Librarius Booker, Confabulation and Choice Blindness

Jimmy Kimmel has a terrific regular feature on his show he calls Lie Witness News, whereby his crew asks people about non-existent events or people and waits for a series of often hilarious, fabricated responses.  In the recent “Miami Heat edition,” Kimmel’s crew discovered that even those who claimed to be big Heat fans and who lived in Miami knew a lot less about “their” team than they claimed.  These fans were asked what they thought of a whole litany of ridiculous things which did not exist, such as Miami’s peek-a-boo defense (in response to San Antonio’s rhombus offense), back-up point guard MooShu Pork and his being fined for criticizing the officials, Heat coach Eric Estrada, and LeBron James’ painful injury (a bruised vulva). The answers are hysterical.  My favorite is the following about alleged Heat player Libraius Booker.

“He’s gonna get to get a ring.  At the end of the day, Librarius Booker’s gonna have a ring.  A lot of people aren’t gonna have a ring at the end of the day, y’know what I’m saying? Carmelo’s not gonna have a ring.  But Librarius Booker is gonna have a ring.” 

Watch it below.

  

As Jimmy points out, some of his victims have surely jumped on the Miami bandwagon. But the real problem is confabulation, which occurs when people distort, misinterpret or even fabricate things without any apparent conscious intention to deceive. Those who suffer from confabulation are typically very confident about what they claim to “know,” evidence notwithstanding.  Its more extreme forms are caused by brain damage or dementia. However, research has shown that prodding people to answer when they don’t know often results in a confabulated response.  Add a television camera and the desire to get some fame by providing an apparently well-considered answer must be strong indeed.

Morten Kringelbach, an Oxford neuroscientist, suspects that confabulation is often routine.  According to him, one intriguing possibility is that we simply do not have access to all of the unconscious information on which we base our decisions, so we create fictions upon which to rationalize them. That’s a scary addendum to the narrative fallacy – our tendency to look backward and create a pattern to fit events and to construct a story that explains what happened along with what caused it to happen.

This willingness to delude ourselves may help to explain the research which shows that what people think or claim their investment returns were and what those returns actually were have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Nearly everyone claims to have done much better in the markets than they actually have.

A related and perhaps even bigger issue is choice blindness.  Careful research in this area demonstrates that people are all too willing to miss glaring mismatches between their intentions and outcomes, while nevertheless being prepared to offer introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did.

In one experiment, subjects were shown pairs of cards with pictures of faces on them and asked to choose the more attractive. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the person showing the cards was a magician who routinely then swapped the rejected card for the selected one. The subjects were then shown the rejected face and asked why they picked the way they did. Often the swap went completely unnoticed.  When that happened, subjects came up with all kinds of elaborate explanations relating to the rejected faces for their (nonexistent) choices – about hair color, the look of the eyes or the assumed personality of the substituted face. Clearly people can readily misremember what they did as well as why they did what they did and then confabulate explanations under conditions where they cannot know why they made a particular choice. 

One famous study provided a display of four identical items of clothing and asked subjects to pick which they thought was of the best quality.  Four out of five participants picked the garment on the right (a typical tendency). Yet when asked why they made the choice they did, the answers were always confabulations since the items were identical.  The answers focused on the alleged fineness of the weave, a richer color or superior texture. The likely reason, per Kringelbach, is that we often make our decisions subconsciously but rationalize them in our consciousness via pure fiction, or confabulation. One intriguing study found that we can be convinced we reported symptoms of mental illness that we had never mentioned and, as a result, we can actually start believing we suffer from have those symptoms. 

It is surprisingly common for stroke patients with paralyzed limbs to deny there is anything wrong. These patients often make up elaborate tales to explain away their problems. One patient, for example, had a paralyzed arm, but claimed it was normal.  Yet when neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran offered cash to patients with this type of problem, promising higher rewards for tasks they couldn’t possibly do – such as clapping or changing a light bulb – and lower rewards for tasks they could, they would always attempt the high pay-off task, as if they genuinely had no idea they would fail.

This result is indicative of problems every experienced trader has had to deal with.  These include the common tendency to hang onto losses too long or even to double down on them, our willingness to create after-the-fact (and potentially dangerous) explanations for what happened that have little (if any) basis in fact, and the misremembering of our intentions when things don’t turn out as expected. 

It’s really tough to learn from our mistakes — which is crucial to investment success — when we don’t even recognize what our mistakes were, much less understand why we made them and what they mean, suggest and portend. As if investing weren’t already hard enough….

Advertisement