Some thoughts on advice and irrationality

The following essay appeared in today's Wall Street Journal by Joe Queenan, entitled, "A Word of Advice...on Advice."

It's a light-hearted, humorous look at advice, and why it's usually useless and/or downright harmful. 

Mr. Queenan suggests this is because most advice--however well-meaning--is on some level thoughtless, unwanted, solicited  to make one's poor,easy decisions seem more rational, or simply to put off making any decision at all.

Consider this paragraph:

"Obviously, not all advice is equally useful. Advice untethered from a strategy for implementing it is feckless, merely annoying. It doesn't do any good to tell people with back problems to lose weight. They know that. They read that somewhere. Telling fat people that they should stop patronizing Mrs. Fields is like telling poor people to stop being poor. This is not really a lifestyle decision. This is the way things are."

In this case, the one receiving advice already knows the problem they face, and even have a general idea how to fix it. Repeating what they already know probably won't do any good.

Now consider this line:

"A similar dynamic is at work when one decides to make a sudden, life-altering and potentially disastrous career choice. You have already decided to do something self-destructive, but you want to feel good about it."

In this instance, the implication is that we seek advice because that is what people do when making big choices, even though in many cases we've already made it before asking. I'm rather reminded of a coffee-mug I saw once in the mall that read, "I've already made up my mind, don't confuse me with facts."

Reading Mr. Queenan's piece, my thoughts turned to an online course I took some time ago on the subject of Behavioral Economics--a field of study that seeks to understand better why people don't behave like perfectly rational economic decision-makers. It's a fascinating subject whose investigators have turned up all manner of interesting biases, short-cuts, and patterns of thought that have served the human race well at points in our history, but which form the root of many problems we experience today. These findings have even led some behavioral economists to see humans as predictably irrational, which is the title of Dan Ariely's 2008 book, and the subject of a book review by Mr. Money Mustache. 

This "irrationality" is not all bad; for instance, the "irrational" fear of flying has led to a much greater focus on improving flight-safety than statistics would deem warranted, which has in turn made flying--a statistically "safe" form of travel--even safer than before. 

Now let's explore a concept in Behavioral economics called "time inconsistency." An interesting finding at the root of this idea holds that humans tend to have an inconsistent measure of value within the context of time. To give a simple example, imagine if I offered to give you $10 today, or promised to give you $15 a month from now. Which would you take? Most people take the $10 now, even though by waiting a month they'd get 50% more money. Now imagine I offer to give you either $10 in a week, or $15 in a month; which would you take? Most people would take the $15. When faced with a decision between gaining something now or more of something later, we tend to weight the value of "now" more heavily. On the other hand, when both choices are offered in the future we tend to choose the option with the greatest value. In short, our scale of value tends to be inconsistent over time, varying to a great extent on how our choices are presented. This finding forms the basis of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's "Nudge" (2008), which explores the implications of behavioral economics in the realms of government and social policy.

Bringing the discussion back to Queenan's piece, I wonder if these "irrational" fears and time-inconsistencies of value play a role in rendering most advice useless and/or harmful. After all, perfectly rational beings would surely make all decisions with their best interests in mind, right? They wouldn't dither, procrastinate, or ignore wise-sounding advice if the data suggested the shouldn't. 

Yet humans clearly aren't perfectly rational, which suggests that advice isn't, and perhaps shouldn't pretend to be either--as Mr. Queenan puts it, "Asking for advice is a form of thinking out loud, except that it involves no thought." As such when we ask for advice, perhaps we're really seeking answers (or something) from both another person and ourselves. The problem may be that the other person does't realize this, and ends up excluding the inquirer from the discussion. Thus we get annoyed when the adviser says things we already know; ignore them when their advice fails to account for feelings of which only we are aware; or discount their advice entirely when it goes well because, as Queenan puts it, "Sooner or later, everyone wants to be a self-made man or woman." 

Taken together it's perhaps a little less surprising that humans so often ignore advice, or end up badly despite its good intentions.