086：What Gets Your Attention？Social Pressure, Myopia, Saliency

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Hello, Himalaya’s subscribers. My name is Timothy Taylor, and today  we're gonna discuss what gets your attention, myopia, menu effects and social pressure. Let's start off by talking about what happens when you see something with your eyes. The basic idea is pretty well known of course, light goes into your eye, it hits the retina of your eye that creates a signal that travels up the optic nerve and reaches your brain. But here's what's less well known. 

Your eyes are not like two large cameras, taking sharp images of everything you see to send up to your brain.Instead, when light enters your eye and hits your retina, the actual image is only sharp and well defined at the very center of the image, which is sometimes called the fovea. It's the center of what you see, which is about one percent of everything that's in your field of vision, all the rest around that is really quite blurry. So what actually happens with human vision is your eyes are always moving around, taking a series of pictures. Those pictures are one percent clear in the center, but blurry everywhere else. And your eyes are moving around, moving around, moving around. Your brain, takes all the images coming from both eyes and combines them. 

So if you stand on a busy street and you look ahead， or you stand in a place where you can look out over a farm or the countryside, it feels as if you're seeing a wide range of images all at once. But that's actually your brain fooling you. You aren't seeing it all at once. You're seeing a series of small, small, clear images and large, blurry images which are all blended together by your brain. Well, why does it work that way? One professor explained this by saying that about one third of the human brain is committed to processing visual signals. 

Imagine the part of your brain with a sharp focus was two times as big. So instead of seeing one percent of everything sharply, you saw two percent of everything very sharply, your brain would need to be much bigger to process all that information. You need to have a head about the size of a basketball. My main lesson here is that our minds can only take in so much information at any given time. As a result, our brains have shortcuts to decide what we will focus on. And then shortcuts often work pretty well, but sometimes they can cause us to make mistakes. 

This isn't just true of our eyesight in our vision, but in general, human attention is limited in all areas. And again, our brain uses shortcuts. In this lecture we’ll focus on some ideas about what gets our attention. And this will be a continuation of our earlier discussion of behavioral economics and psychological biases. We'll talk about three issues in particular. One is short time horizons and myopia, a word we’ll need to talk about. Second, we'll talk about limited attention and menu effects. And third, we'll talk about social pressure. 

Let's start off by talking about short time horizons and myopia. Myopia is the medical term for being shortsighted. That is, you can see things that are very close, but not things that are far away. I wear glasses, for example, because I'm short sighted. I have myopia. When economists and psychologists use the term myopia they aren’t referring to your physical vision but to the focus of your attention. Does my attention focus on things that are close up in time, leading me to act in ways that might make sense in the short term, but not in the long term. And many of us have patterns of behavior that seem to be sense explained in this way. 

You have something you want to do, but you never quite started today. You're always putting it off till tomorrow. Like many people say, “Oh, I always want to get more exercise, but I'll start next week or next month. I want to quit smoking, but I'll start next week or next month. Or I want to take a class to get better skills or pursue one of my interests, but I'll start next week or next month.” Ah, of course, if you're always starting next week or next month, you never really get started at all. 

This can be thought of as a problem of self control. You want to do something, but you can't get started. If you know you're that kind of person, at least in certain situations, what do you do about it? Let me mention a couple of the most famous studies on this topic of self control and short time horizons. One was a study done in the US of an exercise club, you know, a place where you go to take exercise equipment and exercise classes. And this particular exercise club had two choices for how to pay. One was you could have a monthly contract of eighty dollars a month, and then you could go as many times as you wanted. 

The other was you could pay each time you visit and pay ten dollars for a visit. So think about it. If you're going to go eight or more times in a month, it makes sense to get the monthly deal. But if you're going to go less than eight times per month, then just pay the ten dollars each time. The problem was that when they looked at the evidence, the people who bought the monthly contract of this health club were only going on average four or five times a month. 

So why did people do this? Well, one answer is that if you have to pay every time you go, that might discourage you from going. If you pay in advance, then it feels like when you're going, it's something you've already paid for. And the additional cost is zero. You feel like you're committed to going. You've made yourself a promise to go. So in a way, people might have been signing up for the monthly contract of that health club as a way to pressure themselves to go get some exercise. In other words, it was a way of dealing with their own myopia and self control problems. 

Another very well known example of this kind of problem involves savings accounts. And this was a study done in a real world US company. The company set up a policy to encourage its employees to save money. For example, if you contributed up to six percent of your income and had that amount automatically deposited in a savings account for your retirement, the company would match that amount. So for example, if you put in five percent of your income to the retirement savings account, the company would add an amount equal to five percent of your income. That's what I mean by match your mount. 

They then divided the employees of the company randomly into two groups. One group need to sign up for this retirement plan, which wasn't that hard. It just took a phone call, but you did need to sign up. And after a year, half of the people in this category had signed up to an a role in the plan. But half never made the call, and we're not signed. The other group was automatically enrolled in the plan. Now, if you were in the plan and you wanted to get out, that was also very easy to do. Again, it just took a phone call to get out. But a year later, eighty six percent of those who had been automatically enrolled were still enrolled, and only fourteen percent had called opt out. To economists this is a bit of a puzzle. 

No matter which category you started in, its easy to switch with a phone call. It seems easy to get what you want. And then these two big groups seems like on average, roughly the same number of people should be interested in being in the retirement plan. Why do you end up with one group that's only half enrolled and the other group that's eighty six percent enrolled. It seems like a lot of people were just going with whatever the default option was. If the default was not to be enrolled, half stuck with that. If the default was to be enrolled, eighty six percent stuck with that. 

The study suggests that a bunch of Americans have a hard time getting started with savings, even when the company offers to match part of what you save. But if you automatically put them in the system, then they're happy to stay there and that overcomes their self control problem. As a second example of a behavioral issue. Let's talk about limited attention and menu effects. We all have limited attention. And there are classic examples in psychology to do things like say listen to a different message in each ear and then try to answer questions. When your attention gets divided up, it's hard to do things like that. 

As a consumer, you should be able to think of situations where there's a lot of information. Maybe it's an expensive product. Maybe it's not so expensive a product, but the salesperson or the company does a lot of talking. There's a lot of information. It can be hard to think about what you really want or if it's worth the cost. And sometimes you might end up buying something you didn't really expect or maybe even want to buy. Sometimes information that seems like it should matter, gets hidden in all the other information. Like, did you ever buy something and find out there were additional hidden costs, maybe a shipping cost or a fee for handling or a government tax or charge. And often information about this additional fee was available. But with limited attention, you just don't always think to ask. 

Another form of limited attention is sometimes called a menu effect. And I'm not referring here exactly to a menu in a restaurant, but any situation where you have a list of choices, and you have to react to that list. For example, say an investment company offers you twenty different choices for how to invest your money. What would you do? Well, it would take a lot of time and attention, really to evaluate all twenty choices and see what all the trade-offs are. So in that situation, a lot of people just pick one, or others divide up their moneys they've got some in all twenty of the options. With limited tension, sometimes it can be hard to choose. 

There are even some studies that show of people have too many choices. They might not want to decide at all. There was one study where they let people have little tastes of jam. And when they offered lots and lots and lots of flavors that you could taste, more people didn't wanna taste any of the jam at all. Can you think of a situation where you were faced with too much information, too many choices and you took a shortcut? Maybe it turned out, okay, maybe it didn't turn out to be the best choice. 

Our final example here is to talk about social pressure. Many people find that if other people think something is true or act in a certain way, then they will also tend to believe it's true or act in that way. And let me tell you about a classic experiment in psychology. You have a bunch of big cards. Uh, maybe one meter by one meter in each card has a line on it. The lines all point in different directions. And while they are similar in length, they're not the same. Some of the lines are a little shorter and some are a little longer. 

So in part one of the experiment, you hold up two of the cards. You ask someone which line is longer? And most people are pretty accurate most of the time when you ask them that question. But part two gets more complicated. Now you have a group of maybe five people, and you hold up two cards, and you ask the group if they think one line is longer or shorter. But there's a secret in this research. Out of the five people, four of them are actually working with the researcher. And their job is to give the wrong answer to the question. 

So the real study is, does that final person agree with the wrong answer? Or do they stick with what they're pretty sure is correct? Remember, if they're answering on their own, they will mostly get this right. Well, it turns out that if others in the group are all giving a certain answer, even though it's wrong, the final person will also end up agreeing with them. And there's some economic experiments which involve social pressure in these ways. For example, one study done by a researcher in Switzerland had students who had a task and happened to be folding up papers, putting them in an envelope and sealing the envelope. It turns out that if you do this in a room with a partner, people were much faster than if they were doing it on their own. 

Or one real world study looked at evidence from a big supermarket. There was a big row of cashiers in the front where you pay for whatever you're buying. It turns out that if some cashiers are working at the same time as a top speed cashier, they get faster too. And I should emphasize these social pressures are not always positive. A common example involves investment recommendations. You'll often hear people say, “oh do this, buy this stock, buy this property, sell this and so on.” And they'll often say everyone is rushing to do this or everyone will rush as soon as they find out about it. Well, that might be true. It might not be true, but when someone says you should do something because everyone else is doing it, maybe pause for just a moment and think, does it really make sense to you? Do you really personally want to do it? If so, that's fine of course, but at least pause for a moment and ask, are you following your own judgment, or are you just following the social pressure? 

Let's end here with a few review questions. What do economists and psychologists mean when they talk about shortsightedness or myopia,and know it's not about your actual physical vision? Give an example of a self control problem. Maybe one you face in your own life. Can you think of a situation where your own attention was limited, but you needed to make a decision anyway, and you sort of just took a shortcut? And what is a possible bias for decision making created by social pressure? In the next lecture, we'll discuss how government can use the insights of behavioral economics in choosing a set of public policies that we will call nudge policies. 

I'm Timothy Taylor. Thank you for listening to Himalaya.