Predictably Irrational

This weekend, I was home all by myself, since my wife took our daughter to Vancouver for the Taylor Swift Eras Tour concert. While looking in the fridge for something to feed myself, I saw some smoked salmon from Costco, which reminded me of the following article I published in 2023 within Meta.

There is a famous book called “Predictably Irrational” that describes human behaviors. In short, we are irrational, and our irrationality follows patterns and is predictable. Thus the title.

I recommend anyone working on consumer products to read the book. It helps understand users and identify what products resonate with users.

Smoked Salmon Example

What I want to share today is one direct example of how we behave this way, even if we are aware of this.

• Before COVID, FB cafes served smoked salmon in breakfast every Friday. I always went for them.

• After COVID, when I first went back to office in 2022, I noticed smoked salmon was gone from Friday breakfast. Oh well, sort of understandable, given back-to-office was still a test and very few people were actually in office.

• A few months later, when more people were back in office, and when cafes began to serve more regularly, I checked again, still no smoked salmon. Somewhat disappointed, but still felt understandable since Meta post COVID was not the same as FB before COVID. Gradually I stopped thinking about smoked salmon.

• A few months later, one Friday morning, I saw someone else's plate with smoked salmon. I immediately asked, "where did you get the smoked salmon?" and he pointed me to the condiment rows next to the sandwich station. I grabbed a few and was so happy!

  • I was immediately aware how irrational I was. It's not like I couldn't afford smoked salmon myself; it's also not like I didn't have smoked salmon at home. But for whatever reason, I was very excited to see smoked salmon offered at Meta cafe on Friday breakfast!

  • I laughed at myself while grabbing the smoked salmon.

  • I told my family that night, and laughed at myself again.

• Next Fri, and the next Fri again, I went to office with better mood and went to look for smoked salmon. It was not offered again.

  • It was very clear how that disappointed me, even though I fully knew I shouldn't expect this to be a recurring thing.

  • I noted myself again as being Predictably Irrational.

  • I again told my family that.

  • My wife started to put smoked salmon in the fridge on the eyeball-level shelf.

• This morning, I saw the smoked salmon in fridge, laughed, and grabbed a few.

  • I told myself, “okay, stop being Predictably Irrational on smoked salmon; instead write about Predictably Irrational”.

More Examples

Here are a short list of Predictably Irrational behaviors we are familiar with:

• Procrastinate

  • When we procrastinate something, it keeps occupying our mindshare until it’s eventually done. In other words, if the task takes the same amount of time to complete, it’s much more rational to finish it early so that it doesn’t occupy our mindshare.

  • Knowing that, most of us still procrastinate, under the (likely false) notion that if I do it last minute, I’ll do it more efficiently.

• Prioritize urgent tasks over important tasks

  • It’s a well-known issue that while we know we should prioritize important tasks over urgent but unimportant tasks, but our behavior is predictably to handle urgent tasks first.

• Chase instant small gratification over challenging but bigger gratification

  • This is the natural extension of the last point. When we have 2 tasks where A takes 5 min with small gratification, and B takes one week with much bigger gratification, we handle A first.

• Focus on what we don't have instead of leveraging what we already have

  • We don’t appreciate enough what we already have. Instead, we ignore them, but focus on what we don’t have yet.

  • One such example is instead of a product spending resources in better serving its existing 1M user base, it spends most focus in acquiring the next 1K users.

• Repeat a failed approach, just with more force

  • When our approach to solve a problem fails, it’s rational to consider alternative approaches.

  • But we often repeat the same approach, just with more effort, expecting to get a different outcome.