Blog: The Perfectly Irrational Day

Nobody wakes up thinking, “Today I will be irrational.”

And yet, most days work out that way.

Ada has a presentation at 10 a.m. She's been rehearsing it for three days — in the shower, on the commute, at 2 a.m. while pretending to sleep. She knows it's cold. She could probably give it half-asleep.

Ada is a lawyer at Simpson & Simpson. Her boss thinks she is exceptional. He says it in performance reviews, in passing, in the way he hands her out the interesting problems, and Ada always delivers. In the last year, she has been promoted twice. Slowly, almost invisibly, Ada begins behaving like the capable person her boss already believes she is. Although anxious about meeting her boss's expectations for the presentation, she is still ready to give it to her all.

Psychologists call this the Pygmalion Effect—the quiet way other people's expectations shape how we perform.

Ada doesn't know any of this. Unable to go back to sleep, she wakes up two hours before her alarm and makes herself some coffee.

Ada opens her phone's news feed and comes across an article explaining the food matrix. She's never heard of the term before. By the time she finishes her coffee, she's seen it three more times. A tweet. A podcast title. A caption under someone's breakfast photo.

Suddenly, it feels like the internet discovered food matrices overnight. It didn't. Ada did.

Once your brain notices something, it starts flagging every instance of it. The world hasn't changed. Your filter has. Psychologists call this the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

She makes a mental note to eat better — she has a croissant.

On the train to work, a man drops his bag. Papers scatter across the floor.

For a moment, nobody moves.

Ada looks around. The man kneels to gather the papers himself. Then Ada bends down to help. Two others follow.

On the platform afterwards, she wonders why she hesitated. She's a considerate person. She would have helped immediately if she'd been alone.

She's probably right.

When many people are present, responsibility becomes spread too thin. Everyone waits for someone else to act first. Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané called this the Bystander Effect. It is easier to postpone action when there are others around.

At the office, her presentation was excellent. Her boss is impressed yet again.

Later, she goes to get a cup of coffee and meets her colleague James in the kitchen.

James discovered intermittent fasting eight days ago and has since become an authority on insulin response, metabolic windows, and how prehistoric humans supposedly ate. He is eager to share his knowledge, and Ada listens politely.

He is confident, as people often are, when they know just enough not to doubt themselves yet.

Psychologists call this the Dunning–Kruger Effect. Confidence spikes early, before competence catches up. Real experts often sound less certain. They know how complicated things actually are.

Ada nods politely, smiling at herself as she recalls at least four times when she exhibited the same behaviour.

In the afternoon meeting, the department head asks if everyone is aligned on the new reporting structure. The room nods. Ada nods too, although she has some concerns.

Later at lunch, a colleague raises the same concerns she had, and others join in. She realizes that most people in the meeting had concerns, but, like her, no one brought them up.

Psychologists call this Pluralistic ignorance — when a group privately disagrees but publicly performs agreement; each person's silence convinces everyone else that the consensus is real.

The strange thing about pluralistic ignorance is how fragile it is. Sometimes it takes only one person to say, “Actually, I'm not sure,” for the entire room to exhale.

Ada finds the realization unsettling. That's new.

At home, a podcast sends her down a rabbit hole, as podcasts tend to do. She reads about the Dancing Plague of 1518. A woman in Strasbourg began dancing in the street and couldn't stop. Within weeks, hundreds of people had joined her. Some danced for days. Some collapsed from exhaustion. No music. No plans. It simply spread. Researchers now know that behaviour travels through social networks in similar ways. Happiness spreads. Loneliness spreads. So do obesity, generosity, and political participation.

Your friend's friend is shaping your behaviour right now. You didn't choose it, you caught it. Ada wonders how much of the person she has been lately is someone she decided to become, and how much she simply absorbed from the people around her.

The answer isn't obvious.

Before bed, she decides to assemble the shelf she bought three weeks ago, which she has been ignoring. Forty minutes. One brief argument with the diagram.

The shelf is set. She loves it. More than she would have loved the exact same shelf if it had arrived already assembled. Researchers found the same thing with flat-pack furniture and origami cranes. People consistently value things they made themselves more than identical expert-made versions. Psychologists call this the IKEA Effect. Effort creates attachments. You don't just own the things you build. You feel them.

In bed, Ada thinks about the events of her day — her actions and interactions.

It was a surprisingly interesting day.

And when you really think about it, you might recognize yourself somewhere on Ada's day.