Just a reminder that the Quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter can be downloaded from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

Enjoy!

AWKWARD FUTURE SELF INTERACTIONS

Decision Science News readers know about Hal Hershfield and Dan Goldstein‘s experiments in which they exposed people to interactive virtual-reality movies of their future selves to see how it would impact their saving behavior (pictured above). The idea was sent up in three Saturday Night Live fake commercials for Lincoln Financial (hat tip: Jake for alerting us). The SNL interactions with the future self were a lot more awkward than ours, but maybe that’s a good thing for changing behavior.

Links (mildly disturbing):

• http://www.hulu.com/watch/287086/saturday-night-live-lincoln-financial-i
• http://www.hulu.com/watch/287087/saturday-night-live-lincoln-financial-ii
• http://www.hulu.com/watch/287094/saturday-night-live-lincoln-financial-iii

After seeing that, you may want to check out a selection of more wholesome media concerning our research.

Hershfield, H. E., Goldstein, D. G., Sharpe, W. F., Fox, J., Yeykelis, L., Carstensen, L. L., & Bailenson, J. N. (2011). Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48, S23-S37.

Wall Street Journal Article Meet ‘Future You.’ Like What You See?

New York Times Article Some novel ideas for improving retirement income

Allianz report featuring the research Behavioral Finance and the Post-Retirement Crisis

Decision Science News is no stranger to misleading infographics in free New York newspapers. We could upgrade to real newspapers, but we find that playing “spot the infographic flaw” really makes the time fly on the subway.

We saw the above graphic in a paper called Metro. In New York City, restaurants are graded by health inspectors and receive an “A”, “B”, or “C” rating (any lower than C and they are shut down). This graphic was supposed to inform us about the percentage of restaurants with As, by borough and citywide. Can you spot the goof?

You might be curious how the weighted average of 73.3%, 62.8%, 63.6%, 61.4%, and 62.2% could be 69% (shown in the red box) given that 73.3% gets the smallest weight in the average.

Ignoring the top row in the table, a simple calculation from the remaining numbers gives 63.6% as the percentage of restaurants with As. But which stat is correct? Perhaps the top row is correct and some other numbers in the table are wrong.

Amazingly, the same day, AM New York, yet another free paper, ran more or less the same story, but with different numbers. Based on those, 68% of restaurants had As. Disappointingly, all their by-borough percentages failed to line up with hose from Metro (see R code at end of this article).

Decision Science News then tried to cut out the middleman and hit the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Website. Pie charts are much maligned, but when it comes to the topic of food safety, why not? If it were up to us, we would have drawn in a crust and whipped cream, but then our taste in charts is controversial.

Taken from http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/rii/restaurant-grading-1-year-report.pdf

So, we now have four candidate figures, 69%, 63.6%, 68% and 69%, which are in no way independent, but do suggest the answer is “just shy of 70%”.

Another interesting tidbit in the health department’s report is that the restaurant grades may be effective at changing restaurants’ behavior. At first inspection, 39% of restaurants got As, 34% got Bs, and 27% got Cs. From page 3:

Among those scoring in the B range on initial inspection, nearly 40% improved to earn an A on reinspection. Of restaurants that scored in the C range on their initial inspection, 72% improved enough to earn an A or B on re-inspection.

There you have it!

R CODE FOR R NERDS

################
#Metro data
graded=c(22454,2204,5235,9086,5030,899)
asMetrostated=c(.69,.662,.628,.636,.614,.733)
asMetrocount=round(asMetrostated*graded)
metro=data.frame(graded,asMetrostated,asMetrocount)
row.names(metro)=c("citywide","bronx","brooklyn","manhattan","queens","statenIsland")
metro
sprintf("Total graded: %d", sum(metro[2:6,1]))
sprintf("Total As: %d", sum(metro[2:6,3]))
sprintf("Percent As: %.2f", (sum(metro[2:6,3]) / sum(metro[2:6,1]) * 100))
################
#AM New York data
statenIsland=c(644,73,20,82)
queens=c(3009,601,152,806)
brooklyn=c(3197,619,152,774)
bronx=c(1394,260,54,332)
manhattan=c(5792,1006,256,1314)
am=data.frame(bronx,brooklyn,manhattan,queens,statenIsland)
am[5,]=apply(am[1:4,],2,sum)
am[6,] = am[1,]/am[5,]
row.names(am)=c("A","B","C","GradePending","total","As")
round(am,2)
sprintf("Percent As: %.2f", sum(am[1,]) / sum(am[5,]))

PhD students in Marketing, Psychology, and Economics should have sent their “packets” out by the fourth of July in the hopes of lining up interviews at the annual AMA Summer Educator’s Conference. Each year DSN reprints this sort of “what to expect while you’re applying” guide, first published here by Dan Goldstein in 2005.

SHARE YOUR OWN AMA TIPS
I am more than happy to publish AMA tips , updated information, or just AMA horror storie,s as part of this post. You can reach me at dan at dangoldstein dot com and let me know if you want to be anonymous or the opposite (nonymous?).

WHY AM I WRITING THIS?
I’ve seen the Marketing job market turn happy grad students into quivering masses of fear. I want to share experiences that I and others have contributed, and provide a bit advice to make the whole process less mysterious.

WHY SHOULD ANYONE LISTEN TO ME?
I’ve been on the AMA job market twice (mid 2000s), the Psychology market once (late 90s). As a professor I’ve conducted 20 AMA interviews and been a part of dozens of hiring decisions. I’ve been on the candidate end of about 40 AMA interviews, and experienced numerous campus visits, face-to-face interviews, offers, and rejections. I’m an outsider to Marketing who went on the market older and with more experience than the average rookie (35 years of age, with 8 years of research scientist, postdoc, visiting scholar, and industry positions). I’ve hired many people for many academic posts, so I know both sides.

HOW TO GET INTO THE AMA JOB MARKET
First, at least a couple months before the conference, find where it will be. It’s called the American Marketing Association Summer Educator’s Conference. Strange name, I know. Insiders just call it “The AMA”. Get yourself a room in the conference hotel, preferably on the floor where the express elevator meets the local elevator for the upper floors. You’ll be hanging out on this floor waiting to change elevators anyway, so you might as well start there.

Next, get your advisor / sponsor to write a cover letter encouraging people to meet with you at AMA. It helps if this person is in Marketing. Get 1 or 2 other letters of recommendation, a CV, and some choice pubs. Put them in an envelope and mail them out to a friend of your sponsor at the desired school. It should look like the letter is coming from your sponsor, even though you are doing the actual assembly and mailing. Repeat this process a bunch of times. It’s a good idea to hit a school with 2 packets, 3 if you suspect they’re a little disorganized. Certainly send one to the recruiting coordinator (you might find their name on hiring announcements, which are often sent to your home department’s secretary) and one to your sponsor’s friend. Mail to schools regardless of whether they are advertising a position or not. This is academia: nobody knows anything. This means you may be sending 50 or more packets. You want to have them mailed by the 4^th of July.

THEN WHAT?
Wait to get calls or emails from schools wishing to set up AMA interviews with you. These calls may come in as late as one week before the conference. Often they come when you are sitting outside having a drink with friends. Some schools will not invite you for totally unknown reasons. You may get interviews from the top 10 schools and rejected from the 30th-ranked one. Don’t sweat it. Again, this is the land of total and absolute unpredictability that you’re entering into. Also, know that just because you get an interview doesn’t mean they have a job. Sometimes schools don’t know until the last minute if they’ll have funding for a post. Still, you’ll want to meet with them anyway. Other times, schools are quite certain they have two positions, but then later university politics shift and they turn out to have none.

After the AMA, you’ll hopefully get “fly-outs,” that is, offers to come and visit the campus and give a talk. This means you’ve made the top five or so. Most offers go down in December. There’s a second market that happens after all the schools realize they’ve made offers to the same person. Of course, some schools get wise to this and don’t make offers to amazing people who would have come. We need some kind of market mechanism to work out this part of the system.

THE “IT’S ALL ABOUT FRIENDSHIP” RULE
Keep in mind that you will leave this process with 1 or 0 jobs. Therefore, when talking to a person, the most likely thing is that he or she will not be your colleague in the future. You should then think of each opportunity as a chance to make a friend. You’ll need friends to collaborate, to get tenure, get grants, and to go on the market again if you’re not happy with what you get.

HOW DO YOU FIND OUT IN WHICH ROOM TO INTERVIEW?
The schools will leave messages for you telling you in which rooms your interviews will be. You’ll get calls, emails, and notes held for you at the hotel reception. Some schools will fail to get in touch with you so you have to try to find them. Many profs ask the hotel to make their room number public, but for some reason many hotel operators will still not give you the room number. Naturally having a mobile internet connection allows for emailing of room numbers. Try to take care of this early on the first day.

HOW TO TREAT YOURSELF WHILE THERE
My sponsor gave me the advice of not going out at night and getting room service for breakfast and dinner. This worked for me. Also, the ridiculously high price of a room-service breakfast made me feel like I was sparing no expense, which I found strangely motivating.

HOW DO THE ACTUAL AMA INTERVIEWS GO?
At the pre-arranged time you will knock on their hotel room door. You will be let into a suite (p=.4) or a normal hotel room (p=.5, but see below). In the latter case, there will be professors with long and illustrious titles—people you once imagined as dignified—sitting on beds in their socks. The other people in the room may not look at you when you walk in because they will be looking for a precious few seconds at your CV. For at least some people in the room, this may be the first time they have concentrated on your CV. Yikes is right. Put the important stuff early in your CV so nobody can miss it.

THE SEAT OF HONOR
There will be one armchair in the room. Someone will motion towards the armchair, smile, and say, “You get the seat of honor!” This will happen at every school, at every interview, for three days. I promise.

THE TIME COURSE
There will be two minutes of pleasant chit-chat. They will propose that you talk first and they talk next. There will be a little table next to the chair on which you will put your flip book of slides. You will present for 30 minutes, taking their questions as they come. They will be very nice. When done, they will ask you if you have anything to ask them. You of course do not. You hate this question. You make something up. Don’t worry, they too have a spiel, and all you need to do is find a way to get them started on it. By the time they are done, it’s time for you to leave. The whole experience will feel like it went rather well.

PREDICTING IF YOU WILL GET A FLY-OUT
It’s impossible to tell from how it seems to have gone whether they will give you a fly-out or not. Again, this is the land of staggering and high-impact uncertainty. They might not invite you because you were too bad (and they don’t want you), or because you were too good (and they think they don’t stand a chance of getting you and they don’t want to waste a precious fly-0ut on you). The latter fact means that “playing hard to get” is a bad idea.

DO INTERVIEWS DEVIATE FROM THAT MODEL?
Yes.

Sometimes instead of a hotel room, they will have a private meeting room (p=.075). Sometimes they will have a private meeting room with fruit, coffee, and bottled water (p=.025). Sometimes, they will fall asleep while you are speaking (p=.05). Sometimes they will be rude to you (p=.025). Sometimes a key person will miss an early interview due to a hangover (p=.025). Sometimes, if it’s the end of the day, they will offer you alcohol (p=.18, conditional on it being the end of the day).

HOW YOU THINK THE PROCESS WORKS
The committee has read your CV and cover letter and looked at your pubs. They know your topic and can instantly appreciate that what you are doing is important. They know the value of each journal you have published in and each prize you’ve won. They know your advisor and the strengths she or he instills into each student. They ignore what they’re supposed to ignore and assume everything they’re supposed to assume. They’ll attach a very small weight to the interview and fly you out based on your record, which is the right thing to do according to a mountain of research on interviews.

HOW THE PROCESS REALLY WORKS
The interviewers will have looked at your CV for about one minute a couple months ago, and for a few seconds as you walked in the room. They will never have read your entire cover letter, and they will have forgotten most of what they did read. They could care less about your advisor and will get quite annoyed that you didn’t cite their advisor. They’ll pay attention to everything they’re supposed to ignore and assume nothing except what you repeat five times. Flouting 50 years of research in judgment and decision-making, they’ll attach a small weight to your CV and fly you out based on the interview and their gut feeling.

IF ENGLISH IS NOT YOUR MOTHER TONGUE
Your ability to speak English well won’t get you a good job, but your inability to do so will eliminate you from consideration at every top school. Understand that business schools put a premium on teaching. If the interviewers don’t think you can communicate in the classroom, they’re probably not going to take a chance on you. If you are just starting out and your spoken English is shaky, my advice is to work on it as hard as you are working on anything else. Hire a dialect coach (expensive) or an english-speaking actor or improviser (cheaper) to work with you on your English pronunciation. In the Internet age, it’s quite easy to download samples of English conversational speech, for instance from podcasts, for free. It’s also very easy to get a cheap headset and a free audio recorder (like Audacity) with which to practice.

TWO WAYS TO GIVE YOUR SPIEL
1) The plow. You start and the first slide and go through them until the last slide. Stop when interrupted and get back on track.

2) The volley. Keep the slides closed and just talk with the people about your topic. Get them to converse with you, to ask you questions, to ask for clarifications. When you need to show them something, open up the presentation and show them just that slide.

I did the plow the first year and the volley the second year. I got four times more fly-outs the second year. Econometricians are working hard to determine if there was causality. I would not attempt the volley unless you are generally considered to be very good with words.

HOW TO ACT
Make no mistake, you are an actor auditioning for a part. There will be no energy in the room when you arrive. You have to be like Santa Claus bringing in a large sack of energy. The interviewers will be tired. They’ve been listening to people in a stuffy hotel room from dawn till dusk for days. If you do an average job, you lose: You have to be two standard deviations above the mean to get a fly-out. So audition for the part, and make yourself stand out. If you want to learn how actors audition, read Audition by Michael Shurtleff.

SOCIAL SKILLS MATTER
From the candidate’s point of view, everything is about the CV and the correctness of the mathematical proofs in the job market paper. However, for better or for worse, extra-academic qualities matter. Here are two examples. 1) The Social Lubricant factor. Departments get visitors all the time: guest speakers, visiting professors, job candidates, etc. Some departments are a bunch of folks who stare at their shoes when introduced to a new person. These departments have a real problem: they have nobody on board who can make visitors feel at ease, and sooner or later word starts to spread about how socially awkward the people at University X are. To fix such problems, departments sometimes hire socially-skilled types who know how to make people comfortable in conversation, and who know how to ask good questions during talks. Also, interviewers assume that people who can talk a good game will be star teachers. 2) The Soft Sell factor. Many people succeed in academia not because they are often right, but also because they are masters of making other people feel like they aren’t wrong. Defensiveness or determination to embarrass when responding to critique is an effective way to blow an interview.

HAVE A QUIRK
One of the biggest risks facing you is that you will be forgotten. Make sure the interviewers know something unusual about you. My quirk is that I worked internationally as an actor and theater director for over a decade; I even had a bit part in a Conan O’Brien sketch on TV. It has nothing to do my research, but people always bring up this odd little fact when I do campus visits. Some bits of trivia are just more memorable than others.

DON’T GIVE UP
Never think it’s hopeless. Just because you’re not two SDs above the mean at the school of your dreams, it does not mean you’re not the dream candidate of another perfectly good school.

Many candidates don’t realize the following: The students are competing for schools but the schools are also competing for students. If you strike out, you can just try again next year. I know a person in Psychology who got 70 rejections in one year. I know a person in Marketing who was told he didn’t place in the top 60 candidates at the 20th ranked school. The subsequent year, both people got hired by top 5 departments. One of them is ridiculously famous and considered among the smartest people in Marketing!

RUMORS
Gossip can mess with your chances. Gossip that you are doing well can hurt you because schools will be afraid to invite you if they think you won’t come. Gossip that you are doing poorly can hurt you because schools that like you will be afraid to invite you if they think no one else does. Sometimes people will ask a prof at your school if you would come to their school, and the prof will then ask you. To heck with that. Just say that if they want to talk to you, they should talk with you directly.

The danger of rumors can be summed up by the following story. At ACR in 2003, I was having a beer with someone who confessed, “you know, my friend X at school Y told me that they want to hire you, but they’re afraid your wife won’t move to Z”. I was single.

Decision Science News was amused to see the above advertisement while riding to work.

If the bottom of the bars is zero, and the metro bar is correctly labelled, the amNY bar is at 240,000. We used PlotDigitizer to steal the points from the graph.

This is without doubt the best graph ever, and we have some tough competitors.

The beer sizes are super-informative too. What is that, a 10:1 difference? We should ask our Pierre Chandon and Nailya Ordabayeva.

This week, Decision Science News’ Dan Goldstein travels to Boulder, and teams up with Peter McGraw for a joint post (over grilled steak). — Enjoy

Most people are happy to have a few types of insurance coverage, typically home, health, and life insurance. However, you can insure most anything. A few of the more peculiar insurance products that recently caught our eye (from here and here):

- Backpacking insurance. In case you get sick or have your backpacking trip canceled.

- Kidnap and ransom insurance. In case you get kidnapped and held for ransom (duh).

- Your hands. If you are a yo-yo champion.

- Your derriere. If you are Jennifer Lopez.

And Pete’s favorite: Legal insurance, which was being advertised in the local college student magazine:

Being a Curvball member means you can speak to a criminal defense lawyer immediately. Get the information and advice you need. Don’t wait to be intimidated by a law enforcement officer with an agenda, or an aggressor looking for someone to blame. You can have a lawyer on the phone in 60 seconds.

People like us (the type who would read this blog) probably have health, and if they have a home, homeowners insurance. At the same time, people like us laugh at the idea of buying extended warranties from the big box electronics stores. The question we pose: Where do we draw the line?

Take car insurance, for example. Pete has a car and has no collision insurance on it (he, of course, has liability insurance for it), whereas Dan, when he had a car, bought collision insurance because that what his family always did.

Who is right, and if you have a car, what do you do?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/xrrr/4432159611/

ADDENDUM:
This post has sparked a huge mega-rant on messymatters.com. Check it out!

Last week, Decision Science News posted about a “no-decision diet” in which its editor followed, for one week and without exceptions, a healthy diet designed by someone else. Since then, a number of people have written in asking to have a look at the diet. If you were hoping to find out what the diet included, today is your lucky day.

We note that this diet was not customized for you, it was customized for the Decision Science News Editor. We also reinforce that we are not nutritionists, so consider this document as merely curiosity-appeasing information, not a recommendation.

The No-Decision Diet (XSLX format. Note that the spreadsheet has 3 tabs “Menu”, “Recipes” and “Grocery List”)

Also coming in over the wire this week was this poster on how people think complex diets are more effective than simple diets, while this may not be the case: Costs and Benefits of Simplifying Diet and Exercise Rule Complexity.

See also: Mata, J., Todd, P. M., & Lippke, S. (2010). When weight management lasts: Lower rule complexity increases adherence. Appetite, 54,. 37-43

I wanted to see what would happen if I made no decisions about what to eat for a week.

So, I emailed my friend Dan Reeves, who has a fitness-expert sister named Melanie Reeves Wicklow, to request a healthy diet I could follow for seven days with no exceptions.

(I knew Dan’s sister had this expertise because I use Beeminder, Dan’s behavioral-economics company, which sends you nagging emails requesting you to report back on how much progress you have made towards various self-imposed goals. The emails sometimes contain nutrition / fitness tips from Melanie.)

Melanie sent the diet. It was great; it even had recipes and a shopping list. I’m very thankful for the help in cooking these provided by my lovely wife Dominique.

So this is what went down:

DAY ONE
Discovered that if you eat oatmeal with an egg in it instead of just oatmeal, you feel full for much longer. A protein effect?

DAY TWO
The diet said nothing about coffee. I tend to do things all the way, so I kicked my five-cup-per-day coffee habit. Was starting to feel the effects.

DAY THREE
Got a coffee-withdrawal headache that was so bad I had to take half a day off work. I vow never to get so addicted again.

DAY FOUR
I start to wonder if eating 2200 calories is making me gain weight. Needless to say, I was the opposite of hungry. I start to wonder if everyone in Dan’s family is as hyper-athletic as Dan and thus capable of eating tons. However, I stick exactly to the diet because that is how I roll.

DAY FIVE
Notice that skin and hair are less oily.

DAY SIX
Notice the absence of tired stretches during the workday, which is surprising since I haven’t had any coffee in about a week.

DAY SEVEN
Sorry to see it end.

SPILLOVER EFFECTS
With diet week over, I go back to making decisions about what to eat. However, I notice the following spillover effects

* I switched to decaf coffee as a kind of Methadone. I feel less tired without coffee than I did while on coffee.
* I took an interest in guesstimating the caloric content of foods. Started entering everything eaten on fitday.com. (Dan, Sharad and I will soon launch a giant research project / game on calorie estimation).
* I scaled back to about 1800 calories per day
* I frequently get off the subway one stop early and walk an extra ten minutes

NET RESULT
I lost 15 pounds in about a couple months after the “no-decision” diet. (I lost no weight during the week of the diet).

POSSIBLE INTERPRETATIONS
A) The imposed diet changed my cravings, gave me new-found discipline, and this caused me to lose weight
B) Some latent state changed deep within me, and this caused me to both i) conceive of requesting the diet and ii) commit to eating better and exercising more
C) Some mixture of both

POSTSCRIPT

After reading a draft of this, Melanie asked me “Did the thought and motivation for [exercising more] come from being more aware of calories in/out or just from having more energy and an overall desire to engage in healthier behaviors?”

I replied. “I think it comes from the energy you get from eating better and from the momentum effect of exerting willpower. Once you start following the diet, it is easy to keep following it and pick up other healthy behaviors along the way. Of course, something needs to change within you to make you start following the diet in the first place, so it is hard to know. However, you can get insight from cases in which you exhibit willpower when it is not really your decision, e.g., a lot of Jewish folks fast every year on Yom Kippur. It’s not really a decision to do it if you are raised that way. But once you get through the fast, on the next day, you realize it is not that hard to eat less. You had just done it, so you know. I guess this gives some weight to the ‘momentum of willpower’ explanation.”

Society for Judgment and Decision Making Newsletter Editor Dan Goldstein reports that the March 2011 SJDM newsletter is ready for download.

http://www.sjdm.org/newsletters/11-mar.pdf

Enjoy!

This week, our former home, the Center for the Decision Sciences at Columbia University, has turned us on to this article about a fitness plan that charges you more if you work out less. Yes, it’s a business putting applied behavioral economics to work, not unlike Stickk.com or Beeminder.com (formerly known as Kibotzer.com and currently known as bmndr.com by those who like to abbrvt).

The plan works in conjunction with gyms. We have often heard people say, with great assurance, that gyms bet on people not making good use of their memberships, that they are businesses based on a human inability to commit. Sure, if you take “good use” to mean going every day, it’s clear that gyms could not handle the crowds that would result. However, we at DSN often doubt people who say things with great assurance without evidence. After all, people don’t make good use of their gym memberships may not renew their memberships, and that is bad for business.

SOFT CONTRACTS: AN IDEA THAT WILL NOT WORK IN THEORY BUT WILL WORK NONETHELESS
DSN once committed to patronize the gym 150 times a year. We did pretty well for the first half of the year and then were met by a long spell of illness and travel. After that, hitting the 150 number required more frequent workouts then we cared to commit to, so we gave up. It’s a problem when commitment contracts don’t make room for periods in which you cannot, should not, or do not want to honor your contract. Yes, we grouped “do not want” with the others. For instance, suppose we had been offered an all-expense-paid, two-month trip around the world that would leave no possibility for going to the gym. Taking the once-in-a-lifetime trip would be more important to us than going to the gym 150 times per year, so we would choose to lose the gym bet to take the trip. However, that’s not ideal. What’s ideal is to honor the gym bet when we are home and healthy and to suspend it otherwise. Since we can define these preferences a priori, it should be possible to define contracts that work within those rules. However, since it is impossible to think, a priori, of every possible thing that might make one want to suspend the bet, it seems reasonable to simply trust people to be honest about when they should be honoring the contract and when not. We realize this violates all the sacred principles of commitment contracts, experimental economics, law & order, and so on, but so what. History is filled with failed token economies and successful systems of soft guidelines.

OTHER DSN POSTS ON COMMITMENT DEVICES
Stop overeating with a turn of the wrist

Contracts to fight procrastination