My favourite album of 2020 is actually a mixtape, and it’s actually from 2012. To makes things more confusing, the 12-track tape I’m referring to is titled ‘1999’, but more importantly, it is now remembered as the improbably good debut of the then 17-year-old New York rapper Joey Bada$$. As a wannabe behavioural scientist, I’m used to trying to think about what motivates people, what makes them happy and, more generally, what it’s like to exist as a person in the world.

However, the formality of academic writing sometimes falls short of addressing these questions properly when viewed in comparison to raw self-expression, and ‘1999’ has been highlighting that to me quite a lot recently. The hook that tends to stick with me the most comes from the mixtape’s Nas-inspired final track ‘Third Eye Shit/Suspect’, and comprises this final set of words that the listener is left with at its conclusion:

“Suspect n***** don’t come outside

You might get your wig pushed back tonight

Said I deserve my respect

Brains don’t matter if your wig get split on some third eye shit”

It’s a fairly brutal reminder that life can get shaken from the foundation of certainty that we build upon it, and it’s a point that has transcended art, philosophy and psychology for centuries. In 2020, it lies at the heart of a nascent area of Behavioural Science: cognitive entropy. How you define entropy depends on your discipline, but generally speaking, entropy refers to the level of uncertainty regarding possible actions/outcomes in the environment.

High entropy situations are highly uncertain, and we don’t like that. In fact, a fundamental motive that aids our survival is a desire to minimize entropy at all times, employing strategies we need not be conscious of. In grand terms, the avoid uncertainty is to remain sane, or as Karl Figlio more elegantly puts it, having a sense of certainty allows one to ‘live decisively in an incomprehensible world’.

This desire for reduced uncertainty has evolved to help humans survive in new environments and deal with the threat of the unknown, using tools such as complying with social norms and following common social narratives as a way of guiding one’s behaviour and attitudes to life, without actually having to worry about how things should or shouldn’t be. By this I mean that we behave as most people behave, dress as most people dress, go to college, get a job, start a family and (without trying to sound overly pretentious) follow the quasi-script that society has written for us.

It’s a set of rules, it’s entropy reducing, it makes life simpler and overall, it’s probably a good thing.

Eventually, we start to build an implicit sense of what it is to be a legitimate person, and our sense of how people like us are supposed to behave helps offer a sense of purpose to daily life, as well as a sense of meaning. At the most basic level, it offers a sense of certainty to our experiences, a set of rules for us and the world to operate by, and it relates to our goal of reducing cognitive entropy in our environment. However, evidence suggests that all this may sum to what can be most accurately described as a sort of useful illusion, one that most people can live their whole lives without addressing.

While quite abstract, and somewhat weird, it’s important to behavioural scientists for two reasons. Firstly, the feeling of certainty can be turned into a consumer product. For example, people buy insurance contracts with negative expected value, something homo economicus probably wouldn’t do. A more realistic definition of ‘irrational’ shouldn’t denounce this behaviour as such though, when you consider the increased cognitive entropy one allows into their life when they consider the possibility, however small, of a burnt down house with nothing to pay for a new one. The consumer good on offer need not be so relevant or grand in scale. As long as an advertisement can imply that purchasing a product can boost one’s sense of cohesion and security in the world, its market value should go up and consumers should be relatively happier about themselves.

The second reason this is important to behavioural scientists is more interesting, and more complicated. In basic terms, when we are faced with high entropy situations, where our assumptions of the ‘rules of existence’ are shaken, the way we react is fascinating. Before social science research, this was seen in art.

Recognised most notably through the works of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, the surrealist art movement may have been the first to express how playing with normal objects and presenting them in an incongruous relation can arouse the senses. Magritte’s ‘Le Banquet’ takes advantage of one’s expectation of a typical forest sunset and flips it on its head by placing the setting sun starkly in front of the trees that should be shielding it, breaking the ‘rules’ that seemed so concrete previously. In literature, the works of Franz Kafka typically unfold in a fashion that lacks coherence and a sense of meaning, offering the reader a jarring sense of a world that lacks the consistency and certainty of daily life.

Clever research from Proulx & Heine (2009, for one example) has exposed participants to these varying forms of absurdist art, which were found as significantly increasing the ability to identify novel patterns and solve complex tasks after exposure. The implied relationship being that threatening one’s sense of how the world works motivates a pushback in desire to regain coherence and order, and almost appears to act as a stimulus for more effective task completion. It is simply an illustration of the first principle of cognitive entropy, our need to minimise it, which we appear to be quite efficient at.

While this first study, despite being interesting, does not appear immediately consequential, further experimental designs are slightly more troubling. It appears that uncertainty not only motivates simple task performance, it also influences our grander sense of morals. For example, one study removes the uncertainty-related prime of Kafka/Magritte and replaces it with the presentation of incongruous word pairings, such as ‘Turn Frog’ and ‘Careful-Sweater’, before asking the participant to set a bail on a prostitute, who had been arrested in a hypothetical scenario.

These two items initially seem to have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but the participants that were primed with incoherent word pairings, versus common word pairings, tended to set bail twice as high, without being consciously aware of the effect that had just taken place. When the rules for how language work are broken, participants appear to more strongly affirm the rules of moral behaviour to compensate for the resulting discomfort.

The lesson here is that our senses of reason and meaning in the world, and our conclusions of how people ought to behave, are probably shallower than we expect. The question that looms is what happens when we realise this? Behavioural scientists in firms can use the insights of the first study to design interventions that increase employee entropy and, as a result, performance, but is there a limit to how far this can be pushed?

Returning to the notion of the artificially constructed rules of society that can govern our behaviour, attitudes and ambitions, we can relate this to Soren Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘automatic men’ living in comfortable ignorance. Again, this is a pretty good thing evolutionary speaking, but it’s not always sustainable. As Alan Watkins explains in an excellent public talk, following the rules doesn’t always deliver. In mid-life, one may be a good citizen with a good job and a good house yet conclude that “I’m now supposed to be happy and blissful forever, and I’m not”.

This is a basic midlife existential crisis, possibly best illustrated by the Coen Brothers’ 2009 existentialist endeavour ‘A Serious Man’. Kierkegaard would refer to this moment as the dread that results from falling into self-consciousness. Camus would build his philosophy of the absurd around it. Joey Bada$$ would hark back to it in the recurring line: ‘Brains don’t matter if your wig get split on some third eye shit’.

An added nuance of strangeness is that this is not necessarily a bad thing. While crippling at the moment of crisis, forcing one to realise that their assumptions of what makes for a good, happy life aren’t wholly accurate forces them to recalibrate their ideas. On a small scale, we saw experiment participants learn to solve a lab task more effectively, but scaled up to life-size threats of meaning, people may learn to maximise their own well-being more effectively.

As backed up by empirical research (see Poulin & Silver, 2019), significant negative life events may affect worldviews, and thus behaviour and well-being. Perhaps suffering a crisis in life is actually rather fortunate in the long-term, which could be comforting. If we can design a paradigm that elicits this effect without having to put someone through an actual traumatic event, then even better.

What is concerning to me is how Behavioural Science in its current form fits into this equation. Having a thorough understanding of human motivation is immeasurably useful and can make for great welfare-enhancing policy, but as was repeatedly noted last week in an article titled ‘Imagining the Next Decade of Behavioral Science’, public policy is not the main arena we operate in anymore. “Never before has the essence of the field been so squarely in the wheelhouse of corporate interests” remarks Philip Goff in the piece that combines insights from some of the field’s most influential figures.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, cognitive entropy and its relation to uncertainty in life is only a nascent feature of behavioural science that is likely to continually grow for decades to come. But who is going to influence what form it is going to grow into? People’s sense of certainty and security in an increasingly incoherent, information packed world is a powerful driver of behaviour and can be harnessed for behaviour change. But if it is to be large-scale private corporations that want that change to be more efficient workers, more persuasive advertising and more sales, then I’m not excited to see it.

As Todd Haugh articulates in the aforementioned article, “When we focus only on the is, and not the ought, we miss the deeper understanding of humanity that behavioural science invites”. To take inspiration from hip-hop once more, this time from Mos Def, “it’s a numbers game but shit don’t add up somehow”.