Gal Gadot’s Imagine: Behavioral Game Theory

3 sequential decisions in this episode have all gone wrong and led to a very suboptimal game theory equilibrium:

1. Gal Gadot deciding her cringey video was a good idea
2. Us deciding to hate it
3. Us deciding to loudly communicate said hatred

Gal Gadot’s been adequately destroyed for her totally tone-deaf celebrity mashup video. That’s not too surprising, it’s very destruction-worthy. What’s surprising is it is being destroyed by people who, like me, have always shown zero interest in what celebrities have to say. Movie stars are good at looking good, or acting, or if you’re Brat Pitt and nobody else, both. If we’re all really living in the world of Dave Ricardo where everyone focuses on their specific competitive advantage, then no one would ever care what an actor says or does off-stage. There are many who do live in this world, and live blissfully unaware of their favorite actor’s real life negative IQ, racist tendencies, and appalling collection of Vanilla Ice CDs. When these people suddenly evince outrage about celebrities’ negative IQ and EQ on display, I am surprised. No one is surprised that Wayne Rooney’s answer to world peace, climate change, and the crisis in children’s math scores is ‘to give it 110%’. No one is surprised that Kim Kardashian thinks Australia is the name of a Mexican town, and therefore located in Texas, which on a map she would mark in Brazil (it’s called South America for a reason, like duh). So why is everyone surprised when Gal Gadot thinks the solution to global pandemics is an Instagram video? Why is it so especially annoying? I imagine Gal Gadot has to deal with 3 potential segments of people holding negative reactions:

1. It was not annoying before, but now it is: There’s a time and place for everything. I used to watch Logan Paul’s opinions on the existence of the Higgs Boson and its implications for fundamental physics, but in these stressful times, it suddenly boils my blood to see these rich people in their palaces saying we’re all in this together and that they know how I feel because they’re equally depressed that they just bought a $10000 dress and can’t wear it anywhere :(
2. It was always a little annoying but now it’s intolerable: It used to be harmless garbage that I could tolerate and see a role for somewhere sometime, but now it’s gratuitous preening or virtue signalling or whiney look-at-me and I can no longer just turn the other cheek.
3. It was always very annoying but now I can’t ignore it: Through a mixture of my increased free-time and media consumption, particularly magnified virality of the usual celebrity garbage, and the Streisand Effect, my unsuspecting eyeballs have been subjected to their trash right when they, in their weakest hour, needed it the least.

Of these, do I, Gal Gadot, really care about 2 and 3? These people never liked me, and always thought I was a buffoon (conflict of interest disclaimer: I am one of one people who thinks GG’s WW is an abomination and a disgrace to my 2nd favorite DC character). As a celebrity, I’m not in the business of winning over polarized fans, but of milking my cashcow fanbase for all time, dripfeeding them tantalizing tidbits each day like teasing them that I will shortly reveal my 3rd favorite Ninja Turtle, and then revealing next day that it is Master Oogway, which with unintended irony wins over a few fans from the camp of those who thought I was a buffoon. The additional advantage of being emotionally protected against groups 2 and 3 is it makes for a more generalized emotional protection against all negative feedback. If 2,3 signify a silent opposition that has become vocal only now, then the flipside is that a large % of the vocal criticism I receive now is comprised of people who were always critics. So is my net loss is really just group 1?

On the other hand, I have two potential windfall segments:

4. It was not annoying before, it still isn’t: Celebrity garbage is my daily escape. It still is. In fact I need it more than ever before. Reality is the real garbage, and we’re all trying to escape it in our own way, music, cooking, literature, mine is to create a virtual avatar called Gal Gadot. Imagine.

5. It was annoying before, but now I’m won over: Celebrity garbage was always superficial, pointless, and inane. I never saw the appeal. Now I do. It’s a public good that someone can post something as simple as this and reach millions of people with a positive message instead of all the other things that usually have the power to reach millions of people: slimy politicians with agendas, sensationalist media with TRP targets, and Whatsapp forwards claiming sacrificing a left-handed atheist will cure Covid. As a left-handed atheist, I’d rather watch Gal Gadot sing.

Considering 4 represents no-change, as long as 5–1 is positive, should I go ahead with my supremely poor-taste Imagine video, and laugh all the criticism away? This is where Bayesian game theory gets a bit more complex. Gal Gadot’s video is a signal. If we lived in a world with perfect information and only rational actors taking payoff-maximizing decisions, then the fact that she goes ahead with the video should technically be a signal that she knows more non-fans are converted than fans who defect. As someone who finds this video in very poor taste, I should then reason that it isn’t poor per se, but merely poor to me. In my case it is because I never placed a value on celebrities, and still don’t. If I’m instead from Group 1, I reason that I no longer like celebrities because Covid has taught me that I clearly don’t need them, but also that there are more people who clearly do need them. But this doesn’t happen, we just assume Gal Gadot is a moron whose decisions are suboptimal. We hate the video objectively, and her. This is very sad, it puts her in a no-win position because there’s a version of either decision (release video, don’t release) that signals stupidity, and we’ll likely cherry-pick that specifically.

5–1 is negative, I shouldn’t release the video, but I do:

1. Overconfidence: I have an overinflated view of myself, how important I am and how loved I am. I significantly overcount the number of lives I’m going to be touching and changing, and therefore group 5 is made to look much larger than it really is
2. Action Bias: I honestly do want to help, and I can’t stomach the idea that the best thing I can do is nothing. I want to do something, anything. I’m useless and incompetent, but well-meaning and earnest.
3. Publicity whoring: My currency is publicity. I lose more fans by becoming irrelevant and out of the limelight than I do by becoming potentially insulting or even reviled.
4. Selflessness: I don’t care if I lose some fans. Mental health is a real problem during these trying times, and as a loved celebrity I’m better placed than even doctors or politicians to boost spirits and spread joy. If I lose more fans than I gain (5–1 is negative), it’s because of a generalized stigma against mental health as a legitimate medical concern, and I want to fight against that.

5–1 is positive, I should release a video, but I don’t:

1. Loss Aversion: the fans I lose upset me more than the fans I gain even though I gain more fans than I lose.
2. Endowment effect: I value the fans I already have more than the fans I will shortly get.
3. Sunk Cost Bias: I’ve expended a lot of time and effort into gaining and grooming the fans I currently have. I can’t lose them, it’ll mean all that time and effort was for nothing.
4. Underconfidence: I significantly undercount group 5. Surely I’m not competent enough or popular enough or talented enough to actually make a difference to people’s lives when they have actually important things to worry about right now.
5. Laziness/Selfishness: meh, couldn’t be effed. I got my own issues to deal with. My lazy selfish foot masseuse cancelled on me again, like really Martina no one cares that your parents might die tomorrow, my nails are literally dying today!
6. Awareness of public cynicism: 5–1 might be positive, but if I release the video the loudest people will be the critics and the fans I lose, and that will influence the others, decreasing group 5 and increasing group 1, because the assumption will be that I released the video despite 5–1 being negative.

This is a problem for society, because our ideal scenario is different from Gal Gadot’s. Ideally what we want is that if 5–1 is positive, she releases the video, and 5–1 is negative, she doesn’t. Right now the incentives are not aligned, because she could release the video and be punished and accused of doing it despite 5–1 being negative, whereas she wouldn’t be punished if she had done nothing despite 5–1 being positive (who’s actively calling out one by one any celebrity sitting at home doing nothing?). Worse, there are those people who personify point 4 (selflessness) by releasing the video though 5–1 is negative because some benefits are worth it, and we want to actively incentivize these people. Is there any behavior in scenario 2 (5–1 is positive, but I don’t release the video) that society wants to incentivize? Surely not.

In order to objectively hate the video, not only do we need to calculate 5–1, we also need to calculate the probability of Gal Gadot being selfless (rather than an overconfident busybody publicity addict) if she releases the video despite a negative 5–1. Just hating it, the way we have, especially people like me who never respected the cult of celebrity, is a bad decision. But more importantly there’s the decision of publicly communicating said hatred. For this we need to further subtract the loss of utility from disincentive of public cynicism. Maybe it is because I myself am such a huge cynic, but I imagine that currently we are operating society at a terribly sub-optimal equilibrium where we actively disincentivize actions that could be criticized even if conducted with the best intentions. This creates a doomed market for lemons, because increasingly the only people who will release a video, whether a positive or negative 5–1, will turn out to be the shameless ones who have a high value of overconfidence, action bias, and publicity addiction, not naming names but it rhymes with Drump. The more of this we see, the further we disincentivize it and the more skewed the test positives turn towards false positives. The exact opposite of what we want to achieve. Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a one-time correction of these perverse incentives needs us to swallow our pride and very very very painfully appreciate Gal Gadot for her immensely cringe-worthy superficial garbage. We suck it up and stop criticizing her. We do it publicly so the rest of society notices the shift in incentives. She’s the hero we don’t need right now, but the one we deserve. Hopefully our acceptance of her lays the conditions for the hero we do need right now.