What drives people to make decisions? Dan Ariely, the great behavioral economist, when he talks about his research starts from a question: what is the best possible strategy when you have to remove a plaster? Do you prefer to take it off with a dry and decisive pull or gradually, gently removing it from the skin?
The same question is used by Luciano Canova, professor of economics of happiness, to start his book I choose, therefore I am (Egea 2016; 144 pages; 15 euros).
“… it may seem silly” says Canova, “but how you take off a plaster is a good metaphor for what we do when we make a decision: aggregating information to find the result of a hedonic calculation.
Pleasure and pain are the two springs that guide our existences and our evaluations, so"even standard economics is based on the idea that human beings are perfectly rational and, faced with a choice, they process the information of the context to reach the optimal one, that is capable of making them reach the maximum level of utility” states the author.
However, the truth is that we are not able to perform the famous hedonic calculation correctly. The brain is not designed to measure pain and pleasure exactly, moment-to-moment, so that memory can be accurate. Rather, it applies a rule of thumb: essentially, one remembers very well the peak moment of an experience and the final moment.
Canova explains this by quoting 2001 A Space Odyssey, one of his favorite films. “The fact is that, however, if I have to give an evaluation of the film, the outcome of the mental calculation does not take into account all the moments that made it up, but an overall evaluation and, above all, how I remember my entertainment or my boredom during the film”.
So here is the scientific demonstration of how important it is, when removing a plaster, to proceed gradually, with gentle pulls, to ensure that the pain does not reach peaks and is never too intense.
Canova proposes a journey along the planets of human behavior in which he tries to clear irrationality to bring it into the life of each of us as a daily element of our choices. The last chapters are dedicated to the role that emotions have and the weight they exert on decision making, making a quick examination of the major scientific evidence to support the tranchant judgment of the economist Ariel Rubinstein that psychology and economics are traveling companions a little capricious and that they will never be able to achieve full harmony.
Luciano Canova teaches at the Enrico Mattei school and at the University of Pavia as a professor of the Economy of Happiness.
