During a keynote speech given during the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology annual conference in 2009, the eminent psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, explained how coaches teach children to catch a ball. When you think about it, catching a ball is an incredibly complex calculation. You need to process a bunch of information — speed of the ball, trajectory, wind direction and speed, and so on — which you use to calculate where the ball will travel and where you need to put your hands. If you were to calculate all of those things mathematically, on paper, it would take a huge amount of time and require a lot of very specific types of mathematical expertise. On the face of it, it seems inconceivable that we are able to carry out such complex calculations on a routine basis. And yet, we catch balls, even as children. How?
Gigerenzer explains that the old dictum of coaches the world over: “Keep your eyes on the ball” is now verified by scientists as the most important rule to follow, dramatically increasing the probability of success (Postma et al. 2014). This rule is an example of what psychologists (including Gigerenzer) call “Heuristics,” simple rules of thumb that allow us to circumvent complex calculations in order to achieve a result that, while not perfect, gets us close enough. A large literature in behavioural science finds that we rely on these heuristics for a majority of our decisions (Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman, 2002). You wouldn’t want this process guiding a moon landing (where errors are extremely costly) but for daily day-to-day decisions, where landing in the general vicinity is good enough, heuristics works a treat.
But now imagine you are a goalkeeper about to attempt to save a penalty. You’ve never played football before, let alone been a goalkeeper, but that’s ok — you know all about catching balls. You have done it many times before. You remember the old rule of thumb, “keep your eye on the ball.” The striker runs up to the spot, kicks the ball and… you keep your eyes on the ball as it sails past you and hits the back of the net. The heuristic “keep your eye on the ball” doesn’t apply here – you didn’t have enough time to respond to the ball being struck.
The point of the above is to demonstrate how a change in the situation can render the rule you used with great success in other situations, effectively meaningless. Perhaps the situation calls for new rules, for new heuristics. However, when you are first faced with a unique situation, you tend to look for other situations that feel familiar and apply the decisions you made in them to the current unknown one. In other words, rather than engage with the new situation on its own terms, we first try to find simple short-cuts that allow us to deal with the situation in a “good enough” fashion.
So, why do we do this? We know the previous situation is different, and yet, we would still like to try some of the rules that we used to great effect. This is due to the use of “mental models”, simple representations of the world that we carry in our heads and use to make decisions easily (World Development Report, 2015, pg. 12). Standing as football goalkeeper trying to intercept a ball feels very similar to standing as a cricketing fielder trying to catch a ball. What did we do in that situation? Let’s do that and see what happens, maybe its “good enough”.
All of this takes us to the current coronavirus pandemic. How are we supposed to deal with it? It’s a type of flu? Well, we’ve had the flu before… We’ll treat it the same way. This is an example of how we borrow rules from other situations that feel familiar, and apply them to the unknown. And usually this works fine. For instance, we might find that our current heuristic doesn’t work that well, so we revise our strategy, maybe by looking at what others are doing, others that have more experience in this specific situation than us, and failing that, studying all the information available to define a viable strategy that works for us, for this situation.
The problem we have here is that the consequences are not low. This time around, getting things wrong can be catastrophic. This isn’t a penalty kick; it’s a moon landing. So how do we best navigate it given that our previous experience is not all that useful?
The answer lies in three aspects, two which people routinely talk about, and a third which is discussed tangentially, but never explicitly. The two that you have heard of before are information, and action. We need more information. Data about all sorts of things regarding the pandemic, and the responses to it. We need action, policies that can help mitigate the effect of the pandemic. But there has to be a sequence to the two. Action without information is highly problematic, because said action relies on behaviour from previous situations. As we’ve seen, these might work some of the time, but not all of the time. We need them to work all of the time.
The third aspect is effort. It seems strange to say it explicitly, but it requires a massive amount of effort to collect information, process the information, absorb the information. We need massive effort for formulating action, testing said action, and then revising said action. In a report on the Behavioural Science for Development, the researchers at the World Bank (including myself) argued for a policy-making process (World Development Report 2015, pg. 192), where every policy undertaking is evaluated and improved and revised as needed. This was 5 years ago now, but it has never been clearer that this has become incredibly necessary.
This means that now, perhaps more than ever, policymaking needs to be seen as a process rather than an action. What this means is that once you have collected, processed and absorbed data, you design and implement the policy, but then after this you evaluate the policy, adapt it. In this manner, policymaking goes from being an action (“We implemented a policy to address this issue”) to a process (“We implemented a first version of the policy addressing this issue, and are evaluating it now”).
You might have thought about this already. You might have even remarked to your friends, stories about silly policies that stick around just because no one thought to change them. In the UK, council tax is a good example. A pensioner in a small bungalow in Nottingham may end up paying more in council tax than the resident of a palatial mansion in Chelsea and Westminster. Surely this doesn’t make sense. But changing council tax is hard. It takes effort to implement and revise policies. Now, more than ever, we need information and action.
But even more than this, we need effort. The past is a weak guide. We need to (and can) do better.
Notes:
Postma, Dees BW, A. Rob den Otter, and Frank TJM Zaal. “Keeping your eyes continuously on the ball while running for catchable and uncatchable fly balls.” PloS one 9, no. 3 (2014).
Banner Photo by Kevin Mueller on Unsplash