I am the victim of a certain affliction. Most of you probably share it. I call it the zombie clicking trap. From time to time I find myself in front of a screen, not exactly sure why or how I ended up staring blankly at some random webpage. Periodically I will pause for moment and consider my situation…that moment is typically brief. Within a few seconds my eye catches on something and before I realize what has happened I am clicking again. Some minutes later I might pause again and note that the behavior has repeated itself.
At each pause there is some probability I will break the cycle, but these probabilities do not accrue linearly. A 20% chance of breaking the cycle does not imply that by the fifth cycle I am sure to stop. It feels more like a coin flip – each time the probability is the same and sometimes you come up heads ten times in a row.
Last night I nearly fell into the zombie trap. I was ready to go to sleep, all my electronics already shut down, when some vague hint of a thought about twitter popped into my head. Because my defenses were primed I was able to resist the impulse, and I decided instead to rewind my memory and analyse the preceding thought process. This is what I found…
The momentary association with twitter wouldn’t qualify as a legitimate thought. There wasn’t any real content to it. Nevertheless, it was immediately followed by a mental image of me picking up my phone and opening the twitter app. Again, this image didn’t contain any conscious intention. It was merely an automatic visualization of the next pre-programmed step.
I then decided to project my memories forward to see how this sequence might have played out. I envisioned myself staring at twitter wondering why/how I had ended up there, then setting the question aside and succumbing to some further automatic behavior like checking for new direct messages or mentions.
Why not just stop after the first befuddled pause?
While reviewing my thought process I realized the psychology is analogous to the loss aversion that compels us to follow stock market investments down rather than cut our losses.
The large majority of all human behavior is controlled unconsciously. The capacity of conscious awareness is quite limited. Because conscious awareness cannot keep tabs on everything the unconscious mind is doing, we remain relatively uninhibited when engaging small, trivial, habitual behaviors. We mindlessly proceed from one pre-programmed action to the next. If you find yourself in the bathroom with the shower running you won’t often pause to reconsider how you got there. Rather, you will habitually undress and jump in.
The same cognitive dynamics apply to more significant actions as well. This is why context change is so helpful when trying to reinforce a set intention. If you try to exercise at home in front of the television your willpower is likely to dissipate within a few minutes. By simply driving yourself to the gym you significantly enhance your chances of success. The change in context offers external cues that constantly reinforce the initial intention. Moreover, the act of transporting yourself to another location presents a sunk cost that you are compelled to justify. With each additional layer of intentional behavior the cognitive burden associated with a course reversal becomes more prohibitive.
Investments and Loss Aversion
If we reverse the intentional process described above, the result is loss aversion. Intentional decisions have a certain characteristic smell to them. Walking into the bathroom and turning on the shower feels intentional even when we do it automatically. When you were a child you probably hated showers. At some point along the way you intentionally trained yourself to shower habitually, and eventually you began to enjoy it. That aura of intentionality still lingers.
Investment decisions have that same characteristic smell, only much stronger. As a result, we implicitly accept that past investment decisions must have been made for a good reason even when the conscious mind can’t immediately conjure up what that reason might have been. If investment decisions are actually not intentional…when we invest impulsively…then we irrationally resist selling losers because there exists no evidence that could logically contradict the original decision.
In short, if you buy impulsively then you condemn yourself to sell irrationally as well. And if you are already locked into an irrational decision, how likely is it that you will impulsively decide to eat a loss?
Note the parallels to the zombie clicking trap. When I suddenly find myself staring blankly at twitter, my first question is – Why am I here? If I can’t answer that question then I am locked into an irrational state of mind. But of course, internally it doesn’t feel like an irrational state of mind…it just feels like I haven’t yet found what I came for. If I just look around for moment I’m sure I will remember what I was doing.
As such, it isn’t stubbornness that compels me to justify the sunk cost. Rather, it is cognitive incoherence – the brain’s effort to reconcile its default premise with an incompatible observation.
- Premise: My behaviors are motivated by sensible intentions.
- Observation: I am staring at twitter for no discernible reason.
It is far less cognitively burdensome to follow the script – to continue mindlessly clicking away, expecting at any moment to stumble upon the clue needed to contradict the observation – than it is to open the can of worms that follows from doubting the premise.
The Fix?
Senseless habitualized behaviors are more difficult to overcome than it might seem at first.
Stock market professionals advise that you should always develop an explicit investment thesis prior to acting on any investment decision. You need to understand your explicit reasons for buying so that you can rationally evaluate arguments for selling.
Unfortunately, exercising greater conscious awareness is only a limited solution. Opening that can of worms indiscriminately will lead only to a perpetual state of paralyzing doubt. Over-reliance on conscious evaluation is the definition of analysis paralysis.
The key then is to distinguish generative patterns from destructive ones, and to sequester individual behavioral patterns based on increasingly subtle contextual cues. Context used to be obvious. You would adopt one set of behaviors at the office, then swap in a different behavioral pattern at home. Balancing the two was a relatively trivial matter of balancing time between the two physical locations.
Now those boundaries are blurred and our computers and phones do everything. Yet context, however ambiguous, is no less important. Are you exploring or exploiting? Consuming or producing? Learning or performing? Are you acting socially or individualistically? Collaboratively or cooperatively?
Each distinction suggests certain shifts in the allocation of focused awareness. Accepting the wrong premises for a given context can result in confounding cognitive contradictions. And we have a long way yet to go. Expect zombie traps to be become far more prevalent before any semblance of predictable order returns to the world.
photo courtesy of Zebra Pares
