B. Venkatesh

Consider this. My friend has this habit of collecting crockery, cutlery, paintings and everything in between. She typically goes shopping with an intention of buying particular articles. But she ends up spending a sizable sum buying all the things that she does not want! She is unable to explain her spending habit. Another friend, a scientist by profession, terms her shopping as a "stereotyped action pattern." What does that mean?

It simply refers to an automatic response to a signal. Such responses are more common among birds and animals. A frog may lunge at any dark moving object thinking that it is food. That is a stereotyped action pattern.

Scientists argue that stereotyped action pattern could be one reason why yawning is contagious. You start yawning the moment the person next to you yawns.

And the process continues, as another person catches on from you. For long, scientists have tried to figure out why yawning is contagious. The Finnish government, in fact, funded a study on this subject in 2005. The result confirmed that yawning was largely unconscious. That is, you and I do not really think much when the guy next to us yawns, but we replicate the action anyway.

Of course, stereotyped action pattern cannot really explain my friend's shopping habit. It is certainly not an unconscious action that makes her drop everything on the shop shelf into her shopping cart.

The same can be said about buying momentum stocks. Often, you buy such stocks because you find somebody else buying it when you visit your broker's office. It is just that shopping and buying stocks are sometimes so instantaneous that it is tempting to term them as unconscious actions.

(The author is based in Ontario, Canada)

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