WE OVERESTIMATE SOCIAL COSTS

WE OVERESTIMATE SOCIAL COSTS

Have you ever lied to your doctor? If so, you’re not alone. In two surveys discussed in The Scout Mindset, 81 percent and 61 percent of patients, respectively, admitted to withholding information from their doctor about important things such as whether they were regularly taking their medication or whether they understood their doctor’s instructions.3 The most common reasons patients gave for this behavior? Embarrassment and a fear of being judged. “Most people want their doctor to think highly of them,” the study’s lead author said.4

Think about that trade-off. An admission that feels embarrassing to you may be familiar to a doctor who has seen many patients with similar difficulties. More important, withholding relevant information can make it harder to receive appropriate care. Fear of judgment deserves to be addressed, but it is also worth weighing against the value of accurate medical advice.

This is another way in which our intuition about costs and benefits is skewed—we overestimate the importance of how we come across to other people. Social costs like looking weird or making a fool out of ourselves feel a lot more significant than they actually are. In reality, other people aren’t thinking about you nearly as much as you intuitively think they are, and their opinions of you don’t have nearly as much impact on your life as it feels like they do.

As a result, we end up making tragic trade-offs, sacrificing a lot of potential happiness to avoid relatively small social costs. If you ask someone out on a date and they say no, that isn’t the end of the world—but it can feel like it is. The prospect of rejection is so stressful that we often come up with rationalizations to justify not doing it, convincing ourselves that we’re not interested in a relationship, or that we don’t have time to date right now, or that no one would want to date us anyway, so it’s not even worth trying.

Tall poppy syndrome, discussed in chapter 2 of The Scout Mindset, is the tendency to cut down people perceived as too ambitious. It’s a real phenomenon, but we overreact to it. Economist Julie Fry studies attitudes about ambition in New Zealand, where tall poppy syndrome has historically been common. One day she got back in touch with a woman she had interviewed two years earlier, to renew the permission to publish her recording.

In the original interview, the woman had claimed she found the idea of ambition unappealing, and preferred to stay put in her career. But now she was happily leading a team at her company. She told Fry that their conversation about ambition two years earlier had caused her to go from thinking, “This is not for me, I’m not interested” to “Well, I don’t have to be brash and grabby, but maybe it’s okay for me to reach out and pick something.”5

When we allow ourselves to reflect on a social cost we’ve been avoiding (or when someone else prompts us to reflect on it, like in the case of this New Zealander), we often realize, “Hey, this isn’t such a big deal after all. I can decide to take on a little more responsibility at work, and it’ll be fine. No one’s going to hate me for that.” But when we leave the decision up to our instincts, even a hint of potential social risk prompts a reflexive “Avoid at all costs!” reaction.

We’ll even risk death to avoid looking foolish in front of strangers. In Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America, writer Mark Svenvold describes being in a motel in El Reno, Oklahoma, as a tornado approached. The motel television blared an alarm, and a warning from the National Weather Service scrolled across the bottom of the screen: “TAKE COVER IMMEDIATELY.” Svenvold wondered if his last hours alive were really going to be spent in a cheap motel.

Yet he hesitated to act. Two local men were drinking beers outside the motel, leaning nonchalantly against their truck, apparently unperturbed by the tornado bearing down upon them. Was he being naive? The motel desk clerk also seemed calm. Svenvold asked her if the motel had a basement where he could take cover. “No, we don’t have a basement,” she replied, with a touch of what he took to be contempt.

As Svenvold later recalled, “The sneer of the motel clerk, a local, shaming me, an unschooled visitor, into denial” and the two men outside “implacably sipping their beer” paralyzed him with indecision. After thirty minutes of second-guessing his own judgment, he noticed the men outside were gone, and only then did he finally feel permitted to flee.6

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We’re overly tempted by immediate payoffs, even when they come at a steep cost later on. We underestimate the cumulative harm of false beliefs, and the cumulative benefit of practicing scout habits. We overestimate how much other people judge us, and how much impact their judgments have on our lives. As a result of all these tendencies, we end up being far too willing to sacrifice our ability to see clearly in exchange for short-term emotional and social rewards. That doesn’t mean scout mindset is always the better choice—but it does mean we have a bias in favor of the soldier, even when the scout is a better choice.

Finding out that our brains have these built-in deviations from optimal decision-making might feel like bad news. But it’s actually good news. It means there’s room for improvement, untapped opportunities to make our lives better, if we can learn to rely less on soldier mindset and more on scout mindset instead.