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

Josef Fritzel was convicted today and sentenced to life in prison by an Austrian court. Fritzl trapped his own daughter in a basement “dungeon” for 24 years, raping her 3,000 times over a 24-year period. (That works out to about twice a week.) As the BBC notes, “the story of Josef Fritzl has been described as one of the worst cases in Austria’s criminal history.” But is it?

Whoever thinks that Fritzl is even close to the worst criminal in Austrian history clearly hasn’t heard about Heinrich Gross, an Austrian doctor who tortured and killed hundreds of children–not to mention, of course, Austrian painter and memoirist Adolf Hitler. But of course I agree that Fritzl’s crime is horrible. In addition to enslaving and raping his daughter for a quarter century, he admits to letting one of the resulting children die in the dungeon due to illness, rather than seek medical attention and risk being caught.

But what if Fritzl had committed the very same crimes, trapping a stranger rather than his daughter? The aspect of this case that has generated so much attention–and why some consider it “one of the worst cases in Austria’s criminal history”–is that it involves the taboo of incest.

Consider a thought experiment posed by moral philosopher Jonathon Haidt: “Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They  are traveling together in France on summer  vacation from college. One night they are  staying alone in a cabin near the beach.  They decide that it would be interesting and  fun if they tried making love. At very least  it would be a new experience for each of  them. Julie was already taking birth control  pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to  be safe. They both enjoy making love, but  they decide not to do it again. They keep  that night as a special secret, which makes  them feel even closer to each other. What  do you think about that, was it OK for them  to make love?” (PDF file of Haidt’s article.)

What is your answer to Haidt’s question? Is the act of incest, in and of itself, morally wrong?
–John Bohannon