Читать книгу Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World - Noreena Hertz - Страница 36

The bad news is that it’s not enough to give yourself a general note to avoid basing your decisions on anchors, sensory cues and rhetoric.34 This tends not to make any difference at all.

The good news is that there are ways to regain control of your unconscious, at least to some degree. There are active thinking strategies that do deliver if you suspect you might be being spun or played, or that you might inadvertently be basing your decisions on an anchor.

One such strategy is to get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario, in which your cue or anchor isn’t present. How would you respond then?

So, if you’re viewing a house for sale, and it smells of freshly baked bread, force yourself to consider whether you would be thinking less favourably about the property if it didn’t smell as good. Or before you turn down a date with Sally from match.com, make sure to ask yourself whether you might have said yes if her photo had been set against a red background rather than a green one. And if you’re about to put an offer in for a car in an auction, don’t just anchor your offer automatically around the guide price. Instead, ask yourself what offer you would have put in if you were thinking completely independently.

Studies show that simply by posing such ‘imagine if’ questions, which allow us to consider alternative explanations and different perspectives, we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.35 Liberated from these tricks and triggers, we can consider information through a more neutral, less emotive, more analytical and nuanced lens.

You might also want to do some more active reflecting on the decision you’re making – look at prices of similar homes on the market, say, or think about how it is you actually use your car. By asking yourself additional questions – a car for long-distance journeys? A city runabout? A family car, or just for you? – you can dislodge the frames and anchors that others are attempting to influence you with, and substitute them for more accurate data points.36

Another tactic that works is to build a case for the opposite option to the one you are leaning towards.37 So, write down the reasons why not to buy the house, or why to go on a date with Sally, or why to offer just half the guide-price for the car. By articulating possible reasons to do the opposite, you become better placed to look at your initial position in a more objective light.

Removing yourself from your original decision-making environment before you come to your conclusion is another tack to consider. Given that you may have come to your initial response under the sway of temporary influences you weren’t even aware of – background music, a smell, the touch of someone’s hand, a colour, a word or phrase – by physically removing yourself from the environment of the trigger and taking some time to consider your decision, you will be diluting that influence’s impact.38 Again, if you can, take that beat. That pause that could make the difference between a good decision and a flawed one.

We should also make sure to ask ourselves, as a matter of practice, who is communicating the information to us. What might their agenda be? What is the organisation the ‘messenger’ is speaking for? How does he see the world, and how might that affect how he represents it to you? Does he want you to adopt a particular belief? Act in a particular way? Once you’ve established the messenger’s agenda, ask yourself how the way he’s presenting his case might be affecting you.

Alert now to just how sensitive to language we are when making a decision, there’s something else to do whether you are evaluating a proposal at work, a politician’s policies or an advertiser’s claims. Consider what impact the language you are hearing or reading might be having. What metaphors and adjectives are being used? What kind of words have been chosen, and why? How is the information being framed? What is the tone? How might all of this be swaying your judgement?

Then ask yourself whether your response would be different if emotional, evocative or politically loaded turns of phrase were not in the frame. Think here of Bush’s State of the Union speech, say, and how you might have reacted had fear not been the pervasive tone.

By actively interrogating the language used, and stripping the content of rhetorical flourishes, we can override our immediate responses.

Knowing also now how affected we are by ‘wrappers’ and ‘form’, there are further tactics we can put into regular practice. If you want to make a decision as objectively as possible, ask yourself if there is a way you could strip away the wrapper, or change the very form in which the information has been received. If those colours on the presentation risk leading you down one particular path, maybe ask for a straightforward copy in black and white. What impact would this have on your thinking? Or if you’re asking your HR department to send you a selection of CVs for a post you’re looking to fill, how about asking them to remove the names of the candidates, so you don’t know their gender? The year that University College Cardiff introduced anonymous marking, 47 per cent of female students achieved firsts or 2.1s. In the preceding four years, when graders knew the gender of the person whose final exams they were marking, only 34 per cent of women earned the top grades.39

All of the above are possible steps to take, but if you don’t have time, there’s a simpler strategy that may work. Admit to yourself just how susceptible you probably are to external influences, frames, cues and anchors, and then actively think about the extent to which your assessment may therefore be being distorted. This simple act of self-consciousness can eliminate the effect of the cue, frame or anchor. Reflecting on just how irrational our thinking can be seems to help us to re-establish rational thinking.40 I tried this technique the last time I was at the beauty counter – and came home with no new purchases!