Vintage items, especially if they are no longer in production and sought-after, can fetch substantial multiples of their original cost. For example, a period pen, for sale in the late 1960s for less than $1, recently sold on eBay for $349. But on 15th July, Sotheby’s auctioned a similar vintage pen (together with a nondescript plastic component), which changed hands for $857,600. Close to a million for an old pen and a piece of plastic… isn’t that odd?

The items in question had been on board a NASA mission, and space stuff does command a premium – perhaps $10,000 for a pen and up to $50,000 for some components. But this pairing that went for nearly fifteen times as much had been on the Apollo-11 mission, one in astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s pocket, the other as a circuit-breaker on the lunar lander’s control panel. That component, found to have broken off upon return from the first excursion on the moon, was vital to start the engine of the lander to return to the capsule in orbit, and Aldrin used his Duro felt-tip pen to provide an improvised fix. (Its felt tip was crucial as it would not risk shorting the electrics of the lunar lander.) That background explains the massive price premium… but how, and why, can information multiply value so spectacularly?

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Information, the immaterial cherry on the cake

This auction is a typical illustration of how certain items acquire a value that is vastly higher than its inherent material worth. Most commonly, an object’s age and rarity – typically the case for antiques – can be enough to drive up the price people are prepared to pay for objects that could be reproduced today for much less (and made to look exactly the same). Beyond mere scarcity, authenticity is also a potential source of value. We see it in, for example, mechanical devices, in particular classic motor vehicles. A car that is restored with original parts and still has the original paint will typically sell for more than one that has been modernized or altered in any way (even if the modification is a technical improvement – for example power steering or brakes, or more reliable electrics).

A different kind of authenticity applies where there is information about who owned or has been known to use an article. Psychologists George Newman and Paul Bloom researched the phenomenon of what they called contagion (the apparent transfer of some ‘essence’ of a person to an object), and established that the degree of physical contact a celebrity has had with an item influences how much collectors are willing to pay at an auction. (A sterilized item would fetch less, supposedly because the essence had been diluted.) We can see this played out for clothes, musical instruments, houses, cars and more. This could be seen as a more general variant of the value attributed to authenticated historic works of art, as stories of valuable works of art bought for pennies before being authenticated illustrate. Even when it’s not a celebrity but a dinosaur, authenticity bestows value: a museum-quality cast of T. Rex ‘Stan’ costs roughly $120,000, versus the $31.8 million paid for Stan’s actual fossilized bones – a factor 265.

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Connecting with history… or with a story

But also beyond buying and selling items, when we consider other ways to gauge perceived value, we see similar patterns. Imagine you’re visiting a place for the first time, and on a walk, the path forks into two. A sign describes the two options: both are largely equivalent, but one of them is actually an ancient path that can be traced back to the first century CE, when it linked two Roman settlements. Because of that connection, many people will prefer that route. Similarly, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon attracts many people preferring to experience a performance of one of the bard’s plays in his home town. In these cases, there are no plausible physical connections: the actual soil on which the Roman soldiers walked has long washed away by twenty centuries of rain and the trees lining the path were not even seeds back then, while the Stratford Theatre was built three centuries after Shakespeare’s death. Yet we still seem to treat these places as if the essence of the legionnaires can be felt on the path, and Shakespeare’s spirit is closer to the stage in Stratford than anywhere else.

Buzz Aldrin’s pen (and the accompanying broken switch) has something even more powerful, however, over and above authenticity, contagion and connection. It has a dramatic story, that touches everyone. The tale of two astronauts, this close to being irrevocably stranded on the moon forever, soon running out of food and drink, and eventually out of oxygen – and the simple pen that was their escape route, that very pen, is the pinnacle of uniqueness. More than a shirt worn by Lionel Messi, a signed photograph of Marilyn Monroe, or the Excalibur Roadster owned by Roy Orbison, objects that come with a vivid tale attached have profound universal appeal.

Imagination and trust

This extreme case, in which an object acquired a value more than 100,000-fold of its original inherent worth, shows that it is not just any ‘information’ that is the multiplier. It is information that activates our imagination. That activation is more intense when the object is more authentic (a genuine antique or fossil, a sympathetic car restoration), has had physical contact with a person we admire (an item of clothing or a musical instrument), has a clear role in history (the Roman path or the Shakespeare Theatre), and most of all when it was involved in a brush with disaster. That is what makes objects resonate with us, and for which we are willing to make a sacrifice – if not by offering an elevated price to buy it, then at least through making a special trip or standing in line to experience it.

But for our imagination to be rightfully triggered, another factor is essential: we need to believe the information is true. That means we must trust the source of the information, because there is almost never watertight proof that an object is what it is. We can only hope that the new owner of Buzz Aldrin’s pen will continue to loan it to the Smithsonian Museum, and that it will not need to be replaced by a copy.

Only when we are certain we are beholding the genuine article do we truly experience that resonance.

Imagine you need to relocate for work, more than 100 miles away, and you need to find a new home. You’ve managed to arrange nine viewings on one Saturday, confident that this is the best way to find the ideal home from a bunch that, on paper, ticks all the boxes. You set off early and arrive in good time at the first property. It looks good from the outside, but once inside, you’re less than enamoured by the open-plan kitchen. No worries, there’s eight more to view. House number three is not bad, but it lacks the en-suite bathroom of the previous one. By the time you get to the last one, you’ve got a clear view of the various flaws of each of the nine options, and you’re in no mind to commit to any of them (and you’re seriously considering turning down the new job). Being unable to pick a home from a set of no less than nine plausible candidates, isn’t that odd?

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Rejection breeds rejection

This evokes a phenomenon known as the paradox of choice, popularized by Barry Schwartz in his eponymous 2004 book. However, subsequent research challenged in particular the assumption that the tendency to suffer from choice overload is universal, and a review by Alexander Chernev and colleagues identified the conditions in which it is more likely to occur. Now, new research by Tila Pronk and Jaap Denissen, investigating the paradox that despite the abundant access to more candidate romantic partners than ever before via online dating platforms, people are more likely to be single – shows that it is not necessarily the size of the choice set that leads to a decrease in actual choices made.

Using a customized app, modelled after the popular Tinder dating platform, the researchers discovered that participants became increasingly likely to reject offered candidates: the first candidate had the highest chance of being accepted, and this likelihood dropped until it stabilized after about 12 candidates. Intriguingly, the main driver was not the total number of candidates, but the number of candidates already rejected. This appears to fuel pessimism regarding finding a suitable candidate, and suggests that the phenomenon observed here is less the result of exhaustion, and more a consequence of a build-up of negative emotion – rejection leads to more rejection.

But why are we so quick to reject a choice in the first place? We have a tendency to place options in categories – likely a cognitive adaptation. Categories of “nutritious” or “toxic” plants or fruits will have been helpful to our ancestors. Fast, confident and accurate decisions will have boosted survival rates. Even now, if we are only given two categories in which to place possible choices, we will implicitly treat them as (“good” and “bad”) and sort the options accordingly, typically, with a slight bias towards categorizing uncertain ones as “bad”, since mistaking a bad option for a good one is usually worse than the other way round.

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A positive feedback loop for a negative outcome

However, our problem lies deeper. Categorizing options into good and bad interacts with another strong tendency: the urge to optimize. When organisms evolved the ability not only to sort vital survival resources like food or shelter into good and bad, but also to distinguish degrees of goodness (and badness), they acquired the technical capability to optimize. Once you can compare the goodness of several alternatives, finding the optimum is just a matter of effort. But effort is costly, and to our ancestors, the benefit of doing any more than opportunistically pick the better option within reach never outweighed the physical and cognitive cost.

With our vastly larger cognitive capabilities and our societies in which the choice – whether in toothpaste, streaming media, homes or indeed potential romantic partners – is huge, the ancestral cost barriers have vanished. When our grandparents grew up, choice was, by our standards, severely restricted – at best just two types of bread, and weekday and Sunday clothes. (Even the mass-produced Ford T was available in any colour, as long as it was black!) For our forebears, from way back until very recently, options were scarce and they were mostly satisficers – a term coined by economics Nobel laureate and polymath Herbert Simon. They were satisfied with what suffices, content with what is ‘good enough’. This is much harder to do when we face an abundance of options, and become convinced that the best one is somewhere in that vast collection, so we can, and must, find it.

Here lies the root of the escalating rejection bias: we start out mildly reluctant to accept, since a large pool makes it easy to start off believing something better is still out there, and since turning down a good option is usually less costly than accepting a bad one. Pronk and Denissen show how this mild reluctance compounds with the number of options already rejected. Each thumbs-down makes the next one more likely, until the rate settles at a steady high. Platforms like Tinder even benefit from users’ over-rejecting: they stay single (and hence remain an active, revenue-generating user on the platform) for longer. The same mechanism can affect us even if nobody is trying to exploit it and when the stakes are not so high. Choosing a film for the evening can trigger exactly the same rejection creep as choosing a potential life partner, leaving us with nothing to watch.

The satisficer’s escape

Most biases are reinforced over thousands of generations, almost impossible to shift. But here, our tendency to optimize is so recent it has not yet had the time to become as ingrained as our inclination to satisfice, which has been the norm since before human history began. A recent override sitting on top of much older wiring means the older tendency is still there to be reactivated, given a little help, for example by restricting the number of options we will consider. (We still use it, anyway: if we have just the one possibility, our yay/nay decision inevitably boils down to determining whether it is good enough.) Splitting up a large number of candidates into smaller groups can reduce the pressure to reject, and allows us to identify the best of the bunch before we tackle the next group.

But perhaps the most useful approach is to appreciate the rewards satisficing offers. It saves time, but more importantly, it makes our life more pleasant. What is more enjoyable: trying to work out the very best dish on the menu, then feeling, once you’ve finally chosen, the nagging worry that you should have gone for something else -- or picking any dish that sounds good enough and moving on? Agonizing over what is the most entertaining movie to watch until it’s getting so late that you’re forced to pick something at random, or going with whatever in the Netflix suggestions seems interesting enough? Scrutinizing every potential new home for everything that doesn’t fully meet your preferences, or instead simply answering the question whether you think you would be happy living there?

Choosing from a set of options that are all good enough might still require some consideration. But the knowledge that, whichever one you eventually pick, it will be good enough will relieve the burden of choice and may, who knows, one day save you from having to turn down a wonderful new job in another town, just because you couldn’t decide on where to live.633 Spoiled for choice, spoiled by choice?

The “last-16” stage in the 2026 football World Championship was dominated by the suspension of the US national team’s top striker, Folarin Balogun, for the crucial game against Belgium. He had received a controversial red card in the US’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and according to the rules this means a one-game suspension. However, after contact between US president Donald Trump and FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, FIFA lifted the suspension, citing an obscure Article 27 of their disciplinary code. In the event, Belgium won the game anyway, and the issue has become literally inconsequential.

Respecting the rules we circumvent

However, the episode is a great illustration of the contradictions that rules can introduce. They are created to depoliticize disputes: principles formulated in serene circumstances that dispassionately determine the outcome from the facts, rather than a confrontation in which whoever can deploy the most force dictates it. But sometimes – as in this case – we are devoted followers of rules only until the moment they stop serving us, yet even then, rather than simply defying them, we prefer the elaborate fiction of a technicality that “proves” we never really broke them at all. Isn’t that odd?

Rules are a cultural adaptation: settling disputes by a show of strength (if not an actual combat) is resource-intensive, and ultimately less likely to produce outcomes that are beneficial to the whole tribe. Agreed principles are both more efficient and more effective at solving dilemmas… at least from the point of view of the entire group. But since we are dispositionally self-serving, it is not all that odd that we instinctively celebrate rules that are advantageous to us, and take issue with them when they’re not. What is perhaps more intriguing is that we often comply, even when it would serve us better not to. The thought of running a red light in the middle of the night, with no other soul around, will have crossed our minds – yet even then, we tend to wait until it turns green. We are not complete hypocrites, who only comply with rules when it suits us.

But when the stakes are high enough, we look for ways to prevail, ranging from outright defiance when we can get away with it, to the excavation of an obscure technicality that turns non-compliance into apparent compliance. In between, there are tactics like pleading special circumstances, arguing that the spirit of the rules rather than the letter should win out, or exploiting one’s position of power to influence those who must enforce the rules (some would see Mr Trump’s contacting the FIFA boss as an instance of this).

What all these tactics have in common is that they steer well clear of openly violating the rules. This reluctance is the individual side of the adaptation. Once a group embraces a set of rules, a good compliance record has valuable reputational benefit. But better still for our reputation and self-image than arguing the rules don’t apply or pleading unique circumstances, is being able to demonstrate that the rules actually support our case – even if it is only the fig leaf of a technicality. The more arcane the rules, the more likely there will be obscure clauses that can be dug up and interpreted so we can show we comply with the letter of the rule. But such technical compliance while violating the spirit of the rule is fooling nobody. The fact that it is nonetheless deployed tells us how important we believe apparent compliance really is.

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This particular case, however, takes re-enlisting the rules to justify going against the spirit of them to the extreme. FIFA is both rule-maker and rule-adjudicator, and its own Article 27 offers it formalized unconditional discretion. Because it does not provide any conditions or criteria for when it applies, it essentially says “we can do what we want (and we can get away with it because we literally follow the rules)”. It is the least convincing fig leaf imaginable, yet it is still invoked. FIFA can pretend, with the straightest of faces, that due process was followed, even though everyone knows it is no more than a sleight-of-hand.

Safeguarding a precarious equilibrium

Rules are essential for enabling cooperation: without rules agreed by all in a society, there would be unending conflict. But they are also a powerful instrument for managing and enhancing an individual characteristic that is essential in cooperative groups: a reputation for adhering to the rules of the group is a valuable asset when we rely on cooperation. Remarkably, this secondary role rules play is a defence against their fundamental flaw: the fact that they cannot possibly take into account every conceivable situation. The robust pushback by those who feel disadvantaged, combined with the fact that such challenges respect the framework they contest, preserves and strengthens the legitimacy of rules in a society.

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But it is a precarious equilibrium that relies on the belief in the value of a rule-adhering reputation. Abuse of power and of loopholes can erode the respect rules command, and disturb a society’s ability to navigate a path between rigidity and arbitrariness. We are all custodians of the rules that govern us, and it is up to us to scrutinize those who test the rules – including ourselves. We could conclude that, because Belgium won the game, the lifting of Balogun’s suspension no longer matters. But the Belgian Football Association’s demand for an explanation of FIFA’s invocation of Article 27 shows how we can, and should, preserve trust in the process, and not just be concerned with outcomes.

By using the leeway that they offer us wisely, we can help ensure rules continue to serve our societies best, even if sometimes they don’t serve us individually as well as we would like.

Value is in the eye of the beholder, while cost is in the beholder’s wallet. The latter is precise and exact, but it is the former, despite being fuzzy and inconsistent, that governs how we think about what we spend our money on. The price we pay for something is almost never a direct reflection of its value to us – as long as it exceeds the price, we are getting a bargain. But is that really true? Sometimes the price demanded tests the boundaries of how we value things: surge pricing for rides or energy, gouging when there is sudden scarcity (remember hand disinfectant during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic?), eye-watering mark-ups for drinks in posh establishments, or fast-track tickets in theme parks. Many people loathe these practices, despite the fact that they are a closer reflection of the value of each of these things. That is what we seem to care about, while accountants don’t – yet when prices actually do reflect better what we value, we complain about the cost. Isn’t that odd?

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When it’s the buyers who compete

In a competitive market with unconstrained supply, sellers tend to compete on price. The logic is simple enough: as long as there is a profit on each product or service delivered, selling more means more profit overall, and the surest route is keeping the price as low as possible. This means many buyers get great bargains: the market price is often well below the perceived value of their purchases. But when the supply of a product or service is scarce, rising prices throttle demand from buyers for whom its value is below the new price. Instead of sellers competing for buyers, the tables are turned. Others can then still buy, but at a price that is now much closer to their valuation. When the movies finish or when the bars close downtown, those willing to pay Uber’s surge prices will get a ride straight away, while the others must wait until later; after a hurricane, those who need tarpaulin to cover a damaged roof will be prepared to pay more to meet their need, while those who only need it to cover stuff in a trailer will wait.

A similar situation might arise in busy theme parks in high season: price differentiation through fast-track tickets allows visitors who value the time otherwise spent waiting in line to pay extra to jump the queue. Differentiated prices can also occur when there is no actual scarcity, often when there is a captive audience. Cinema popcorn is usually a good deal dearer than the shop-bought variant, and a bottle of wine in a posh restaurant may be four times the supermarket price. Scarcity can also be artificially created, too: ticket touts (known as scalpers in the US) who buy up large numbers of tickets for events. These are then offered on the secondary market at prices much closer to the value buyers see in them, but in contrast with the other situations, here our suspicions of manipulation are entirely justified.

In all these situations, as the price of goods and services is higher than what we consider as ‘normal’, it inevitably gets closer to the actual value the purchasers. But value does not seem to be our focus. We pay much more attention to how much more it costs us than the normal price we use as our reference – without scarcity, without special, restricted circumstances, and without manipulation. We assume that it is based on a fixed and settled underlying cost, with a reasonable profit margin (sometimes referred to as ‘cost-plus’). When we are asked to pay more, we then feel somehow held to ransom by someone seeking more profit. But are we really – like the accountant – ultimately only interested in the cost? Let’s consider such an accountant, who works for, say, the garage where we have our car regularly maintained, and where recently the free coffee and tea in the reception area disappeared, as did the complimentary windscreen wipers that were part of every service. True to the jibe, the accountant had worked out that this free stuff is costing too much money. Here, at last, our misgivings are genuinely about a loss of value.

The bargain, not the value

Yet this doesn’t rescue the implication that we, unlike accountants, have nobler concerns than grubby cost. What fundamentally seems to matter to us is not so much minimizing the cost, but maximizing the size of the bargain we get – the difference between the price we pay, and the value we receive. When the price for a good or service increases from the normal price, that difference shrinks, and so does our benefit, and we don’t like it. So, we do end up guilty of what we accuse the accountant of: reducing everything to a number, only from the buyer’s side of the transaction.

Still, we could choose to have a bit more of an eye for value, and recognize that higher prices can correspond with extra value: surge pricing gives us access to an Uber when there are few around if we want one badly, and it ensures that we can get as much power from the grid when we need it rather than suffer a blackout. When demand outstrips supply, what may look like price gouging helps allocate scarce resources to those people who value them the most. VIP tickets at a theme park also offer additional value: less time wasted queueing, and anyone can determine whether that is worth the extra cost. And even ‘overpriced’ cinema popcorn or wine at a top restaurant might represent value. The products are identical to what we’d pay less for elsewhere, but the convenience of not having to bring our own popcorn, or the experience of enjoying the wine bundled with a superb meal in lovely surroundings, may well justify the markup.

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Scalpers’ inflated prices, although they are closer to the buyer value, do nothing to justify the price hike – they are purely extractive. In other cases, we need to remember that value is not an inherent property we can discover: it is a matter of judgment. We, the beholders, must establish what it is. It is indeed in our eye… but we need to be prepared to look.

Vera is an exceptional waitress. Her skill in carrying multiple dishes from the kitchen to the tables, and piling empty plates, bowls and glasses like a circus acrobat on one arm in the other direction is only matched by her personable interaction with the guests. From spotting that someone needs something and a little joke to a toddler in one of the high chairs to knowledgeable recommendations for the dishes and the wines, she is the restaurant’s best asset. Her secret? Intrinsic motivation – the inner drive that encourages us to do the best at a task we possibly can. She loves her job, and enjoys every bit of it – including making sure the tables are spotless after the guests have left.

Many of them leave a generous tip. That adds up to a tidy bonus every evening, but it was never her reason for going the extra mile. Then, the restaurant owner retired, and his son took over as a manager. He had new ideas for team-based rewards: the tips would be pooled together, and divided equally among the waiting staff. That had been an unpleasant shock to her: it meant a significant cut in her take-home pay, and before long, she found herself looking for a job elsewhere. The intrinsic motivation was apparently not so intrinsic after all. Isn’t that odd?

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Motivations, ignoble and noble

We seem to assume there are two kinds of motivations: extrinsic motivation, which encourages effort through material incentives, and intrinsic motivation, a nobler variant, independent of external rewards. They are antithetical, we also believe: mixing the two – known as crowding out – corrupts and destroys the noble version. But the example above challenges these assumptions, and it is not an isolated illustration. In a recent Hidden Brain podcast episode, psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis relates how celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, after dropping out of school aged 16, started working in a kitchen and discovered a profound love of cooking. He trained with some of the greatest chefs, and within ten years he had opened his own restaurant and earned a Michelin star. Aged 33, he was the youngest chef to earn three of them. However, shortly after, he quit and gave his stars back, which had symbolized his progress – propelled by his intrinsic motivation to become an ever-better chef. But once he had reached the 3-star ceiling, something changed. Instead of innovating and taking risks, now the only thing that mattered was not making any mistakes that might make him lose a star.

Perhaps the purest form of intrinsic motivation is volunteering. Consider Joe, working for a company where the hours are arranged such that the week ends at noon on Friday. Instead of putting his feet up, watching TV or tinkering in the garden, he volunteered at a daycare centre for preschoolers as a general dogsbody: helping set up the rooms, supporting the animators and clearing up after the children had gone home. Four hours every week, in return for nothing but a warm glow – the noblest, purest motivation. Over the years, occasional little performances to mark the end of the week had become a weekly show with the kids performing a funny sketch or a song to thank the volunteers. Their spontaneity was touching, and with the applause of the many parents who attended just before picking up their offspring, the ritual was often the highlight of his week. Then, Joe got a new job and his Friday afternoons were no longer his. He continued to volunteer on Saturdays now, but that was doing administration, and repairing or restoring toys that had been donated – he never saw the children, and never saw their show. Soon, he started skipping more and more Saturdays, and began looking for another opportunity that would give him back the interaction and recognition he so enjoyed.

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All three examples cast doubt over the purity of the protagonists’ motivation: the external environment clearly influences their behaviour. Yet, in none of the cases did it provide the initial motivation. For Vera the waitress and Joe the volunteer, it did not even provide ongoing motivation – the intrinsic motivation of doing a good job because that is the right thing to do was working exactly as expected. More tips or longer children’s performances would, one suspects, not have affected the behaviour of either. It was the removal of something that, without directly affecting it, had become closely associated with the activity that led to their response. True extrinsic motivation is characterized by a monotonic relationship between reward and response; here, instead, we have a kink from the status quo reference point, much like in Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Prospect Theory. The ‘reward’ is not the engine, it is the pleasant scenery in which the engine of the intrinsic motivation propels us. Take that away, and we take our intrinsic engine elsewhere.

Extrinsic signals for intrinsic motivation

There is a second, perhaps even more important aspect to this: both Vera’s tips and the children’s (and their parents’) appreciation for Joe as a volunteer play a distinct role beyond providing the scenery. Intrinsic motivation means we cast aside our narrow self-interest, and lose the corresponding extrinsic incentives that guide us. But how do we recognize that our effort lands? For that we need, literally, recognition. We need an external signal that confirms our actions are appreciated. And we are wired for seeking, and reacting to, such feedback. When we feel thirsty and subsequently drink a glass of water, we feel a sense of pleasure and satisfaction that signals this is what we should do when dehydrated (rather than, say, comb our hair or take a deep breath). By the same logic, praise, a thank you, a tip, a reciprocating gesture, a social media like, a good review… and indeed the number of paying customers are pleasurable signals telling us, “Well done! Do again!”. Intrinsic motivation is an expression of caring, and it is precisely this caring – directly for others and their enjoyment or wellbeing, but also about doing something as well as we can, even if there is no immediate beneficiary – that makes us yearn for these indicators, like Marco Pierre White’s Michelin stars. But they ceased providing the validation he sought when the 3-star pinnacle was reached. And just like Vera and Joe, with the vital signal gone, he too lost his motivation.

Intrinsic motivation might appear to violate Adam Smith’s famous observation that it is not others’ benevolence but “their regard to their own interest” that meets our needs. This is often cynically interpreted as “We’re only in it for the money”. But if we look closer, we realize that self-interest is an essential component for making intrinsically inspired acts work: it is the channel through which we know they succeed.

Much of our behaviour is not narrowly self-interested. But to see the intrinsic motivation that drives it as nobler and morally superior to grubby extrinsic motivation is mistaken. The belief that extrinsic, material signals must inevitably devalue the purity of intrinsic motivation is illogical and contrary to human nature. The pleasure that people derive from tips, grateful performances, Michelin stars and all the other material signals is nothing to be frowned upon. It should be enjoyed, because not only is it the information that sustains the intrinsically motivated behaviour, it is also the energy fuelling the warm glow that tells us we are doing something Right (with capital R).

In a certain region on our planet, there is a single cause of death that kills tens of thousands of people every year. We might expect that to draw the attention of policymakers and the general public, but no. Attempts to address it tend to come to nothing. In a different region on our planet, there is a different cause of death, that also kills tens of thousands of people every year. And likewise, policymakers and public opinion seem uninterested. Yet the people in the first region are outraged about the situation in the second one, and vice versa. Isn’t that odd?

Let me clarify (if you have not already guessed it): the first region is the US, and the cause of death in question is gun violence; region two is Europe (somewhat vaguely defined), and the cause of death is hot weather. Recently, a chart circulated on social media, illustrating this intriguing discrepancy by comparing both causes of death in both regions. Despite some methodological differences (e.g., how ‘heat deaths’ are defined), the figures make directional sense: many more people die as a result of firearms in one region, and many more die from heat-related causes in the other. What might be behind the difference in attitude towards what, ultimately, are just deaths?

Worry or indignation?

An obvious difference is that one kind of death has a perpetrator (someone has fired a gun), while the other is the consequence of, well, natural causes (weather, even if you argue that the climate is changing as a result of human intervention, the link is much weaker than that with firearms). Being able to blame a specific person for a death makes it easier to see it as both more serious and preventable, while the weather is a diffuse phenomenon, with nobody to pinpoint as the culprit. However, that doesn’t help us understand the difference in perception or indignation between the regions. A related angle is what, in behavioural terms, is described as commission versus omission. A gun death is commission (someone actively pulled a trigger); a heat death is omission (the weather just happened, and nothing was done to prevent the death). Omission bias was coined first by Ilana Ritov and Jonathan Baron in 1990. It describes the tendency to favour inaction over action, and judge harm resulting from commission as more negatively than harm following from omission, which might explain why we see firearm deaths as worse. But look closer, and that asymmetry collapses: nothing is done to stem gun deaths – it is a policy matter. If both are policy omissions, the bias that supposedly distinguishes them applies equally to both — so it cannot be what explains why we react so differently.

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Could it all be driven by tribal ingroup/outgroup rivalry? In order to assert our own tribe’s superiority, castigating the others as somehow inferior is a good way to rally our people and bolster their confidence. Regardless what the Americans themselves feel about gun deaths, Europeans can look down on them. Similarly, Americans can condemn the Europeans for their lack of ubiquitous air conditioning and lack of care for the vulnerable. This perspective would seem to be on the right track, but what it misses is that indifference precedes rivalry: we don’t become blind to local problems because we are busy criticizing others, we failed to see them properly in the first place.

Anchored to the cradle

The hypothesis that addresses the phenomenon fully builds on the tribal perspective, but ties it to our cultural habitus. As we grow up, we tend to absorb the immediate surroundings of our cradle as if they were the entire world — not only as it is, but as it should be. That stretches from home rules (“finish your greens or no pudding!”) and school rules (when the bell goes, you form a two-by-two row) to societal rules (renting a home is what you do in anticipation of buying one). Even before we consciously adopt a sense of right and wrong, we associate what is familiar with what is right. To me, born and bred in Belgium, the identity card was not remotely controversial: you showed it to a police officer if they asked for it, or you used it at the municipal swimming pool to get the local resident discount. I remember being quite proud to get one before the mandatory age of 12, as I was spending Christmas with a friend who had relocated to Germany – and quite baffled when I later discovered how controversial the idea was in other countries, including just across the border: the Netherlands harbours a deep-rooted aversion to identity papers, which kept ID taboo until as recently as 2005.

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Americans are born in a culture where firearms are nothing out of the ordinary, and generally think nothing much of seeing someone walking by carrying a gun. In the UK, even the vast majority of police officers do not carry a gun. Until 2017, the number of gun violence victims in the US, while unsurprisingly higher than in Europe, was lower than the number of deaths from road traffic accidents. In the US, air conditioning in cars and buildings has been widespread for decades, but in Europe it was exceedingly rare until the end of the 20th century. While now common in cars, it is still far from the rule in residential dwellings and many places of work. Some European countries like France and Switzerland even heavily regulate the use of air conditioning. Both “carrying guns is fine” and “we don’t need no air conditioning” firmly fall in the “this is the kind of thing we do/we don’t do round here” category of cultural norms and traditions. Like David Foster Wallace’s goldfish joke (“Morning, boys! How’s the water?” “What the hell is water?”) we tend to stop seeing what is common, normal and part of life in our society, and zoom in on what, to our eyes, is uncommon and out of the ordinary in another society. If it causes harm, it will produce outrage among those outside the community, but within it, it is treated as a standard cost of doing business.

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[The birthplace of the world as we see it (image: Marie/Flickr CC BY NC ND 2.0)]

That we treat the environment in which we grow up as representative of the world is hardly surprising. Even today, many of us at most sporadically venture into foreign lands, so it mostly makes good sense to generalize from what we know – and what we know is local. We tend to embrace all the familiar patterns we perceive and experience from an early age, whether they are beneficial or detrimental. But when we are confronted with patterns from another habitus that appear alien to our own milieu, we question and perhaps challenge them, especially if they look like inexplicable deliberate choices.

Our intuition drives both an indifference around the consequences of our environment (they’re natural and inevitable) and a defensiveness of our traditions and customs, and disapproval of different patterns elsewhere, especially if they go against what we are used to. Yet, cultural idiosyncrasies could, on the one hand, be a cue to explore rather than to dismiss, and to cultivate understanding and tolerance of different societal choices, and on the other, inspire us to adopt perspectives and approaches that might improve or complement our habitus.

But for that to happen, we need to realize that the things that strike us as odd in other societies are precisely the things that are invisible to their members, and that the reason we see other people’s blind spots so well is that we have our own. The oddness is not theirs – it’s ours… and everyone’s.

People respond to incentives, wrote economist Steven Landsburg – the rest is commentary. I have cited this numerous times, as his observation explains a lot about the world around us. Incentives – often monetary in nature, so we can convert them to whatever we value – inspire many of the choices and trade-offs we make. The prospect of a reward can encourage us to do something we otherwise wouldn’t do (for example, turn up at work every day for a salary, donate blood for a hat or a T-shirt), or can motivate us to make additional effort or take additional risk (work towards a performance bonus, own stock options). The exact link between motivation and incentive may be hard to trace, but in most cases, adding or strengthening incentives tends to increase motivation to act, while removing or capping them tends to reduce motivation.

Billionaires are also people, and Landsburg did not make an exception for them. Are they just as much motivated by incentives as ordinary mortals? Not everyone would seem to agree. Campaign groups, politicians and indeed large swathes of the population believe their considerable wealth is excessive and should be capped. Calls to tax away the glut, if anything, seem to have become more frequent – think of the annual Global Inequality reports or calls for a wealth tax. Few people would deny the power of incentives to influence their own behaviour. Yet those objecting to billionaires’ wealth seem to believe that cutting or capping their incentives will not have any adverse effect – and hence not alter the billionaires’ behaviour at all. There is no evidence that rewards stop affecting behaviour above a certain threshold, yet the assumption persists. Isn’t that odd?

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Motivated by a dream

One possible argument is that – because the chance of becoming the next Jeff Bezos, Taylor Swift or Cristiano Ronaldo is vanishingly small – budding billionaires’ initial motivation really does not depend on this unlikely outcome. For every Bezos or Swift, there are thousands who fall well short of a ten-figure net worth, yet still end up comfortably off, and many thousands more who never get off the ground. Despite the infinitesimal odds, they are all motivated, so surely, a more modest reward should be adequate?

However, this is not where aspiring entrepreneurs, artists or athletes start. They are motivated by a dream: reaching the top rungs of a ladder that disappears into the clouds – no ceiling. Capping the corresponding incentive would mean curtailing that dream, and a tightly restricted incentive tends to produce tightly bounded ambition — not the kind of attitude that is most likely to build Amazon. Moreover, a cap’s influence would stretch well beyond the rich individuals: the uncapped outcome that motivated Bezos and Swift is inspiring a thousand more people to work on the next Amazon, or to aspire to be the next enterprising, spunky pop star.

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A second argument is the compensation-for-effort perspective: if they have already been handsomely rewarded, would they continue to need more still? The implication is that Bezos and Swift would have delivered the same outcomes, even if their net worth had been capped at a fraction of their current wealth. But that counterfactual makes no sense: the destination affects the journey. Bezos and Swift can, and do, still make decisions that add value to the world: serving their customers and fans always better. Regardless of their wealth today, they put in extra effort and take new risks when launching new services or turning to a new musical direction. And just like ordinary mortals would resist going the extra mile if every marginal dollar they might earn as a bonus was confiscated, so, mutatis mutandis, would Bezos and Swift. Such a cap does not just limit their input, it redirects it: the energy they would have devoted to the next venture or new songs would go somewhere less productive, and the world would lose out.

Perhaps the deepest-rooted misunderstanding is the consumption perspective: “who needs billions – so much more than anyone can possibly spend?”. Naturally, billionaires will spend more than ordinary mortals – some of it even on frivolous, self-aggrandizing status purchases like private islands or superyachts. But while ordinary mortals might see a bonus primarily as extra spending money, maybe for a new car or a holiday, billionaires tend to perceive it differently. Typically, those who mostly made (rather than inherited) their fortune did so by providing value to the world, reflected in the financial reward the world has given to them. They tend to relate to their accumulated wealth much like a founder (which many billionaires are anyway) relates to the company they started: a vehicle for agency. Much of their wealth will never be ‘spent’ in the way you and I might do, but instead used to fund visionary moonshot initiatives like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Altos of OceanX, or to finance large-scale philanthropic initiatives like the Gates Foundation. The motivation that drove present-day billionaires in the early days of their journey has hardly changed in nature – only in scale and scope.

Dropping the cap

Not everyone who dreams big sees their dreams come true. But it is really the dreams that fuel everyone’s motivation, however remote the odds that they will become reality. Limiting the materialization of the dream is saying to high jumpers, “2m40 is high enough” and preventing them from clearing more than that, or to a writer that, once they have sold half a million books, they can no longer profit from the movie rights. Sure, many athletes or writers will never come near such targets, just like many entrepreneurs will never accumulate a billion. But setting a ceiling will affect not only those who could go further, but the entire ecosystem. It might not stop Amazons and million-selling singer-songwriters emerging, but there would be fewer, because fewer would pursue big dreams.

“People respond to incentives” – true, but to believe that incentives are rewards for greed is a grave misunderstanding. They are a proxy for the realization of the dreams that the rewards reflect – whether it is the long-wished-for kitchen extension to our house or the holiday of a lifetime, or performing for 100 million people during a world tour, or serving 300 million regular customers. Capping incentives may cut perceived excess, but it will also curtail dreams, at any scale. We know this well, of course: few things demotivate us faster than the realization that someone is limiting our potential reward. So, we should be wary of imposing a ceiling on others, unaware as we are that their unlimited dreams are benefiting us too, whether through cardboard boxes on our doorstep or music in our ears.

(This essay was inspired by a post by )

She used to quite like flying. More than just not minding the frequent travel, she actually used to enjoy the experience: the check-in rituals, slotting her carry-on case in the locker, the tea and coffee on tap… Yes, flying was a bit pricey, but the occasional random upgrade almost single-handedly made up for that. Perhaps a low-cost competitor might give the established airlines a kick up the backside and make them a little more efficient and cheaper? And lo: a no-frills operator barged in, and the prices, they dropped. The high life was good.

A wish fulfilled

Wonderful, the way the competitive market had been doing its thing. Profit margins must have been way too generous. Sure, the symbolic meal had been swapped for a two-pack of crackers; hungry travellers could get some bland sandwiches in exchange for serious money – but nobody’s obliged to eat on the plane, after all. Next, the legroom mysteriously shrunk, as did the maximum acceptable size of carry-on bags. Still, kind of unavoidable to create extra capacity and minimize turnaround times – who could be against that? Anyone who wanted could upgrade to an extra legroom row, or pay for a larger bag. More recently, choosing your seat had become payable, and checking in at a desk rather than at a machine also meant an extra fee – all this not just for the new entrant, but for the many legacy carriers that had followed suit. Individually perhaps minor frills, but together they were little luxuries that used to make her feel valued. Now they were gone, she felt like cargo. “Be careful what you wish for”, her great-aunt used to say when she was a little girl expressing unreasonable desires. Yes, she and her fellow frequent flyers had got their wish, but they were far from happy. Isn’t that odd?

The ultra-low-cost strategy of the ambitious new entrant in scheduled air travel had managed to seize market share from the comparatively bloated legacy airlines. Their pared down product, with every extra to be paid for, enabled them to offer rock-bottom baseline prices, and passenger numbers and profits rose five-fold in its first ten years. Anyone questioning the wisdom of the business model had been served a generous portion of airline humble pie. But it wasn’t to last. When rising fuel costs turned profits into losses that kept on accumulating, the company eventually went bust. Few people mourned its demise. Blaming it for starting a race to the bottom, reactions were more “good riddance” than “rest in peace”: the carrier had managed to break the market.

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But was that a fair accusation? The demand for its trimmed-down budget product suggests it appealed to at least a section of the market that had been underserved until then. People vote with their wallet and the quintupling of their passengers was, if anything, a sound vote of confidence. Much of that market had probably been new flyers or existing flyers flying more, but a sizeable portion surely were former legacy airlines customers attracted by bargain fares. A price war may have seemed inevitable, but it was not the only, perhaps not even the wisest reaction. In 1982, the startup advertising firm BBH got its first commission from Levi’s, then facing competition from retailers’ cut-price own brand jeans. The slogan still resounds more than forty years on: “When the world zigs, zag” (not quite a proverb, but it should be one). Yet, instead of zagging, the established airlines opted to zig along with the newcomer, but in the process deprived the flying public of an alternative.

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The ease of zigging along

That choice meant the bosses of the other airlines were also in the business of wishing: wishing their deep pockets would enable them to beat the upstart at its own game, and lure back the lost customers with their trusted brands, generous loyalty programmes and better seating. It was wishfully thinking that reduced prices would boost load factors and maintain margins, without having to tweak their superior offering. Yet, as they tried to undercut the price-cutter, they found that, to make the numbers add up, they had to reduce costs. And while their nemesis had the frank, uncompromising courage of its unashamed no-frills mission, they desperately tried to hang on to the vestiges of their legacy identity, even as they were compelled to dismantle it bit by bit, reducing or removing everything that used to make their service distinctive and their customers feel appreciated. They bet the firm on zigging, but their heart was not in it. Isn’t that odd?

A free, competitive market is supposed to stratify: different players cater for different categories of consumers, in niches where they are the best placed. Before air travel deregulation, differentiation between airlines had been modest – different flavours of the same menu, but at least the menu offered service levels from basic to very comfortable. Now, that menu was reduced to a single, identical low-cost dish, aimed at the travellers prioritizing headline cost above all else, especially at the point of purchase. This race to the bottom was not the consequence of a market failure, but of salience failure. The market had worked as designed: optimizing for what customers appeared to want, not what they actually valued while travelling.

It was not really the ultra-low-cost competitor that initiated the race to the bottom. What it did was to reveal – unintentionally sacrificing itself in the process – how easily such a race is started and how hard it is to stop it. The culprit is a common, profound human flaw: denying that “you cannot have your cake and eat it”. Travellers and airlines unwittingly colluded in a downward spiral of delusion and misinterpretation. Fixated on the price, passengers forgot there was a trade-off to be made with other things they value. Legacy airline marketers, concerned about safe career progression as much as the brand’s long-term health, heeded John Maynard Keynes’ advice: “it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally” – to take a performance hit while zigging was more expedient than to succeed while zagging. In organizations, bravery is not often rewarded, especially if it does not have an immediate payoff…

So our passenger is mourning – not the demise of the no-frills carrier, but the market that its success destroyed. She got what she wished for (cheaper flights) and lost what she didn’t realize she valued (the option of a better offer at a reasonable price). Her wish was granted, but a hidden clause guaranteed everyone else’s identical wish would be granted too, with dramatic compound effect.

She did get to eat her cake, yet found that none was left.

You’re struggling to open the screw cap of a bottle of pop, or the lid of a jar of jam. Oh, if only there was a trick to make your grip just a bit stronger! Well, good news everybody: there is. Pick the strongest profanity you can think of and mutter it under your breath while you give it one last go. This – with a more laboratory-like exercise of chair push-ups – is exactly what Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele University and colleagues found: when participants swore, they could sustain their bodyweight on average 10% longer. This is a modest, but consistent gain, replicated with 300 participants across two experiments. Boosting your strength by uttering profanities. Isn’t that odd?

This in itself is not an entirely new finding: a paper from 1961 by Michio Ikai and Arthur Steinhaus reports how participants shouting while pulling a weight performed up to 26.5% stronger. We may also have heard athletes shout or grunt in sports categories like weight lifting and indeed tennis. The theory was that our strength is normally inhibited, and shouting (among other techniques) can reduce the inhibitions, presumably brought about through a physiological mechanism of autonomic arousal, supported by the elevated heart rate typically associated with swearing. But research found the strength gain happened even in the absence of physiological markers. What this latest research now suggests is that swearing triggers a psychological state disinhibition, “counteracting the tendency to hold back”.

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We are all inhibited

This tendency to hold back has its seat in the Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS), which suppresses impulsive actions and prioritizes socially appropriate behaviour. Its counterpart, which steps in when the BIS is subdued, is the Behavioural Activation System (BAS), narrowing the focus on immediate goals, prioritizing action and setting aside conflicting social concerns. Consciously swearing – a transgressive activity – briefly suppresses the BIS, which drops our self-consciousness, silences our inner critic, enables a state of flow, and boosts self-confidence. The resulting psychological release allows us to push our limits. The ‘central governor’ theory, proposed by sports scientist Tim Noakes in 1997 (based on an idea first mooted by physiologist and Nobel laureate Archibald Hill in 1924), gives this protective mechanism its most vivid expression: a brain process that limits physical output by constraining how many muscle fibres the body can recruit.

This complex system is a crucial evolutionary adaptation. Organisms that manage their inner resources as if they were limitless would soon completely exhaust their reserves, and cause structural, eventually irreparable damage to the body (notably the heart muscle), leaving them unable to replenish their energy and to reproduce successfully. We are the happy descendants of their cousins with the adaptation, which works much like a speed limiter in a car that stops us from damaging our wallet (or indeed ourselves and other road users). The throttling of available muscle fibre prevents us from exercising ourselves to death: we experience this as fatigue, and slow down.

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What we can achieve through swearing is not quite overriding the governor process, but sneaking behind its back to tap into a readily available, short-term reserve – limited in capacity, but exhausting it will not cause any damage, and it is relatively quickly replenished. The fatigue we feel, as real and genuine as it comes across, is to a large degree a managed signal, rather than a direct sign of exhaustion, like the “overload” indicator on the recording device – occasionally OK, but not for continuous use.

But this is only part of the story. What if the situation presents a trade-off in which we should pull out all of the stops? Evolution has provided us with the tools to handle those, too. It seems we are capable of superhuman strength, better (and more accurately) known as hysterical strength. Such feats occasionally reach the news, or go viral on social media. In September 2019, a man working on the underside of his VW Passat got trapped underneath the car when the jack failed. Alerted by his wife’s cries for help, the 16-year-old boy next door ran to the rescue, and managed to lift the car for long enough to allow others to pull him clear. More recently, CCTV footage shows a boy of about four getting crushed by a heavy metal gate. His only slightly older companion initially wavers between blind panic and trying to lift the gate, opts for the latter, realizes it’s well beyond his power, starts running off to look for help, then returns for a second attempt. This time, he succeeds in raising the gate, allowing the smallest boy to crawl free.

When the governor is overridden

Both are perfect showcases of how the inhibition system of the central governor is not just bypassed, but swamped by signals from the amygdala (the emotional centre of our brain) and the hypothalamus (the hormonal trigger), which together translate this alarm into a cascade of adrenaline that disables the body’s protective reflexes that normally prevent maximum muscle contraction. All available muscle power, reserved for genuine do or die situations, is mobilized. But that comes at a price – recovering from the damage to tendons, joints and muscles is painful and leaves us incapacitated for days or weeks. This is what the governor normally protects us from. Only the most intense emotional triggers can override the governor in this comprehensive way: love or terror that is so far off the scale that self-preservation has become irrelevant.

This remarkable system operates at two levels: a modest, accessible buffer just beyond the governor’s normal ceiling — unlocked by a password any of us can use consciously: a grunt, a swear word, the brief con of a taboo violation. Behind that, a reserve of last resort, sealed off and accessible only to those who have stopped caring about themselves entirely. In extreme emergencies, when intense emotions swipe away all inhibition, our body releases all it’s got, and damn the cost. The master password to release this maximum resource is only deployed when the self itself has become secondary.

The most profound decision we might make – where we are ready to sacrifice our very self – is not a choice we make through considered reasoning: it is built-in to our system. There is a “we” to invoke the swear word and con the governor with an unexpected curse. But at this extreme level, the maximum we can do is only available when we have stopped being ourselves – when our deepest instinct, self-preservation, is overridden.

And all this happens in order to help someone else. Isn’t that truly, deeply, odd?

Twitter/X is a rich source of examples of how we think and act, perfect fodder for an observer of human behaviour and decision making. A little while ago, a tweet appeared in my feed from someone who “usually gets flowers from the local Whole Foods” (a rather upmarket supermarket chain), where they are “wrapped in nice paper, with a fancy straw.” That day, he had “decided to support a small local business and buy the same flowers, same wrapping,” and reports being charged 6 times the price. He would “get it if it’s 50%, more, maybe even double the price.” But 500% was too much, and he “will never go to that place again.”

A neoclassical economist might find this willingness to pay more for a near-identical bouquet odd, but for (accidental) behavioural economists, this is standard stuff. Most of us would at least nod approvingly at his desire to “shop smaller”, and we can sympathize with the feeling of outrage at being overcharged. But at the same time, the realization that this sense of modest virtue is conditional on not being too expensive, and the discovery of hard evidence of a specific boundary to one’s virtue, do feel a little uncomfortable. Isn’t that odd?

Principle surcharge

For many of our purchase transactions we have a choice, not just regarding objective, physical characteristics and attributes of what we buy, but also regarding intangible aspects. Our preference for a certain brand, variant, or retailer may reflect our identity, status, tribal belonging, or our values – none of which relate to the functional performance of the purchased product. Often, a cheaper product would be perfectly adequate and in no way inferior, but the more expensive one meets some of these intangible requirements, whether it is a big-ticket item like a car or a washing machine, or an everyday purchase like groceries or… flowers.

In other words, we are willing to pay extra for these hidden features, mostly without ever consciously establishing how much more. Unlike material differences in features where we might engage in trade-offs, these add-ons seem to resist any deliberate cost-benefit analysis. The reason they defy calculation is that they pose as absolute principles not to be questioned. This is certainly the case when it concerns personal values – if we care about the growers in developing countries, we simply buy fairtrade goods – but it easily extends: if we want to emphasize our national feeling, we buy goods produced in our country; if we want to experience the warm glow of generosity, we buy cookies from the girl guides.

We pay over the odds for these intangible add-ons, and act as if the price doesn’t matter – as is appropriate for absolute principles. Of course, we know that there is a limit somewhere, but we entertain a working hypothesis that the on-cost is so relatively small that it won’t ever matter, with a limit so far away that we are unlikely ever to have to deal with it. This strategic vagueness serves us beautifully, allowing us to keep the threshold of acceptability unmentioned, and unmentionable, and maintain the illusion that our principles are not for sale.

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Until it smacks us in the face. The flower buyer, suddenly confronted with a not-actually-so-distant line being crossed, is forced to admit explicitly that his small shop principle is not as unassailable as thought. The psychology is quite intriguing: he turns the tables and accuses the independent flower shop of overcharging him. On impulse, we might agree with him: six times the Whole Foods price seems unreasonable. But is it really? A large retailer like Whole Foods has tremendous buying power and might even position posh flowers as a loss leader to attract customers.

Moreover, by virtue of being in business, the independent shop would seem to have enough customers willing to pay for what they value, even charging the prices it does. So, on further reflection, we might lose most of our initial sympathy for the flower buyer, eager to signal his concern for small traders, but unwilling to put his money where his mouth is (even though he would be unlikely to go hungry). And then it hits us: we see ourselves in him. If we were confronted with a hefty price tag for one of our principles, we would feel just as exposed as we see him now, suddenly facing the precise cash value of a principle we had never consciously priced. (We might even try to pass the buck, too.)

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Taboo threshold

The threshold, the limit of the sacrifices we will make to affirm our principles, is a taboo – not just for the others, but for ourselves too. Saying, “I value supporting independent traders at twice the el-cheapo price, but not at six times” sends a much worse signal than keeping it vague. The revelation is embarrassing in the same way that disclosing a colleague’s salary would be. Both surface assumptions that would be better left undisturbed – about someone’s values, or about their relative value to the organization. An unspecified threshold allows everyone to maintain a comfortable image and self-image. And it saves us from the nagging feeling that we, too, might have a limit that we’d rather not discover.

“Some things are better left unsaid”, Hall and Oates used to sing. Perhaps some thoughts are better left unthought, too. Imagine telling your beloved you’d do anything for them, and thinking of an added, bracketed clause, “(up to £50,000)”. Putting a cost to a principle can be a dangerous affair, even in the privacy of your own mind. But when situations arise that literally challenge us to put our money where our mouth is, we can choose to use them as valuable data, helping us establish how much we truly care about a principle. Priceless doesn’t exist – the price is there all along. It is up to us whether to look at it.

The other morning, while I was in the shower, the sports slot came on the radio news. Apparently, an English Premier League team had won a crucial game 1-0. I am not a great football fan, unable to recall either the club or the player scoring the winning goal, but I recognized his name as that of one of the several Belgian players in the League. And for a fleeting moment, I felt a small, involuntary inner glow. Isn’t that odd?

Perhaps not. He and I are both members of the group of all Belgians. And when a fellow ‘ingroup’ member is put in a positive light, we tend to bask in reflected glory: even if we have no merit in bringing it about, we feel some kind of pride. I might feel the same if a work colleague is praised or achieves something extraordinary – or a member of my extended family, possibly even someone with the same hobby or who lives in my street. But having something in common is not enough: a Swiss or Latvian soccer player would, like me, be a European, or a Dutch player might share my first name, but their performance, commendable as it might be, would not stir any group feeling in me. Some groups, but not others. Isn’t that odd?

Groups in our genes

Groups are a central concept for humans: to our ancestors, an emerging propensity to form tribes became an evolutionary adaptation that made them more successful in securing and protecting vital resources, and in facing up to adversity. We still carry that instinct in our genes – and not even as second nature. Our inclination to embrace a wide range of identities that imply membership of a group is our first nature.

The effectiveness of our ancient forebears’ tribes in improving their chances of survival and successful reproduction was underpinned by cooperation, in turn facilitated through trust and loyalty, two essential characteristics of successful groups, today too. The stronger the affinity we feel with a group, the more we will be prepared to be loyal to the other members, and be both trustworthy and trusting, demonstrating we are a solid cooperation partner. This kinship can stem from commonality, like a shared purpose (survival and prosperity far up humanity’s family tree, but also supporting a sports team or athlete, singing in a choir, or volunteering for a charity), or from a shared interest (model trains, real ale, or ultra-running). But commonality is not enough: I enjoy porridge for breakfast, but I don’t consider myself a member of the porridge-eaters in any meaningful way, and feel no affinity to people who share that preference. We also need to identify with a group in some way – link it with our identity. Even groups where loyalty or trust is not pertinent can nonetheless be strongly associated with an aspect of our identity: while I won’t trust a compatriot any more than any random person, I still identify as a Belgian, would not willy-nilly give up my citizenship, and indeed feel pride if a Belgian does well. The valence of the trigger can even be negative: a man winning something would not activate my maleness, but if men as a group were attacked, I would feel targeted and might react.

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However, our identity has many facets, and our corresponding group memberships are far too numerous to be constantly aware of. Instead, they lie dormant, waiting to be activated by input and context that match their unique pattern of characteristics and affinity. An engineer being awarded a Nobel prize? As a lapsed engineer, I might experience a minor frisson. A Belgian engineer? Slightly more. One that graduated from my own alma mater? A bit more still. And one who was in my year? Now we’re talking! The more the dimensions overlap, the stronger the trigger.

The group instinct

How do we end up in these groups? Some memberships are given, like our sex, family, skin colour or citizenship. Others we choose (our circle of friends, professional or hobby associations, or the sports teams or artists we follow) or earn, as a recipient of a particular honour (employee of the month), or through an achievement (finished an ultra-marathon, published a bestselling book).

But groups can rapidly form too – with the flimsiest of definitions – and produce an equally powerful sense of social identity and corresponding affinity as pre-existing identities. Psychologist Henri Tajfel was the first to experiment with what he called “minimal groups”, ad hoc collectives on the basis of a trivial choice. Distinguished by nothing more than a preference for one or other painting, or whether they judge a hot dog is a sandwich or not, such groups instantly become highly competitive and self-serving. They are not just laboratory artefacts, however – imagine a group of frustrated airline passengers when information about the delay to their flight is not forthcoming, or remember how neighbourhoods got together during the pandemic lockdowns. The feeling of all being in the same boat will at once engage the power of collective identity, and with it a sense of trust and loyalty to our fellow group members, perhaps even a shared purpose or a common enemy. The speed with which such groups emerge is testimony to how deep this impulse runs.

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Unfortunately, that instinct comes with some possible downsides. The deeper our affinity with a group and the stronger our sense of belonging, the more likely our membership will colour our judgment, lead to chauvinism, favouritism and groupthink, produce sizeable asymmetries in tolerance of questionable behaviour all the way to the dehumanization of others. For the most significant consequence of this tendency to form ingroups is arguably that it inevitably implies the creation of outgroups as well: we cannot define membership without also defining non-membership. As we associate with some people, we disassociate from others, and the distance from treating them as merely different to regarding them as less than fully human is small – just consider the kind of visceral contempt with which some refer to their political opponents as vermin.

What separates us is naturally more salient than what unites us, and our prominent differences overshadow our oldest, most fundamental group, which has become faint over time, as there is nothing to contrast it with. Observing it from a distance is something that astronauts have experienced and reported on since the middle of the last century, most recently Artemis II crew member Christina Koch, upon the mission’s return: “Earth was just this lifeboat… planet Earth, you are a crew.”

From space, the contrast of our blue planet with the deep, deep blackness of the universe is right there, and the affinity of anyone observing it with every member of humanity maxes out. It might be fragile in practice, but what if the rest of us, down here, took her word for it, and became the one crew, allowing our instinct to activate the one ingroup without an outgroup?

Somewhat behind many other European countries, Belgium appears to be inching towards embracing late night and Sunday opening for stores. A few weeks ago, following its close competitor Lidl’s lead, discounter Aldi announced plans to open their outlets on Sundays. At the same time, the government has put forward legislation awaiting parliamentary approval, which would abolish the mandatory weekly rest day, and permit retailers to open until 9pm. More flexibility (especially to compete with web shops), more jobs, more business. Yet, not everyone is enamoured – the staff at several Aldi branches promptly walked out. Isn’t that odd?

The psychology of digging in

The small independent shopkeepers took a dim view, too, with one of them objecting, “You can spend a euro only once, anyway”, implying that the result would simply be to distribute existing sales over more hours and days. Another dissenting voice came from striking employees who value their day off on Sunday, some pointing out the difficulty of getting childcare. These two concerns are behavioural science textbook cases: zero-sum thinking, and loss aversion.

The first objection takes for granted the assumption that the demand is fixed. This ignores how consumers’ buying behaviour can change according to the convenience of buying. Not long after we moved to the UK, the large DIY and gardening stores started to flout the prevailing law prohibiting Sunday trading, as they discovered the extra profit they made more than made up for the fines they had to pay. Their campaign of civil disobedience precipitated the enactment of Sunday trading across the entire retail sector. Once the law had caught up with practice, it experienced the same boost: overall sales went up, with part of the increase ascribed to the additional opening hours. If it were the case that this benefits only the consumer and were costly to the retailer, an easy way to boost profits would be to reduce the time the store is open, and squeeze the presumed fixed demand into fewer trading hours. The fact that no retailer tries this tells us something.

Loss aversion is arguably more adaptive: evolution favoured organisms that took care to preserve vital resources over those that were more wasteful. But that sense of aversion can be automatic, visceral, and disproportionate. In the UK, twenty years after the introduction of Sunday trading, only one in six retail employees work regularly on a Sunday. It seems unlikely that introducing it in Belgium will force every shop assistant to choose between mandatory Sunday working and being fired. A final factor at play is one of the most common biases: the tendency to prefer the status quo. The proverb tells us, “Better the devil you know” – and this too is an adaptation: organisms that rush towards a risky, unfamiliar and uncertain option harm their chances of survival. But dispassionately considering the alternative on its merits can be better than unconditionally staying put.

These psychological tendencies largely explain the resistance to the anticipated change, but the fact that the response they trigger is to cling to the prevailing regulation is at least as interesting. Regulations, like the restrictions on trading hours that Belgian lawmakers introduced in the past, may initially be legitimate ways to control behaviour through prohibitions. But often, they turn out to have unintended consequences, and instead of rethinking or indeed questioning their continued necessity, further conditions are added. For example, when retailers in tourist destinations expressed their dismay at being prevented from welcoming visitors with irresistible offers seven days per week, instead of consigning the mandatory day of closure to the statutory dustbin, law makers introduced a new law capturing an exception. This reflects a deep-rooted human instinct, described by Leidy Klotz, to solve problems primarily by adding, rather than subtracting.

In search of a better equilibrium

But is there a better approach than regulation here? The French word for trader, négociant, hints at an alternative. In it, we see the verb to negotiate – the principal activity that characterizes what we know as a market: the place that leaves every buyer and seller better off, by efficiently coordinating demand and supply. Price negotiation is a substantial part of market interaction, but it can involve many additional elements, from alterations to the product or long-term supply arrangements to terms of employment. The market could thus help determine when and how different opening times constitute an overall improvement. Direct negotiations between retailer and staff can determine whether there is a mutually acceptable wage uplift for staff to work on Sundays. Offering additional trading hours is a form of negotiation with the customers, whose response – flocking to the store, or keeping away – will be an accurate gauge of the perceived convenience (or lack thereof). And in between, the retailer must determine whether the trade-offs make business sense: do the extra revenue and the extra costs lead to higher weekly profits? If there is a possible superior equilibrium, the market allows it to be discovered.

If this sounds far-fetched, think about the places where the exceptions apply. In tourist towns, shopkeepers and their staff appear perfectly capable of finding a way to serve tourists on Sundays just as well as on any other day. Some may appreciate the extra Sunday pay, others may prefer the time off on that day. The children are not left to their own devices. The local market has established an equilibrium without regulation.

Regulations do have a legitimate place in situations where potential abuse and exploitation, for example due to power or information imbalance, make fair market negotiations impossible. But as a blanket ban on Sunday and late evening trading, they prevent these negotiations from taking place, and the better equilibrium from being discovered. If maximizing welfare is important, it may be of questionable wisdom to give a welfare-constraining veto to those who are content with the status quo – whether they are shopkeepers who want to keep away Sunday competition, employees who, because they don’t want to work on Sundays, believe nobody should either.

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The resistance is real and psychologically understandable, but this situation ultimately does not involve significant power asymmetries. It is about competing preferences, and that is where market negotiation is the appropriate mechanism. Asked for a reaction to the strikes, Marketing professor Gino Van Ossel summarized it nicely: Belgium is often a bit like the Gallic village where Asterix lives – but instead of holding out against the invasion of the mighty Roman legions, it resists the forces of the market. However, unlike the resourceful Gauls from the comic, the Belgians have no magic potion.

The consumers and the suppliers who make up the market don’t even need a magic potion, though. They will find their equilibrium eventually. The question is only how many years of regulatory friction until then.

One of the features of Twitter is its facility to conduct polls in which respondents can choose between up to four options. While most people recognize that they cannot be scientifically robust, you still see them pop up occasionally, on topics that range from frivolous and trivial to academic and earnest. One such poll, posted recently by the popular writer and blogger Tim Urban – had just two options to choose from, to answer a simple question. And it caused quite a stir. Isn’t that odd?

More than just a puzzle

At first sight, it looks like a variant of the Keynesian Beauty Contest, first formulated by economist John Maynard Keynes as a metaphor for stock market buy and sell decisions. He wanted to illustrate how some decisions are not about what we think is the right answer, but what others choose. If the goal is not to pick the candidate you find most beautiful, but the one you think others will select, you must model other people’s minds. This poll, however, turned it into a literal life-or-death dilemma, equivalent to a contest between two candidates – Blue and Red, in which, if the majority answer is Red, you die if you picked Blue; if you picked Red, you live but contribute to the death of those who picked Blue. If the majority answer is Blue, everyone lives (no thanks to you if you voted Red!).

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It is clear that if everyone pressed the same button, everyone would survive. However, those pressing the blue button run the risk that less than half of the others will do so, which means they will die. To determine the rational choice, you not only need to predict how others will vote, but also define what ‘rational’ means – are you only concerned about the outcome for you, or for the outcome for everyone? If you are concerned about safeguarding blue voters, then clearly being one yourself helps, but only if enough others do so. Are you willing to take that risk? If not, then you jeopardize anyone who still prefers blue – you have entered a recursive cognitive trap.

Much may depend on the framing, though. Several commenters observed that different formulations of the problem (e.g., everyone has the choice of stepping into a giant blender, or not; when everyone has made their choice, the blender will be activated if fewer than half of the people have opted to get in) would likely alter people’s thinking – in particular the willingness to save those who made the risky choice. This suggests the specific wording of the dilemma does a lot of the work: if the same logic produces different intuitions depending on how it is dressed, that tells us our intuitions were never really about the logic.

Despite this twisted complexity, and the way different frames might affect people’s behaviour, multiple versions of the poll produce remarkably consistent results. In the original poll (formulated by a 12-year-old boy in 2023), 65% of 70k participants opted for blue, in the present one 58% of 100k participants did the same and in a replication by Youtuber Mr Beast, 300k took part, 56% of whom picked blue. Moreover, statistically, no individual vote makes any difference (as in other polls), but voting red literally makes no difference at all, regardless of the outcome, while voting blue could mean death. And still well over half of the people opt for blue. This result cannot be explained through reasoning alone, nor does game theory resolve it, as both outcomes are equilibria.

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Not reasoning, but knowing

We might even question whether reasoning got a look in at all. The comments certainly revealed strong, unequivocal convictions on both sides, uncharacteristic for deliberate reasoning. We are cognitive misers, and if we can avoid reasoning (which is metabolically costly), we are likely to take any shortcut – and an effective option here is to embrace prior beliefs to make decisions – preferably moral priors, because these are seen as unassailable. Thus, people not only assumed others would share their view, they thought they should do so. The ferocity of some of the comments left little to the imagination: blue voters saw themselves as humane, altruistic and kind, and their opponents as “selfish monsters” and “cowards”; red button pushers were, to themselves, smart and rational, and saw the blue voters as stupid and naïve virtue signallers.

The initial impulsive response does not prevent supporting the choice with (motivated) reasoning, though. Of course, the cold-hearted red voters have no regard for children, vulnerable people or indeed those who are confused or clumsy. And should blue fail to make the 50% threshold, “then you know what, I don’t want to live in a hellhole world populated by selfish arseholes”. And so, the split maps neatly onto two opposing worldviews, separated by the individualist/collectivist fault line. From the Blue viewpoint, the Reds are self-serving hyperindividualists, putting individual freedoms above all else, while the Reds see the Blues as collectivist prescriptivists, intent on curtailing the freedom of those unwilling to conform to their perspective.

But to me, perhaps the most interesting experience was how I hesitated, trying to decide which button to push, even though nobody would see what button I would press, and in the spirit of the thought experiment, it was a “private vote”. It was immediately plain to me that the red button was not only the safe option, it was the one rational option (because it carried no risk for the voter). But I noticed Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ sitting on my shoulder, listening in on my inner dialogue. The red button felt totally rational… until I realized that ‘rational’ was carrying a crucial assumption: that was the option most others would choose too – which meant by choosing it, I would be content to let all the blue voters die. Was I really the kind of person who didn’t give a fig about them? Should I press the blue button too, and risk perishing as well? As I got more and more entangled in the cognitive trap, the impartial spectator raised an eyebrow.

Wisdom or cowardice?

Tim Urban posted his own struggle working out what to do, which echoed much of what I had experienced. His final sentence captured the ultimate essence of many of the choices we make: “The mammal I live in has already made up its mind.” Often, we have made up our mind well ahead of any reasoning, which arrives later, to advocate for our decision and give it an air of respectability. Deep down, most of the time, we just know what is Right – with a capital R – and we just bend and twist everything to support that. That is why, when we truly don’t know, when we really cannot work out the right thing to do, we feel very lost, in a physically painful quandary.

Is this poll ultimately not a tug-of-war between individualist egotist and collectivist altruist, but between pragmatism and principle? Initially, I thought that might be the case. But while, ostensibly, the blue voters vote so unconditionally, would they also do so if the threshold was not 50% but 75%, or 90%? The lower the probability of reaching the threshold, I reckon, the more people would ultimately choose red. Would that make it a wise choice, or a cowardly choice?

That would be for others to judge. For us it would be the choice we would know is the Right one. No audience to signal to. Just us, and our impartial spectator. Isn’t that odd?

Stating that Javier Milei, the iconoclastic economist who became Argentinian president in 2023, is a controversial figure with controversial policies is putting things mildly. Notorious for posing with a chainsaw symbolizing his intention to slash government expenditure, he also found his radical economic approach famously denounced in a letter signed by more than 100 prominent fellow economists. Many people with an interest in either economics or Argentina have since separated into supporters and detractors, with each side regularly adducing evidence for their respective case.

A recent example is a chart tweeted a while ago, showing Argentina’s debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), along with that of other large borrowers. The size of Argentina’s loan dwarfs the others – its debt of $57 billion reportedly represents over one third of all outstanding IMF credit worldwide. The author of the tweet sarcastically declares love for “anti-government politicians” who, as soon as they are elected, “take out huge loans to keep their stupid ideologies afloat”. Is that odd?

Odd at second sight

No, it is not odd in itself. The facts shown on the chart are accurate, reflecting the IMF’s own data: while the debt was already high when Milei came to power in 2023, it has since genuinely jumped up by a further $18 billion. At first sight, the tweet’s interpretation is entirely understandable. But at second sight?

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The increase in borrowing turns out not to be additional deficit financing, but the accounting result of restructuring the original credit line of $57 billion the IMF extended to Argentina in 2018 when, long before Milei’s election, its finances and economy were in dire straits. Admittedly, that would not be the first explanation that comes to mind, certainly not for people unfamiliar with the intricacies of the financial management of countries. The information in the chart is technically correct, and its original source makes no claims about reckless spending. Yet the author of the tweet missed the real reason for the apparent boost in borrowing, and adopted the one that seemed natural, if not the only one that would come to a lay person’s mind. And isn’t that odd?

‘Missing out’ vital information and thus misinterpreting facts is a pattern that is not uncommon. Aside from incorrectly inferring the reason for an observed fact, it often involves arriving at a conclusion without accounting for important context. During the COVID pandemic, as the first vaccines were being administered, antivaxxers cited the number of Vaccine Adverse Events, while ignoring the vaccination base rates. Naturally, missing out the crucial denominator of the hundreds of millions of individuals that had received the vaccine would, at first sight, make absolute numbers certainly look alarming. Likewise, citing absolute crime figures without a population-adjusted baseline, or reporting shifts in prices or wages without adjusting for inflation may lead to incorrect inferences because it misses out an essential reference point.

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It is easy to presume an intent to deceive on the part of people disseminating such misinterpreted facts. But that is because we can easily see the deception when we know – or believe – the interpretation to be wrong. Different priors, and a different chart – and we might just as easily have adopted a plausible, but ultimately incorrect interpretation. And we a few potent cognitive tendencies to give us a hand: from the innocently negligent WYSIATI (what you see is all there is – a failure to consider a bigger, a smaller, or a different picture) and the annoying confirmation bias **(using convenient facts to support prior beliefs, likewise without considering alternatives) to the pernicious motivated reasoning (using facts suitably spun or framed to construct an argumentation towards a pre-existing conclusion). But the fundamental mechanism resides deeper still.

Our ancestors did not evolve to be interested in facts per se, but to be able to interpret them so they could navigate the world to successfully survive and reproduce. Facts were placed into a wider narrative: either a beneficial one (in which they helped achieve those aims), or a detrimental one (where they were a hindrance). As facts on their own often do not provide the full story, they were, and are, typically combined with remembered knowledge, and even with prior feelings, resulting in a coherent and instructive narrative that is unequivocally right or wrong. By implication, the facts inherit that same emotional charge.

The tangled web of fact and interpretation

Thus, facts and their normative interpretation become inextricably entangled, and we no longer distinguish between the two. And it is the facts themselves that activate this deceptive process, and lead us to treat the acquired meaning as no less true than the fact itself. Rather than a pure perpetrator of misinformation, the interpreter is the inadvertent accomplice. The person who tweeted the chart – a self-described socialist according to their bio – very likely already had a negative opinion about Milei which, combined with WYSIATI and perhaps a whiff of confirmation bias, led to the interpretation, communicated with the same conviction as stating that water is wet. No deceptive intent, simply stating what is experienced as a self-evident, unconditional truth.

Misinformation of the deliberate deception kind, in which active spinning of cherry-picked facts is woven into disingenuous disinformation, attracts a lot of attention. But a great deal of misinformation is of the type discussed above: people genuinely believing they are communicating true facts, that only people acting in bad faith will reject (while it is their opponents that accuse them of acting in bad faith).

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We can try to avoid this trap by anticipating the three missing frames discussed above. When we encounter a fact (such as a chart, an outcome, a number, or a trend), we can choose to suppress the urge to interpret it at once, and take a second sight – asking ourselves: what are the possible reasons for the observed fact and which has the strongest evidence?; what is the denominator that correctly frames an absolute number?; and what other variables provide essential context to a trend expressed in absolute numbers?

Thus, we engage a powerful instrument of epistemic self-defence to help us avoid presumptuously asserting “The facts say it all”, and instead aim to complete the sentence, “All the facts say is…”.

This morning, my printer ran out of magenta ink. A bottle of cyan, a few months ago, cost just £11.50 – limited scope for huge savings, but like most sensible people, I still did a quick search for the best price. As a self-described accidental behavioural economist, I naturally take pride in my superior ability to spot, and avoid, the cognitive traps astute sellers set to hoodwink unsuspecting customers to make them pay over the odds with concealed fees, expensive bundles, or bogus discounts. Yet, when I finally got my ink, I ended up paying more than the lowest price I had found. Isn’t that odd?

Morally triggered

Of course it is, and I must explain. It was nothing to do with the delivery cost – the largest retailer in the world was selling the ink for just £9.99, but unless I also purchased additional goods for £25.01, I needed to add £4.99 for shipping. No: a quick search confirmed the cheapest offer was still the printer manufacturer’s – the same price as my previous purchase, including free delivery. However, as soon as I added the item to my basket, the price mysteriously increased to £12.49. While this was still the lowest I had found in my search, I spent some time verifying I had not made a mistake, and even attempted to buy the ink from a different device. No dice – it went up by 99p, whatever I tried.

After the briefest of hesitations, I clicked the ‘chat’ button to contact Customer Service, and explained the matter to the agent. Not her area, it transpired, and she swiftly passed me on to Sales, where Eleonora took over the conversation and, moments later, confirmed the correct price was the higher one. There was an error, she added tersely, and she would “ask to have it changed”. No apology, no offer to sell it to me at the advertised price – “Unfortunately I can’t do anything”. That was the end of the chat, and I was left with the routine satisfaction questionnaire – of course I was not satisfied! And, for once, I waded through the lengthy form, expounding all the reasons. Finally, I checked what my ink would cost at a local store, found it in stock at £12.99 – so I bought it to pick up when I do the weekly shop tomorrow.

But why did I end up paying 50p more, and spending a good half an hour of my precious time dealing with this situation over a measly 99p? My situation had a more than passing resemblance to my favourite cartoon ever: the single XKCD panel in which a character is sitting at a computer, while an out-of-panel voice asks whether they are coming to bed. The answer is negative, because “someone is wrong on the internet”. There was something wrong about the price of the ink flipping up as soon as it was added to my basket – and I could not let that lie. While nobody is legally obliged to sell anything to anyone, I – and I am sure many with me – would see it as a moral duty to accept an offer for the advertised price. It is this moral interpretation that makes the price difference almost irrelevant: imagine going to the shop for a pint of milk with a price tag of 95p, and the shopkeeper demands 96p, insisting that this is the actual price. Few people would agree to pay the extra penny without further ado, even though it would resolve a matter that is literally not worth a penny.

This price discrepancy kicked off a sequence of events. When I clicked the contact button, it was in part out of a sense of duty to inform the supplier of the discrepancy, but if I am honest (of course I am), it was mostly indignation. The quick chat response and the smooth process may have mellowed me a bit, but the subsequent indifference with which my approach was treated only added insult to injury. How could I give this company my money? The situation reminded me of the ultimatum game, a psychology experiment in which a sender is asked to share a known sum of money with a receiver, who can reject the offer if deemed too low, in which case the sum is forfeited. It was a form of costly punishment, but without an audience to give me recognition for it. This suggests that the moralization of situations like this can be intrinsic rather than instrumental: reacting to a wrong is not necessarily done for personal, consequential reasons.

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Knowingly irrational?

What is especially intriguing is that, at the very moment that I decided I would not buy the ink from the manufacturer, I realized very clearly what I was doing, well aware how irrational it seemed. I was going to spend even more time, and more money – and get nothing for it in return. What possessed me?

The uncaring response from the chat agent triggered, in part, the sunk cost fallacy **: having spent a good twenty minutes on the affair already, it had a certain momentum that felt wrong to abandon. Buying from this supplier would make all my effort pointless. Another angle is that I experienced the Ovsiankina effect: an uncompleted task creates its own ‘quasi-need’ to finish it. My most important mission now was to complete the expression of my annoyance, not meeting my need for ink, which meant I had to spend more time deciding on an alternative supplier.

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But the most important driver for my actions was the profound sense of injustice. I knew full well all along that my actions would not make the least impression on anyone: most of it was posturing without spectators. Yet the urge was irresistible. A norm had been violated, and that demanded a clear reaction – consequentialist cost-benefit analysis, my foot. This visceral response likely has deep roots, and may have evolved for instrumental reasons: costly punishment of norm transgressors demonstrates to others that we are on their side and that we are a trustworthy cooperation partner. But over generations, it has been fine-tuned and gradually became ingrained into our behavioural patterns. When triggered, we engage it without consciously considering what we might gain, and even if nobody is watching.

Did I act irrationally? If you look from a purely materialist viewpoint, certainly. But it is not quite true that I got nothing for my seemingly futile actions. I did gain a sense of restoration, of righting a wrong. Sacrificing time and money for this reason is just as sensible as doing so to buy an ornament we like the look of. But more importantly, while my intrinsically inspired actions were ultimately inconsequential, in different settings, they would have reinforced a societal norm (thou shalt not make false price claims). And the fact that we are all equipped with the intrinsic tendency to respond to norm violations is, itself, an adaptation that likely supports the persistence of our society, more than one where norms can be trodden on without consequence.

And that is, after all, pretty rational.

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Homer’s Odyssey is an enduring tale that, unsurprisingly, continues to inspire movie directors, most recently Sir Christopher Nolan, whose $250 million production, The Odyssey, is slated for release later this Summer. The casting has led to some controversy: the role of Helen of Troy will be played by the black Mexican-Kenyan-American actor, Lupita Nyong’o, a choice that turned out not to everyone’s taste. Sir Christopher “has lost his integrity”, tweeted Elon Musk, in response to some posts expressing outrage, with numerous comments supporting the critical sentiments voiced. According to them, a supposedly white person’s part should be played by an actor with a white skin. Judging an actor’s suitability not based on the essential demands of the role, but on their conformance to a constructed and inconsequential image… isn’t that odd?

Who needs pictures on the radio?

Moving to the UK, many years ago, reignited my enjoyment of radio plays, which had all but disappeared in Belgium. One early classic was the daily soap opera, The Archers. Naturally, I only knew the actors by their voice, but occasionally, one of them appeared on TV or I saw their picture in the programme guide, and it was striking how – despite not actually having a clear image of the characters – I often felt they looked nothing like how I would have imagined them. I did not have an idea of Kenton Archer’s hair length or colour, but discovering he is bald was certainly a surprise.

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Even absent any narrative cues of appearance, most people spontaneously confabulate mental pictures of objects, places and people. That may feel like a legitimate expectation, and when their actual appearance is different, the incongruence naturally jars. But what really is the legitimacy? There may be physical requirements to support authenticity where needed – hobbits are small creatures, so Arnold Schwarzenegger might not be a perfect fit for Bilbo Baggins, and Robert Redford would have little credibility as a choice for the title role in a biopic about Malcolm X. But it is hard to see why a character’s failure to correspond to an idiosyncratic mental image – or even an immaterial literary description – should be problematic.

Authenticity is not a clear-cut matter, though. In Shakespeare’s time, plays used to be staged with an all-male cast, regardless of the roles. Should this imply that present-day performances really ought to honour that custom? Or precisely the opposite? What to make of the role of the ‘dame’ in the British panto genre, played by cross-dressing men, typically to comic and demeaning effect. And there are other authenticity conundrums. Should one criticize the casting of Al Pacino or John Gielgud in the role of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and applaud picking a Jewish actor instead? Or should one condemn such casting as a case of blatant essentialist condescension? Clearly, the issue is not about the dramatic art, not a matter of inauthenticity, and not a violation of a fundamental principle.

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Arnold Kling’s three languages of politics, notably the two of conservatives and progressives (or liberals) might help explain why this is such a hot potato. He argues that the overriding concern of the former tribe is preserving and protecting Western values, and defending society against “the assault on moral values and traditions that are the foundations of our civilization.” The latter tribe tends to focus on the rights of the underprivileged – in particular minorities. If one’s sole concern is either of these issues, it is easy to see why a black actor in the role of Helen of Troy is a big deal, and that a compromise will be hard to establish. Here, conservatives consider the casting as a direct attack on inherited cultural authenticity, while progressives see it as a laudable correction to historical exclusion. Both are coherent positions, given the respective premises, but the problem is that neither is material to the dramatic art itself. One perceives a deviation from a prevailing norm, the other a step towards a new one. And yet, on either side, no number of ‘correct’ castings would neutralize a single ‘wrong’ one: norm violations cannot be remedied by compensation.

Illusory neutrality

The underlying problem is, of course, that there is no such thing as a neutral norm in casting, much like there is no neutral choice architecture (the way options are presented inevitably shapes the choices people make) in behavioural economics. That doesn’t stop us from appropriating the neutrality category for whatever is our preference or, more broadly, whatever we feel is ‘right’: without that cloak of neutrality, our insistence on how the casting should be done would be seen as petty and self-centred (and not without reason). But the very act of selecting leads to a particular choice – even if the selection is random. Only one dessert item can be placed at eye level in the canteen: either the unhealthy, but appealing donut or the healthy but a bit dull banana , and neither is ‘neutral’. Helen of Troy might have been played by Lupita Nyong’o, or by, say, Klelia Andriolatou: one black-skinned, established, famous, born in Mexico, the other is white-skinned, up-and-coming, not famous, and (aptly) born in Greece. Here too, neither is neutral: actors are not just actors – they have an identity, and every single attribute, intentionally selected for or not, might be taken as significant and symbolic of something objectionable.

We see two phenomena interacting here in shaping, or indeed misshaping our judgment. The first is the selective recruitment of ostensibly objective reasons and basic principles to argue about a subjective, ideological norm violation. However, that quickly becomes a logical trap. Supposed authenticity – as a principle – is de rigueur when the actor chosen does not conform to the skin colour of a conventional portrayal of the character, but is objectionable if the actor is chosen for their specific ethnic facial traits; applauding the choice of, say, a Latino actor in an unremarked role, but complaining about casting an actor of the same ethnicity as a Colombian drug baron is the parallel trap. The second phenomenon is the tendency then to elevate the recruited principle to the primary criterion for judgment, eclipsing the actual essence of what ought to be judged.

Both are red flags where sound judgment is concerned, but while the former can be excused (though not justified) as a common cognitive bias, an instance of post-hoc rationalization, the latter is where the actual failure of judgment takes place. Sir Christopher Nolan’s film should be judged by the standards and norms of cinematic craft, and not disqualified for social or ideological preferences masquerading as authoritative criteria before we have even seen the trailer. The director’s artistic freedom is absolute to realize the vision, and it is this overall result that deserves our considered appraisal, not conformance to idiosyncratic details with no demonstrable relevance to the work.

The same mechanisms can surface wherever we make value or moral judgements. The label on a bottle of wine should not matter, yet wine tastings are still blind: the label recruits the principle, and the principle then overpowers the wine. A foul on the football pitch looks entirely different depending on which shirt you’re wearing.

Plenty of opportunity for spotting questionable judgments!

Decades ago, as a young whippersnapper, I joined a large firm. At the induction course, the instructor imparted some advice on the new employees: “Don’t assume, or you make an ASS out of U and ME” – a mnemonic that sticks with me to this day. A few years earlier, it would certainly have come in handy: as an engineering student, I was sympathetic to a motley collection of lefty causes, one of which was opposition to nuclear power. It seemed a good topic for bit of activism in the faculty, and I hung up some posters for an inaugural “Nuclear Power Working Group” session. Imagine my surprise when most of the dozen or so people who pitched up turned out neutral or positive towards nuclear power generation. My welcome statement, built on my assumption that everyone would naturally be critical, was thoroughly sunk, in a cloud of embarrassment.

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Not that the instructor’s advice had all that much immediate effect. A year later, we had moved from Belgium to the UK, and on our first British Sunday afternoon, we popped over, unannounced, to a close colleague’s place. The scene was one of mutual puzzlement: I assumed that – as back home – friends regularly paid spontaneous visits to each other; he and his wife clearly assumed that normal people did no such thing. Neither of us had consciously considered the opposite of our respective assumptions. This typifies the phenomenon perfectly: assumptions underlie how we make decisions and judgments, unseen, until they hit reality (or someone else’s conflicting assumption). Isn’t that odd?

The unseen substrate

They are the invisible load-bearers of our image of the world. Deep within, they encode the fundamental patterns that, in our perception, govern it and thus help us predict what is uncertain. Some reflect the physical world: we assume that gravity will still work the same tomorrow as it does today, that our car will not break down, that our taps will supply water on demand. Many more reflect our interactions with our fellow humans: we assume people will wear clothes, keep a certain distance from each other, respond when addressed. Assumptions are obvious truths, hard to articulate but easy to sense – we simply know when they are accurate and when they clash. They are the implicit, difficult to directly observe substrate beneath social norms, which are more explicit and visible by comparison. That distinction conceals a strong connection between the two: they are like the two ends of a polar molecule, one drawn to the light, the other into obscurity.

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Assumptions can relate to many aspects of human behaviour. Some could be classified as cultural (‘always welcome at a friend’s house’, different societies’ concept of punctuality or of appropriate displays of emotion). Others are more deeply personal and developmental: our childhood at home may have imbued us with the assumption that parents are warm and supportive, or alternatively that they are strict and distant. At school, we may have acquired assumptions about power and hierarchy, and how to interact with authority. Even the ones that appear to possess a moral payload essentially describe expected behavioural patterns: ingroup members unconditionally support each other, people don’t take advantage of those who trust them.

They are similar to beliefs, but there is an important difference: beliefs are conscious, while assumptions sit in the background. We can formulate beliefs in concrete terms and defend them, but it would not even occur to us to defend an assumption. Assumptions are absorbed rather than learned, which explains why we experience them as natural truths and not deliberate choices. They are background framing, our unknown knowns – we are not aware that we hold them, until they are violated.

Assumptions may provide essential padding when we make decisions, so that we don’t need to verify countless aspects before every step we make, but they play a further role, which is arguably even more important. We all hold one huge meta-assumption of presumed convergence: the unspoken, unverified and – crucially – usually-correct guess that the people with whom we interact share the background framing that our own assumptions amount to. This shared framing is performing an enormous amount of work to lubricate the machinery of social interaction, and it does so without being noticed – until it fails, with consequences that range from a moment’s mild embarrassment to something much more definitive.

When assumptions collide with reality

How we react to the sudden realization that there is no convergence depends on the nature of our assumption. Some are contextually peculiar. We may have grown up in a country where vehicles drive on the left, assuming this to be a general truth, just like the fact that houses have their roof on top. That assumption may be called into question when we visit a country where vehicles drive on the opposite side. If we happen to be driving and literally get confronted by a clash of assumptions by a driver coming from the other direction, we will experience an embarrassment akin to mine at the inaugural (and only) nuclear power working group meeting, or at the unannounced visit to my colleague. Even if we are spared the humiliation of exposing our naïve, parochial ignorance, our reaction will be to update and refine our assumption.

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But such recalibration is not on the cards when convergence is lacking for an assumption we treat as universal – one we expect to apply to everyone. Imagine a colleague receiving by mistake your salary letter, and sharing it with your colleagues. Imagine having cared daily for your mother through years of Alzheimer’s, now in a nursing home twenty miles away. You visit three times a week; the travel costs are significant but her finances can easily absorb them – and she always insisted on reimbursing anyone who did anything for her. Then, a sibling vetoes that reimbursement and declares once a month is enough. Your assumptions about collegiality, and about children’s loyalty to elderly parents are not context-specific, but universal, and possess a moral weight. Because the violations are not just behavioural, but reflective of character, there is nothing to reconsider, and recalibration will not fix this. So, we turn to a more drastic reaction: exclusion. We blank the colleague, or rupture the sibling relationship.

Our reactions to a violation of an assumption demonstrate that they are more than simply invisible guidance for decision making. They can be a mechanism for realizing that we had too narrow, or too naïve a world view, and a signal encouraging us update and refine it. But even more, our instinctive response to violations of universal assumptions shows that they draw boundaries of belonging. The presumed convergence of assumptions implicitly sorts people: an ingroup (of those who share them), not formed by agreement or declaration, but by the silent confirmation of a common background framing, and an outgroup (of those who don’t). A collision of universal assumptions is final and fatal: there is no place in our group for someone who does not share them.

Only when assumptions collide do we glimpse their contours, and can we grow wiser – but at a cost: the discomfort of embarrassment, or the emotional pain of a broken relationship. We can reduce that cost by actively considering possible conflicts, and what our hypothetical reaction would be. Surfacing our unknown knowns will not alter our assumptions, but make us more conscious of them.

Last week, my father died. He was 98, and while until recently in very good physical health, he had contracted pneumonia a week earlier, so it was not entirely unexpected. Still, all of a sudden, a lot of decisions needed to be made at short notice – decisions that, for most, are deeply unfamiliar. Choosing a coffin, figuring out who to inform of his death, deciding how much to spend on flowers and on the ceremony, or which of his belongings from his room in the care home to keep, all within the span of a few days, are not everyday choices. One thing made these decisions truly of a different kind: the central stakeholder, the person whose preferences would matter most, is no longer there to consult, to approve or to question. Instinctively, my sisters and I felt a great need for our father’s blessing. And that was no longer available.

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The absence of such a lodestar is disorientating. We have tools and tricks to help us reason towards good decisions, from analytical pros and cons lists to tried and tested heuristics, but they all require a goal and a beneficiary for orientation, someone whose judgment counts when navigating the available options. Here, when the stakes were the highest and we desperately wanted to get it right, our familiar machinery was useless.

The external compass, necessary but not sufficient

We did have some sources of external guidance, though. The undertakers’ expertise was a great help: a range of possible coffins, and structured options for the ceremony and for the reception afterwards. It is tempting to dismiss this as mere theatre, but it is more than that. The rituals of a funeral – signing a register, composing invitations and mourning cards, the reading of testimonies, paying one’s respects at the coffin – steer us through the unknown terrain. They are not just a social script, but a solid, reassuring scaffolding that takes care of our bewilderment and offers a place for our grief.

Another one is the eyes that would look on: the guests who would judge us and our choices. The funeral master of ceremonies may be the director, but we, next of kin, are the actors in this theatre, and how we behave and what props we have chosen would be read as signals of our love, our values, and what he meant to us.

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But this cannot be the whole story. Even if the onlookers disappeared, the inner pressure to make the right choices wouldn’t lift. We might end up making different ones, but they would not be the most convenient – the easiest or cheapest for us. If the judgment that matters most isn’t the audience’s, what else might be leading us?

Perhaps our other choices might shed some light. Two days after his passing, I spent a day with my sister clearing my father’s belongings from the room in the care home that had been his residence for the last couple of years. There, the stark reality of, for every item, choosing between either take it home or dump it – gone forever, just like him – hit me full on. I picked some drawings that my grandsons – his great-grandsons – had made for his most recent birthday, some random items of clothing (the dressing gown he was wearing during his last few days, way too big for him, but fitting me perfectly, his Panama hat and his old man’s cap, both much too small for me). I could not face losing them for good.

These ostensibly insignificant material objects, with no inherent material value, for me, possess a strong, near-metaphysical association with my father. Back home, I hung his hat and cap on one of the hallstand’s hooks – as if he is on one of his annual visits to us, which he kept up right until COVID stopped all travel. These seemingly arbitrary artefacts play a special role for me. When someone dies, they leave behind a void in our life… but that hiatus has their shape. As the years go by, these artefacts will continue to trace the outline of the person we lost, and keep our memories a little more vivid, ensuring they never disappear. What strange, unnamed instinct guided what I kept and what I discarded?

In the end, we can trust our inner voice

During what turned out to be his final few days, my father was sedated and drifting in and out of semi-consciousness, barely aware of his surroundings. My sisters, who lived much closer than me, were already there, and I faced the question whether I too should go and be close to him. The logistics – an eight-hour journey of three hundred and fifty miles and a sea crossing – would be complicated but feasible.

Yet, with difficult decisions, it is good to consider what the goal is. We had had many great moments together during my recent visits: last summer, we drove to his native village, walked past the house where he was born and lived until he married my mother, and chatted away about his childhood memories. But he was afflicted by dementia, and over the last five years, I had gradually said my goodbyes during our near-daily facetime calls. Now he was no longer even able to speak. What aims would my going over serve? I could find no reason – neither a practical one nor a symbolic one. We had both been ready and prepared for this moment for a long time. It was not a case of costs outweighing benefits, it was a case of no benefits at all. Making the journey would be nothing more than an ostentatious sacrifice with no recipient. Not virtue, just performance. That is not what my father would have expected from me. Going just did not feel right.

So I stayed. He was comfortable and at peace, gently drifting away, and well cared for. My decision felt right, with a strange sense of certainty I cannot really explain, but which was undeniable. Was this reasoning? In part, yes. But the feeling, the inner voice, had done most of the work – mine had advised me to stay home; for my sisters, being present had been exactly right. And for all three of us, in all these other choices we had had to make in that strange landscape that surrounded my father’s death too, it was the inner voice that turned out to be the most reliable guide available – the essence of decision-making.

Isn’t that odd?

The UK and its political leadership are attracting a lot of criticism these days. One of the critics’ targets is the so-called “triple lock”, a policy that ensures the state pension increases each year in April by the highest of three measures: average earnings growth (including bonuses), consumer price inflation, and 2.5%. It is branded as excessively generous, fiscally irresponsible and absurd.

In 1980, the UK government switched from using earnings growth as the determinant for annual state pension increases to linking it with price inflation. As a result, the state pension, as a percentage of average earnings, fell from 26% in 1979 to 16% in 2010. To close that gap the government of the day opted for a gradual correction rather than one massive and unrealistic leap, through the infamous triple lock. What it forgot to do was stipulate when this correction was complete. This makes it less an example of an insanely generous policy, than of a much more common failure: we tend to be pretty good at specifying “entry” conditions for decision, but setting out the exit conditions is much rarer. We are clear when to start, but vague about when we’ll stop. Isn’t that odd?

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How temporary becomes permanent

In policy making, this typically happens with temporary measures in response to unexpected shocks (COVID lockdowns and restrictions, or the UK’s “temporary” additional 50% income tax rate introduced after the financial crisis of 2008 which, albeit now reduced to 45%, is still in force), to handle extraordinary situations (the UK alcohol licensing restrictions rescinded in 2003 were introduced as a wartime measure during WWII), or to rectify (perceived) social injustices (affirmative action regulations in the US were in force from 1969 and were only curtailed by Supreme Court rulings in 2003 and 2023). While often justified or at least defensible, and implemented with good intentions, they become a trap: temporary measures, without clearly stating the goal that is aimed for, or without a review process and a date when this should be invoked tend to become permanent by default.

As individuals too, we make choices that are not necessarily intended to hold unconditionally and indefinitely, yet end up being just that. We may stick with a job “until something better comes along”, without ever defining what that would entail, and justifying that by telling ourselves we “are keeping our options open” or “just love serendipity”. Thus, “something better” never comes along. We may pause a project to release resources that are urgently needed elsewhere, and simply assume that it will restart when that need is addressed – only to find that those resources are always needed somewhere else, and our original project gets abandoned by drift. Or we may feel obliged to grant someone a one-off favour allowing them to park their car on our drive, but they interpret it as an open invitation, and we never set them an ultimatum.

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Why do we tend to neglect establishing exit or termination conditions? There is no shortage of explanations. Often, the ‘entry’ decision in question is made under time (or even emotional) pressure, responding to immediate issues, and an end point is simply not on the agenda. Later on, when the acute need has been addressed, habituation takes hold, and we succumb to status quo bias or are too embarrassed to set conditions or limits. Sometimes, there is active reluctance to reverse the earlier decision or change course: perhaps it is deemed too early, or there are more important or urgent matters to deal with, and “it can wait”. The hardy perennial of anticipated regret and risk aversion may join forces to instil worry in our mind: why rock the boat? Are we sure we are ready to give up the stability of the status quo by stepping in?

By omitting exit conditions, we also escape the discomfort of having to deal with future uncertainty. More importantly, an explicit statement can be verified, and makes us vulnerable to being called to account. Vagueness protects us from this annoyance under a guise of “being flexible”. Another phenomenon that might make us reluctant to contemplate the finiteness of a decision and describe precisely when it will come to an end is goal-completion aversion. Superficially, completing a goal sounds like a desirable outcome, but declaring something “done” invites scrutiny and judgment. We can always describe open-ended commitments as still doing their work.

Why the exit can be as important as the entry

The consequences of missing exit conditions may not immediately be obvious, but there is one situation that starkly illustrates how they can be detrimental: bidding in an auction. The entry decision is easy: we want the item, and the starting price feels like a bargain. But failing to set a ceiling price we are prepared to pay, and not a penny more, opens the door to the winner’s curse: auction winners often end up paying more than their win is worth. The absence of a hard limit means that the bidding decision is not made on overall affordability or value estimate, but on the emotion of being outbid (fuelled by loss aversion), and the small size of the bid increment – in the heat of the moment, it is easy to think you’d be mad to lose a £500 item for “just another £10”.

Sophisticated investors think exactly the other way round. Financiers like angels and venture capitalists are just as concerned with the exit timing and conditions as with the criteria for investing in the first place. They typically aim to sell their stake within 5-10 years, and evaluate possible investments with explicit attention for suitable scenarios before taking a stake. Their discipline is in glaring contrast with the much more typical lack of discipline of the naïve bidder in an auction, and indeed the short-sighted politician.

The real problem with the UK’s triple lock policy is not that it is inherently a flawed approach. It was arguably a sensible mechanism to realign the state pension with earnings. The political aims of the policy were clear: being seen to robustly fix the long-standing issues with the state pension, and winning the political support of the electorally powerful grey vote. But to realize them, it was not necessary – maybe even disadvantageous – to state clear termination or review conditions. This, alongside other reasons alluded to, may well explain why no such steps were taken at the time.

That absence is what deserves condemnation. It is a pity that this is not what the critics set their sights on.

The arcane concept of “International law” has been in the news a lot more than usual lately. It last got some attention when Russia annexed the Crimea and again when it invaded Ukraine. But in just one year, the US has repeatedly been accused of violating it: attacks on the small boats allegedly carrying drugs, abducting Venezuelan president Maduro, threatening to invade Greenland and now attacking Iran. Along with the protests, we hear handwringing observations about the toothlessness of this international law: countries can ignore it, unobstructed by any form of enforcement.

Economist Gary Becker hypothesized that criminals rationally weigh up the expected costs and payoffs of committing crime. This is a clear argument for enforcement: to reduce crime, make it sufficiently expensive to transgress. But is that really the issue? It is hard to believe that enforcement is all that keeps you and me from committing crimes. If it is not necessary to stop most of us from turning into habitual expense-fiddlers and stationery-swipers at work, or Netflix-defrauders and people who pocket unscanned items at the self-checkouts, it is unlikely to be the reason why we don’t go robbing stores, beating up people or drug trafficking. Ordinary people by and large comply with ordinary laws without enforcement, yet lack of it is blamed for country leaders’ violation of international law. Isn’t that odd?

Good behaviour without incentives

If not enforcement, then what does keep us on the straight and narrow? Research by Dorsa Amir and colleagues across societies as diverse as urban US, rural Uganda and a hunter-horticulturalist tribe in Ecuador found that children aged 5 already exhibit cooperative behaviours and moral norms (of fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness and honesty). This suggests we are all born with a raw capacity for moral judgment, together with a rough initial moral compass. According to the study, this is then chiselled down to fit the collective social norms that prevail in each community by mid-childhood.

As we age, this is further refined into a distinct moral identity – religious, secular or both – which is reflected in our behaviour, and which our behaviour seeks to protect. Within our societies, we belong to multiple groups – classes at school, friend groups, work colleagues, and even countries, each of which typically expects or even requires compliance with their respective norms. We have several mechanisms that help us do so. One is our reputation, a highly valuable asset for members of a ‘tribe’, and adhering to the prevailing norms is one way of safeguarding it. Another one is the capacity to experience shame, even when we are not observed, when we violate a norm. But perhaps the most robust one is a deepening of the moral intuitions we are born with: Adam Smith, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, refers to “the inhabitant of the breast” – an impartial spectator who is looking over our shoulder. This character helps us to live up to our desire to be “lovely” – worthy of love and praise.

So, why don’t we see this for international law? Even though we are nowhere near global anarchy, the steady stream of “illegitimate” armed conflicts suggests it’s not working. Might the difference between acting in a personal capacity and as a national leader play a role? One possibility is that the people attracted to, and attaining, that top job disproportionately have a personality that is more prone to violating rules if they are inconvenient.

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But as they say, “clothes make the man”, and maybe there is some of that too. Stepping into the role of commander in chief can evoke different kinds of responses. Some may experience a grand calling, and consider their duty to their country, or even to the “free world”, a higher authority than this “international law”. Others might see an opportunity to exploit newfound power, in the absence of enforcement, with self-serving motives. Like a toddler who suddenly gains access to the forbidden world of mum’s make-up drawer, they test the boundaries of their power, not just in international law, but closer to home, too. Yet somehow, these individual-focused explanations feel incomplete. The moral intuitions that work so reliably at the individual level appear to lose their grip entirely at greater scale.

Abandoned by evolution

Examining how we came to acquire these intuitions reveals a potentially more fundamental reason for the discrepancy. The way natural selection has shaped our morals to balance self-interest with an inclination to cooperate is certainly remarkable. Our own ancestors were more cooperative than other individuals, and the tribes to which they belonged were more cooperative than other tribes. Because that made them more successful in surviving and reproducing, they prevailed to the detriment of those who were less cooperative, thus passing these traits down the generations. This is why human societies work with much less rule enforcement than would otherwise be needed. Yet, that tendency is not reflected at the global level. Isn’t that odd?

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Evolution effectively carries out continuous A/B tests ** – rival variants of the same organism compete in the same environment, and the fitter among them prevail. But for this to happen, there must be competing variants to be pitted against one another. At global level, there is no other planet, with a different set of countries that are more bellicose, or more pacifist, more zero-sum-based or more cooperative at the supranational level, to establish which combination does better in the competition for scarce resources. There is just one single unit, and evolution has no grip on it.

Which arrangement – clear supranational norms, enforced where necessary, or the law of the jungle, in which the biggest and strongest call the shots, regardless of any principles – is “fitter” for our species? We cannot second guess the outcome of an evolutionary process that not only has not taken place, but cannot actually take place. We can make moral judgments that favour collaboration, but we have not honed the moral instincts to handle the challenges at a planetary scale. For the first time in our existence, we cannot rely on evolution to sort out what is best.

We are on our own, and we can only hope we get it right.