You’re not rational
You may think you’re rational, but you’re not.
This article is all about human rationality and there are two brilliant books that I really recommend on this subject. One is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and the other is The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.
In the latter, Johnathan Haidt comes up with the analogy of the way the mind works as being like an elephant stomping about and a rider on top, uselessly holding a pair of reigns. The elephant is your subconscious mind. It crashes about all over the place, taking no notice of the rider balanced on top. The rider is your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is proud and wants to believe it controls the elephant, so wherever the elephant goes, the rider invents a reason why they really did want to go that way actually.
So if the elephant crashes towards the river, the rider claims he was thirsty and directed the elephant that way for a drink. If the elephant stomps up the hill, the rider claims to have wanted to look at the view. You get the idea.
According to Dr Haidt, your mind is similar. You reach the conclusions you do for all kinds of reasons caused by biases, social norms and unconscious triggers that you’re not aware of (the equivalent of the elephant crashing around) - but then you come up with rationalisations afterwards to explain them (the proud rider wanting to look clever).
So, for example, I might think that I oppose Brexit because of the economic and political consequences which my rational mind is fully aware of. But the subconscious elephant stomped that way because I want to fit in amongst middle class Londoners and I like foreign holidays. And, on the opposing side, norms and biases cause people to reach the opposite conclusion.
This is why on topics like Brexit, two different people can look at the same evidence and reach opposing conclusions. We use the evidence to support our conclusions, not the other way round.
Umm, so what, Thomas
Why am I going on about this? Well, it’s because this was front and centre in a fascinating conversation I had a few weeks ago with Rory Sutherland. You can listen to the whole thing on The Freewheeling Podcast, if you like. Rory Sutherland is an eminent behavioural scientist. Realising that we don’t make rational decisions, he tries to work out why we do make the decisions that we do, and then how to use those insights.
Rory Sutherland
His key insight is that we don’t make decisions for what we need but for how they make us feel.
He believes that public transport operators would get more customers, in his view, if we focused on how customers feel, not on the rational factors like journey time that we care about less than we think we do. In effect, we focus on trying to encourage the rider but the rider is powerless. We need to focus on the elephant.
Here are some of his thoughts with regard to transport:
Journey time isn’t very important
Rory says that there are lots of things we (the rider) think are important. But most of us are actually motivated by these five things: Status, Certainty, Relatedness, Autonomy and Fairness.
Deliver these to people, and you’ll have a successful business.
For this reason, Rory is a big fan of performance padding in timetables. We hate uncertainty, so we’d rather arrive on time later than risk being late. It’s also why he’s a big fan of part-time season tickets: not because the economics add up, but because dealing with the perception of unfairness is crucial to happy customers.
Some of these points take you in directions we don’t expect. We talked about the hateful Class 319 trains once used on Thameslink and now sent to the North West. I’ve always hated those trains and thought I did so because of the badly aligned windows and the smelly loos. But those things happen in other trains. Rory explains that the reason those trains are so unpopular is because the seats are the wrong height. He points out that the seats are much lower than is normally the case compared to the window, so the bottom of the window is level with our face, making us feel like a child. Given we love status, that makes us hate the train.
(This, incidentally, also explains the SUV boom. It’s nothing to do with the ‘need’ as defined by Kensington & Chelsea Assembly Member Tony Devenish last week “An SUV is often essential if you are part of the sandwich generation, looking after children (in different schools), enjoying time with elderly parents and being part of the boom in dog ownership while holding down a career.” People were having kids plus dogs long before SUVs. Kids and dogs is rider reasoning - the elephant wants an SUV because it feeds the human need for status by giving an elevated driving position and enabling the driver to look down at other people).
Privatisation didn’t cause the growth in rail travel
Given that the growth in rail travel kicked off in the late 1990s just as privatisation occurred, many in the industry believe that was the cause. Rory says that’s nonsense and that it would have happened regardless.
What actually caused it, he believes, was the invention of portable technology. First the mobile phone and portable DVD player; later the smartphone. Suddenly a railway carriage was an office or an entertainment centre. Train travel became better and the time became productive.
This matters because, in his view, this is a one-time effect. That impact has played through the system, and the growth is now going to peter out - regardless of Covid.
Journey time improvements can be made without infrastructure
Rory points out that we’re spending nearly £100bn on HS2, which will make it faster to reach Birmingham and Manchester. But he points out that most people travelling to these cities do so on Advance tickets. And they don’t want to risk missing their train, so will arrive at Euston 45 minutes early. During which time, two trains will leave to the place they're going to.
He points out that allowing those people onto the train (for a small supplement) would cut their journey time by 20 or 40 minutes. Why do we miss these opportunities? Because we’re focused on rational metrics like journey time of the train, which ignores the experience actual customers have - which is measured in how long the journey feels. And waiting for half an hour in Euston makes it feel very slow.
Public transport doesn’t ‘get’ loyalty
He also points out that different sectors fail to learn from each other. For example, he praises the railways for realising that it’s a good idea to differentially price for customer groups less likely to afford full fares (such as young people and families) and finds it strange that airlines still don’t get this.
Conversely, he praises the airlines for automatically applying frequent flyer benefits, as it appeals to our sense of fairness; one of the five basic human needs.
He highlights how the railway treats a train as either ‘crowded’ or ‘not crowded’, and doesn’t take into account with whom the train is crowded. But a train full of people standing who only stand once in a blue moon is not crowding that matters. Five people standing once doesn’t matter. Whereas one person standing five times really does matter, as that customer will be very unhappy. So Rory suggests that half the train is reserved for season ticket holders, as opposed to all seats being first-come, first served. Providing a loyalty benefit (a guaranteed seat) to a customer that has bought a loyalty product (a season ticket) appeals to our sense of fairness.
This is only a taste of what was a fascinating discussion. (Well, Rory being Rory, it was more a monologue than a discussion! Do take a listen when you have 45 minutes to spare.
What do you think? Are we rational? Tell me your thoughts on LinkedIn
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