Commit to The Bit

People say the essence of comedy is timing, but I think it’s dedication. Commitment to the bit. I’ve heard it said that 90% of people didn’t think Andy Kaufman was funny, but that 10% found him to be the funniest guy who ever lived. I’m definitely in that 10% – I think he was a genius.

It’s not just comedy that benefits from this, of course. Commitment to a stance can warp the very world around you.

There’s this psychology experiment about fairness. Here’s how it works: you have two people, Person A and Person B. Person A is given $100 and told to split it however they like with Person B. Person B then gets to accept or reject the offer; if B accepts, then they both get the money as it was split by A. If B rejects the offer, both parties get nothing.

The point of the experiment is to demonstrate that humans care more about fairness than personal benefit. Here’s why it appears to do just that: if Person A decides that the split they want to offer is 99 bucks for them and a dollar for Person B, then Person B will reject that offer every time. But look at what they’re rejecting – a free dollar! They’d rather take nothing than a dollar, because the offer was “unfair.” In practice, the offers have to be generally at least 60/40 before people will start accepting them. People will trash 20 bucks!

So this is supposed to show that people are irrational, but I posit that it doesn’t show that at all. First, consider: almost all of our social instincts evolved when you would interact with the same 20 or 30 people over and over again your whole life. In that context, being willing to burn it all down in the name of fairness actually made perfect sense, because it taught everyone around you that you wouldn’t tolerate being treated unfairly in the future, either. It taught people that if they didn’t split that elk fairly with you, you’d rather kick it into the river and both starve than take the lesser cut. That was a strong way of motivating people to be fair to you.

In a world with many strangers who you’ll never see again (and thus, can’t “train” in this way) it makes the most sense to just ignore fairness and take any money offered to you rather than die on a hill. But we commit to the bit anyway, because most of the time we’re interacting with people we’ve interacted with before and will interact with again. It makes sense to teach them things about ourselves that we want them to know.

You can get very far with people by watching what they’re consistent about. And you can get a lot of what you want out of life by consistently committing to the bits you find important.