Counterintuitive Insights

HS #56 2020.3.12

Counterintuitive Insights

Recently I got into an oft-repeated conversation in the locker room of MVP Athletic Club. Several of us were getting dressed in one crowded aisle while the rest of the locker room was empty. So the inevitable comment: Here’s Murphy’s Law in action – the undesirable outcome happens most often. 

Actually, not the case. Most of the time, men (and presumably, women) are distributed throughout the locker room. We just notice the rare occasions when we’re bunched up. 

The situation illustrates a common mistake in perception. Humans are not very good at taking into account the entirety of our experience. A similar thing happens when folks attribute a streak of six three-point shots in a basketball game to a “hot hand.” Nope. It’s just going to happen every once in a while.  

Want some proof?  Suppose you had a fair (balanced) coin and you flipped it 30 times, what would the sequence of heads (H) and tails (T) look like? Try this: Write out a random sequence of 30 Hs and Ts. THEN, flip a coin thirty times and compare the sequences. Don’t continue reading until you have done it. 

Please – some of you haven’t done it yet. 

OK – Here’s my prediction: The ACTUAL sequence of heads and tails has a longer string of all heads or all tails than the random one you imagined. Am I correct? 

Humans don’t realize that randomness produces such strings as often as it does. Moreover, as with the locker room and hot streaks, we remember such things when they do happen.  But statistical analysis shows that these events happen about as often as probability would predict. 

In the examples above, events happened that we didn’t expect. Another mistake in perception occurs when we wrongly DO expect unlikely events to happen more often than they do. 

If you’re interested in evaluating your perception at this, take a break from reading this column and find a copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (easily found online). The address has 268 words of various lengths. Pick out a sample of ten words that you think is representative of the entire collection. Then continue reading below. 

Do you have your ten words? How well did you sample?  Here are a couple ways to check: i) four of your words should be 3 letters or less. ii) six of them should be 4 letters or less, iii) the total number of letters in your ten words should be about 43.  I bet you didn’t have enough small words. Instead, your eye was drawn to the exceptions – the longer words. Am I correct? 

If so, then you, like the rest of us, focus on the exceptions – in this case the longer words. These noteworthy occurrences catch our attention and we mistakenly think they happen more often than they do.  And this tendency to think that the exceptional rare event will happen to us can have negative consequences. 

As a preteen and young teenager, I rode my bicycle all around town – exploring streams and railroad bridges, cemeteries and vacant lots. Only rule: be home in time for supper. My mom, who had no trouble worrying about colds and germs and wet hair, wasn’t concerned about me being abducted. What has changed over the years? Why aren’t there scores of young kids biking all around Holland? Have parents focused on the exceptions – those very rare but well-publicized cases around the country when a child is abducted? Look at the cost – the loss of “Tom Sawyer” adventures for millions.  (I keep an empty lot behind my house “wild” to allow neighborhood children a place to explore and have fun in a non-manicured setting.) Similarly, rare-but-publicized shark attacks keep beach goers from enjoyable vacations. 

This tendency to focus on the exception also contributes to why people are suckers for the lottery. We see via the media those rare lucky ones who win a jackpot and imagine it happening to us, but don’t see the millions who – over the space of a year - could have bought themselves tickets to a favorite event with the money. 

Loss of money and opportunity is bad enough,  but Hope psychology professor, David Myers, realized this tendency can have even more serious consequences. After the terrorist attack of 9/11, he predicted 800 more traffic deaths the following year as people flew less and drove more.  For although not as spectacular and news-making, the probability of death from car travel greatly exceeds that from flying. He was wrong. The difference was 1500.