Warning: This is an extremely personal interpretation, tinged with the F-type's hasty generalization and excessive speculation that produces confirmation bias, born from comparing a piece of news I happened to encounter while reading with the book I was reading at that very moment.
I was in the middle of reading a book... when a news push notification arrived from Bing.
Since the content of the news lined up so neatly with what I was reading at that exact moment, I decided to leave a post about it.
The news was about the final scrapping of the 'Corporal Chae Special Counsel Bill' incident.
Regarding a citizen who, for the sake of the country, had to perform military service,
and the chain of events leading to his sad passing, along with several suspicions that arose during that process,
on the question of whether 'legal discussion (investigation) should proceed,'
the National Assembly representing the people, the so-called nation,
in the end decided to maintain the existing stance of refusing that discussion (investigation),
and so - the bill related to this discussion (investigation) concerning the death of an ordinary individual who had suddenly, one day, become part of the minority - was ultimately discarded.
This was the kind of news,
and I received the alert just as - in the book The Undoing Project: Thinking About Thinking - I was reading the passage below.
The following describes how Danny and Amos discovered an issue with 'expected utility,' and how, in the process of interpreting it, they arrived at and fleshed out their own new 'Risk-Value Theory.'
When making decisions, people sought to minimize regret rather than maximize utility. If a new theory could be built starting from this fact, something seemed likely to come of it. Whenever Amos was asked how he made important life decisions, he used to say he employed a strategy of imagining the regret he would feel after each choice and then picking the option that would generate the least regret.
Regret could be imagined indefinitely, so people imagined regret even in situations they could do nothing about. But the moment when regret carries the most force is, of course, when the regret could have been avoided. It was not clear what people would regret, or how much.
The two of them closely observed Israelis after the Yom Kippur War. Most people felt sorry that Israel had been attacked by surprise. Some regretted that Israel had not launched a preemptive strike. But hardly anyone regretted what Danny and Amos thought truly deserved to be regretted. Namely, the fact that the Israeli government had not been willing to give back the territory it had gained in the 1967 war. Had Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt, Sadat in all likelihood would not have felt the need to attack Israel in the first place.
Why did people not regret what Israel had failed to do? Amos's and Danny's thought was this. Regret was much greater when one had done something - and done something one shouldn't have done - than when one had failed to do something, even something one perhaps should have done. In a short note Danny sent to Amos, he wrote this.
"The pain of suffering a loss because of an action that changes the present situation is far greater than the pain suffered because of a decision to keep the present situation as it is. When disaster strikes after someone fails to take an action that would have prevented it, that person does not accept responsibility for the disaster."
- The Undoing Project: Thinking About Thinking
In short, people tend to regret what they did more than what they didn't do. And even when the outcome of doing nothing is bad, that outcome is, in effect, 'out-of-mind.'
Whether it's Israel inside the book, the National Assembly inside the news, or even the office workers around us in everyday life, or married couples or partners closer at hand - the (former) ordinary individual or (former) ordinary family who, by some accident, ends up in the minority -
despite being wounded by the unfortunate events that have suddenly struck them, in the end - within their own circumstances and for their own reasons, as if they had no other choice -
decide to bear that pain on their own, or are pressured by those around them not to make a fuss,
and have no option but to live out tomorrow by maintaining today's status quo. As fortunate ordinary people who have not yet been folded into the minority,
we sometimes happen to witness scenes like that, here and there, just a few steps away from where we stand.
Returning to the news article: 'In the plenary session held that afternoon, 294 lawmakers participated in the re-vote on the Corporal Chae Special Counsel Bill, with 179 in favor, 111 against, and 4 invalid, so the bill was rejected.' Why did those who, in interviews with the media, had spoken with one voice condemning the case and saying they hoped the truth would be uncovered, end up casting votes against it?
Looking at it through the lens of the book, rather than focusing on the surface-level outcome of a specific event, the topic of curiosity shifted to: "What exactly is the 'expected utility' or the 'source of anxiety' that they perceived, the thing that ultimately kept them from matching their words with their actions? And from a psychological perspective, what kind of 'alternative could be proposed?' "
(Reflecting on a past, unprecedented in any other country, in which the majority of the citizens themselves acted, and through that action could directly experience - or at least watch - healthy social change;;)
The book also discussed how, in such situations, this idea might be used as a method to lead the majority - those who, for now, have still been able to live ordinary lives - toward recognition and self-awareness, and from there toward actions that bring about change.
While studying regret, Amos and Danny had observed that, when a gamble offered a certain outcome, people would pay quite a high price for that certainty. But now, they newly observed that people responded differently depending on the degree of uncertainty. They responded to probability with emotion rather than reason. Whatever the precise nature of this emotion, the more remote the possibility, the stronger the emotion grew.
Showing this kind of emotion at extremely low probabilities ended up reversing people's normal sense of risk: they pursued risk in the chase of hopeless gains, and avoided risk even when the probability of a loss was extremely small (which is also why lotteries and insurance sell). Danny said, "Once you start thinking about the possibility, the thought blows up. If your daughter is late, even though you know there's no need to worry, your head fills up with nothing but worry." And to make that worry go away, people end up paying more than is necessary.
People treated every possible event as something that could happen, no matter how low the probability. To build a theory that predicts how people will actually behave under uncertainty, you had to assign an emotional 'weight' to each probability, just as in real life. If you did so, you could explain not only why insurance and lotteries sell, but even Allais's paradox."
- The Undoing Project: Thinking About Thinking
I came to think that perhaps what allowed so many people to come out into the streets was precisely this perception of '(whether positive or negative) possibility.'
The awareness of the possibility that, if things continue as they are, they could go even more wrong. The recognition of the possibility that, if I do something, I might be able to change things.
…
Just thinking out loud ;;
