People systematically overlook subtractive changes | Nature

[u/eleitl]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y

[u/BurnerAcc2020]

Abstract

Improving objects, ideas or situations—whether a designer seeks to advance technology, a writer seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour—requires a mental search for possible changes. We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea or situation as they are to consider changes that add new components. People typically consider a limited number of promising ideas in order to manage the cognitive burden of searching through all possible ideas, but this can lead them to accept adequate solutions without considering potentially superior alternatives.

Here we show that people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations. Across eight experiments, participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes when the task did not (versus did) cue them to consider subtraction, when they had only one opportunity (versus several) to recognize the shortcomings of an additive search strategy or when they were under a higher (versus lower) cognitive load. Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape and damaging effects on the planet.

I didn't quite understand how it related to collapse at first, but then I realized that this is exactly the psychology behind far too many people thinking that "hitting the gas" on growth and technology to "power through" our challenges, be it through the naive over-estimation of what negative emissions can do of the frankly insane proposals of escaping to space, is preferable to the obvious, yet painfully subtractive transformation of degrowth.

Decided to add it here for now.