Counterintuition

Why we fall in love with--or just fall for--surprising ideas

“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.”
-Jim Thompson

Why are many business, success, and self-improvement books built on “counterintuitive” concepts?

Some examples:

• Gallup’s 1999 book First, Break All the Rules illustrates the failings of the “conventional wisdom” about performance management and employee retention.
• Books on productivity and work/life balance turn familiar arrangements on their heads; witness Ricardo Semler’s Seven Day Weekend and Timothy Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week.
• Julie Morgenstern’s Making Work Work was renamed Never Check E-mail in the Morning. Apparently, even that was insufficiently counterintuitive, so someone had to tell us the book was surprising by adding the subtitle “and other unexpected strategies for making your work life work.”
• Malcolm Gladwell challenged our sense of proportion in cause/effect relationships with The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. More recent works in this subgenre include The Power of Less, The Power of Small, and The Power of Slow.

Why do authors and publishers push the counterintuitive? Maybe, counter-intuitively, such ideas hold an intuitive appeal. Perhaps we automatically, instinctively give them more weight than their accuracy or significance merits.

Caught by Surprise

In Made To Stick, Dan and Chip Heath suggest that ideas tend to stick when they surprise us. They describe the physiological reaction to surprise--widening eyes, gaping mouth, cessation of speech and movement--and the apparent function of this reaction:

So surprise acts as a kind of emergency override when we confront something unexpected and our guessing machines fail. Things come to a halt, ongoing activities are interrupted, our attention focuses involuntarily on the event that surprised us.

The counterintuitive, of course, runs counter to our intuitions. This surprises, and surprise captures attention.

Memorably Counterintuitive

Once they grab our attention, counterintuitive ideas often find a handhold in our memories.

Barrett and Nyhof (2001, as cited in Upal, Gonce, Tweney, & Slone, 2007) conducted research on the recall of concepts contained in Native American folktales and in a story about an alien museum. The stories used included intuitive concepts (such as a being that was self-aware), counterintuitive concepts (such as an immortal being), and merely bizarre concepts (such as a 1000-lb. being). They found that recall was best for the counterintuitive, and worst for the intuitive.

In discussing other memory research and their own experiments, Upal et al. suggest that the ever-frugal brain assumes it can reconstruct or reacquire intuitive information using what is already known; since it would be more difficult to reconstruct counterintuitive information, the brain encodes a new memory instead. The counterintuitive stands out in our memories.

Need for Novelty

In Satisfaction, Dr. Gregory Berns explores neuroscience, cooking, Icelandic mythology, S&M, and 100-mile ultra-marathons (which might, themselves, be classified as S&M). He sought the source of satisfaction, and formed this theory:

If you believe that the world is unpredictable . . . then a straightforward way to counteract such unpredictability is to motivate humans to better their predictions. . . .

The drive to predict leads to a single outcome in a fundamentally unpredictable world--the need for novelty. I have come to understand novelty as the one thing that we all want.

One way to pin down novelty is through its relationship with information. Novel events, when they occur, contain a great deal of information that you don't already know.

I would expect counterintuitive ideas to be more novel, on average, than intuitive ideas. They promise new information, so we may feel driven to seek them.

Bored by Common Sense

Back in Made to Stick, the Heaths point out that we don’t pay attention to new information if we do not feel a corresponding gap in our knowledge. Per the Heaths:

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other. And why shouldn't they? If I already intuitively "get" what you're trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it?

Counterintuitive information enjoys a clear advantage over common sense.

What does this mean?

There seem to be good reasons why counterintuition captures attention and remains memorable. Why should we care?

We are biased in favor of counterintuitive information because it is likely to contain new and novel information, not necessarily because that information is valuable, or even true. For example, both The Secret and Predictably Irrational dispute the conventional wisdom. The Secret does so with anecdotal stories, metaphysical assertions, and a misunderstanding of quantum physics. Predictably Irrational does so with extensive behavioral economics experiments by a social scientist at MIT.

Sometimes, a concept is counterintuitive because it contradicts reality. If we stay conscious of the power of surprise, maybe we can evaluate new ideas on merit, rather than unexpectedness.

Monday, October 26, 2009