the Electric Monk

Next time you walk into a restaurant, don’t even look at the menu. Ask one of the regulars what he thinks the best dish is–you’re far more likely to be pleased with your meal.

This is the basic conclusion of a study led by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. They used a speed-dating scenario to test the accuracy of “affective forecasting”–people’s projections about how happy something will make them. The results indicate that when it comes to helpful knowledge about future experiences, less really is more: Women who were given more information about a man they were about to speed-date tended to make less accurate forecasts about how enjoyable the date would turn out. Women with only a tiny bit of info–the rating of the man by his previous date–were significantly better at estimating how satisfied they would walk away feeling. As Gilbert puts it, “If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself.” (You can read about the study here and here.) Is this good news, or does this spell big trouble for freedom and liberty?

If you think you know yourself better than anyone, Gilbert’s study should unsettle you at least a bit. An even more bizarre conclusion of the experiment was that participants largely preferred to be “informed” predictors–getting all the information available–even after they learned that it would make them less accurate at predicting their own happiness. (In a certain sense, the information makes them less informed!) They hold that deeply universal belief: “I know what is best for me.” It is a fundamental tenet of liberty, one of Western society’s core principles. People ought to be free to do what they want, our implicit logic goes, because they tend to want the sorts of things that enable them to lead happy, fulfilling lives.

So should we be “outsourcing” our decisions to the wisdom of the crowds? If so, what sort of decisions should we trust to others? Where to eat? What to read? Whom to love? (Hint: you probably outsource far more decisions than you realize.)
–Roland Nadler