WS MoreOrLess: Heads Or Tails?
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What is More or Less and who hosts this short edition?
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. You can insert your own statistical pun here. I'm Tim Harford. A little later, we'll be investigating what we can learn by examining the birthdays of World Cup footballers.
The birthday paradox is probably... One of maths' greatest hits. It's something you can say in one line which gives you this kind of wow.
But first, I'd like to claim that the world's most popular economics writer is me. But sadly, we don't live in a just universe. Instead, it's Steve Levitt, prize-winning professor of economics at Chicago, famous data detective, and with the journalist Stephen Dubner, the author of Freakonomics, and more recently, Think Like a Freak. Levitt and Dubner say they want to help people make better decisions. So I sat down with Steve Levitt and asked him about a very unusual project he and Dubner have been working on.
Essentially, we put out the word that if you had a big problem that you were trying to solve, you could come and we would help you. We would help you decide whether you should get a tattoo or go on a diet or quit your job or break up with your boyfriend. Any question you wanted, it didn't matter. And we tried to, through the questions we had... help people think differently about the problem so maybe they could come to some resolution. Many people, even after having done that, still couldn't decide what they should do. And then we did the ultimate favor to these folks, which is that we decided for them. We flipped a coin.
Now, Steve, there is actually someone in the studio with us, my producer, Laura Gray, who is putting her head in her hands. I'm going to take a coin out. Laura, would you mind coming on the mic? Steve, I'm going to give you a coin. Now, Laura has a decision, so tell Steve all about it.
Okay, so my decision is, should I or should I not move in with my boyfriend?
Okay, so if you had to decide today, which way are you leaning?
No. No.
You're leaning no. Okay. And have you in the recent past been leaning yes or you've been leaning no the whole time?
Been leaning yes.
Okay. One thing I think that's helpful in decision making is to first think about if you move in and the worst case scenario and think about how bad that is and how much regret you'll have. Okay. And then think about if you don't move in, the worst case scenario and kind of how much regret you have. Because I think that that's not a crazy way to make decisions is to say, I'm going to take the path where in the worst case, I will have the least regret. So is there one path or the other which feels incredibly like we would have the most regret?
I think I'd have more regret if I didn't move in.
Okay, so heads is going to be move in, tails is going to be not move in. You ready?
Yeah, I'm ready.
We also do a very important option on the website, which is to offer best two out of three if you really want to make sure the gods don't make a mistake. Do you want the two out of three option or do you want to go with just one cause? Just the one. Okay, here we go.
Who is Steven Levitt and what project did he bring to the show?
Heads you move in, tails you don't. Here we go. What were you hoping for?
This is so embarrassing on the radio. I was thinking, yes.
You're hoping for heads?
It was heads. There you have it. Their ultimate tool for decision-making, flipping a coin. What's incredible is that more than 40,000 people have used this site to make decisions. Levitt admits that even with 8,000 people changing their minds on the toss of a coin, he doesn't have statistically robust results to tell us that, for example, if in doubt, we should change direction in life. But he argues that other evidence from economics and psychology suggests that we do tend to be too stuck in our ways.
I think the biases that humans have suggest that there's not enough quitting going on. Changing the path that you're on. Even though today I feel like I should change, I think to myself, OK, I could change today or... I could stick with it for one more day and I could quit tomorrow.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is More or Less and who hosts this short edition?
0:00–3:27
2
Who is Steven Levitt and what project did he bring to the show?
3:27–5:43
3
How did Levitt and Dubner invite people to make major life decisions?
5:43–9:16
4
Why did the hosts flip a coin for a listener’s relationship decision?
9:16–9:32