A Happy Life Is a Coin Toss Away
A remarkable study from Freakonomics about how to change your life
Let’s say you are thinking about quitting your job.
You make decent or even great money, but your boss is a jerk, the hours are long, and the work is dull. Maybe you have ideas for a business or want to find another job you actually enjoy.
You’ve obsessively weighed the pros and cons in your head for months and can’t bring yourself to make a decision.
So, what do you do?
Nothing.
Most people have a bias toward the status quo—they trust the devil they know more than the devil they don’t. This is how people get stuck in jobs and relationships that make them happy for years, decades, or even their entire lives.
Perhaps you know you want to quit that job, but you are afraid of what will happen because once you say, “I quit,” you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. You are like a kid standing at the edge of the diving board, looking into the pool. You want to jump in feet first, but you can’t bring yourself to do it.
What you need is that overly aggressive-friend who will sneak up and push you off the diving board. You’re terrified for those few seconds in midair, but once your feet hit the pool and everything turns out fine, you are secretly relieved—even if you are also annoyed at your friend for pushing you.
Your aggressive friend pushing you off the diving board is a catalyst to help you take action. While nobody wants to have their decisions made for them by someone else, it can be valuable to find a catalyst to nudge you to decide to take action or maintain the status quo when faced with important decisions.
What if your catalyst to make important decisions could be as simple as a coin toss?
Freakonomics takes on decision making
A 2016 paper by Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame explored whether a simple coin toss could help people get off the fence and take action on life-changing decisions.
To do this, Levitt created a website where people struggling to make a decision could toss a coin to determine whether they took action. If you want to quit your job but can’t bring yourself to take action, you flip the coin, and if it lands on heads you quit your job, and if it lands on tails, you don’t.
If this sounds familiar for the comic book nerds out there, it’s because this is how the Batman villain Two-Face makes every decision.
People who participated in the survey had to agree to follow-up surveys two and six months after the coin flip. They also had to find a friend or family member to agree to fill out follow-up surveys verifying if the person flipping the coin followed through on what they said they would do.
Involving a friend in this experiment is powerful for two reasons.
It helps the researcher verify the results
More importantly, it adds pressure and accountability for the coin flipper to follow through and do what they said they would do.
Levitt wanted to answer two questions from this experiment.
Could flipping a coin act as a catalyst to make life-changing decisions?
Would the people who made these life-changing decisions based on the outcome of a coin toss be more or less happy?
The results were fascinating.