Assessing information and making decisions that will improve consumer health in relation to food is what we are about in the FSA. We are proud to say that our decisions are evidence-based and we provide information and advice to consumers so that they can make informed choices. Daniel Kahneman has spent a lifetime thinking about this and provides a wealth of information drawn from hundreds of studies that describe what people actually do when they make decisions, rather than what they say they do or what we might assume they do. It makes for a fascinating and thought-provoking read.
It would be unrealistic to try to summarise the book in a few sentences so I will instead pick out a couple of points that stayed with me. The author says that we are lazy, so it is much easier and quicker to use heuristics (simple rules of thumb) to analyse a situation (thinking fast) rather than painstakingly going through the data from first principles (thinking slow). This works for us most of the time, so we carry on our thinking fast, possibly unaware that in some cases we are making the wrong choice. Message to the FSA: do the slow thinking as well as the fast!
Lots of different examples of bias are described, but I liked the example of whether rewards for improved performance work better than punishment – a proposition supported by much evidence, but not apparently by many bosses. Kahneman relays the story of how an instructor in the Israeli Air Force told him this didn’t work for flight cadets: those who he praised for good performance usually did worse the next time, whereas those who he screamed at for poor performance usually did better the next time. What the instructor was observing was regression to the mean, due to random fluctuations in performance. The chances are, when we do something really well, next time it won’t go so well and vice versa. The error the instructor made was ascribing a causal influence to the inevitable fluctuations in a random process.
As Kahneman put it: ‘…the feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.’ Has anyone else shared the misfortune of experiencing a boss who is convinced that shouting is an effective motivational tool?
Why not share your favourite science books this year? Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.