Sendhil Mullainathan: Task switching is hard because we do not control...

The scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors that maintain or reinforce their future disadvantage. If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that youll have little in the future.

Sendhil Mullainathan

scarcity littles people

Policymakers think that if they get the abstractions right, that will drive behavior in the desired direction. But the world happens in real time.

Sendhil Mullainathan

real world thinking

January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

Sendhil Mullainathan

new-year self years

Eat better or work out more, and youll see the benefits weeks, months or years down the road. Sleep more, and youll see the benefits tomorrow.

Sendhil Mullainathan

work-out sleep years

The ability to save automatically is among the most powerful tools available to us.

Sendhil Mullainathan

ability powerful tools

Faced with a time shortage, we squeeze tasks into the nooks and crannies of our calendar, leaving less and less time to switch between them. As a result, we become less and less productive exactly when we need to be most productive.

Sendhil Mullainathan

leaving tasks needs

The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. 'Big data' is terrific, but it's usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.

Sendhil Mullainathan

nothing understand problem work

Serial tasking is hard because switching tasks is hard, even when the tasks are easy and similar. In some experiments, bilingual speakers are asked to read out numbers, first in one language and then midway in another language. They often stumble at the switch, taking many tries before they hit their stride again.

Sendhil Mullainathan

hard language easy numbers

As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you're very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in.

Sendhil Mullainathan

your you understanding world

The amount of resources we put in are disparate. We put billions of dollars into fuel-efficient technologies. How much are we putting into energy behavior change in a credible, systematic, testing way?

Sendhil Mullainathan

behavior energy change way

Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is 'scarcity,' and anyone who has the experience of 'having very little' experiences the same psychology.

Sendhil Mullainathan

something poverty experience special

It's 2014, and women are still paid less than men. Does this suggest that a gender pay gap is an unfortunately permanent fixture? Will it still be with us in 50 years? I would predict yes. But by that point, it will be men who will be earning less than women.

Sendhil Mullainathan

will gender women men

Even when a man and a woman perform equally well in a task - say, solving math problems - men are more willing to enter competitions based on that task. Men also show less risk aversion.

Sendhil Mullainathan

woman problems man men

If someone who is poor says, 'I may not have much money, but for me, what's really important is to have a good television so my family can enjoy and watch,' we should be a little careful and recognize that just like we all have individual liberty to make the choices we want, that we not judge too much on that.

Sendhil Mullainathan

good me family money

No one would say, 'Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it.' We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? 'Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let's put it out there.'

Sendhil Mullainathan

good think you people

Marketing is selling an ad to a firm. So, in some sense, a lot of marketing is about convincing a CEO, 'This is a good ad campaign.' So, there is a little bit of slippage there. That's just a caveat. That's different from actually having an effective ad campaign.

Sendhil Mullainathan

some good marketing different

Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources - psychologists call them working memory and executive control - that we use in nearly every activity.

Sendhil Mullainathan

memory mistake time people

Time can be dissected easily: an hour can be cut up in many ways. Fifteen minutes on this memo, a five-minute walk to another meeting, 30 minutes at that meeting and then 10 minutes debriefing. Oh, and maybe a quick phone call on the walk to that meeting. The busy are expert at dissection: that's how they make it all fit.

Sendhil Mullainathan

phone-call walk busy time

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

Sendhil Mullainathan

some-people you poor people

One cost, for the lonely: If you want to be interesting, the one thing you shouldn't do is really focus on the fact that 'I want this person to like me.' That's going to make you very uninteresting. But the lonely, they just can't help but focus on that.

Sendhil Mullainathan

person me you focus

Task switching is hard because we do not control what is on our mind. Despite our efforts, the original task continues to occupy our mental bandwidth. Although we can control where our time goes, we cannot fully control how our bandwidth is allocated.