When 1+1=3 (Part 19 of Cognitive Biases)

Our 19th installment of Cognitive Biases covers the status quo bias, stereotyping, and the subadditivity effect.


Status Quo Bias

Sigmund Freud suggested that there were only two reasons people changed: pain and pressure. Evidence for the status quo bias, a preference not to change established behavior (even if negative) unless the incentive to change is overwhelming, comes from many fields, including political science and economics.

Another way to look at the status quo bias is inertia: the tendency of objects at rest to remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force. The corollary, that objects once in motion tend to stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force, gives hope for change. Unfortunately, one of those outside forces is friction, which is as easy to see in human affairs as it is in the rest of the material universe.

Daniel Kahneman (this time without Amos Tversky) has created experiments that can produce status quo bias effects reliably. It seems to be a combination of loss aversion and the endowment effect, both described elsewhere.

The status quo bias should be distinguished from a rational preference for the status quo in any particular incident. Change is not in itself always good.

Stereotyping

A stereotype, strictly speaking, is a commonly held popular belief about a specific social group or type of individual. It’s not identical to prejudice:

• Prejudices are abstract-general preconceptions or abstract-general attitudes towards any type of situation, object, or person.
• Stereotypes are generalizations of existing characteristics that reduce complexity.

The word stereotype originally comes from printing: a duplicate impression of an original typographic element used for printing instead of the original. (A cliché, interestingly, is the technical term for the printing surface of a stereotype.) It was journalist Walter Lippmann who first used the word in its modern interpersonal sense. A stereotype is a “picture in our heads,“ he wrote, “whether right or wrong.“

Mental categorizing and labeling is both necessary and inescapable. Automatic stereotyping is natural; the necessary (but often omitted) follow-up is to make a conscious check to adjust the impression.

A number of theories have been derived from sociological studies of stereotyping and prejudicial thinking. In early studies it was believed that stereotypes were only used by rigid, repressed, and authoritarian people. Sociologists concluded that this was a result of conflict, poor parenting, and inadequate mental and emotional development. This idea has been overturned; more recent studies have concluded that stereotypes are commonplace.

One theory as to why people stereotype is that it is too difficult to take in all of the complexities of other people as individuals. Even though stereotyping is inexact, it is an efficient way to mentally organize large blocks of information. Categorization is an essential human capability because it enables us to simplify, predict, and organize our world. Once one has sorted and organized everyone into tidy categories, there is a human tendency to avoid processing new or unexpected information about each individual. Assigning general group characteristics to members of that group saves time and satisfies the need to predict the social world in a general sense.

Another theory is that people stereotype because of the need to feel good about oneself. Stereotypes protect one from anxiety and enhance self-esteem. By designating one's own group as the standard or normal group and assigning others to groups considered inferior or abnormal, it provides one with a sense of worth, and in that sense, stereotyping is related to the ingroup bias.

Subadditivity Effect

The subadditivity effect is the tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.

For instance, subjects in one experiment judged the probability of death from cancer in the United States was 18%, the probability from heart attack was 22%, and the probability of death from "other natural causes" was 33%. Other participants judged the probability of death from a natural cause was 58%. Natural causes are made up of precisely cancer, heart attack, and "other natural causes," however, the sum of the latter three probabilities is 73%. According to Tversky and Koehler in a 1994 study, this kind of result is observed consistently.

The subadditivity effect is related to other math-oriented cognitive biases, including the denomination effect, the base rate fallacy, and especially the conjunction fallacy.

More next week.

To read the whole series, click "Cognitive bias" in the tag cloud to your right, or search for any individual bias the same way.

Requirements and Horses' Asses

There’s a common joke that makes the rounds of forwarded Internet email that claims the width of the booster rockets on the Space Shuttle) are constrained by the width of an ancient Roman chariot (more colorfully, by “a couple of horses’ asses”). Here’s the linkage:

• Why are the boosters the width they are? So they can fit through train tunnels.
• Why are train tunnels the width they are? Because of the gauge of the track.
• Why do we use that particular track gauge in the US? Because it was built by British engineers who used the British standard.
• Why was that track gauge the British standard? Because it was based on existing horse-pulled mine cars that ran on rails.
• Why was that the width of mine cars? Because it was the standard cart width.
• Why was that the standard cart width? Because it was the spacing of ruts on British roads.
• Who made the ruts? The Romans.
• Why was that the spacing of the ruts? That was the standard width of a Roman chariot.
• Why was that the standard width of a Roman chariot? Because the chariot was pulled by two horses.
• Ergo, the requirements for the Space Shuttle booster rocket width was originally set by a couple of horses’ asses.

The story is exaggerated in its specifics, but it does point out a useful insight: The present is sometimes constrained by the past.

Builder Robert Moses, famously opposed to public transportation, engineered bridges on New York’s Wantagh Parkway with an ulterior motive–he purposely ensured that they were too low for buses, and buses still do not run on his parkway. Similarly, we type on a keyboard with the top row spelling QWERTYUIOP, a jumble of letters designed to slow down our typing so that the keys on our manual typewriter do not jam as they hit the paper.

Why don’t we change to a more efficient system? Too much effort. Legacy costs. Infrastructure limitations. Inertia.

Thousands of business books talk about change resistance as some sort of failure. Your people – or managers – just aren’t flexible enough. Personal agendas undercut corporate improvement. You don’t have the right kind of corporate culture.

We can list numerous reasons, but it all comes down to physics. Inertia is as much a human and organizational concept as it is a law of the physical universe. And why wouldn’t that be true? It would be far more surprising if organizations were exempt from the law that drives everything else in the universe.

If resistance to change is just inertia wearing a clever plastic disguise, what does that teach us? Well, inertia is the tendency of an object at rest to stay at rest, but more importantly, the tendency of a body once in motion to stay in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force. To change the moment of inertia of an object, you apply force over time. But no matter how flexible the management team, you can’t flip the Exxon Valdez around like a speedboat. Massive objects (large companies) are simply harder to move. There’s no point in getting frustrated about it, which is often the reaction. Instead, be realistic about the force you can apply in the time period over which you can apply it in contemplating which changes to pursue.

If inertia applies in the corporate world, what about the other rules of physics? It’s easy to see the everyday effects of friction in human interactions. Why do meetings take so long? Why does it matter so much what the people at work like each other or get along? Well, when moving parts rub up against one another, friction is the result. To overcome friction, you need lubrication. Good manners, kindness, and the spirit of teamwork work wonders as well.

And, of course, there’s entropy, or the tendency of systems to move in the direction of chaos. Things fall apart unless new energy is applied. That great new management initiative will deliver great results just as long as you keep pumping energy into it. Decide you are done, and immediately it begins to unravel.

There are structural limits that reality places on change. Applying these physics concepts of inertia, friction, and entropy allows us to understand more deeply how organizations, systems, societies, and individuals work. They help you identify possible futures, constrain our analysis of alternatives, and point out the paths of least resistance along which history tends to flow.