Intensity Matching
Intensity matching is a mental model where people intuitively match the intensity or magnitude of one attribute (e.g., crime severity) to another (e.g., loudness of sound) using a common scale, even across different dimensions. This heuristic is natural for System 1 but can lead to statistical errors when used for prediction.
THE IDEA
INTENSITY MATCHING
Questions about your happiness, the president’s popularity, the proper punishment of financial evildoers, and the future prospects of a politician share an important characteristic: they all refer to an underlying dimension of intensity or amount, which permits the use of the word more: more happy, more popular, more severe, or more powerful (for a politician). For example, a candidate’s political future can range from the low of “She will be defeated in the primary” to a high of “She will someday be president of the United States.”
Here we encounter a new aptitude of System 1. An underlying scale of intensity allows matching across diverse dimensions. If crimes were colors, murder would be a deeper shade of red than theft. If crimes were expressed as music, mass murder would be played fortissimo while accumulating unpaid parking tickets would be a faint pianissimo. And of course you have similar feelings about the intensity of punishments. In classic experiments, people adjusted the loudness of a sound to the severity of crimes; other people adjusted loudness to the severity of legal punishments. If you heard two notes, one for the crime and one for the punishment, you would feel a sense of injustice if one tone was much louder than the other.
Consider an example that we will encounter again later:
Julie read fluently when she was four years old.
Now match Julie’s reading prowess as a child to the following intensity scales:
How tall is a man who is as tall as Julie was precocious?
What do you think of 6 feet? Obviously too little. What about 7 feet? Probably too much. You are looking for a height that is as remarkable as the achievement of reading at age four. Fairly remarkable, but not extraordinary. Reading at fifteen months would be extraordinary, perhaps like a man who is 7′8″.
What level of income in your profession matches Julie’s reading achievement?
Which crime is as severe as Julie was precocious?
Which graduating GPA in an Ivy League college matches Julie’s reading?
Not very hard, was it? Furthermore, you can be assured that your matches will be quite close to those of other people in your cultural milieu. We will see that when people are asked to predict Julie’s GPA from the information about the age at which she learned to read, they answer by translating from one scale to another and pick the matching GPA. And we will also see why this mode of prediction by matching is statistically wrong—although it is perfectly natural to System 1, and for most people except statisticians it is also acceptable to System 2.
When to use it
In performance evaluations, managers might match an employee's early success to a salary raise, ignoring other factors like consistency or skill development.
In legal sentencing, judges and juries may match the severity of a crime to a punishment using intuitive intensity scaling, but this can lead to inconsistencies across cases.
In product design, matching the intensity of a customer's problem to the features of a solution can help prioritize development efforts.
In investing, investors might match the intensity of a positive news story to a stock's potential, leading to overreaction.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Julie's Reading Achievement
When given the fact that Julie read fluently at age four, people naturally match her precocity to other dimensions: they estimate that a man as tall as Julie is precocious would be around 6-7 feet, and they match her reading to a corresponding income level, crime severity, or GPA. System 1 automatically translates between different intensity scales.
Crime and Punishment Matching
In classic experiments, participants adjusted the loudness of a sound to match the severity of crimes. For example, mass murder might be matched to a very loud sound, while a minor traffic violation would be matched to a soft sound. This shows how people intuitively match intensities across different domains, and they sense injustice if the punishments don't match the crime's intensity.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Think of a recent decision you made where you matched the intensity of one factor (like effort or risk) to another (like reward). How might that have influenced your decision?
When predicting someone's future success based on a single early achievement, how does intensity matching lead to errors? Can you think of an example where such a prediction was wrong?
In what ways can awareness of intensity matching help you avoid common biases in evaluations, such as in hiring or performance reviews?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)