The Boring Task
By: Valkyrie Holmes
Tags: Brain, Self Help, Psychology, Mental Health, Decision Making

The Boring Task

By Valkyrie Holmes

Imagine you’ve been asked to choose between a hundred dollar bill and a thousand dollars. Which would you choose?

Now assuming you’ve picked the one of greater value, now let’s say that you have the same options but the hundred dollar bill has a 20% chance of being fake and the thousand dollars has a 90% chance of being fake.

Holding those two scenarios in your head, now which one would you choose?

This clash of influencing factors is something we call cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance happens to our brains whenever a pair of incompatible beliefs or decisions collide in our minds, provoking a kind of mental discomfort. It’s heightened when we have two decisions close to each other in value. In this case, the likelihood of the money being fake is a key factor in your decision to take either pile. Actually, it would change from person to person and be variable compared to what the person defines as risky. But these kinds of things are what influence every decision in our day to day lives.

Festinger’s Chore

An American psychologist by the name of Leon Festinger paired together with James Carlsmith for an attention study done in 1959. It was called “The Boring Task”.

Researcher and subject, discussing the game results

Here’s how it was set up:

Participants were asked to perform an hour-long task, variant from person to person, but always monotonous and dull. The most common experiment happened to be moving pegs on a board for sixty minutes straight.

Students were then paid either one dollar or twenty dollars to convince another person that the task was fun and that they enjoyed the experiment.

Afterward, they were asked by researchers whether or not the experiment was actually fun or not. Those who were paid one dollar, interestingly enough, said that they had found the task enjoyable whereas almost every single student paid twenty dollars said that it was terribly boring and unenjoyable.

How odd.

The first thing that comes to mind would be that those paid significantly less would have less of a reason to lie and say that the task fulfilled them in some way. But the opposite was true. Why is that?

Festinger interpreted these results as proof of cognitive dissonance. He said that “the students’ belief that the task was dull clashed with the fact that they’d just told someone else it was fun, thus causing uncomfortable mental dissociation”. However, to those who paid more, this contradiction was easily resolved, almost as if the money was in exchange for their lie to the other subject. After both sides of the scale had been leveled, there was no reason to give a faulty answer to the researcher asking the question.

The Decision Making Process

If you believe one thing, yet do or say another, what happens psychologically? Our decision-making process is built on the net principle of positives and negatives: the net desirability of chosen and unchosen options and the importance of the decision. If there are two options, both being desirable, then cognitive dissonance is high due to the fact that the chosen and unchosen options equal each other. It makes it harder to make these decisions in general. The same goes for the importance of a decision. If a decision is not important, dissonance plays less of a role in the process.

Now imagine you’re choosing where to go for college. In one scenario, you have to choose between a mediocre college and an Ivy League school. There is no hesitation to pick the better school because the stakes are unbalanced; it’s easier to choose the better decision because one is SO much better than the other.

Now let’s say you have another scenario where you have two Ivy League schools, both of which you wanted to get into, and have to choose. Now we’ve got a tougher situation on our hands.

It’s not just humans who experience this kind of psychological phenomenon. Louisa Egan from Yale University performed a study in 2007 in which they offered capuchin monkeys the choice between pairs of differently colored, yet equally appealing candy. After turning down a given color in one pair, a monkey made subsequent choices that showed it had devalued the rejected color in its mind. In the capuchin’s head, the color was demoted, making it easier to choose between the two colors again and again to justify the arbitrary preference.

Capuchin monkeys being given candies in Egan’s experiment

The Lake Wobegon Effect

Now let’s move away from Festinger’s theory and focus on another common psychological factor in decision making: the Lake Wobegon effect.

From good looks and popularity to intellectual ability and drive, the typical person believes they are superior to most others. Don’t worry, this isn’t me attacking you. This is all based on the human tendency to overestimate their achievements in comparison to the rest of their community. Garrison Keillor, radio host of “A Prairie Home Companion”, describes a fictional town, Lake Wobegon, in which “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average”, making it the nickname to this mental game we all play in our heads.

More scientifically known as illusory superiority, this phenomenon appears in multiple contexts, especially in profession-specific scenarios. In a 1981 study, it stated that 90% of drivers believed they were above average. The same is true with disease, in that when surveyed, people believed they were “less likely to get the flu” than others, so didn’t get flu shots. Another example of this would be on dating apps. Most exaggerate or believe that they are worlds above where they actually are to impress others and most of the time, end up believing those lies themselves.

Countless psychological studies show that in real life, most people have a touch of the Evil Queen’s vanity about them. Instead of blindly believing that they’re the “the fairest of them all”, it’s more likely a collection of misplaced confidence that can account for these feelings.

Even things that aren’t jobs or relationships suffer from this form of thinking. Take tardiness, for instance. Business owners and those who come up with excuses for these things make the argument that “many projects end up late” and “I bet there are tons of over-budget projects this month”. By taking the easy way out, our mind tricks us into thinking that we are better than we truly are, resulting in false hope and a generally unhealthy mental relationship.

While the mind can certainly trick us into believing that we’re better than most, the same can be true when describing things that we’re worse at. The “worse than average” effect describes our negatively skewed belief in our ability to succeed relative to others at unusual or difficult challenges, like fire dancing or juggling. To most people, these tasks seem virtually impossible and without trying, we all form a precognitive bias in our heads about how we perform in these things without acknowledging the fact that experts fail and struggle too. We block out that part of our brain and only see what we want to see, which is an insanely frustrating task that can never be accomplished by the thinker.

Okay, get the drift? Now let’s talk about how to take advantage of cognitive dissonance to take control of your life.

Taking Control of Your Mind

The mind is an incredibly powerful thing. We can control it or we can let it control us. Either way, there will be periods of both and advantages and disadvantages to either method. The one thing we NEED to take care of is our awareness.

Decision making is one of the toughest parts of life. It forms your future and present life, impacts those around you, and can slip out of your hands when you least expect it. But this constant cycle of letting cognitive dissonance hold you back isn’t necessary and you can break out of that cycle by adhering to a few simple principles:

1. Predict your Regrets

One of the best things we as a society have been trained to do is visualize our options. We take these principles and use them to our advantage in that we can control how we feel and what we do based on looking at our decisions from an outside perspective. Don’t act hastily, there’s time for you to catch up to yourself and make those good decisions. Mark Manson, a NY Times bestselling author and blogger on self-help, says to ask yourself, “Would I regret this failure?” If you can visualize yourself being okay with failing at a certain task, then that risk is necessary to achieve your goals.

2. Be Aware of Your Overconfidence

When thinking about a decision, those who are more overconfident tend to make false judgments on the quality and outcome of said decision. The more overconfident you are, the more likely your plan or decision is going to go awry. In other words, be more careful with your assumptions about other people and most importantly, yourself.

3. Make adjustable decisions

Many people have a very closed mindset when it comes to the decision making process. It very much controls them to the point of no return, so when things don’t work out as planned, that system they’ve built shatters. Don’t be that person! Having an open mind to changing things up and shifting your perspective will help you not only in adaptability but in the fundamental process of choice.

We all have problems in our lives and dealing with them is one of the most fundamental aspects of living in our society. By finding better ways to deal with these problems, we can control their outcomes and in turn, bring light to a future that would have otherwise gone dark.

Read more: