The irrationality of rationality

I’ve been watching a lot of crime shows lately.?

Some of what I’ve watched recently have been true crime documentaries. There’s something both fascinating and horrendous about crime and how it intersects with human behavior.

One of the shows I watched was Homicide: Los Angeles, which I started watching about a month before we left my son in LA for school. He and my husband both questioned my sanity.

Some of the shows I’ve been drawn to have also been fictional crime procedural dramas. My favorite was The Closer (again, set in LA-- surprise, surprise). I think what I like most about all of these shows is how they touch on behavioral science.

I find behavioral science so interesting. Why do people act the way they do? Understanding that is a key aspect of being a UX professional.

Humans are irrational

The standard understanding of people that we are rational beings. It’s probably because we have the capacity to be rational.

However, humans act irrationally most of the time. Throw in some emotion and stressful circumstances and you can all but guarantee that a human will predictably act irrationally.

I understand that TV writers take a lot of license with their stories, and the facts don’t always match reality. But when they write characters that act irrationally -- that’s realistic. I can see that in my own TV viewing choices.

A rational person might avoid watching LA crime stories before taking their kid to college in Los Angeles. They might be able to reason that LA crime stories might make a person feel more anxious and worried.

I don’t think I made a reasoned judgment before watching LA crime shows. In fact, I likely acted emotionally and then rationalized my decision AFTER the fact. My reasoning for watching is that hearing from LA Sheriff’s detectives actually made me feel better about my kiddo being so far from home. I have reasoned that knowing the dangers was better than wondering about the dangers.

This isn’t a new concept. Sales professionals understand that people buy emotionally and justify their purchases rationally.

Weird how people think, right??

Humans and bounded rationality

This is where I want to tie in an interesting behavioral bias called bounded rationality. In bounded rationality, humans tend to make choices that satisfy particular criteria rather than optimize for it.

Here’s what I mean.

Let’s imagine you are shopping for a new smartphone. You have a budget of $500, but there are dozens of models with all kinds of features. Some focus on camera quality, others on battery life, processing power, or storage.?

You don’t have the time to research every spec or compare all the reviews, so you will probably limit your search to three brands that you recognize and choose a model that has decent reviews and fits within your budget.

While you didn’t explore every possible option or fully understand all the technical details, you made a "good enough" decision by narrowing down the choices based on familiar brands and your budget.?

I think I do this every time I hop on Amazon.

The exhaustion of choice

We make choices every day. Some of them are quite small, while others are much larger. If you think about how many decisions your brain has to make in a day, you might get quite tired. That’s because it is tiring! Our cognitive reasoning requires a lot of brainpower. And frankly it’s exhausting. That’s why our brains have these shortcuts -- like bounded rationality.

Ultimately, we have to decide what makes sense at the time and then decide if it’s good enough to live with.?

It doesn’t matter whether you are buying a product or figuring out how to build a feature that satisfies both the user as well as a myriad of business needs.?

This whole concept may shed a little more light onto why I’m watching so many crime shows. Maybe it’s just too damn exhausting to find the optimal show.

Or maybe the algorithm made me do it

MAYBE--- just maybe -- my decision to watch crime shows also has to do with what the Netflix algorithm has decided to put in front of me. Maybe I’m making the irrational decision to watch crime about LA because Netflix is giving me so much to choose from that I’m using bounded rationality to make a decision that’s “good enough.”

Something to think about….