Back to The Undercover Economist homepageSeamus McCauley has an interesting thought, inspired by, um, me. In The Logic of Life, I write:
"the experimenters offered the subjects a snack: fruit or chocolate. Seven out of ten subjects asked for chocolate. But when the experimenters offered other subjects a different choice, the answer was different too: ‘I’ll bring you a snack next week. What would you like then, fruit or chocolate?’ Three-quarters of subjects chose fruit."
This is just one of many examples when our short-term, dopamine-fired preferences conflict with what we might choose given an opportunity to reflect in tranquility. Seamus then asks what that story implies for online news:
Apply for a moment this understanding of decision-making to newspapers and we arrive at a not-very-comforting conclusion. A newspaper is a package of information, the celebrity gossip and TV listings bundled in with the op-ed and the current affairs. Choose the bundle of news in a newspaper and you satisfy both parts of your decision-making brain. The dopamine system gets the immediate gratification of reading about the fabricated erotic misadventures of some soap actress or the Spurs result; the cognitive system gets the glow of knowing there’s real, hard, investigative news in there somewhere too (don’t worry, you don’t ever have to actually read it to get the effect).
Online, the news package is unbundled (we already know this) and hard news outside the bundle is hard to monetise (we already know this too). But the effect on reading habits of unbundling hard news from the newspaper package seems likely, from this understanding of how decisions are made, to have a disastrous impact on the propensity to read that news (this might be new). Online, news consumption is all about immediate gratification: you choose the story you want to read now every single time.
I think Seamus is saying that you shouldn’t be getting cheap thrills from this blog but should read something worthier instead… His whole post, with lots of tempting short-termist links, is well worth a read.
Tim writes about the economics of everyday life. His 