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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on "What-the-hell" Cognitive Failure Mode: a Separate Bias or a Combination of Other Biases? - Less Wrong
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Comments (34)
It's not clear to me that this should be analyzed as a cognitive bias. It seems to be primarily a social phenomenon, and seems pretty reasonable if you operate in a social environment where small and large transgressions of rules are punished equally severely. I wouldn't be surprised to see it disappear in a social environment where people didn't use binary social rules but awarded points based on how well you adhered to rules.
There is not much social about it when it's just between you and an extra slice of pizza in front of you.
Dieting, and keeping to your commitments, are both socially rewarded. This thought, the image of others' disapproval if you fail to diet, is mentally present even when one is alone. People judge themselves by their society's standards. So it's a social pressure mediated by psychological effects (memory and imagination).
I agree on the "pressure" part. However, the pressure need not be social, unless you count every action as mediated by societal influences. True enough, dieting is often driven by societal pressure, maybe the pizza example was not so great, but there are many other pressures people exert on themselves. Are you saying that breaking under internal pressures don't result in the "what-the-hell" reaction?
Sorry, I was focusing on the dieting example too much. Social pressure is just one kind related to dieting, and it's probably not directly related to the "what the hell" pattern itself. I'll comment on the pattern in a top level comment.
Qiaochu's explanation could still work on an ev-psych level, though. It makes sense that far mode commitments would tend to be social.
I wouldn't call that a primarily social phenomenon, since this seems to happen with internal thought processes just as easily, but that's more of a minor nit-pick in phrasing. I think you're spot-on about rational adaptation to perverse incentives :)
I've experienced this phenomenon when I was trying to hold myself to an entirely self crafted set of dietary restrictions which nobody else knew the terms of or was trying to encourage me to follow (I was trying to hit single digit body fat percentage in college, and had functionally unlimited quantities of food on offer in the cafeteria. Sometimes, if I still felt too hungry after the caloric intake I had allotted for myself, I would give in and let myself eat much, much more than I intended.)
Were the rules binary (e.g. "don't do X") or did you make yourself a point system?
I had a target number of calories per day, plus guidelines for the sort of things I ought to eat to feel full enough and get enough nutrition at low calorie levels, and an understanding that if I broke the target number, it was better to do it by a little rather than a lot.
I was pretty successful (dropped down to approximately 7% body fat according to an electrical impedance scale,) but I learned that it was important not to break the targets at all, because it was practically impossible to break them by just a little. If I did, it was hard to not simply give up on diet control for the day.
Pretty sure that happened to me before when I hadn't told anyone about my precommitment.