There's another extension of this, it's called the "Choice Support Bias," and that's the
idea that we take ownership over the ideas that we have discovered.
We will fight and we will defend them.
Things that we have come up with or we have
discovered.
Even if we know that your ideas are not as
good as somebody else's ideas.
I'm going to give you an example of this from
history.
World War Two: April 30th, 1943.
A body is found floating face-down in the
Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Huelva, Spain.
This body is in military khakis, held afloat
by a life preserver, and has handcuffed to
wrist a locked briefcase.
Inspection of the corpse's wallet reveals
that this was a man named Major William Martin,
of the British Navy.
But here's the thing, William Martin was an
illusion.
Completely conjured up by a hush-hush secret
organization, part of the 17-M unit of the
British Secret Wartime Service.
And this was an elaborate ruse called "Operation
Mincemeat," that's actually what it was called.
And they went to great lengths, "Operation
Mincemeat," to convince the people that found
this body that it was a real person.
They used a real corpse, of course, they even
had a death notice printed in the Evening
Times, and they had in his wallet also, a
picture of the man's girlfriend.
So what they were hoping was that this fisherman,
or whoever would find it, would get that briefcase
to the Germans.
Because even though Spain was neutral, they
were sympathetic to the German war effort.
And they were hoping that that information
that was in the briefcase would make its way
to the German High Command.
Here's why: the Germans had suspected for
a long time that the allies were going to
invade from their perch in North Africa across
the Mediterranean, but they didn't know whether
they were going to go to Greece and Sardinia,
or to the Balkans or to Sicily.
And what the allies did is they planted disinformation
in that briefcase, just enough information
that the Germans would themselves conclude
that the allies were going to go to Greece
and Sardinia and that's where they fortified
their defenses.
And that's exactly what the allies wanted
because they instead invaded Sicily.
And that's because the Germans discovered
this themselves, and in a sense, the allies
were "Choice Architects."
And what a "Choice Architect" is, and this
is a term that is coined by Cass Sunstein
and Richard Thaler in their book *Nudge* is
someone who can design the ways to help people
make the decisions that they themselves think
are better.
And by the way what nudging is, nudging is
a leadership term where a leader knows what
is best for people, but wants to put the decision
in the hands of his or her followers so that
they make that decision themselves, and probably
the best example of that is in the cafeteria,
putting the healthier food at eye level.
It's still up to them to decide but they will
choose the healthier food.
