Commitment bias, Positive Feedback loops, Cognitive Dissonance, and the effect compounding interest

Recently I have been doing a lot of reading into life predictors. These are ways that we can predict how our lives will turn out based on past experiences and our personalities. This was sparked by a conversation with my friend on potential and how we determine what ours is. I found that many philosophers seemed to believe that potential is based primarily on IQ, Extraversion, Drive, Ambition, and openness to opportunity. Your ability to understand new situations quickly can be applied to any aspect of your life with great benefit, along with the openness to taking opportunities as they present themselves. However, this is obviously not the only factor and, in my opinion, IQ is the least interesting. You see studies show that all-around IQ cannot be improved. This may be a surprise to some, but it is quite obvious when you think about it. The best way of explaining it is that if you practice for physics exams you will improve at the physics exams you practiced for and other Physics exams but will not improve in an Art exam. In the same way that learning to speak English won’t make you any better at speaking German (bare maybe some techniques on how to learn a new language). IQ tests all-round intelligence so despite being able to improve your specific intellect, your general intellect will not increase.

Then with openness to opportunity, it is largely based on personality. This leads to a strong debate on whether personality can be changed which is what I will talk about for the rest of this article, but for a quick summary of my opinion on the matter, you can change your personality through A. Major Life Events (e.g. Marriages, Divorce, Being Fired, Hired, Injury, Giving birth etc...) or B. Persistent Intervention through active changes (e.g. purposely acting different every day until the way you act becomes natural and integrated into your personality). The second of these is the more interesting and surprising. Obviously getting married, divorced, Giving birth etc... Will change your personality. But the idea that through actively trying to be different you can change your personality to a point to where you become that person is intriguing. This suggests that our actions in the real world change us psychologically and that we can steer how we think based on our actions. I will look into this further by evaluating methods to change someone's actions into habits.

Commitment Bias

Commitment Bias (Escalation of commitment) is our human tendency to stick to past behaviour despite the outcome. This is due to a feeling that our future behaviour/decisions must parallel the things we have said or done in the past. Even, when previous decisions have led to undesirable outcomes. We tend to find that rather than learn from our mistakes and change for the future, we retroactively make our bad decisions seem good in our heads. This is in an attempt to avoid taking the responsibility for the mistake, instead we make the mistake make more sense to us and the person we are. I feel like this is hard to explain so I will give an example, if you ended up taking a job you thought you would like but didn’t. You are more likely to retroactively act like you knew going in that you weren’t going to like the job. Or if you entered a competition that you ended up not doing well in, you are likely to say that you were there for the experience or that you never thought you were going to win anyway. You attempt to make sense of a decision you made even when the outcome wasn’t desired.

Cognitive Dissonance

We do this to avoid an effect known as Cognitive Dissonance which occurs when our actions do not align with our values or beliefs. Are brains struggle to process when we do things that we don’t agree with or when evidence from the real world conflicts with what we think. To solve this we tend to either 1) Change our beliefs 2) Change our actions or 3) justify our actions with a new belief that can meet them somewhere in between. For example, smoking, if your belief is that smoking is bad but then you smoke your brain will either 1) Change your belief to think that smoking isn’t that bad 2) Change your actions to try not to smoke again or 3) Justify why you smoked with a new belief like it was a social event or it was just a one time thing. This can be applied to any situation where your actions don’t align with your beliefs.

This system can be used for good as it forces our brains to understand and make sense of conflicting evidence and information. One way you can use this to your advantage is by reducing the justification of bad actions, this forces you into either changing your beliefs or your actions. Either way, this will help (even if you change your belief to a bad one at least you aren’t challenging your own belief with your actions).

How Escalation of commitment can be used to your own benefit or detriment

So now that I have explained this concept and why as humans we do this, now we will look at how this can affect our lives either to our benefit or detriment. Firstly, it means that it is best to not commit to something you disagree with or that you are not certain that you want to do, as early as possible to make it easiest to let go of. For example, bad habits that you don’t enjoy e.g. smoking, unhealthy eating, toxic relationships, disagreements, Jobs etc... Once you have built a habit that is not desirable then it is increasingly more difficult to get rid of over time.

On the other hand, commitment bias can be used to force yourself towards future outcomes that are desirable by committing now. Firstly, a gym membership, many people at the start of a new year will buy a gym membership. This is a purchase in advance meaning you are paying for a service to be used in the future. Because of this, you have made a commitment to going to the gym in the future to get your “money’s worth on the service”. You will retroactively justify the money you spent on the gym based on how much you went to it. This is a very beneficial system.

Another way of forcing yourself into decisions is to make you actively think about the desired outcome before the decision, specifically for things that you don’t want to do but know you should do. Like doing chores, manually setting a timer/reminder on your phone to do your chores at a specific time will force yourself to think about doing them when the time that you are meant to do them arises. Similarly, for healthier eating you can put a mirror in your kitchen which will make you conscientiously think about how you look before you eat, in studies by Brian Cushman it shows that seeing yourself before you decide what to eat makes you more self-conscious and therefore more likely to eat more healthily.

For investing, already putting your money aside into your investing account will force you to make investments as at that point you can’t use that money for anything else. It takes the choice away from you in a positive way. This is also why having money in multiple areas or budgeted based on areas to spend it on (E.g. £100 for food, £50 for going out, £75 for travelling) is beneficial, as you have already made a decision on how much you want to spend for things, it makes it much more difficult to overspend.

How this can be used in your professional career

So now that I have explained how you can use this in your personal life, I will now apply this to the professional setting.

First, verbal commitment to a goal. So telling people what you want to do professionally (e.g. “I want to get a job, “I want to join this company”, “I want to move to London, Manchester, Birmingham etc....”). This verbal commitment will make you more driven towards that objective as there is now an expectation from your peers for you to do that. Personally, I use this to my own benefit by only saying that I am writing when I am at least halfway through working on whatever I am writing on. As at this point, I know I will finish the article, while any earlier I may decide that I don’t like what I am writing about and stop.

Additionally, how you verbally commit to yourself. Studies show that just saying to yourself that you are going to have a good day will increase the likelihood of you having a good day. Naming/describing yourself in a certain way can promote you to become more like the person you are describing. For example, saying that you are hard-working and confident will make you more of these things as you will try to validate the claims you have made about yourself.

You can also use commitment bias to encourage others around you. As if you are committed to certain goals or achievements others will likely follow suit if your goals align. For example, joining the gym is likely to make others join the gym as they see you working towards your goal which will encourage them to do the same. Studies tend to indicate that we doubt ourselves more than others doubt us. Meaning if you buy a gym membership people will most likely assume that you will start going to the gym fairly regularly, while you still might be doubtful of how much you will actually go. This can again be used for encouragement for others by saying that you are committed to goals for yourself, to try and encourage them to do the same. For example, if you want your mate to get a job, by saying that you are committing to getting a job (and more specifically telling them how much you are committed, such as how many hours you are searching for one a night, or how many applications you have done) will likely make them also commit to this goal. Although I would argue that this is manipulative by lying about your commitments.

Positive Feedback loops and social sigma

They often say that the first step is the hardest. This, in most cases is very true as it is the one taken with the least knowledge of where you will end up. Over time you understand things and situations better the more you do them making them easier. The problem with this is that it becomes increasingly more difficult to change course the further down that path you have gone. This can be very detrimental to bad decisions in which they increase the likelihood for more bad decisions. A lot of this is not only psychological but social as well. If you have been defined as one type of person your whole life, breaking that mold and changing for the future becomes increasingly more difficult. In this section I will use multiple examples to explain how these bad decisions lead to more bad decisions.

Social Sigma’s and general opinion have a large effect on these as well, it feeds back with the commitment bias of describing oneself of being known for something. Once that barrier has been crossed in many cases it will become increasingly easier to cross in future and you have passed the “point of no return” for example, Steroid use, Plastic Surgery, Drugs, Cheating, Smoking, Drinking, etc... We encourage a have or have not question around these topics. In which, you are not asked whether you are currently doing any of them but whether you have done any of them. The problem with this kind of questioning is it encourages an escalation of commitment as once you have done something there is no going back and it doesn’t matter have many times you have done it. For example, cheating, the most common question asked is have you cheated before? This means that people that have cheated will have already had to say yes, so further cheating is not discouraged. This leads to people that have cheated before becoming more likely to cheat again as there is no difference in opinion based on the number of times they have done that thing. That value or belief that stopped them has gone and therefore getting it back is impossible. This is one of the reasons why it is very important to avoid significant bad decisions as it is likely to become linked to your character in some way.

I mentioned fitness earlier with commitment bias with the gym. However, your reasoning behind starting fitness can have negative outcomes if not for the right reasons. First off, the vanity of improving ones looks. By committing to improving the way you look you are subconsciously stating that you are not happy with how you look now. Because of this you are likely to create an image in your mind for what you want to look like when going to the gym. It is estimated that 1 in 10 gym goers have body dysmorphia which is a mental illness relating to worrying about your body image. This image of your potential body is often based off of other gym goers or people that you see on social media. The problem is that everyone is different, everyone’s bodies are different and we all have different body types. However, the encouragement of going to the gym and improving one's body is increasingly making certain body types more desired. People cannot change their body types regardless of natural training. So people who are naturally “bigger” or hold more fat on their body will find it increasingly difficult to look the way that they might want to look as their body is not made to look like that. In the same way, if you hold very little muscle naturally, it will be far more difficult to gain muscle than someone that naturally holds a lot of muscle regardless of training.

How does this link in with commitment bias? Well let's say your goal was to be a professional bodybuilder. You may began pursuing this goal and really enjoy it while making significant progress. Winning regional competitions and performing well. But eventually, there will be a point where the physical peak for your body has been reached (in fitness it is often estimated that after around 4 years of training your body will struggle to gain any more muscle) and there is no higher you can go without using steroids (this is quite well know in professional bodybuilding with how limited the drug testing is and its openness in discussion). At this point there is a dilemma between giving up on your dream to become a professional bodybuilder or to sacrifice your health. This decision is now far more difficult than at the start as you haven’t committed so much of your time and effort to it beforehand. As you get closer to the goal you already set out, the measures you would go to see it achieved increase. This can be used in any situation, as you get closer to finishing your studies the likelihood of you cheating on an exam increases, as you are closer to finishing your degree and see each exam as more important. You become most desperate when the thing you originally wanted is closest.

I believe escalation of commitment has had an effect on the raise of Steroid use and Plastic Surgery as the commitment to creating a certain look for yourself has been taken to more extreme measures as you get closer to that goal. As physical training and knowledge on fitness has improved so has beauty standards which has inevitably created a positive feedback loop in which people increasingly have to become better looking to think they are attractive as other people become better looking themselves. As people get closer to the “aesthetic” look that they want for themselves they are likely to increasingly sacrifice more to have it achieved.

Grades are seen to have a massive psychological effect on young people in determining how smart they think they are. In most cases, the higher grades you achieve, the more intelligent you believe yourself to be and therefore the more confident you are in your academic ability leading you to achieve more success. There are many examples where students just believing that they achieved better grades in the past than they actually did made them more confident going into future exams which made them achieve even better grades. This is often because the pressure to fail an exam is far greater than the pressure to supersede. Once you believe that you are comfortable with the grade you are at it is far easier to think clearly and study better without the fear of failure.

Conclusion

I have shown that Escalation of commitment and positive feedback loops are a double-edged sword, in which previous good decisions can compound into increasingly better decisions while bad ones can also do the same. Cognitive Dissonance can be created when your commitment to something that then didn’t turn out the way you expect makes you retroactively justify your original commitment. I have shown that creating commitment biases that led to desirable outcomes can make you build good habits for the future and make yourself more like the person you want to be. Although committing to the right things for the wrong reasons can then compound for benefits that could then backfire as you get closer to the things you originally committed to. as you increase the measures you are willing to go to reach that original goal.