I spent one year as an Associate Professor at Boston University. The doors in the economics building are strange because the key turns in the opposite way you would expect. Instead of turning the key to the right in order to pull the bolt left-to-right, you turn the key to the left. For the first month I got it wrong every morning.
Eventually I realized that I needed to do the opposite of my instinct. And so as I was just about to turn the key to the right I would stop myself and do the opposite. This worked for about a week. The problem was that as soon as I started to consistently get it right, it became second nature and then I could no longer tell what my primitive instinct was and what my second-order counter-instinct was. I would begin to turn the key to the left and then stop myself and turn the key to the right.
I have since concluded that it is basically impossible to “do the opposite” and that we are all lesser beings because of it. We could learn from experience much faster if we had the ability to remenber what our a) what our natural instinct is b) whether it works and c) to do the opposite when it doesn’t.
We could be George Castanza:
Cheap Talk 
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June 1, 2010 at 1:54 pm
QED Real Estate Consulting
Just think of the great economic position we would be in if George Costanza had been Economic Professors in the past 20 years. Maybe the closest we come to that is Nassim Taleb who wrote the Black Swan.
June 1, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Ryan
Right. Instinct and habits we are trying to change are bad reference points. As long as we can remember that, I think the problem goes away. Yet I often find myself thinking “Ok, this is the one I usually get wrong. But which is the way I usually do it?” I wish I could remember something more useful than that I most often get it wrong.
June 2, 2010 at 11:36 am
Anonymous
Hello Jeff:
When it comes to driving in some countries in Asia and also in Europe vs driving in US (left hand vs right hand driving), we do adapt and get it right instantly, isn’t it? The cost of not adapting is severe (e.g one may cause an accident/ get a ticket/suspended license etc). In your example of the doors at BU, there is no damage incurred even if I perpetually keep trying the wrong way.
June 2, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Anonymous
This didn’t work for me. While in England I had the same problem while walking on two sided streets. I eventually had to look both ways since my brain was completely lost (i didn’t drive a car though).
June 2, 2010 at 11:47 pm
jeff
me too.
June 17, 2010 at 8:46 pm
twicker
Part of it may be the cost, but I suspect a large part of it is that you’re around a bunch of other people who are driving on side-of-street A and not B. As long as you follow the crowd, you’re fine. As an American, the only time I had a problem driving in England was when there *wasn’t* anyone for me to follow, and I was turning onto a smallish two-lane road – i.e., I had no reference point, so I reverted to habit.
Think about all the car accidents we *do* have, and the number of people who *do* commit acts that could result in tickets/suspended licenses/death. If the high potential cost was enough to keep people from doing the wrong thing, almost no one would ever die in a car accident – basically, not unless a mechanical/electrical system malfunctioned.
June 17, 2010 at 3:18 am
Noumenon
What you need to do is take a Sharpie marker, draw an arrow on the lock and write the word “unlock” over the arrow. Problem solved for you and everyone else.