Sublime

egosyntonic satisficing is the process of making easy decisions that support a belief in a self that is good, kind and generally above average. So much of human behavior – political, religious, financial – can be explained by the fact that we want to think the best of ourselves and don’t want to work very hard to do it.

A professor of finance and a student are strolling across the Chicago campus. The student stops and exclaims, “Look! There’s a five-dollar bill on the ground!” The professor replies, “It can’t be a five-dollar bill or someone else would have picked it up already.”

In other words, people seemed to act as if they had multiple personalities, each with different preferences. The context picks the personality that gets to decide in a particular situation. In the Swiss experiment, the context was whether or not the person saw himself as a banker, but in life it is often the people we are with, the schools we went

Every decision Sam made involved an expected value calculation. The numbers in Sam’s mind were always shifting.

This, then, is the key sleight-of-hand at the heart of our psychosocial problems: We pretend we’re in charge, both to others and even to ourselves, but we’re less in charge than we think. We pose as privileged insiders, when in fact we’re often making the same kind of educated guesses that any informed outsider could make. We claim to know our own

people’s identity, or their self-understanding, can greatly matter.

Altering the ratio of rewards to contributions by making such negative contributions won’t improve a bank account, but it can balance accounts emotionally.