Why seeing patterns in random events can backfire

Decision-Making

In 1948, a man called B. F. Skinner put hungry pigeons into glass boxes. We’ve all done it. He had a feeder attached to each box through which pigeon food (fag ends and sick, presumably - I’ve never been sure) was dropped every fifteen seconds. The pigeons were observed for a while to see what would happen.

While research assistants hid behind one-way mirrors and made fun of the birds, congratulating each other on their hysterical but offensive club-footed, retarded, help-I’m-trapped-inside-a-box pigeon impressions, the birds themselves developed some interesting behaviours. As these fat, grey, warbling, puffed-up, disease-spreading scientists watched, they noticed that the pigeons were trying to work out what had to be done to release the food. Although the food was arriving entirely independently of their actions, an early drop would inevitably occur at the same time the bird made a particular gesture, such as bobbing its head or pecking at the roof of the box. The bird seemed to presume that this action had caused the arrival of the food, so each pigeon began to act out a ritual inside its box consisting of repeated actions misguidedly designed to trigger more food. Some would walk around in circles, others would peck repeatedly in the corner, and so on.

The pigeon turns left. Food arrives. A management methodology is born. Random rewards are brilliant at manufacturing confident stories. Demand rises after the new campaign, so the creative receives a trophy; seasonality is unavailable for comment. Revenue recovers after a reporting ritual appears, so the ritual gains permanent residency. A salesperson uses a peculiar opening on one exceptional call and spends the next year forcing it upon innocent prospects.

Coincidence rarely has a narrator. The ritual does.

We need patterns to learn. The expensive mistake is promoting sequence directly to cause because the success was vivid and arrived wearing our name badge.

Try to kill the story before building a department around it. What would the result look like if the intervention did nothing? Compare a baseline. Repeat the test. Find occasions when the action happened without the reward and the reward arrived without the action. Keep the failed versions in the family album; winners are shameless editors of their childhood. Some rituals remain useful because they create confidence, rhythm or attention. Keep them on those honest terms. A lucky tie is cheap. A quarterly transformation programme based on three good Tuesdays is another matter.

When the feeder runs on a timer, more sophisticated pecking will not improve dinner. Refuse coincidence the budget. You do not have to refuse it the laugh.