A Foolish Consistency....

... is not just the hobgoblin of little minds. Consistency at the expense of reason seems to be a universal feature of our thought. Libertarians and other economists seem pretty certain that presenting people with greater choice is a positive good, but the evidence doesn't back them up. We mostly don't like having to decide and tend to adopt drastic economies when forced to choose.

We have a whole set of strategies for minimizing the difficulty of decision making. I mentioned one in my previous post: faced with a three way choice we tend to make the easy choice even at the expense of global optimization. An even more important one is a kind of imprinting - choosing whatever was closest to our previous similar choice. Dan Arielly refers to this as arbitrary coherence - essentially sticking with whatever choice we first made.

Arielly is interested in the economic implications, but it also applies to the rest of the universe. We pick a sports team, a political party, a church, and maybe even an attitude toward the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and once picked these choices are usually pretty durable.

There is a strong element of irrationality here, because those choices tend to promote seemingly suboptimal behavior - think of Joe the Plumber and his attitude toward taxes. This irrationality has a strong evolutionary motive, though - maintaining a consistent world view. An inconsistent world view makes decision making difficult or impossible, and that can be worse than the consequences of bad or at least suboptimal decisions. There is a saying in chess that a bad plan is better than no plan.