Naively, one might assume that people do what it benefits them to do. In fact, that’s an assumption commonly made in economics. Yet it’s clear that our behavior is not always in our own self-interest. People frequently buy fake supplements, try drugs they know are highly addictive, eat things they know they’ll later regret, drive away the people they love most, procrastinate on really important things, and so on.
So why do we behave in these strange ways? Well, here’s my list of reasons we so often fail to act in our own self-interest. As you can see, the reasons are numerous.
Note: the items listed are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive. Some reasons are connected, and sometimes multiple reasons apply in the same scenario.
(1) Misinformation – believing an action is in your self-interest when it isn’t, or that an action isn’t in your self-interest when it is (e.g., taking useless nutritional supplements daily, because you’ve heard they are helpful but are unaware of the significant risk they pose to your liver)
(2) Temptation – choosing a tempting, short-term benefit over a larger long-term benefit (e.g., eating the chocolate cake that you know you’ll regret tomorrow)
(3) Avoidance – avoiding a certain choice based on its short-term consequences, even though it could be better for you long-term (e.g., staying in an unhealthy relationship to avoid a painful breakup)
(4) Anxiety – avoiding a beneficial action out of fear of possible consequences (e.g., avoiding public speaking opportunities because they cause anxiety despite enjoying public speaking overall) [This is similar to Avoidance, but different because Avoidance is based on a real consequence, as opposed to irrational fear.]
(5) Altruism – acting in a way that is beneficial to a person or cause but harmful to you in some way (e.g., donating a substantial portion of your income to an effective charity) [this is a positive reason but included for comprehensiveness]
(6) Forgetting – simply not remembering to act on something that is beneficial (e.g., forgetting to take your medicine)
(7) Confusion – not knowing how to carry out a beneficial action properly (e.g., you want to lift weights weekly to be healthier, but do not have sufficient training on the correct form to avoid injury)
(8) Distraction – intending to carry out a beneficial action but getting sidetracked during the process (e.g., sitting down at 6 pm for daily journaling but being called away to help your child)
(9) Delaying – pushing a beneficial action into the future since it has no clear deadline (e.g., you know you really should get treatment for your sleep problems that are ruining your happiness, but you’re busy and plan to address it next month)
(10) Helplessness – you’re convinced that attempts to take a beneficial action will inevitably fail, so lack the motivation to try (e.g., you feel that you’re dumb and will get bad grades no matter what, so you feel unmotivated to try in school)
(11) Unmotivated – knowing a certain action is good for you, in theory, but not feeling driven to do it (e.g., you know your current job is not a good fit for you but never feel motivated to search for a different one)
(12) Habits – you fall into harmful, subconsciously triggered routines of behavior or perpetually behave in a way that inhibits beneficial outcomes (e.g., you have a habit of fixating on negative traits of other people, and this makes it hard to develop deep friendships)
(13) Unequipped – you lack the ability or resources to carry out a beneficial action due to a lack of practice or training (e.g., you know it’s important to communicate honestly with your romantic partner, but struggle to put your thoughts and challenges into words)
(14) Love – making a sacrifice for a person with whom you have a close personal relationship (e.g., a parent who works an extra job so as to send their child to a better school they couldn’t otherwise afford) [similar to altruism, but more personal than acting out of general goodwill]
(15) Punishment – you punish yourself because you feel you deserve it, or to harm others indirectly (e.g., a teenager who engages in self-harm because they believe they are worthless or because they know it upsets their parents)
(16) Overwhelm – you have too many choices or too much information related to a certain action, so you shutdown or stick with the first or easiest choice (e.g., you know you should carefully select details of your 401(k) plan but, after reviewing three dozen options, you get frustrated and leave it at the default setting)
(17) Reactance – you resist outside efforts to control you (e.g., an employee who intentionally takes three cups of coffee per day in order to flout the two cup limit)
(18) Freedom – you choose to act contrary to your self-interest solely to demonstrate (to yourself or others) your freedom to choose (e.g., a person who makes a minor bad decision to show they could do so any time, if desired)
(19) Impulse – you feel a strong, subconscious-rooted urge to carry out certain harmful actions (e.g., a person who feels a strong urge to curse constantly)
(20) Expectations – you are expected to or pressured to act a certain way, and you are either used to satisfying expectations or desire social acceptance (e.g., an unbelieving person attends weekly religious services long-term solely because the community views them as devout)
(21) Over-optimizing – you expend so much time, attention, or effort toward improving on a process or decision that you end up losing more than you gained (e.g., someone who changes projects every year because they want to find the very “best” project but actually accomplishes little because the projects are all left unfinished)
(22) Fatigue – you do not have the cognitive resources to make a good judgment at that moment [resulting from lack of sleep, burnout, drugs, etc.]
(23) Misjudgment – you misjudge the relevant probabilities or values involved in a choice and so choose the wrong one (e.g., making a bad stock market investment because of misanalysis of the relevant factors)
(24) Uncertainty – you avoid options that are uncertain or ambiguous because certainty makes you more comfortable (e.g., someone who passes on a new interactive theatre experience, something they have no previous experience with, to instead watch a movie they’ve seen fifteen times)
(25) Inertia – you stick to the decision you previously made, or the path you’re already going down, even though it is clearly no longer beneficial (e.g., you’ve finished the first year of law school and, even though you don’t like it or want to be a lawyer anymore, you don’t withdraw)
(26) Haste – you make a decision under time pressure and therefore don’t consider all the options or don’t consider the options thoroughly enough (e.g., a deer runs into the road, and you decide to swerve left even though it would have been a lot safer to swerve right)
(27) Prioritization – you expend effort or resources to make good decisions in some areas but not in those that are less important to you (e.g., a person chooses to focus their entire energy on getting healthy but neglects interpersonal relationships)
(28) Morality – you think it would be immoral to take the action that is most in your self-interest, or you feel guilty thinking about taking it (e.g., you really want a stereo and know you wouldn’t be caught stealing it, but you won’t take it anyway)
(29) Emotion – you are experiencing intense emotions that alter your perception of what a good decision would be (e.g., you are really pissed off, so you punch the person that you’re talking to)
(30) Complexity – the decision is too complex for you to reason about effectively or too different from previous decisions you’ve made for your intuition to be reliable (e.g., you’ve just been elected president, and now you have to make decisions involving hundreds of factors and hard to predict second-order effects in areas that you’re not an expert in)
(31) Identity – you think of yourself as the sort of person who does X, so you choose to do X to maintain this self-identity or as a shortcut in decision-making (e.g., a person who thinks of themselves as a non-drinker and so doesn’t even consider the option of drinking in cases where they could potentially benefit)
(32) Attention – you make self-harming decisions because you want others to notice you, step in to help you or show that they care (e.g., a person who burns themselves with cigarettes so that others will notice the burns and feel concerned)
(33) Myopia – you think that your options are more limited than they are or you fail to fully consider what your best option is (e.g., you quit your job because you think of your options as either “stay” or “quit,” whereas you would have actually been better off renegotiating your role without quitting)
(34) Normality – you don’t want to take any action that may be considered strange, odd or weird (e.g., even though you are confident you would be better off having an open relationship rather than a monogamous one, you would not consider it because in your culture that would be a “strange” lifestyle)
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