After the Bell: Insurance and irrationality

On Sunday morning we had one of those incredibly rare weekend days where no one had to be anywhere in a hurry. You may know the kind of morning, where everyone is waking up in their own bed, with nothing urgent forcing you to dive deep into the coffee pot after shivering in the shower.

It was glorious.

And took me literally a month to organise, considering that for teenagers, with WhatsApp comes the ability to set their own diaries.

Yawning, I stretched over and looked at my phone.

I deliberately ignored WhatsApp and email and all of the other ties that bind our economy together.

But then there was a ping, and a notification.

A few seconds later all my family (and various cats) heard was a muffled oath.

My family, hoping that nothing had come along to disturb our rare moment of peace, tried to look away.

The object of my ire was our insurance company.

It had decided this was a good moment to tell me, cheerfully, that I have achieved precisely zero “speeding event free days”.

My muffled oath was not out of any sense of failure.

It was my early morning indignation that some app based on some algorithm dreamt up by some group of young people whom I’ve never met had dared to tell me how to behave. That they were judging me.

Now, this might not be entirely rational.

In my defence, the coffee pot was still relatively full. And I’m sure some well-meaning actuary somewhere can tell me with graphs and numbers and a super-duper app with an ever-changing list of passwords that it is all for my own good.

But I’m now at a life stage where I feel that if you are going to tell me what to do, or how I should “improve myself”, you had better be either my wife, my employer or wearing a police uniform (with exceptions for medical staff and, of course, my teenage daughter).

And for some reason I think all of us hate being told how to drive. I don’t know if it’s because it’s quite a personal behaviour, or because it’s infringing our privacy in some way, or what it is.

But I’ve seen people quite reasonably and gently telling another driver that they’re behaving dangerously only to be met with insults and threats.

I have some sympathy with the good people at my insurance company. They really are trying to make me and people around me safer.

I know that other nudges have really worked. Discovery is famous in insurance circles around the world for using numbers to influence behaviour and make their members healthier (they’ve made a tidy packet at the same time).

They seem to have found the world’s first constructive use of a cappuccino – basically giving them to people if they exercise.

It may say something about cappuccino drinkers that so many people have “exercised” this benefit.

When it comes to speeding the one thing that really works for me is that speeding camera on Van Reenen’s Pass on the N3 to Durban that gives you a “live score” of how you’re doing. Literally as you go past it you will see a flash, then, a few metres further down the road is a digital sign that tells you how fast you’re going.

I know another one like it near a park popular with young children in Joburg.

Every time I go past it I see my speed and rebuke myself. Over time, on both routes, I’ve come to anticipate them.

And I’m pleased to report that at both places I have achieved multiple “speeding event free days”.

The scariest thing about this is that right in front of my nose, literally through my steering wheel, is a weird device called a speedometer.

It has all sorts of settings and information and details.

And yet I don’t pay nearly enough attention to it.

Why do I pay more attention to some road sign while the information I need is right in front of me?

If I look around me consciously, with the coffee pot now empty, there are so many data points available to help me improve my behaviour.

I know, I have been told – educated – that exercise is good for me, that driving is inherently dangerous and that too much meat and too many glasses of the Irish are not truly medicinal.

One or two truly brave souls have even tried to tell me to buy a smaller coffee pot.

And yet that doesn’t necessarily change my behaviour. Because I suspect that, like you, I’m not always rational.

Perhaps my insurance company needs a different phone notification.

One that will be able to tell me, cheerfully, how many “irrationality-free event days” I’ve had in the last week.

But it should wait until after the coffee pot has been properly drained before I hear that ping. DM