There Is Usually Only 1 Reason

Commentary

Let’s talk about decision theory in practical ways that may help you in your daily life, beginning with an example.

Let’s say you have a dinner party in which you expect a friend to join. But just before dinner, you get a text that says he cannot come. Usually in these cases, the friend will give a reason for the change of plans.

But his message is strange. He gives five reasons instead of one: “So sorry I cannot come because I’m not feeling well, my car is in the shop, my phone is on the fritz so I cannot call an Uber, I’m expecting a package delivery for which I must sign, and I’m concerned about the weather.”

That’s a lot of reasons. The correspondent might think that you will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of reasons that he cannot come. The plethora of excuses is supposed to convince you that he had no other choice. Give him a pass.

The critically minded person will know for sure that there is something sketchy about this litany of excuses. If you know how the human mind works, you know that there is usually, if not always, just one reason. Whatever that reason, there is only one. If you were going to speculate on that one reason, you might conclude that he found something better to do. You would be correct.

The lesson here: If you want others to believe you, you should have only one reason for any decision you make. The more reasons you manufacture out of thin air—thinking that this will add to your case and create a thicker buffer between you and the doubting listener—the less you help your case.

It’s the same if you have to call in to work to say you cannot come in. You can say you are not feeling well. No one can doubt you. Australia has the best phrase for this: chucking a sickie.

But if you add to that more reasons, you are undermining yourself. You might add that your dog’s grooming is at noon, the traffic is bad, you are expecting the painters to come, and you might have to visit a sick relative. At this point, your credibility is gone.

There is only one reason for the decisions you make. If you can figure out what that is and say it plainly, you stand a better chance of convincing others. If the one reason is something you cannot reveal, you need to have another reason for your choices. The more you flounder around with a plethora of excuses, the less people will believe a word you are saying.

Why do we find such rhetorical tactics disreputable? Because they contradict our every intuition about decision-making. We don’t make choices on aggregate conditions; we make choices on the margin.

It so happens that there is a theory of action that underscores the point I’m making here. It is from Philip Wicksteed’s incredible book called “The Common Sense of Political Economy,” from 1910. It is a fabulous and slightly obsessive treatise on what is called the theory of marginal utility. It also drives home a central insight of economics: opportunity cost.

In Wicksteed’s view, human utility—the satisfaction you get from what you choose—is not cardinal but ordinal. Those seem like complicated terms, but the concept is simple. Your preference at any moment of your life, the options you have for what you do, are ranked on a preference ledger.

But it is not a mathematical ledger. It is a list of possibilities that cannot be cumulated in a mathematical way. Moreover, because there is no way to objectify utility with math, there is no possible way to aggregate, much less compare, ordinal utilities between individuals.

Let’s see what a preference ledger might look like when you first wake. This is entirely conceptual, a kind of mental experiment, because you cannot do all these things at once. This is not the same as a to-do list but rather a list of possibilities ranked in order of most urgent to least urgent.

A. Make your bed

B. Get the coffee brewing

C. Brush your teeth and shave

D. Catch up on the news

E. Answer an urgent email that arrived overnight

Any and every choice you make among these possible preferences has a cost. If you decide not to make your bed, the cost of doing so at that moment is B on the list: You are forgoing getting the coffee going. Once you finish making your bed and tackling the coffee, the cost of doing that is brushing your teeth. If you follow this preference scale exactly, once you catch up on the news, the cost of doing that is answering that urgent email.

Note that in each case, there is only one reason for doing what you do. You make your bed first because you think that is a more urgent priority than making the coffee. And you know how you are. If you get the coffee going, you might forgo the bed making, and you don’t want to do that.

To be sure, your preference scale can change quickly. Once you drink your coffee and become alert, you might remember that you have an urgent email. In that case, E and D flip in the preference ranking. That means that the cost of answering the email is catching up on the news.

This is the idea of opportunity cost. The thinking behind it is rather abstract. We think of the cost of filling up your gas tank as the money you pay, but that’s accounting cost. Opportunity cost is what you otherwise would have done instead of stopping at the gas station, plus what you otherwise might have done with that money. So the opportunity cost of a full tank of gas might be staying home and spending money on a streaming movie.

Let’s say it is Saturday afternoon and a preference ranking is forming in your mind.

A. Spend quality time with family/partner/kids

B. Hit the gym or go for a long run/hike

C. Catch up on a personal project: guitar practice, gardening, or reading a book

D. Meet friends for cocktails and dinner

E. Binge a new show or movie

F. Run errands such as getting groceries

G. Nap or zone out

H. Pour a martini and stare at the ceiling

The cost of doing any one thing on the list is the next thing on the list that you have forgone. Spending time with the kids means that you are giving up the gym. Going to the gym means not practicing guitar. Meeting friends for dinner means not watching a show. Of course, this list shuffles based on what you do. If F moves to A, and the others remain the same, the cost of getting groceries is spending time with kids.

Now let’s return to the initial example. You see on your calendar that someone has invited you for dinner. That would mean moving D to the A spot. That means giving up quality time with family. You decline to do it because the cost to you is too high: that cost is the next-ranked list item.

What does this imply? It means that there is only one reason for your cancellation. It is because you would rather stay home and snuggle with your wife and kids. That is the reason, but sensing that such a declaration would come across as rude, you panic and start listing other things that come to mind, some in your preference list or some wholly made up, piling up excuse after excuse.

When you or someone else does this, it stands in conflict with the logic of decision-making. The only reason we do what we do, at any one moment, is that we would rather do this as opposed to the next-highest item on our ordinal but entirely subjective personal list.

That’s it and nothing else. The reasons why are not cardinally cumulative—you cannot run an algorithm to tell you which choice grants you the most utility—but rather ordinally ranked. That’s why our preference rankings are listed as letters rather than numbers.

Let’s return to the original example. You are expected at a dinner party but sense that you cannot go. The reasons: You are feeling sick and the weather is bad. Let’s stop right there. If the weather were good, would you go even though you are feeling sick? If no, you have the real reason. If you were feeling well, and the weather was bad, you would go. The reason, then, is that you aren’t feeling well.

This whole way of thinking was at the core of microeconomics before things went rather haywire with mathematization, utilitarianism, and central planning schemes that overrode individual preferences in service of some elite goals, such as became common from the 1930s onward.

If you want to know how the human mind really works, and how human society really functions, have a look at Wicksteed’s wonderful book (which is a truly exciting read!).

Economics is not only insightful, but also enormously practical. It can help with your own clarity of mind and give you a lens with which to ferret out duplicitous excuse makers in business and personal life. So when your friend lists every conceivable excuse, he is discrediting himself. It’s why when you have to make choices, you should know in your own mind that there is really only one reason, whatever it might be.

Know your true marginal reason.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.