compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan – with confidence levels that ranged between 30 and 95 per cent – ‘What you started getting was probabilities that disguised uncertainty as opposed to actually providing you with more useful information.’24
In our desire to reduce everything to some sort of standardised measure, to create universal meanings for things that will always be subjective, and to create the illusion of certainty when uncertainty is in fact what prevails, do we not risk making decisions on the basis of what may seem intelligence-rich information, but is in truth pretty meaningless?
Not everything can be measured, not everything can be compared, especially in a world as complex as ours. Indeed, Obama, realising this, responded to the various probabilities he’d been presented with, ‘Look guys, this is a flip of the coin. I can’t base this decision on the notion that we have any greater certainty than that.’25 A flip of the coin which we now know that President Obama won and Osama bin Laden lost.
All That Counts
Another danger of putting the measurable on a pedestal is that what cannot be measured often ends up being discarded, or dismissed. But just because something can’t be quantified, it doesn’t mean that we should ignore what it is telling us.
A conversation with a senior director of a multi-billion-dollar international children’s charity brought this point home to me in a stark way. Huddled in a Cambridge University antechamber, encircled by six of her colleagues, Ms Broun explained that the key problem children now face in many middle-income countries was domestic violence.26 She and her colleagues knew this, because they had personally witnessed countless cases of children bearing marks of physical abuse alongside symptoms of mental strain. They’d heard their stories, seen their scars, and noted their teachers’ and community leaders’ corroborating stories.
Domestic violence, however, is hard to measure. What do you record? The number of bruises? How can you capture in numbers how terrified a child feels? As a result, Ms Broun had been unable to convince the organisation’s head office that domestic violence was something vital for them to target. Instead she was told to focus her efforts on addressing problems for which they could collect numbers, and thereby easily gauge progress on – problems such as under-attendance at school, or children without sufficient vaccinations.
These instructions were given to Ms Broun despite the fact that in middle-income nations, such measurable and easily trackable problems had to a great extent been resolved, whereas domestic violence was active and growing.
In many ways it’s hard to accept this story. It speaks of bureaucratic intransigence and rigidity, and it’s also symptomatic of the way in which the Cult of the Measurable can overshadow what really needs to be seen, and what really needs doing. In this case it is incredibly painful, because the happiness and welfare of children is at stake. If the over-importance of numbers can become embedded in this kind of situation, where in your business or personal life could the Cult of Comfortable Measurement be adversely affecting your decisions?27
By devaluing that which cannot be measured, we risk not only making poorer decisions, but also distorting our priorities and goals. As was once said, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’28
Glass Half Full
So we need to be careful about focusing excessively on numbers, or on things in bold typeface, or on the information that others deem most relevant for us, or that glitters most brightly. We also need to start paying more attention to people’s stories and testimonies, even if they cannot be quantified.
Beyond this, there’s another type of information we should watch out for that is prone to draw us in – information we want to hear, over information we don’t.
Neuroscientist Tali Sharot explored this theme by putting volunteers in a brain scanner and asking them what they believed the chances were of various unpleasant events occurring to them in their lifetime. She asked questions like how likely are you to get burgled? How likely are you to contract genital warts? How likely are you to develop Parkinson’s disease? That sort of thing.29
After each answer, she immediately told her volunteers what the real chances were of such an event happening. So, if someone thought they had a 10 per cent chance of developing cancer, she would reveal that the real probability was 30 per cent – or quite a lot worse.
What Sharot discovered was that when her subjects were given bad news, news that should have led them to be more concerned than they were previously, the part of their brains that should have fixed the mismatch between their prediction and the true chance of disaster showed only low-level activation.
However, when a subject was given information that was better than expected – for example, if someone thought they had a 50 per cent of being burgled, but was then told that their real chance of being burgled was only 30 per cent – the part of their brain that processed the information went wild. What’s more, when the volunteers were asked to go through the list of unpleasant events again, they actively changed their beliefs when the information they had been given improved their prospects. For example, if they found out that they were actually less likely to suffer from infertility than they had thought, they adjusted to the new risk percentages presented. But if the new information pointed to there being an even higher chance of something bad happening to them, they simply ignored it.
When it comes to things that affect us directly, it seems that many of us dismiss information that suggests that bad things will happen to us, and only pay attention to the good stuff. It doesn’t matter what we throw at them, unconscious processes in our brains are determined to show us a rosy glow.
There are obvious dangers to this when it comes to making decisions. If your unconscious belief is that you won’t get lung cancer from smoking, then you’re unlikely to choose to quit. For every warning from an anti-smoking campaigner, your brain will be giving a lot more weight to that story of the ninety-nine-year-old lady who smokes fifty cigarettes a day but is still going strong. You’re not doing this consciously, but it is happening.
Similarly, if you’re a trader buying and selling stocks and shares, or an investor looking to buy another property, you’ll be paying more attention to evidence of sustained growth and stories of rising prices than to the nay-sayers who predict a crash – a partial explanation for financial and housing bubbles.30
The inability to properly process news that suggests something bad may happen to us is clearly a dangerous trait for nearly all decision-makers – not just traders or smokers or property speculators. Dr Sharot’s research reveals that 80 per cent of us are very vulnerable to this mental lapse.31 Interestingly, however, there is one group of people who it turns out update their beliefs in a more balanced way: people with mild depression appear to be better at balancing the good and the bad when they receive information.
If you’re not depressed yourself, however, don’t despair. Being aware that you’re prone to this thinking error is a start – it means you can challenge your immediate reactions and reflect upon how your decisions would be affected if your optimism were overstated. You might also, now that you are cognisant of your ability to trip yourself up, want to take out insurance against the worst happening.
