check-ups or a retirement savings plan if everything is going to pan out in the end? ‘“Smoking kills” messages don’t work because people think their chances of cancer are low,’ says Sharot. ‘The divorce rate is 50 per cent, but people don’t think it’s the same for them. There is a very fundamental bias in the brain.’ And that bias affects the way we tackle problems. When you slip on the rose-tinted spectacles, the easy quick fix suddenly looks a whole lot more plausible.
The human brain also has a natural fondness for familiar solutions. Instead of taking the time to understand a problem on its own merits, our habit is to reach for fixes that have worked on similar problems in the past, even when better options are staring us in the face. This bias, uncovered in study after study, is known as the Einstellung effect. It was useful back in the days when mankind faced a limited set of urgent and straightforward problems such as how to avoid being eaten by a lion; it is less helpful in a modern world of spiralling complexity. The Einstellung effect is one reason we often make the same mistakes over and over again in politics, relationships and careers.
Another is our aversion to change. Conservatives do not have a monopoly on wanting to keep things as they are. Even when confronted with compelling arguments for a fresh start, the human instinct is to stay put. That’s why we can read a self-help book, nod in agreement all the way through, and then fail to put any of the advice into practice. Psychologists call this inertia the ‘status-quo bias’. It explains why we always sit in the same place in a classroom when there is no seating plan or stick with the same bank, pension provider and utility company when rivals offer better deals. This resistance to change is woven into our vernacular. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ we say, or, ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ Along with the Einstellung effect, the status-quo bias makes it harder for us to break out of a quick-fix rut.
Combine that with our reluctance to admit mistakes and you end up with another obstacle to the Slow Fix: the so-called ‘legacy problem’. The more we invest in a solution – staff, technology, marketing, reputation – the less inclined we are to question it or search for something better. That means we would rather stand by a fix that is not working than start looking for one that does. Even the nimblest problem-solvers can fall into this trap. In the early 2000s a trio of software whizzes in Estonia wrote some code that made it easy to make telephone calls over the Internet. Result: the birth of one of the fastest-growing companies of the 21st century. A decade later the Skype headquarters in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, remains a shrine to start-up chic, with bare brick walls, bean bags and funky art. Everywhere you look, multinational hipsters are sipping mineral water or fiddling with iPads. On a landing near the room where I meet Andres Kütt, Skype’s young, goateed business evangelist, stands a whiteboard covered in squiggles from the last brainstorming session.
Even in this iconoclastic bear pit, the wrong fix can win stubborn defenders. At 36, Kütt is already a seasoned problem-solver. He helped pioneer Internet banking and spearheaded efforts to get Estonians to file their tax returns online. He worries that, by growing old enough and big enough to have vested interests, Skype has lost some of its problem-solving mojo. ‘Legacy is now a big problem for us, too,’ he says. ‘You make a massive investment to solve a problem and suddenly the problem is surrounded by a huge number of people and systems that want to justify their existence. You end up with a scenario where the original source of the problem is hidden and hard to reach.’ Rather than change tack, people in those circumstances usually plough on with the prevailing fix. ‘It is scary to step back and deal with the idea that your old solutions may not even work, and to contemplate investing time, money and energy in finding better ones,’ says Kütt. ‘It’s so much easier and safer to stay in your comfort zone.’
Clinging to a sinking ship may be irrational, but the truth is we are not as rational as we like to imagine. Study after study shows that we assume people with deeper voices (usually men) are cleverer and more trustworthy than those who speak in a higher register (usually women). We also tend to think good-looking folk are smarter and more competent than they really are. Or consider the Side Salad Illusion. In one study carried out at the Kellogg School of Management, people were asked to estimate the number of calories in unhealthy foods, such as bacon-and-cheese waffles. They then guessed the caloric content of those same foods when paired with a healthy side dish, such as a bowl of carrot and celery sticks. Time and again, people concluded that adding a virtuous accompaniment made the whole meal contain fewer calories, as if the healthy food could somehow make the unhealthy food less fattening. And this halo effect was three times more pronounced among avid dieters. The conclusion of Alexander Chernev, the lead researcher: ‘People often behave in a way that is illogical and ultimately counterproductive to their goals.’
You can say that again. Our gift for tunnel vision can seem limitless. When confronted by awkward facts that challenge our favoured view – proof that our quick fix is not working, for instance – we tend to write them off as a rogue result, or as evidence that ‘the exception proves the rule’. This is known as the confirmation bias. Sigmund Freud called it ‘denial’, and it goes hand in hand with the legacy problem and the status-quo bias. It can generate a powerful reality distortion field. When told by doctors they are going to die, many people block out the news entirely. Sometimes we cling to our beliefs even in the face of slam-dunk evidence to the contrary. Look at the cottage industry in Holocaust denial. Or how, in the late 1990s, Thabo Mbeki, then the president of South Africa, refused to accept the scientific consensus that AIDS was caused by the HIV virus, leading to the death of more than 330,000 people.
Even when we have no vested interest in distorting or filtering out information, we are still prone to tunnel vision. In an experiment repeated dozens of times on YouTube, test subjects are asked to count the number of passes made by one of two teams playing basketball together in a video. Because both sides have a ball, and the players are constantly weaving in and out around one another, this demands real concentration. Often, that sort of focus is useful, allowing us to block out the distractions that militate against deep thinking. But sometimes it can narrow the lens so we miss valuable bits of information and fail to see the forest for the trees. Halfway through the video a man dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into the middle of the basketball game, turns towards the camera, beats his chest, and walks out again. Guess how many people fail to spot the gorilla? More than half.
What all this underlines is an alarming truth: the human brain is chronically unreliable. The optimism, status-quo and confirmation biases; the lure of System 1; the Einstellung effect, denial and the legacy problem – sometimes it seems as if embracing the quick fix is our biological destiny. Yet neurological wiring is only part of the story. We have also built a roadrunner culture that steers us into Quick Fix Avenue.
These days, hurry is our answer to every problem. We walk fast, talk fast, read fast, eat fast, make love fast, think fast. This is the age of speed yoga and one-minute bedtime stories, of ‘just in time’ this and ‘on demand’ that. Surrounded by gadgets that perform minor miracles at the click of a mouse or the tap of a screen, we come to expect everything to happen at the speed of software. Even our most sacred rituals are under pressure to streamline, accelerate, get up to speed. Churches in the United States have experimented with drive-thru funerals. Recently the Vatican was forced to warn Catholics they could not gain absolution by confessing their sins through a smartphone app. Even our recreational drugs of choice nudge us into quick fix mode: alcohol, amphetamines and cocaine all shift the brain into System 1 gear.
The economy ramps up the pressure for quick fixes. Capitalism has rewarded speed since long before high-frequency trading. The faster investors turn a profit, the faster they can reinvest to make even more money. Any fix that keeps the cash flowing, or the share price buoyant, stands a good chance of carrying the day – because there is money to be made right now and someone else can clean up the mess later. That mindset has sharpened over the last two decades. Many companies spend more time fretting over what their stock prices are doing today than over what will make them stronger a year from now. With so many of us working on short-term contracts, and hopping from job to job, the pressure to make an instant impact or tackle problems
