Stop Fixing the Person When the Choice Architecture Is Broken

The killer thought from the briefing was:

What looks like poor thinking may be perfectly understandable behaviour inside a badly structured set of choices.

That has ThinkWORKS written all over it.

There's also a fascinating tension with Conspiracy, because we've previously discussed scarcity consuming mental bandwidth. I wouldn't hide from that — I'd make it part of the piece. This new research doesn't establish that poverty has no psychological effects or overturn the entire scarcity literature. It challenges one influential experimental explanation for a particular observed effect. (Nature)

That nuance actually makes the piece better.

I'd make Wednesday's blog something like this:

Stop Fixing the Person When the Choices Are Broken

There's a particular kind of explanation we seem to find irresistible.

When somebody repeatedly makes decisions that appear to leave them worse off, we look at the person.

Why did they do that?

Why didn't they plan ahead?

Why did they borrow again?

Why didn't they save?

Why didn't they take the better option?

And eventually we begin constructing explanations about the individual.

Poor judgement.

Lack of self-control.

Short-term thinking.

Perhaps even lack of intelligence.

But what if we've been looking in the wrong place?

What if sometimes the interesting question isn't:

“Why did this person make such a bad choice?”

but:

“What choices were actually available to them?”

Poverty and the Mind

There's an influential idea in behavioural science known as attentional tunnelling.

The basic argument is intuitive.

When something is scarce — particularly money — it captures our attention.

If you're worrying about whether you can pay the electricity bill, your attention becomes concentrated on the immediate problem.

Longer-term considerations can disappear outside the tunnel.

That idea has influenced how researchers think about poverty and decision-making.

But a newly published paper in Nature Communications has gone back and examined some of the experimental evidence behind it.

And the researchers found something interesting.

They challenge whether some of the behavioural differences previously attributed to attention really require an attentional explanation at all. Their reanalysis and conceptual replication suggest that important differences can arise from the structure of the task itself — including the different decisions and borrowing opportunities faced by participants with fewer resources. (Nature)

That sounds like a fairly technical academic disagreement.

But underneath it is a much bigger idea.

Maybe the Person Isn't the Problem

Imagine two people.

One has £1,000 available to deal with the month ahead.

The other has £100.

They aren't facing the same decisions with different amounts of money.

In an important sense, they're facing different decision environments.

An unexpected £80 expense is inconvenient to the first person.

It may be catastrophic to the second.

The first person can absorb it.

The second may have to borrow.

Borrowing may create additional cost.

That additional cost reduces their options next week.

Which may require another compromise.

And suddenly we're observing a chain of apparently poor decisions.

From the outside we might say:

“Look at all those bad choices.”

But zoom out.

Were they really choosing between:

good option and bad option?

Or were they choosing between:

bad option and slightly less disastrous option?

That's different.

Choice Architecture Matters

This idea travels far beyond poverty.

Imagine an employee who repeatedly misses deadlines.

We could conclude that they're badly organised.

But suppose their workload exceeds the hours available.

Now the problem isn't simply time management.

They're being forced to choose which deadline to miss.

Imagine somebody who continually buys the cheapest product rather than the more durable one.

Perhaps they're financially irrational.

Or perhaps they simply don't possess enough spare cash to make the investment that would save them money over five years.

Imagine somebody who can't attend a training course that might improve their career.

Perhaps they're insufficiently ambitious.

Or perhaps attending requires childcare they cannot afford.

Same person.

Same intelligence.

Different choice architecture.

And that leads to a systems principle I think we should use far more often:

Before judging the decision, examine the choices.

The Luxury of the Better Option

There's an uncomfortable assumption buried inside a lot of advice.

We tell people to:

plan for the future,

invest in themselves,

buy quality,

build savings,

take opportunities,

develop new skills,

change jobs,

start businesses,

make healthier choices.

Often that's perfectly good advice.

But advice tends to assume that the recipient has access to the choices contained within it.

Sometimes they don't.

And if the better option is inaccessible, telling somebody repeatedly to choose it doesn't create agency.

It merely creates frustration.

You cannot exercise an option you don't possess.

This Doesn't Mean Psychology Doesn't Matter

And here's where we need to be careful.

This new research doesn't demonstrate that poverty has no psychological consequences.

It doesn't prove that financial stress never affects attention.

And it certainly doesn't mean individual decisions don't matter.

It challenges a particular interpretation of experimental evidence for scarcity-induced attentional tunnelling. (Nature)

That's an important distinction.

Human behaviour is rarely either:

the person

or

the system.

Usually it's an interaction between the two.

But perhaps we've developed a habit of reaching for psychological explanations too quickly.

We see behaviour.

We diagnose the person.

And sometimes forget to inspect the environment producing the decisions.

The Same Mistake at Work

Organisations do this constantly.

An employee struggles.

Send them on training.

Managers aren't innovating.

Teach them creativity.

People aren't collaborating.

Run a teamwork workshop.

Staff are stressed.

Give them a wellbeing app.

Sometimes those interventions help.

But what if the underlying system still rewards exactly the behaviour we're trying to change?

What if people don't need more resilience?

They need a workload that isn't ridiculous.

What if managers don't need another leadership model?

They need enough time to actually manage people.

What if employees don't need motivational training?

They need some control over decisions affecting their work.

Again:

Stop fixing the person before you've examined the system.

Look One Level Up

So here's a little ThinkWORKS exercise.

Next time you find yourself looking at somebody's behaviour and thinking:

“Why on earth would they do that?”

stop.

Move one level up.

Ask:

What choices did they actually have?

What did each choice cost them?

What constraints were operating?

What risks could they afford to take?

Would I make the same decision if I had their options rather than mine?

You may still conclude that they made a poor decision.

People do.

I certainly do.

So do you.

But at least you'll be evaluating the decision they actually faced, rather than the imaginary one you assumed they faced.

Because what looks like poor thinking may sometimes be perfectly understandable behaviour inside a badly structured set of choices.

And if that's true, then trying to improve the person's thinking won't solve the problem.

Sometimes the person doesn't need fixing.

The choices do.

This piece was inspired by new research published in Nature Communications examining evidence for the proposed attentional effects of scarcity. (Nature)

On Monday's ThinkWORKS: we'll take this further — into poverty, work, management and everyday life — and ask why systems so often blame people for making decisions that the system itself made almost inevitable.