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LAST week I went to the dogs—literally. While the spectacle provided by
greyhounds running round and round in circles was evidently sufficient to fill a
stadium, my eyes were firmly on the humans. The dogs are only really there to
act as a less random version of the lottery balls, a device for generating
uncertainty so that gambling can take place.

The evidence for a particular species of human irrationality was hard to
ignore. For example, during each race, people were yelling: “Come on, number
four!”, or “Two! two! Go number two!” But how on earth could that help? Did each
dog know the number it was wearing? Perhaps the owners always carefully brief
their dogs: “You are number five, remember, number five.” Perhaps.

Then I remembered hearing my next-door neighbour shouting at a football match
on television, alternately exhorting and cursing players. Our homes are so far
from any stadium it is unlikely that he could be heard at the ground. Worse, it
turned out that he was shouting at a recorded match. Of course, we can all rage
at the past, but should we hope to change it? Before recorded matches are shown,
TV newscasters collude with our desire for self-delusion by saying: “If you
don’t want to know the score, look away now.” They never say: “If you don’t want
to know the result of the Gulf War/general election /latest industrial dispute,
look away now.”

And it’s nice to have this irrationality quantified, rationally. At Stanford
University, George Quattrone and Amos Tversky asked people to submerge their
arms in circulating cold water until they couldn’t stand it any more. Then they
were told that increased tolerance of pain (or decreased tolerance in another
group) indicated a healthy heart. Curiously, on a second trial, their endurance
of the awful coldness changed—to match the information about healthy
hearts.

Of course, your heart is as healthy as it is regardless of the experiment but
people may like to send “good news” self-deluding signals to themselves. Such
self-signalling might explain another puzzle: why do people give luxurious gifts
instead of their cash value? Cash is more exchangeable, while gifts can at best
only be worth their cash value—and only then if it was something the
recipient would have bought anyway. One possibility is that people deem
luxurious items “off-limits”, fearing that they would lose control if they
started buying extravagant Armani-type things. Thus the ideal gift is,
paradoxically, one that recipients wouldn’t dare buy for themselves but are
delighted that you bought it for them. They have the gift but without the
dangerous signal that they could afford it.

Meanwhile at the dog track, the last race was due and I had yet to place a
bet. I recalled a ploy for betting that would signal rationality to myself. A
friend plays the lottery by not buying a ticket but by writing down six numbers
and then praying they don’t come up. Naturally if they do, without a ticket you
stand to lose big time. If they don’t, you win the saved stake. The advantage?
As most gambling offers an expected loss for normal players, you expect to come
out ahead.

So I wrote down the number of a dog and waited, tight-lipped. It lost, so I
won.