Hi All,
Today we’re trying a new format called Bone Shards, named after the partial fragments often found at fossil dig sites. These posts bundle together two to four quick-hitting pieces that aren’t long enough to justify a full post, but are too substantial for a Note.
Please let us know if you have strong feelings, for or against, this kind of post. As always, thanks for reading and engaging.
The Limits of the Satiation Model—JZ
Rob likes to tell a story as part of his gripe about explanations:
Many years ago, I was having dinner with a collection of Very Smart People, the sort that get invited to scientific gatherings where academics try to impress one another and eat free meals.
It was at one of these free meals—I think it was a schnitzel place?— that I asked the gathered worthies if people eat faster when they are hungrier. I myself certainly do this, but I was loath to generalize from my very small sample size of little ol’ me.
The table agreed that this was, indeed, the case, and I wondered aloud why. The senior Very Smart Person, to whom everyone’s gaze had turned, squinted his eyes slightly and, after a dramatic pause, said, “drive reduction.” There were pious murmurs of agreement, and some considered nodding at this and the discussion passed on to the important matter of whether the conference organizers would object if we ordered another round of Weissbier for alles.
Rob tells this story to show that a word—or even a pair of words—can’t constitute an explanation. One must be more specific than that. A not-specific-enough explanation becomes, as Gerd Gigerenzer writes, “a Rorschach inkblot,” into which anyone can read what they wish.
I’ve moved in the direction of agreeing with Rob, but still maintain that “drive reduction” is a perfectly reasonable answer in that context. It seems clear enough what the senior Very Smart Person meant: as someone eats, thereby reducing the empty space in their stomach, the drive based on that empty space (hunger) also diminishes. Taking it a step further, it seems plausible that as hunger is experienced at lower intensity, one eats more slowly, since the problem has become less urgent. Similarly, the more intense an itch, the faster I would expect someone to bring their fingers to the spot.
This satiation model, in which motivation declines as a need is progressively satisfied, describes plenty of phenomena, from eating to taxi-driving behavior. Work in economics shows that taxi drivers having a great night with lots of fares tend to quit earlier than those having a bad night. Those having a good night “reach their fill,” so to speak, while those having a bad night stay out longer, still “hungry” for fares.
Then there are other phenomena that don’t fit the satiation model at all, and yet the model is commonly applied anyway. For example, what do we do with the fact that:
I experience less psychological resistance at the prospect of a second workout in a day than the first
Those who have had more sexual partners before marriage have a higher likelihood of cheating
Those with abundant power, money, and championships seem to want more of those things than those with less
I feel a stronger urge to write—and have more ideas to write about—than when Living Fossils launched nearly three years ago1
These don’t seem explicable by the satiation model, do they? Yet we often invoke that model when thinking about them. According to satiation logic, one might reason:
You’ve already hit your quota of workouts for the day; relax
You’ve sown your wild oats; time to settle down
You have more power/money/championships than you know what to do with. Why do you want more?
Surely, with sixty articles behind you, you’re running out of things to say…
I tried explaining the inadequacy of the satiation model in a prior note, arguing that a better explanation for these patterns is plain old positive feedback. You work out in the morning, feel great, and later think: let me hit that serotonin again. You publish an article, someone leaves a kind comment, and you’re even more motivated to write the next one.
But I don’t think I went far enough in that note because I didn’t explain why the satiation model is so tempting despite not being a great explanation. It’s tempting because it’s partly right.
More precisely, the satiation model describes short-term stop signals, but it fails as a theory of long-term motivation because motivation over time is expectation-based rather than consumption-based.2 If long-term desire were consumption-based, the richest people would be the least motivated, the most successful writers would run out of things to say, and Michael Jordan’s first retirement might have stuck.
Instead, when something happens with regularity, we begin to expect it. We quietly build it into our model of the future. And because satisfaction depends, at least in part, on how outcomes compare to expectations, yesterday’s pleasure quickly becomes today’s baseline. To feel pleased again, the outcome must exceed what we now take for granted—what we now expect.
Let’s return to taxi drivers. The satiation model does a good job explaining their behavior on a given night: those who hit their number quit, while those who haven’t keep driving. But a different set of mechanisms is needed to explain their behavior over time. A driver who reliably hits their number might stay out even longer on nights when they fall short—and, more importantly, may begin to raise the number itself. Indeed, where does that number come from, if not (at least in part) from prior experience?
The mechanisms needed to explain long-term desire include: positive feedback, habituation, tolerance, diminishing returns, prospect theory, and hedonic adaptation. Together, these explain why more—or better—becomes the price of feeling the same.
The satiation model helps explain why people stop in the moment, but not why motivation changes over time. It cannot explain why those with more often want more, or why those with less might come to want less. For that, we need the insight that satisfaction does not extinguish desire so much as inflate it: as people grow accustomed to being satisfied, the threshold for satisfaction rises. All else equal, Michael Jordan—a perennial champion—may have wanted his next championship more than Charles Barkley, who never won one.
Why do you get what you pay for?—JZ
The familiar saying “you get what you pay for” is usually taken to mean that higher prices buy better products, services, or experiences. Most people explain this in straightforward economic terms: quality costs money. Better materials cost more, better workers command higher wages, and so on.
All this is true, but it ignores a second way money dictates value: social expectation.
I stumbled on this second way just this morning, after yet another conversation with the longwinded, cantankerous, and supremely well-meaning Mrs. T., one of the staff at my daughter’s daycare. Now, I don’t have a bona fide complaint against Mrs. T.—not yet, anyway—but if I ever did, I’d be constrained in voicing it by the fact that my wife and I pay downmarket rates. A request that Mrs. T. clean up her act would fall into the same category as a request for organic baby food or for the place to smell less like diapers. Hey, guy—what do you think this is? The Ritz?
I’d be constrained, that is, by the very notion that one gets what one pays for. I can only be a tyrant if I’m paying tyrant prices.
Here’s another way to think about it. For some things, like organic fruit, the price more or less is what it is. There’s limited room for illusion. But something like worker quality is different. While there are real differences among workers—stemming from personality, training, or experience—the larger determinant of how people behave is often social norms, with price playing a central role.3 Put a low-end daycare worker into a high-end environment, and you’ll often see rapid improvement as she steps up to meet the prevailing expectations. This is where ordinary economics gives way to social economics.4
Don’t get me wrong: wages matter in attracting higher-quality workers. But they also do a great deal of work enforcing social norms. Were I to pay double for my daughter’s daycare, I wouldn’t only be paying for better-trained staff; I’d also be paying for the right to demand higher standards. Basically, I’d feel more comfortable suggesting to Mrs. T. that she should shut her beak once in a while.
Daycare is not the only setting where this applies, nor is price the only norm-setter. Another example comes from sports: research shows that strong teams do indeed play down to weaker opponents. The weaker team sets a standard of engagement that the stronger team cannot help but respond to.
Long story short, until Rob and I turn on paid subscriptions, I’ll have no choice but to suffer Mrs. T in silence.
The Wisdom of My Grandfather—RK
I have a complicated relationship with wisdom. It comes in three pieces.
First, my maternal grandfather – with whom my relationship was not especially complicated – used to say, “People grow too soon old and too late smart.”
I’m sad to say that I don’t recall many of my grandfather’s sayings, so the fact that that one stuck with me seems significant.
Second, there’s Shani. He has cornered the market on wisdom, and I have come to appreciate, well, his wisdom. He says wisdom is Important. He’s usually right.
Third, there’s this evolutionary piece. Lots of evolved creatures come with lots of True information equipped standard. You pop out of your chrysalis, and boom, you know how to fly.
If wisdom is important, and guides good decision making, then why do we wind up getting too soon old and too late wise? Why doesn’t wisdom come with our standard equipment? Why didn’t evolution craft human minds to be smart, or at least wise, from the get-go?
This idea is embodied in stereotypes of the Old Wise One, a staple of fiction, especially fantasy. It also accords with my experience. With the wisdom that comes from being in my mid fifties, the youngs often appear to act unwisely. As, no doubt, I did.
I don’t really have a good answer for this. My guess is that there are a few key pieces.
The first is that wisdom isn’t quite as wise as we think it is. That is, suppose you measure once instead of twice. Ok, yeah, much of the time it’s probably a good idea to measure twice so that you reduce the chance of error. But not always. There are occasions when time is so pressing, it’s actually better to measure once and hope for the best, even if that means cutting twice. So wise sayings aren’t universally applicable.
Second, and related, the value of some aspects of wisdom might change with age. It seems wise to recognize that “if you chase two rabbits, you catch none.” That is, focus of attention on one thing improves your chances of accomplishing your goal. But, I dunno. When you’re younger, you can focus on more than one goal at a time, often without much loss to the pursuit of either. My experience as I get older is that I have to concentrate on one thing to get anything done.
Third, to take a combination of one of my favorite things—it’s complicated—and one of Josh’s favorite things—mismatch—it could be that the modern world is too complex for ancient wisdom to work. So maybe a stitch in time saves nine, usually, but tradeoffs depend on a lot of factors. Maybe sometimes it’s not worth putting in the time to do repairs in the face of other exigencies.
In short, maybe—probably, I’d say—the nuggets of wisdom that turn out to be the most valuable vary from time to time and place to place. So evolution couldn’t just build in principles of wisdom because what principle works in a given situation varies too much from context to context. What is wise depends on the situation you’re in, and situations have varied tremendously over evolutionary time. Worse, the wise move might change during your lifetime as culture changes and you yourself change.
Are you in a situation in which you should look before you leap or should you strike while the iron is hot? It depends.
Maybe, as the Serenity Prayer intimates, wisdom is about learning how to tell the difference. Humans are pretty good at learning, so eventually, yeah, we learn to tell the difference. But only after we’ve put in the time. Something that comes with age.
Bone Shard Collections
Keep in mind that all of these phenomena may have many different explanations.
Ultimately, this is because evolutionary success is relative.
This is an instance of a more general principle called situationism, the idea that behavior is often better explained by situational constraints than by personality or personal history. In this case, social norms—anchored by price—are part of the situation. See my series, How to Understand Human Behavior, for more.
We might say, in ordinary economic terms, that fruit is a search good—its quality can be assessed before purchase through inspection or comparison—and worker quality is closer to a credence good, where quality is difficult to verify even after use (because of how much it is subject to social norms).
My Slovak doctor wife has a doctor friend who came to America and was working at a hospital in DC. A smoker who had tried & failed to quit.
In DC, she had to go outside to smoke, with the janitors, receptionists, an occasional nurse, but no doctors.
She was able to quit—situationism leading to a bit of credence improvement.
IQ remains the best single trait for predicting most life outcomes, and different situations are in opposition to scientific repeatability, and thus replication.