At the start of a week's sailing on the beautiful Norfolk Broads, a question occurred to me... are we rational with regards to time?
I was a leader on Harriers B - a fantastic camp for 15-18s. On the first evening on the cruise, when commanded by the Commodore, we all changed our watches to something called cruise time. Cruise time is an hour later, so at 21:45 all our time-keeping devices were changed to 22:45. The rationale behind it is that as a small fleet of yachts we need to get into moorings early each day while there is still space. So cruise time helps us be earlier. For example, we get up at 7am cruise time and are usually moored up by 5pm cruise time. This sounds a lot better than getting up at 6am every day to be in by 4pm. And because it sounds better it feels better. And because it feels better we do more at that ungodly hour of the morning. Thus cruise time works. It genuinely makes us earlier.
Admittedly there was some protest this year from one of the leaders...
Commy: I'll wake you all up at 7am tomorrow...
Matt: It's 6am!
Commy: No it's not!
Matt: You can't fool my body!
(And in fairness Matt did his very best to prove this was the case throughout the week, never knowingly getting up).
However, most of us swiftly adjusted to cruise time. We were probably better at getting up in the morning in the mindset of it being 7am than 6am, even though it was all a trick.
According to traditional economics we, as homo economicus, should be unaffected by cruise time. We should behave just the same. It is just a simple trick - the real world time is unaffected. We are not deceived into changing our watches, we all know what we're doing and why we're doing it.
But given that we do change our behaviour when we're told that it's 7am not 6am, even when we know that is not the case, I suggest that this presents a challenge to the belief that we're all the perfectly rational homo economicus.
Recommended listening:
I'm A Harrier And I'm Okay (see verse 5)
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