Things Always Have a Logic Somewhere

Recently, our local council moved the regular weekly bin collection to once every two weeks, and then introduced a weekly food waste collection.

Many people were befuddled at this choice, angry at the idea of this causing their bins to overflow by the time the fortnightly collection was made.

I, too, was a little confused, as the reduction of the weekly connections — and then the addition of another — seemed totally counterintuitive.

And right there a failure in how we think was highlighted.

I promise this isn’t just a story about bin collections.

Sat at my dining room table and reading the letter sent by the council informing our road about the change in bin collection, I was confused for the reasons above.

How does that make any sense? I thought to myself. Almost immediately, I wrote this scheme off as councilors being totally out of touch with how the real world works.

Furious, I set about Googling why this was the case. Through my annoyance-tinted rage-searching, I discovered that this change in collection timetables was happening across the country.

Huh, I thought to myself again, there must be some logic to it, if it’s being rolled out country-wide.

And, of course, there was a logic to it.

Without going into the boring, nerdy stuff — because I did already promise this wasn’t a story about bin collections — here’s why the change is happening:

• Food waste makes bins smell horrible, so removing it weekly means the fortnightly general collection is less grim.

• Separate food waste collected on a weekly basis can be turned into energy and fertiliser, instead of rotting in landfill and producing unutilised methane.

• We’re recycling more as a society which means, without the food waste, the general bin shouldn't fill up as fast.

• And it saves the council money.

Once I knew all the facts, the logic of this made much more sense, and I ended up agreeing with council on this new change.

I did think that the new scheme saving the council money should also mean I’d have to pay less tax, but in modern Britain that’s never gonna happen.

Emotions Cloud Judgement

This is happens all too commonly in our lives.

When presented with a new scenario and the limited information we have access to, we make a knee-jerk conclusion that doesn’t factor in what we don’t know.

Typically, these are emotional conclusions, too, which trump logic in almost all situations.

In the bin example, people in our little community were fuming in the local Facebook group, calling the council a bunch of charlatans who should be chased out of town or, if that wasn’t an option, tarred and feathered outside the local pub.

We immediately see situations based only on the limited information we’ve been presented, which causes us to be greatly annoyed (or downright furious in the worst cases) about things we don’t fully understand.

In psychology terms, this is referred to as the availability heuristic. This is a mental shortcut we all use from time to time that relies on immediate examples that come to mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision.

Put simply, it means we jump to conclusions based on very limited information.

The takeaway is that strong emotional reactions are often a signal that we're working with incomplete information, not that we've correctly identified wrongdoing.

We should be training ourselves to recognise this feeling as a cue for curiosity and a prompt to seek more information, rather than making a conclusion there and then.

As I learned with the bins example, once I knew why this change was happening, I could see the logic of the schedule change.

I do still think I should pay less tax, though.