Mental Models

Latticework of Mental Models: Asymmetric Information

Exactly eleven days after buying my windows smartphone, I realized my mistake. Unfortunately, the ten day return window (no pun intended) had already closed.

So I listed it for sale on couple of online used item marketplaces (OLX, Quikr etc.). To my utter surprise no one was willing to pay more than 70 percent of the original cost for my brand new phone. Was my phone model so bad?

But I found that almost all the other similar deals for used electronic gadgets (which were only few days old) were being sold at significant discount to MRP. I was quite sure that many of those sellers, like me, were selling because they didn’t like the product, and not because there was some defect in it.

Then why was the used-item-market heavily discounting the price for an item which was almost brand new? I also noticed that there wasn’t much difference between the price of a 1 year old phone a 1 month old phone of the exactly same brand and model.

Another observation – the number of listings for relatively newer items were very few as compared to the ones for 1-2 years old items. Why so?

Latticework of Mental Models: The Halo Effect

Complexity is the indispensable thread in the fabric of world of business today. As a result, in spite of all the secrets formulas and all the self-proclaimed thought leadership, success in business is as elusive as ever. Unlike hard sciences there are no immutable laws in management because managing business isn’t a science.

Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director of Bajaj auto, said this in one of his talks –

I joined the company [Bajaj Auto] twenty years back. In my college I was trained to think ‘Just in Time’ because it was supposed to be one solution for all the problems. And then somebody said, Just in Time is not enough. They said there must be Kaizen, World class manufacturing, Toyota production system, Kawasaki system, automation and robotics. Then they said you must also know CAD, CAM, simultaneous engineering, re-engineering, six-sigma, TQM, and you must wear six hats, follow seven habits, look for blue oceans, be a bit of a maverick and indulge in management by walking around. Every time I learnt something new, I found myself back at the starting point. There was always the new book on the shelf, and there was always the new consultant on the seminar circuit. And these guys would do anything to keep themselves in demand and keep all of us confused. So I decided to ignore all of these.

Rajiv Bajaj turned around Bajaj Auto from a loss making company in the year 2000 to the most profitable auto company in world and it’s pretty clear from his talk that he didn’t do it just by blindly listening to those management experts and celebrity CEOs who claim to have the next new thing.

Latticework of Mental Models: The Zero Price Effect

Would you buy something if it were discounted from Rs. 500 to Rs. 200? May be.

What if it was discounted from Rs. 500 to Rs. 10? Possibly.

How about if it were discounted to zero? Absolutely!

Getting something for free feels good. Isn’t it?

But don’t get too excited. Although the ‘cost of free’ is zero, it’s also a source of irrational behaviour. Remember those pile of free key chains, free pencils and notepads lying at some corner of your house? Well that pile may be harmless but there are other situations where this irrational affinity for FREE stuff can cause us to make bad decisions. The Zero Price Effect says that we often pay too much when we pay nothing.

I regularly give in to this zero price effect in my day to day decisions. Amazon offers zero shipping charges if I make a minimum purchase of Rs. 499. Every time I order a book which costs less than 499, I end up buying another book (which I don’t plan to read) just to avail the free shipping offer. I just can’t let go off the free offer.

So what explains our unusual love for FREE! stuff?

Latticework of Mental Models: Deliberate Practice

There are moments in life when you are in awe of someone so much that you wish to be in that person’s shoes, doing what he or she is doing.

For that matter, everybody aspires to be really good at something. It could be a sport, an art, playing a musical instrument or any other activity like reading, painting or drawing. When we see someone who displays an extraordinary talent in any of these fields, it leaves us awestruck and inspired.

So how do you become good at something? How do you improve your performance in a chosen activity?

The most popular strategy among people is to practice by mindlessly repeating an activity over and over. Many performance coaches and motivational gurus tout this idea of working incessantly for long and hard hours. Practice makes perfect – is the mantra they preach. Ten thousand hours of practice, they say, is the key to world class performance.

Latticework of Mental Models: Naive Realism

Let me start by inviting you to have an intellectual and emotional experience. Take a few seconds and stare at the picture below.

**Image-1 (Source: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey)**

Observe closely. What do you see?

You’d probably see a woman who is looking away from you. You may notice that she is wearing a necklace. She seems to have high cheekbones, long eyelashes, and a pointy nose.

Now I ask you to take your eyes off her and focus on the second picture below –

**Image-2 (Source: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey)**

What do you see now? Another woman? What does she look like? How old do you think she is? What is she wearing? In what kind of roles do you see her?

You probably would describe this second woman as beautiful as the first one. You might guess that she is about 25 years old and fashionable. In fact, the second image looks like a lower resolution version of the first image.

Latticework of Mental Models: Antifragility

As a kid, one of the most fascinating thing I ever witnessed while conducting my own zoology experiments, was to watch a lizard leave it’s tail behind.

I am sure many of you must have found it intriguing that a lizard, if threatened, can voluntarily let go of its tail. It’s common in many lizard species to shed a part of their tails. It’s a survival mechanism. The trick allows these reptiles to escape when captured by the tail by a predator. The detached tail writhes and wiggles, creating a deceptive sense of continued struggle, distracting the predator’s attention from the fleeing prey animal.

It’s a marvellous self-preservation mechanism that evolution has given to lizards. And what’s more fascinating is that the lizard can grow that tail back in a matter of few weeks. What a robust way to deal with loss!

If that sounds cool then you must also know about Hydra. It is a serpent-like creature from Greek mythology. Hydra grows two new heads every time you cut one off. In Indian mythology, there is a similar character called Raktavija. A demon (asura) who who has the magic boon that every drop of blood shed from his body gives rise to another Raktavija (literally the blood borne).

These apocryphal characters are very important metaphors to improve our understanding about fragility and robustness.

What is fragile? Something which breaks or disintegrates easily when subjected to a stress or disorder. Isn’t it?

Latticework of Mental Models: Straw Man Fallacy

A policeman, while on his usual late night patrol, finds a well dressed gentleman squatting under a streetlight.

“Is there a problem sir? Are you looking for something?” Policeman asked the man.

“I lost my car keys officer.” Replied the gentleman.

“Do you need some help?”

“Thanks. I sure could use some help. It’s been an hour since I lost my keys and can’t find them.”

So they both started looking under the streetlight together. After about half an hour, the policeman asks, “Where exactly did you lose your keys?”

“Oh, I actually lost them in the park, half a kilometre down this road.”

“Then why in the world are you searching here under the streetlight?”

“Because this is where the light is.” The gentleman replies with shrug and a look of obviousness on his face.

This might look like a party joke but it has important clues about human behaviour. Please allow me to explain.

Video Series: Latticework of Mental Models

We perceive this world through our five senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. So our eyes, ears, skin, tongue and nose are the five receivers which help us make sense of the world around us.

Nature has designed each of our senses meticulously. In spite of that, if used individually, these five instruments are insufficient to help us function normally. That’s why for most of our routine activities we use combination of more than one sense organ. For example, walking requires use of eyes, skin and ear (for balancing), for communicating we use ears and tongue etc.

For most people who are passionate about learning, reading is a primary source of information. However, in reading you’re only using one instrument – eyes. These days, audio books is another popular and very effective medium to learn new things. In audio books (and podcasts), you’re again engaging only one sense – hearing.

In fact, for thousands of years, until the discovery of print medium, most human civilizations transferred their knowledge orally from one generation to other – their own version of audio books, if you will.

But what if you could engage both these senses together? Don’t you think the retention of what you learn would be much better?

Latticework of Mental Models: Inattentional Bias

“Where is it?” I asked my wife, while my eyes scanned the kitchen cupboard again. I was looking for the sugar jar. The plan was to impress her with my exceptional tea making skills which I acquired after watching few YouTube videos.

“It should be there. Right in front!” informed my wife from the other room.

“It’s not here. I can’t see it.” I again scanned all the shelves in the cupboard.

“Look again. I kept it there in the morning.” My wife sounded very sure about it.

“No! It’s not here. I am sure.” I confirmed while closing the cupboard. What happened next shouldn’t be surprising for you because most of you have experienced it before.

She came, opened the cupboard, grabbed the sugar jar which was obviously sitting right in front and handed over to me. I stood there flabbergasted. How could I miss it? What’s wrong with my eyes? Have I gone blind? It felt as if the jar manifested itself out of thin air. It was like…magic.

Haven’t you experienced something similar in your life? I see a smile on your face. 🙂

Now that embarrassing episode in the kitchen may look like a minor incident but it holds an important clue to a fascinating behavioural bias inherent in every human brain. It’s called Inattentional Blindness, which means not being able to see things that are actually there.

Latticework of Mental Models: Wisdom of Crowds

Kaun Banega Crorepati (Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) is unarguably one of the most popular reality show on Indian Television. So here’s a question which has never appeared in KBC before and probably never will.

Among all the different types of life lines that Mr. Amitabh Bachchan offers to a KBC contestant, which is the most reliable one?

We’ll come back to this little later in the post. However, you can keep thinking about it while you read on.

Have you ever seen an ant at work? If you closely watch a single ant when it’s away from its other ant friends, the little fellow seems to be taking a stroll in the park with no specific purpose or sense of direction. It seems to be looking for something but its approach appears largely chaotic.

Dumb insect, isn’t it? But wait a minute. If the ant is so dumb why is there an army of scientists enamoured by the behaviour of ants?

In numerous fascinating studies, these scientists have discovered that in spite of seemingly unimpressive behaviour of a single ant, the ant colony works as a highly efficient entity for exploring and exploiting the sources of food. Somehow an ant’s individual pattern-less behaviour, when combined across several thousand ants, transforms in to a very intelligent strategy.