At one point in I Am Not Your Guru, the new Netflix documentary about the enormous (in multiple senses) self-help phenomenon Tony Robbins, a tearful woman rises to her feet, to talk about her unhappiness in love. We’re at Robbins’s £3,800, six-day Date With Destiny seminar, in Florida, and the hyped-up audience is putty in his hands. The woman’s current relationship sounds OK. But no matter! Robbins tells her to switch her phone to speaker, call her boyfriend, and dump him right there. Which, astoundingly, she does. (The film is worth watching: it’s fawning, but you get to experience being swept up in the emotional atmospherics of a Robbins event.) Once she’d returned home, after the high faded, did she regret her decision? You can’t help wondering. Unless you’re the cosmically self-confident Robbins himself, that is: he doesn’t appear to give the matter a moment’s further thought.
On balance, though, the chances are she didn’t regret it. That’s the implication of a giant, unconventional experiment conducted by the economist Steven Levitt, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Levitt asked thousands of people who were contemplating a major life-change, like leaving a job or relationship, to visit a website, where a virtual coin-flip told them what to do. Obviously, many ignored the advice, but some didn’t. When Levitt followed up, six months later, he found those who had made the change were happier than those who hadn’t – even if their reason for changing was nothing more than a coin-flip. The lesson (notwithstanding various limitations to the project, like the self-selecting sample)? If you’re facing a dilemma, and can’t figure out whether to take the plunge, then all else being equal, you should. Few of us are immune to the “status quo bias”: we prefer the way things are over the frightening unknown. So when you consult your gut about whether to seek a divorce, abandon your PhD, or move to Iceland, the answer you receive will be biased toward inertia. Correct for that, and your feeling of being on the fence is really an argument for action.
Beware, though: the status quo bias is sneaky, and easily capable of making the safe choice look like the bold one. If it’s your custom to glide from one superficial relationship to the next, leaving your latest one isn’t really “taking the plunge”; it’s more of the same. The big change, in that case, would be staying. I make no apologies for mentioning, once more, the question suggested by the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis: does this choice enlarge me or diminish me? Go for enlargement, every time.
Ultimately, the Levitt experiment may echo that weather-beaten advice often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: “Do one thing every day that scares you.” Faced with two seemingly equal options, choose the scarier. Not because the universe will respect your courage and grant you Unlimited Power, as Robbins would probably tell you. But because fear is almost certainly skewing your judgment.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
