#28 Ostrich Effect: Why you really should just go to the doctor
If information can help us make good decisions, why would we sometimes actively avoid it? In this episode, Mel and Dan discuss the ostrich effect, and how brands can overcome the tendency we have to bury our heads in the sand.
Mel: 00:20 Hi, and welcome to Bad Decisions.
Dan: 00:22 The show that helps us to understand why we choose what we choose.
Mel: 00:24 Why we think what we think.
Dan: 00:25 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.
Mel: 00:28 I'm Dr. Mel Weinberg. I'm a performance psychologist.
Dan: 00:30 And I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat. So Mel.
Mel: 00:45 Yes, Dan.
Dan: 00:46 Look, I know we usually start these shows with me having some ridiculous story, sounding like an idiot. And then you come in like the smart therapist that you are.
Mel: 00:54 I wasn't going to say that you sound like an idiot..
Dan: 00:56 And explain to me how I've been doing it all wrong, but I'm not doing that today. Because today, spoiler alert, we are talking about the ostrich effect. And in doing some work, some prep, some research for this show today-
Mel: 01:09 Which we do plenty of.
Dan: 01:10 Always. I have to let you know I'm furious. I'm outraged. Not since I learned that pigs don't sweat, despite the saying 'sweating like a pig' have I been so upset for one member of the animal kingdom.
Mel: 01:25 Dan, I hear you.
Dan: 01:28 Because ... I'm not finished. Let me tell you why I'm so mad. The ostrich effect. Obviously, people are going to go, "Oh, it's the ostrich effect. It's to do with people putting their heads in the sand." Right? Because that's what ostriches do. Right?
Mel: 01:41 That's what I understand.
Dan: 01:44 Wrong, they don't! Sorry. Wrong, Mel.
Mel: 01:47 Wow. Okay. This has taken a turn.
Dan: 01:49 Well, it's not like there's hundreds of things that the ostrich is known for. Tell me some of the things about the ostrich.
Mel: 01:55 I don't know much about the ostrich.
Dan: 01:57 You don't know much about the ostrich?
Mel: 01:57 No, I believe they bury their head in the sand.
Dan: 01:59 Yeah. The one thing that people know is completely fictitious.
Mel: 02:01 So they don't bury their heads in the sand?
Dan: 02:02 They don't bury their heads in the sand; they can stand up to nine feet tall; they can run 60 kilometers an hour. They can kill a lion with a single kick. And the only thing people know is that they put their head in the sand, which is wrong.
Mel: 02:13 I can hear your frustration. Your frustration seems valid.
Dan: 02:16 Yep. Shall we move on?
Mel: 02:19 Are we done? I don't mean to dismiss your emotions in any way.
Dan: 02:22 Yeah. I don't feel dismissed. I feel heard. Let's get on.
Mel: 02:24 Good good. I'm glad. I just hope that everybody listening also acknowledges that you have this anger.
Dan: 02:31 No, don't acknowledge that I have the anger. Acknowledge that this is an unfairness. It's a tragedy to members of the ostrich family. Let's get on with it. Let's talk about the ostrich effect.
Mel: 02:39 Look, I don't mean to blame anybody, but the term ostrich effect-
Dan: 02:44 Oh, here we go.
Mel: 02:45 Was actually given to us by Galai and Sade in 2005.
Dan: 02:50 Oh wait, let me just write them down. You guys are on my list.
Mel: 02:54 They were a couple of Israeli researchers who coined the term the ostrich effect. And they defined it as the tendency for people to avoid apparently risky financial situations by just pretending they do not exist. For lack of a better phrase, we bury our heads in the sand.
Dan: 03:12 Like birds do or don't do. Regardless, I understand the appeal of that.
Mel: 03:16 Now that we all understand a little bit more about ostriches Dan, and thank you for providing us with that really important information-
Dan: 03:20 You're welcome. Just doing what I can.
Mel: 03:20 May I provide some real science?
Dan: 03:26 Oh, don't trigger me, Mel.
Mel: 03:28 Let me give you some research.
Dan: 03:37 All right.
Mel: 03:37 So in 2016, Carlsson, Lowenstein and Sepi did some investigation into this idea of the ostrich effect and what they did was they compared behaviour of investors in both Sweden and the US. So what they're looking at really was how often do investors monitor their portfolios when the market's rising or falling, right?
Mel: 03:57 They wondered whether their behaviour will change in response to what the market's doing. And what they actually found was that when the stock market was down, investors would actively avoid looking at their portfolio.
Dan: 04:07 Yeah, of course.
Mel: 04:08 Of course?
Dan: 04:09 Yeah. It's not going down if I don't know it.
Mel: 04:12 That's exactly what the ostrich effect is all about. And this tendency to avoid is something that we see a lot. I mean, I see a lot, I guess, from a psychology perspective, it's common for us to avoid it. But I guess it's a problem when we think about what it does to our decisions, because traditionally, decision-making would tell us that in order to make the best decision for us, it would surely be helpful to us to have all of the information at hand, right?
Mel: 04:39 If we know everything, then we can the best place to make a decision about what's good for us and what's not. The problem is when it comes to the ostrich effect, is that in this instance we're actively avoiding information and that information could be helpful to us. So it doesn't quite make sense. Does it?
Dan: 04:53 I mean, we might make better informed decisions, but we might also be sad because there's a letter here from my bank, which I'm pretty sure is a credit card statement, but if I don't open it, I don't know about that. I've got other things to do.
Mel: 05:04 Yeah. And I mean, look, from a psychological perspective, there's a few things that come into this, that underpin why we might avoid information. For a start, it's probably worth considering the idea of selective attention, right? We can't just attend to every single piece of information that is available to us. It's too much, it's overwhelming to us. We don't have the capacity to deal with all of these things. And so we have to, to some extent, filter out information.
Dan: 05:30 Yeah, I hear you. But also, that feels like a poor excuse.
Mel: 05:33 Well, that's the thing.
Dan: 05:34 I don't really have time to be an adult.
Mel: 05:36 I've got too much to do. I can't attend to everything. Look, the concern with regard to the ostrich effect, as we've sort of said, is that we'd ordinarily filter out information that isn't relevant or helpful. The thing is that in this instance, we're actively avoiding information and filtering out information that could help us. We're just choosing to filter it out.
Mel: 05:56 When it comes to avoidance and this idea of avoiding particular information, there are a number of reasons why we might do it. So from a psychological perspective, avoiding things can have some benefits to us.
Dan: 06:08 Sure.
Mel: 06:08 Right? Sometimes, if we think about something that we know is going to make us uncomfortable, then we don't want to do it. So it would be much more helpful to us in some instances to just avoid thinking or feeling about things that are going to make us feel like crap.
Dan: 06:23 Yeah. So much happier. In fact, you know who probably has been a big contributor to this, knowingly or unknowingly?
Mel: 06:29 Who's that?
Dan: 06:30 Your mate, what's his name? Positive psychology guy, Martin Seligman. Is that his name?
Mel: 06:34 What about him? Not my mate, by the way.
Dan: 06:37 Your mate. The world of positive psychology is really just focused on the good stuff. Just ignore the bad things! Don't worry about addressing weaknesses, just focus on the strengths. Weaknesses: I have obesity, my credit card's due and I have a toothache that won't go away. I'm just not going to focus on those things because they are going to let me down. And instead, I'm just going to focus on everything that's good in life.
Mel: 07:01 So just in defence of all the positive psychologists out there who do some wonderful work that you probably misrepresented them a little bit.
Dan: 07:07 They do, they probably do. The thing is, if they're doing bad work, they don't want to know about it anyway.
Mel: 07:11 I'm going to leave that right there.
Dan: 07:12 Okay, yeah. Love your work everybody!
Mel: 07:15 But we're all very familiar with the idea of avoidance coping in, for example, the health industry. So I'm sure all of us have been in this situation where you might notice that there's something not quite right with you and you're feeling a little bit off, but you're like, "You know what? I don't need to go to the doctor for this."
Dan: 07:32 As a middle aged white male, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Mel: 07:35 You've never really thought, "Oh look, that's a strange thing on my skin."
Dan: 07:40 No.
Mel: 07:40 But no, I don't really want to know what it is. If I go to the doctor, they're going to tell me it's something bad. They're going to make me have some medicine. They're going to make me have some procedures that I don't want. So it's just easier to not know.
Dan: 07:50 Yeah. I think the last time I actually went to a doctor, the original series of Beverly Hills 90210 was still new.
Mel: 07:56 Great reference. And I appreciate that. And would like to talk about that further. However-
Dan: 08:01 But not for today's episode.
Mel: 08:08 There are all sorts of reasons why, as we've just discussed, why we might actually avoid certain bits of information or just not want to deal with them. If we don't deal with them, then they're not there, and then we don't get annoyed about them. We're not making any judgment call on avoidance per se, right? It's not the case necessarily that avoidance is always bad.
Dan: 08:24 Well, I would like to make a small judgment call, which is to say that I think part of adulting, becoming an adult is learning to stop avoiding stuff. There's nobody coming to pick up for you. And part of being an adult and a contributing member of society is meeting your obligations, like paying your taxes and paying your credit card bills. And generally, looking after yourself. So small judgment, if you are avoiding all of those things.
Mel: 08:47 Yeah. But all adulting responsibilities and commitments aside, I guess what I'm saying with regard to the idea of avoiding things is that it's not necessarily that avoiding is good or bad in itself. It's more that it's the outcome of it. So there are many instances in which avoiding something might actually be good for you, right?
Mel: 09:04 Like we said before, confronting something might actually introduce more distress than you're able to deal with. So in that sense, avoiding things or avoiding something in particular could be beneficial for you. We've talked about this with regard to the Choice Paradox, right? The idea that too much information can sometimes be overwhelming and can hold you back from actually making a decision.
Mel: 09:23 So in those cases, avoiding something or avoiding many things that could disrupt your decision making process is probably going to lead to you making a better decision and being more satisfied with it. But in a number of cases, intentionally avoiding information can lead us to a bad decision. And that's where we need to be careful.
Dan: 09:40 Yeah. And I think if we were to swing a marketing lens onto this now where I really think about this being a problem is if you are selling any sort of remedial product. So if you are selling a financial counselling service or weight loss or really any sort of health related products or service, people are ignoring their way out of becoming your customer. It's like if they knew how much trouble they were in or going to get in, they would gladly and willingly be your customer, but they've got their head in the sand like some unnamed bird, which may or may not do that.
Dan: 10:14 And they are not only blocking themselves from knowing about this, but they are blocking you from getting a customer. So working out how to circumvent this effect, the O effect, is ... I'm going to call it the ostrich effect, which is no endorsement of the term. But for the coherence of this episode, working on how to circumvent the ostrich effect is really important for a number of industries out there.
Mel: 10:35 I think of this with regard to the idea of ... Have you ever been in a car accident? Even just a little one.
Dan: 10:41 A little one.
Mel: 10:42 I have, I've been in a car accident. It wasn't my fault. Never is.
Dan: 10:45 Never is. That tree just jumped out of nowhere.
Mel: 10:48 I wasn't even driving, all right? But the intersection where it occurred, if I could, I'd rather just avoid it. That intersection triggers unpleasant memories for me, unpleasant thoughts. I don't like it.
Dan: 11:00 I think the official term is heebie-jeebies. It gives you the heebie-jeebies.
Mel: 11:04 I mean, I guess it's no surprise that I would use the term avoidance. However, in that instance, it's much more preferable for me to just avoid that intersection. And I'm sure many people can relate to this. The idea is this usually isn't an issue. The avoidance in that sense is helpful. It actually prevents you from actually feeling any of that distress.
Mel: 11:22 It usually only becomes a problem if, for example, you were to get a new job and the quickest and most efficient way to get to work is to drive directly through that intersection. Right? At that point, you've got a choice to make. Do you circumvent that discomfort by taking the scenic route to work, which might add an extra 30 to 40 minutes of travel time but you're going to avoid the distress of that intersection. Or do you just confront, make your way through that intersection, deal with the discomfort.
Dan: 11:53 This actually sounds like a good setup for Scooby Doo episode where there's a haunted intersection that everybody wants to avoid. And at some point, they realise it's just the owner of a shop that used to be there and missed having people around or something. Anyway, less intersections, more brands. So this is exactly what brands are dealing with that have to confront the ostrich effect.
Dan: 12:13 So the idea of people are avoiding becoming your customer because it's uncomfortable to think about the fact that they are more overweight than they'd like to be or in more financial hardship than they'd like to be. So I've actually got five things that I think brands can do to overcome this effect if they're confronted with it.
Dan: 12:29 So the first one is to make the discomfort from avoiding the issue greater than the discomfort of confronting it. So to do that, we need to dramatise, we need to extrapolate, we need to use emotion. We need to do everything we can to dial up how bad things are going to be if you don't actually deal with the thing you need to deal with, which is going to lend you to my product, business or service.
Mel: 12:47 Okay.
Dan: 12:48 So that's one. The second thing I think we could do is if we acknowledge that people are avoiding this because it's a negative and an icky thing to deal with, what we could do is reframe that negative into a positive, but the positive can't just be the bad thing's going to go away. The positive has to be awesome in its own right.
Dan: 13:06 So let's say if you're a financial counselling service, people just don't want to deal with that because I just don't want to think about how much debt I'm in and all those sorts of things. But if you actually targeted people by talking about how to start building a property portfolio or how to achieve true financial independence, all of a sudden, this is now an enjoyable, positive thing that I'm going to go explore and not an icky negative thing. But I'm pretty sure when you turn up to the first seminar about how to build a property portfolio, they're going to tell you to pay down your credit card bill. But you're there for a positive reason, not to alleviate a negative.
Mel: 13:37 So does that hark back to what you talked about before that if somebody is feeling bad, don't just say, "Oh, just be happy." That's not going to do the trick.
Dan: 13:43 No.
Mel: 13:44 Right, got you.
Dan: 13:44 Just be really, really happy.
Mel: 13:46 That'll fix you.
Dan: 13:48 All right. The third thing that I've thought about here is that people are uncomfortable dealing with something. And one of the ways that we can make people less uncomfortable with something is to make it more familiar.
Mel: 13:59 Definitely.
Dan: 13:59 And if you roll back to, I don't remember what episode it was, but we talked about the Mere Exposure Effect.
Mel: 14:04 I remember.
Dan: 14:05 Do you remember the definition?
Mel: 14:05 Of course not.
Dan: 14:09 You call yourself a doctor! With a laptop in front of you as well. So, the Mere Exposure Effect was the idea that things become more likeable just because we become more familiar with them because we're exposed to them more and more times. So I think about all of the options there, especially through digital and social channels, with subtle targeting and remarketing, to get people slowly more and more familiar and more and more comfortable with whatever it is we're trying to get them to confront, so that it's not such a huge leap to go and tackle it.
Dan: 14:38 And probably bundled in with that is giving people a really easy on ramp. So it's like just a 30 second survey or a two minute call or a 15 minute appointment, just to make it easier for people to get started back on the right path.
Mel: 14:50 Increased familiarity, reduced discomfort. Got you.
Dan: 14:52 Exactly. That's pretty much what I said in a less articulate format. So number four is the idea of trying to automate as much as you can for people. So you're basically making the trade off for them to think about it once and have it solved lots and lots of times.
Dan: 15:04 So obviously, signing up to personal trainers is one place where we see this, where you're sort of motivated to correct your lifestyle or your health wants. And a trainer is going to turn up to your door at 6:00 AM every Wednesday until you say stop. But another place where we've seen this really come to life is in the subscription meal kits. So whether that's with the Light and Easy's or the Marley Spoon's of the world, what these guys do is they take the notion that at some point in time, you have decided to try and eat better and they have automated the service of eating better by sending calorie-controlled, portion-controlled, ready to go meals basically until you tell them to stop.
Mel: 15:41 Nice. I like it.
Dan: 15:43 Yeah. And I think number five is the idea that our imagination is a pretty amazing thing. And I think often when we're avoiding something, we think that the cost of dealing with it is far greater than it is. And the impact of not dealing with it is far less than it is. So it's like, "Oh, I've got something weird, it feels weird somewhere on me. It's going to be such a pain in the ass to go to the doctor. I'm going to have to take half a day off work. I'm always going to get stuck waiting in the waiting room. I'm probably going to get sick while I'm there. And it's probably nothing anyway."
Dan: 16:13 And if we can start shredding through that with some real data that it's actually only going to take you a 15 minute online consultation and you could die! And if you could die, then you should probably deal with it now, not later. The notion of giving real data to remove people's imaginations about how good and bad things could be, I think would also massively help.
Mel: 16:35 That's good.
Dan: 16:36 Quite comprehensive.
Mel: 16:36 That's five strong tips. There's a lot there. That last one. It sounds to me like you're talking about the idea of when there's an emotion attached to something that if you can actually present them with the rational objective data and that should take people out of it, yeah?
Dan: 16:48 Should.
Mel: 16:49 That's sort of what I think about when I think about how people just in general can avoid ostriching, if we can use the term that way.
Dan: 16:57 Yeah, of course we can.
Mel: 16:57 How to avoid ostriching.
Dan: 16:59 It's completely factitious anyway. You can conjugate it however you want.
Mel: 17:02 So the idea that I think about is that if you're avoiding something, it's because you've got an emotional attachment to it. So from a psychological perspective, what I want to do is to distance you from that. So the way that I would do that or one way to create some psychological distance would be to say, "If this weren't happening to you at all, if this was happening to a friend-"
Dan: 17:21 The old asking for a friend technique.
Mel: 17:22 What would you tell your friend? What advice would you give to a friend who was in this situation? So it's the same sort of idea. I'm trying to take away that emotional attachment to it which can help people to see things in a different light.
Dan: 17:33 I would tell my friend to pay the damn credit card bill before they ruin their financial track record.
Mel: 17:38 Probably some good advice.
Dan: 17:39 Yeah. I don't need to take that advice because I haven't opened a credit card statement in years. But I'm fine.
Mel: 17:45 The other thing that I would suggest to people who may be ostriching would be, if you can identify, and it's not hard to identify for yourself when you're avoiding a task, right? I think we all know it. The whole point is we're doing it consciously. We're consciously avoiding it. Sometimes we can ask ourselves, what are we actually avoiding? In the case of going to the doctor that you mentioned, what am I actually afraid of? What am I avoiding? What am I afraid of? Oh, I'm afraid that this is actually really something bad.
Mel: 18:09 In that case, surely the best course of action is actually to do something about it. Early intervention would have to be better than letting it just sort of sit there and grow.
Dan: 18:17 Damn you and your rational arguments. That makes so much sense.
Mel: 18:23 So I think that's pretty much a wrap on the ostrich effect.
Dan: 18:25 Yeah. All right. I think so too. Do you want to give us the definition one more time? The ostrich effect is-
Mel: 18:31 Is the tendency to actively avoid information just by pretending it doesn't exist.
Dan: 18:35 Yeah. Which may or may not be named after a bird that does or doesn't do that.
Mel: 18:39 At your discretion.
Dan: 18:40 Yeah, and we talked about how avoiding information in its own right is maybe not bad, but it can lead to bad outcomes.
Mel: 18:48 Definitely if it leads to bad decisions and that's why you're here, really.
Dan: 18:51 And if pain persists-
Mel: 18:53 Please see your doctor.
Dan: 18:54 All right. And then we talked about very briefly, rapid fire succession, five things that brands can do about this. So that was about dialing up the discomfort from avoiding the issue; reframing the negative into a positive; making people more comfortable by repeated subtle exposure to what you want them to do; automate as much as possible and replace imagination with real data. And then you talked about what peeps can do.
Mel: 19:17 Just what you can do. What would you do if it was a friend in that situation? And really just identifying and acknowledging I'm avoiding something: what am I avoiding? What am I so afraid of?
Dan: 19:26 Yeah. And just get on with it.
Mel: 19:28 Confront it.
Dan: 19:28 You're probably going to be fine. Confront your demons. All right. Psychological advice provided to you by me.
Mel: 19:36 Oh dear.
Dan: 19:38 And often corrected by you. Don't do that. I'm not a therapist.
Mel: 19:42 He's really not.
Dan: 19:42 No, but I am on the internet. You can find me @danmonheit all over the place.
Mel: 19:47 And I'm @drmelw.
Dan: 19:49 All right, we'll see you all next time. Pull your head out of the sand, people.