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A Psicologia das falhas de julgamento humanas (II) |
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 (1ª Parte)
- Six: the use of granny's rule. I love this. one of the
psychologists who works for the Center gets paid a fortune running
around America, and he teaches executives to manipulate
themselves. Now granny's rule is you don't get the ice cream unless
you eat your carrots. Well granny was a very wise woman. That is a
very good system. And so this guy, a very eminent psychologist, he
runs around the country telling executives to organize their day so
they force themselves to do what's unpleasant and important by doing
that first, and then rewarding themselves with something they really
like doing. He is profoundly correct.
- Seven: the Harvard Business School's emphasis on decision
trees. When I was young and foolish I used to laugh at the Harvard
Business School. I said, "They're teaching 28-year-old people that
high school algebra works in real life?" We're talking about
elementary probability. But later I wised up and I realized that it
was very important that they do that, and better late than never.
- Eight: the use of post-mortems at Johnson & Johnson. At most
corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a
disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb
acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You've got denial,
you've got everything in the world. You've got Pavlovian association
tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned
thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody
revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the
presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do
the same thing routinely.
- Nine: the great example of Charles Darwin is he avoided
confirmation bias. Darwin probably changed my life because I'm a
biography nut, and when I found out the way he always paid extra
attention to the disconfirming evidence and all these little
psychological tricks. I also found out that he wasn't very smart by
the ordinary standards of human acuity, yet there he is buried in
Westminster Abbey. That's not where I'm going, I'll tell you. And I
said, "My God, here's a guy that, by all objective evidence, is not
nearly as smart as I am and he's in Westminster Abbey? He must have
tricks I should learn." And I started wearing little hair shirts like
Darwin to try and train myself out of these subconscious
psychological tendencies that cause so many errors. It didn't work
perfectly, as you can tell from listening to this talk, but it
would've been even worse if I hadn't done what I did. And you can
know these psychological tendencies and avoid being the patsy of all
the people that are trying to manipulate you to your disadvantage,
like Sam Walton. Sam Walton won't let a purchasing agent take a
handkerchief from a salesman. He knows how powerful the subconscious
reciprocation tendency is. That is a profoundly correct way for Sam
Walton to behave.
- Ten: Then there is the Warren Buffett rule for open-outcry
auctions: don't go. We don't go to the closed-bid auctions too
because they...that's a counter-productive way to do things
ordinarily for a different reason, which Zeckhauser would understand.
4. Four: What special knowledge problems lie buried in the thought
system indicated by the list?
Well one is paradox. Now we're talking about a type of human wisdom that
the more people learn about it, the more attenuated the wisdom
gets. That's an intrinsically paradoxical kind of wisdom. But we have
paradox in mathematics and we don't give up mathematics. I say damn the
paradox. This stuff is wonderfully useful. And by the way, the granny's
rule, when you apply it to yourself, is sort of a paradox in a
paradox. The manipulation still works even though you know you're doing
it. And I've seen that done by one person to another. I drew this
beautiful woman as my dinner partner a few years ago, and I'd never seen
her before. Well, she's married to prominent Angelino, and she sat down
next to me and she turned her beautiful face up and she said, "Charlie,"
she said, "What one word accounts for your remarkable success in life?"
And I knew I was being manipulated and that she'd done this before, and
I just loved it. I mean I never see this woman without a little lift in
my spirits. And by the way I told her I was rational. You'll have to
judge yourself whether that's true. I may be demonstrating some
psychological tendency I hadn't planned on demonstrating.
How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an
enlightened economist's mind? Two views: that's the thermodynamics
model. You know, you can't derive thermodynamics from plutonium, gravity
and laws of mechanics, even though it's a lot of little particles
interacting. And here is this wonderful truth that you can sort of
develop on your own, which is thermodynamics. And some economists -- and
I think Milton Friedman is in this group, but I may be wrong on that --
sort of like the thermodynamics model. I think Milton Friedman, who has
a Nobel prize, is probably a little wrong on that. I think the
thermodynamics analogy is over-strained. I think knowledge from these
different soft sciences have to be reconciled to eliminate
conflict. After all, there's nothing in thermodynamics that's
inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics and gravity, and I think that some
of these economic theories are not totally consistent with other
knowledge, and they have to be bent. And I think that these behavioral
economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in
the correct direction.
Now my prediction is when the economists take a little psychology into
account that the reconciliation will be quite endurable. And here my
model is the procession of the equinoxes. The world would be simpler for
a long-term climatologist if the angle of the axis of the Earth's
rotation, compared to the plane of the Euclyptic, were absolutely
fixed. But it isn't fixed. Over every 40,000 years or so there's this
little wobble, and that has pronounced long-term effects. Well in many
cases what psychology is going to add is just a little wobble, and it
will be endurable. Here I quote another hero of mine, which of course is
Einstein, where he said, "The Lord is subtle, but not malicious." And I
don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to
accommodate what's right in psychology.
5. Fifth: The final question is: If the thought system indicated by this
list of psychological tendencies has great value not recognized and
employed, what should the educational system do about it?
I am not going to answer that one now. I like leaving a little mystery.
Have I used up all the time so there's no time for questions?
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Moderator: I think that what we're going to do is we're going to borrow
a little bit of time from the end of the day questions, and we're going
to move it and allocate it to Charles Munger, if that's acceptable to
everybody.
Munger: By the way, the dean of the Stanford Law School is here today,
Paul Brest, and he is trying to create a course at the Stanford Law
School that tries to work stuff similar to this into worldly wisdom for
lawyers, which I regard as a profoundly good idea, and he wrote an
article about it, and you'll be given a copy along with Cialdini's
book. [The article Mr. Munger is referring to is called "On Teaching
Professional Judgment" by Paul Brest and Linda Krieger. It was published
in the July 1994 edition of the Washington Law Review.] Questions?
Audience Member #1: Will we be able to get a copy of that list of 24
[standard causes of human misjudgment]?
Munger: Yes. I presumed there would be one curious man [laughter], and I
have it and I'll put it over there on the table, but don't take more
than one, because I didn't anticipate such a big crowd. And if we run
short, I'm sure the Center is up to making other copies.
Audience Member #2: If I had listened to this talk I might have thought
that Charles Munger was a psychology professor operating in a business
school. Every once in a while a micro-issue -- you told us how you
would've deal with one of these issues, for example with the unfortunate
lady See's -- but you didn't tell us how these tendencies affected you
and what's probably the most important, or one of the most important
elements of your success, which was deciding where to invest your
money. And I'm wondering if you might relate some of these principles to
some of your past decisions that way.
Munger: Well of course an investment decision in the common stock of a
company frequently involves a whole lot of factors interacting. Usually,
of course, there's one big, simple model, and a lot of those models are
microeconomic. And I have a little list of -- it wouldn't be nearly 24,
of those -- but I don't have time for that one. And I don't have too
much interest in teaching other people how to get rich. And that isn't
because I fear the competition or anything like that -- Warren has
always been very open about what he's learned, and I share that
ethos. My personal behavior model is Lord Keynes: I wanted to get rich
so I could be independent, and so I could do other things like give
talks on the intersection of psychology and economics. I didn't want to
turn it into a total obsession.
Audience Member #3: Out of those 24, could you tell us the one rule
that's most important?
Munger: I would say the one thing that causes the most trouble is when
you combine a bunch of these together, you get this lollapalooza
effect. And again, if you read the psychology textbooks, they don't
discuss how these things combine, at least not very much. Do they
multiply? Do they add? How does it work? You'd think it'd be just an
automatic subject for research, but it doesn't seem to turn the
psychology establishment on. I think this is a man from Mars approach to
psychology.
I just reached in and took what I thought I had to have. That is a
different set of incentives from rising in an economic establishment
where the rewards system, again, the reinforcement, comes from being a
truffle hound. That's what Jacob Viner, the great economist called it:
the truffle hound -- an animal so bred and trained for one narrow
purpose that he wasn't much good at anything else, and that is the
reward system in a lot of academic departments. It is not necessarily
for the good. It may be fine if you want new drugs or something. You
want people stunted in a lot of different directions so they can grow in
one narrow direction, but I don't think it's good teaching psychology to
the masses. In fact, I think it's terrible.
(Fim)
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