Mismatch!

I have a bold aim.

By the end of this story, I hope to change your mind.

By the end, I will convince you that we should focus less on the “predictably-irrational”, “flawed”, “bias-laden” nature of human beings, and instead become sharply-critical of the ‘novel environment’ that we operate within.

By the end, I want you to come away with a deeper understanding of how hard we’ve made decisions, stronger compassion for how we’ve tried to manage these new scenarios, and yet how large a mismatch exists today.

And I will do so with a short story about a man on a plane.

It’s a rainy afternoon in London Heathrow.

Jay, a professor from Harvard has just boarded a packed flight back to Boston. A few hours after takeoff, the cabin crew bring out the food carts. Like everyone else, Jay is given a tray of food, a makeup of which he’s had no say in: a hot pasta dish, a bread roll, some butter, a salad, some sauces and a brownie.

[food tray]

After finishing his hot meal, it’s naturally time for dessert.

However, Jay’s trying hard to look after his weight. Unfortunately for him, just as for everyone else, this tray will sit on his lap for the best part of an hour before being taken away.

[image of the brownie in front of him]

The salted caramel brownie is staring him in the face. There’s no way he can’t eat it.

The rustling of plastic wrappers as other passengers all around open and consume the delicious treat compounds the problem and normalises the behaviour.

His self-control is being tested to the max.

What is he to do?

Jay has a wild and extreme idea.

Rifling amongst his tray, he pulls out the sachet of mayonnaise, rips it open and squirts it all over the brownie.

[image of brownie being covered in mayo]

His behaviour is met with shock and bemusement by those around him, yet Jay knows this is the right thing to do...

Immediately, the effort required to abstain from indulgence is gone. For the next 45 mins, Jay has no desire whatsoever to eat the brownie, and a puzzled cabin crew member takes his tray away.

Put another way, by his actions, Jay has controlled for this ‘novel environment’ he finds himself in.

Job done.

This strange, novel environment...

Sociologist Ziegmund Bauman famously famously spoke of the key role of sociology 'to defamiliarise the familiar’, or to shift from what we see and do as normal to that which is strange.

Let’s start by recognising that there is nothing normal about the environment Jay found himself in.

So let’s defamiliarise the familiar.

What was Jay actually doing?

He was hurtling miles up in the air at 1000mph in a pressurised metal box, trusting his life in someone who he’s never met, along with hundreds of people who don’t know each other, all of whom are now trapped for 8 hours with no escape other than likely death. They have little control, over their destination, over food, schedules or most of the processes that they’re subject to.

This environment is strange. This environment is novel.

Thinking in evolutionary terms

Let’s zoom out further consider how long air travel has existed, not in years (250), but in evolutionary cycles.

Scientists talk about a human cycle lasting approximately 25-30 years. That is, the rough age it takes for us to give birth to the next generation.

Let’s plot this on a chart along with other human innovations to see just how much we’ve changed:

[Chart showing technological innovations in increasing series of cycles]

We can see just how many aspects of our lives are novel.

However, we need to dig a little deeper into how much change we humans can handle to understand how some change we can tolerate, yet others we can’t.

Splitting cultural and biological adaptation

As a hugely-successful species, we’ve had to be highly adaptive to our environment to remain competitive. From a shift to city-living to the rise and adoption of the internet and mobile phones, digital money, online dating, AI tools... The list goes on.

Yet these are all forms of cultural adaptation. They can be normalised and integrated in as little as one generational cycle.

However, the same isn’t true of biological adaptation. Simply, we cannot fast-track changes to our bodies. These take 10s of 1000s of generations.

[Chart showing biological change in increasing series of cycles]

This speaks to the current mismatch between our bodies and food.

Our ancestors’ metabolism evolved to store energy during times of scarcity, but modern food abundance has only emerged in the last few generations.

For Jay, the only choices are compliance (eat the brownie) extreme levels of self-control (cognitively-draining) or taking control of the environment (mayo smother).

Nobel-prize-winning economist Richard Thaler tells a similar story about cashews. He found that the single best way to prevent his guests over-consuming nuts at the dinner table was not to reduce the bowl size or the nuts’ saltiness, but merely to hide the bowl from view.

[image of cashews on the dinner table]

In this sense, Richard has controlled for the novel (abundant food) environment to ease pressures on self-control for both him and his guests.

Mismatch!

The gap between our biological progress and the novel environment we live in is called a “mismatch”.

By naming it as such, we’re recognising that far from being irrational beings who must try harder, we’re merely doing the best we can in these novel environments based on what still makes sense evolutionarily.

Instead, we’re shifting the focus towards a more critical view of the environments we’ve made and continue to make.

For instance, culturally, we’ve quickly adapted to the growth of dating apps as the de facto standard way of meeting a potential partner.

However, it’s no surprise that the abundance of choice and resultant “partner management” is causing so many single people to disengage and experience romantic burn-out [citation]. We’re desperate to connect with one another, yet these novel environments create chasm-like mismatch with our deeper biological needs.

The same is true of cities.

Culturally, we come together for mutual benefit of opportunity, convenience and belonging. Yet social isolation and loneliness is highest in cities [citation]. We are together yet painfully alone.

Spotting mismatch

First, I hope that by looking through the lens of evolutionary biology, and through the great work of Jay Phelan and Terry Burnham, we can zoom out from and shed important new light on the field of behavioural science.

The first step is always to raise awareness of ideas like 'mismatch' that you’re unlikely to hear from a behavioural scientist.

The second step is that we need to lean more on Bauman’s ideas and actively defamiliarise the familiar, if we are to pick apart what is so novel about our everyday experiences.

I’m reminded of a great piece of art by an unnamed artist that shows how even extreme behaviour can become normalised as long as the majority agrees.

A boy stands in a swimming pool, surrounded by a group of other children, laughing and pointing at him. He is the only one not to have urinated in the pool, and so is being publicly humiliated by the rest of the group.

Once we recognise something as novel, we can start to look at it as separate from ourselves. We should be far more critical and mindful of changes we make to our environments, especially those which deviate too far from our ancestral norms.

"Are we addressing or creating a mismatch?"

This is not to say that we shouldn’t innovate, but that we need to recognise the responsibility we have when creating new environments.

We need to ask ourselves if what we’re doing is addressing or creating an existing mismatch.

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Redesigning for mismatch

If we can first identify the mismatch, then we can start to address it using Behavioural Science.

Given Jay's issue, what could a future flight for him look like?

The change doesn’t need to be expensive, complex or invasive.

[Use Defaults, Present Bias and Salience to pre-select the healthy option on his food. No brownie. No problem]

Closing thoughts

So next time you’re shopping in the supermarket, or looking for your lover online, take a step back, defamiliarise the familiar and recognise the novel environments that are all around you.

Point out their absurdities, laugh about them with your friends.

The world will seem more strange than ever, and that can only be a good lens to have if you’re going to create a future that’s a little kinder to you and everyone around you.