On Sticky Rules

2024.12.15

LXXVIII

It’s often easier to add in rules and beliefs than it is to remove them.

Stickiness

I’m reflecting on the observation that it seems more challenging to remove rules and beliefs and behaviors than it is to add new ones in. So, over time, you likely end up with “more” rules in general, rather than less.

It seems to be very natural and protective for us to add rather than remove beliefs. The cost and risk of removing something is often likely higher than the perceived value of doing so. You can observe this in hungry animals, in publicly traded companies, and even when recovering from trauma.

To be clear about what I mean by rules, I’m referring generally to any sort of patterned response to some sort of stimulus.

Dancing Birds

A study was done in the late 40s called “‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon”. In short, the study showed that hungry pigeons in a cage fed at consistent intervals would develop rituals based on what they were doing at the time they received food. 

For example, one of the birds started thrusting its head towards one of the upper corners of the cage. When it was hungry, it would keep doing this as if it was the ritual that was causing it to be fed.

Even if the bird was not fed again when it did the ritual, it would keep doing the ritual for a very long time–one of the rituals was repeated more than 10,000 times with no food given before the ritual was abandoned. And then, when food returned, the bird resurrected the old ritual!

Based on how quickly all of the birds adopted some ritual and the subsequent persistence, it is clear that it is much harder and more unnatural for the bird to give up the ritual than it was to make the ritual. 

The study, of course, prompts us: are we any different than the birds? Think of sports fans with lucky t-shirts they wear during games of their favorite teams or golfers shuffling their feet just so before they swing, or holding your breath when passing a cemetery*.

*This last one is particularly interesting, as any “bad results” from not doing the practice are second hand, even assuming that the purported Black Plague origins are true. 

Dancing SEC Filings

In the US, publicly traded companies file financial reports every quarter. 

If you’ve ever read one of these reports, you’ll know that a lot of the text in there is nonsense. It’s full of “boilerplate” legal jargon that has low information content.

What might not be immediately obvious, however, is that the quantity of boilerplate has gone up over time. There is some apparent “build up” of  these sentences, particularly sentences around valuation, risk factors, and internal controls. 

A very simple proposed payoff matrix would explain this well:

In other words, even if there is some slight benefit to removing the rules, the perceived risk of doing so could easily be higher. It’s a very human thing to think, “Do I want to be the person that got the company sued because I just had to delete those three sentences?”

I don’t think it’d be a stretch to apply the same sort of matrix in other areas, but I’ll abstain from doing so for the time being.

Trauma

If you’ve ever experienced acute trauma that resulted in some level of PTSD, you know how shocking some of the implicit beliefs that your body “generates” can be.

When something traumatic happens to you, your brain tends to make both subtle and overt connections between your sensory input at the time of the event and your heightened emotional distress. Your body does not want to be hurt again, so you set up these defensive correlations.

This can be protective, but it can also be problematic. If something bad happened at a place you’re familiar with, and you can logically know that it will not happen there again, no matter how much you “reason” that you’re safe, your body might still have an overwhelmingly strong, negative reaction to that place. And the trigger can be much more subtle than a location, too, such as a sound or a smell. 

In effect, your body has “hard coded” in some sets of rules that you might even explicitly know are irrational. Regardless of whether or not you know they’re irrational, they’re still there. 

A part of therapy around trauma is “unlearning” these rules. After all, a lot of traumatic events happen for reasons beyond your control. Meaning, you don’t actually need “more rules” because of the event.

The point of this, though, is that the rules or beliefs that can take an instant to make can take years of concentrated effort to unwind.

Lossy Systems

It seems very natural across the board for rules and behaviors to be much harder to unlearn than they are to learn. 

Since you’re still alive, to some extent your rules are “default working.” But, going deeper, they could be negatively impacting you and your relationships or organizations you are a part of in subtle ways. 

Just because rules and beliefs and patterns tend to be sticky doesn’t actually mean they’re “right.” You get to decide that, not the past. 

Live Deeply,