If you have not heard the podcast, Hidden Brain, I strongly recommend it. On it the other day, was an excellent interview with George Marshall, the author of Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.
a) If we can postpone a cost to the future (even if it is likely to be higher), we will!
b) Current rewards are preferable, so we act now to receive incentives.
c) Uncertainty is uncomfortable, so we ignore it, more so when it is not direct, does not affect me or my family bang on (climate change is one, for a start)
Marshall talks about an experience we have all had that was told to him by the economist Thomas Schelling.
One day Schelling got stuck in traffic on a two-lane road. The traffic moved slowly for 30 minutes and like all the other drivers, he wondered what was slowing everyone down. Finally he reached the cause of the delay – a large mattress was in the middle of the road and traffic both ways had to slow down and drive around it to keep going. Schelling wondered, as he drove by the mattress, why none of the hundred or so drivers that passed the mattress, including him, did not get down from the car and move it out of the way.
Why does this happen? Marshall and Schelling concluded that most of us drive by because we have already paid the cost (that is, the time we have lost) and there is no real incentive to stop and remove the mattress, only an intrinsic reward for helping the drivers behind us, most of whom will never know we did it.
Possible. Even probable. The driver behind you will help because he has nothing to lose, but a great deal to gain (time)!
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