolescents can generally be regarded as incompetent in the field of life skills, and their tendency to overrate their life skills competency explains a lot of their behavior.

Now, it’s one thing to chuckle at the behavior of teenagers, or finally have a cognitive framework to understand internet cranks. It’s a much more serious matter when people in power are incompetent, but don’t know it. That’s downright dangerous.