Predictably Irrational
Page 13
To react to this, we need an intervention that does not rely on the premise that teenagers will remember how they wanted to behave while in a cold state (or how their parents wanted them to behave) and follow these guidelines even when they are in a hot state. Why not build into cars precautionary devices to foil teenagers’ behavior? Such cars might be equipped with a modified OnStar system that the teenager and the parents configure in a cold state. If a car exceeds 65 miles per hour on the highway, or more than 40 miles per hour in a residential zone, for example, there will be consequences. If the car exceeds the speed limit or begins to make erratic turns, the radio might switch from 2Pac to Schumann’s Second Symphony (this would slow most teenagers). Or the car might blast the air conditioning in winter, switch on the heat in summer, or automatically call Mom (a real downer if the driver’s friends are present). With these substantial and immediate consequences in mind, then, the driver and his or her friends would realize that it’s time for Mr. Hyde to move over and let Dr. Jekyll drive.
This is not at all far-fetched. Modern cars are already full of computers that control the fuel injection, the climate system, and the sound system. Cars equipped with OnStar are already linked to a wireless network. With today’s technology, it would be a simple matter for a car to automatically call Mom.
Better Life Decisions
Not uncommonly, women who are pregnant for the first time tell their doctors, before the onset of labor, that they will refuse any kind of painkiller. The decision made in their cold state is admirable, but they make this decision when they can’t imagine the pain that can come with childbirth (let alone the challenges of child rearing). After all is said and done, they may wish they’d gone for the epidural.
With this in mind, Sumi (my lovely wife) and I, readying ourselves for the birth of our first child, Amit, decided to test our mettle before making any decisions about using an epidural. To do this, Sumi plunged her hands into a bucket of ice for two minutes (we did this on the advice of our birth coach, who swore to us that the resulting pain would be similar to the pain of childbirth), while I coached her breathing. If Sumi was unable to bear the pain of this experience, we figured, she’d probably want painkillers when she was going through the actual birth. After two minutes of holding her hands in the ice bucket, Sumi clearly understood the appeal of an epidural. During the birth itself, any ounce of love Sumi ever had for her husband was completely transferred to the anesthesiologist, who produced the epidural at the critical point. (With our second child, we made it to the hospital about two minutes before Neta was born, so Sumi did end up experiencing an analgesic-free birth after all.)
LOOKING FROM ONE emotional state to another is difficult. It’s not always possible; and as Sumi learned it can be painful. But to make informed decisions we need to somehow experience and understand the emotional state we will be in at the other side of the experience. Learning how to bridge this gap is essential to making some of the important decisions of our lives.
It is unlikely that we would move to a different city without asking friends who live there how they like it, or even choose to see a film without reading some reviews. Isn’t it strange that we invest so little in learning about both sides of ourselves? Why should we reserve this subject for psychology classes when failure to understand it can bring about repeated failures in so many aspects of our lives? We need to explore the two sides of ourselves; we need to understand the cold state and the hot state; we need to see how the gap between the hot and cold states benefits our lives, and where it leads us astray.
What did our experiments suggest? It may be that our models of human behavior need to be rethought. Perhaps there is no such thing as a fully integrated human being. We may, in fact, be an agglomeration of multiple selves. Although there is nothing much we can do to get our Dr. Jekyll to fully appreciate the strength of our Mr. Hyde, perhaps just being aware that we are prone to making the wrong decisions when gripped by intense emotion may help us, in some way, to apply our knowledge of our “Hyde” selves to our daily activities.
How can we try to force our “Hyde” self to behave better? This is what Chapter 7 is about.
APPENDIX: CHAPTER 5
A complete list of the questions we asked, with the mean response and percentage differences. Each question was presented on a visual-analog scale that stretched between “no” on the left (zero) to “possibly” in the middle (50) to “yes” on the right (100).
* * *
TABLE 1
RATE THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES
Question
Nonaroused
Aroused
Difference, percent
Are women’s shoes erotic?
42
65
55
Can you imagine being attracted to a 12-year-old girl?
23
46
100
Can you imagine having sex with a 40-year-old woman?
58
77
33
Can you imagine having sex with a 50-year-old woman?
28
55
96
Can you imagine having sex with a 60-year-old woman?
7
23
229
Can you imagine having sex with a man?
8
14
75
Could it be fun to have sex with someone who was extremely fat?
13
24
85
Could you enjoy having sex with someone you hated?
53
77
45
If you were attracted to a woman and she proposed a threesome with a man, would you do it?
19
34
79
Is a woman sexy when she’s sweating?
56
72
29
Is the smell of cigarette smoke arousing?
13
22
69
Would it be fun to get tied up by your sexual partner?
63
81
29
Would it be fun to tie up your sexual partner?
47
75
60
Would it be fun to watch an attractive woman urinating?
25
32
28
Would you find it exciting to spank your sexual partner?
61
72
18
Would you find it exciting to get spanked by an attractive woman?
50
68
36
Would you find it exciting to have anal sex?
46
77
67
Can you imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal?
6
16
167
Is just kissing frustrating?
41
69
68
* * *
* * *
TABLE 2
RATE THE LIKELIHOOD OF ENGAGING IN IMMORAL BEHAVIORS LIKE DATE RAPE (A STRICT ORDER OF SEVERITY IS NOT IMPLIED)
Question
Nonaroused
Aroused
Difference, percent
Would you take a date to a fancy restaurant to increase your chance of having sex with her?
55
70
27
Would you tell a woman that you loved her to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?
30
51
70
Would you encourage your date to drink to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?
46
63
37
Would you keep trying to have sex after your date says “no”?
20
45
125
Would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?
&nbs
p; 5
26
420
* * *
* * *
TABLE 3
RATE YOUR TENDENCY TO USE, AND OUTCOMES OF NOT USING, BIRTH CONTROL
Question
Nonaroused
Aroused
Difference, percent
Birth control is the woman’s responsibility.
34
44
29
A condom decreases sexual pleasure.
66
78
18
A condom interferes with sexual spontaneity.
58
73
26
Would you always use a condom if you didn’t know the sexual history of a new sexual partner?
88
69
22
Would you use a condom even if you were afraid that a woman might change her mind while you went to get it?
86
60
30
* * *
CHAPTER 7
The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control
Why We Can’t Make Ourselves Do
What We Want to Do
Onto the American scene, populated by big homes, big cars, and big-screen plasma televisions, comes another big phenomenon: the biggest decline in the personal savings rate since the Great Depression.
Go back 25 years, and double-digit savings rates were the norm. As recently as 1994 the savings rate was nearly five percent. But by 2006 the savings rate had fallen below zero—to negative one percent. Americans were not only not saving; they were spending more than they earned. Europeans do a lot better—they save an average of 20 percent. Japan’s rate is 25 percent. China’s is 50 percent. So what’s up with America?
I suppose one answer is that Americans have succumbed to rampant consumerism. Go back to a home built before we had to have everything, for instance, and check out the size of the closets. Our house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, was built in 1890. It has no closets whatsoever. Houses in the 1940s had closets barely big enough to stand in. The closet of the 1970s was a bit larger, perhaps deep enough for a fondue pot, a box of eight-track tapes, and a few disco dresses. But the closet of today is a different breed. “Walk-in closet” means that you can literally walk in for quite a distance. And no matter how deep these closets are, Americans have found ways to fill them right up to the closet door.
Another answer—the other half of the problem—is the recent explosion in consumer credit. The average American family now has six credit cards (in 2005 alone, Americans received 6 billion direct-mail solicitations for credit cards). Frighteningly, the average family debt on these cards is about $9,000; and seven in 10 households borrow on credit cards to cover such basic living expenses as food, utilities, and clothing.
So wouldn’t it just be wiser if Americans learned to save, as in the old days, and as the rest of the world does, by diverting some cash to the cookie jar, and delaying some purchases until we can really afford them? Why can’t we save part of our paychecks, as we know we should? Why can’t we resist those new purchases? Why can’t we exert some good old-fashioned self-control?
The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. And most of us know what that’s all about. We promise to save for retirement, but we spend the money on a vacation. We vow to diet, but we surrender to the allure of the dessert cart. We promise to have our cholesterol checked regularly, and then we cancel our appointment.
How much do we lose when our fleeting impulses deflect us from our long-term goals? How much is our health affected by those missed appointments and our lack of exercise? How much is our wealth reduced when we forget our vow to save more and consume less? Why do we lose the fight against procrastination so frequently?
IN CHAPTER 6 we discussed how emotions grab hold of us and make us view the world from a different perspective. Procrastination (from the Latin pro, meaning for; and cras, meaning tomorrow) is rooted in the same kind of problem. When we promise to save our money, we are in a cool state. When we promise to exercise and watch our diet, again we’re cool. But then the lava flow of hot emotion comes rushing in: just when we promise to save, we see a new car, a mountain bike, or a pair of shoes that we must have. Just when we plan to exercise regularly, we find a reason to sit all day in front of the television. And as for the diet? I’ll take that slice of chocolate cake and begin the diet in earnest tomorrow. Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.
As a university professor, I’m all too familiar with procrastination. At the beginning of every semester my students make heroic promises to themselves—vowing to read their assignments on time, submit their papers on time, and in general, stay on top of things. And every semester I’ve watched as temptation takes them out on a date, over to the student union for a meeting, and off on a ski trip in the mountains—while their workload falls farther and farther behind. In the end, they wind up impressing me, not with their punctuality, but with their creativity—inventing stories, excuses, and family tragedies to explain their tardiness. (Why do family tragedies generally occur during the last two weeks of the semester?)
After I’d been teaching at MIT for a few years, my colleague Klaus Wertenbroch (a professor at INSEAD, a business school with campuses in France and Singapore) and I decided to work up a few studies that might get to the root of the problem, and just maybe offer a fix for this common human weakness. Our guinea pigs this time would be the delightful students in my class on consumer behavior.
As they settled into their chairs that first morning, full of anticipation (and, no doubt, with resolutions to stay on top of their class assignments), the students listened to me review the syllabus for the course. There would be three main papers over the 12-week semester, I explained. Together, these papers would constitute much of their final grade.
“And what are the deadlines?” asked one of them, waving his hand from the back. I smiled. “You can hand in the papers at any time before the end of the semester,” I replied. “It’s entirely up to you.” The students looked back blankly.
“Here’s the deal,” I explained. “By the end of the week, you must commit to a deadline date for each paper. Once you set your deadlines, they can’t be changed.” Late papers, I added, would be penalized at the rate of one percent off the grade for each day late. The students could always turn in their papers before their deadlines without penalty, of course, but since I wouldn’t be reading any of them until the end of the semester, there would be no particular advantage in terms of grades for doing so.
In other words, the ball was in their court. Would they have the self-control to play the game?
“But Professor Ariely,” asked Gaurav, a clever master’s student with a charming Indian accent, “given these instructions and incentives, wouldn’t it make sense for us to select the last date possible?”
“You can do that,” I replied. “If you find that it makes sense, by all means do it.”
Under these conditions, what would you have done?
I promise to submit paper 1 on week ———
I promise to submit paper 2 on week ———
I promise to submit paper 3 on week ———
What deadlines did the students pick for themselves? A perfectly rational student would follow Gaurav’s advice and set all the deadlines for the last day of class—after all, it was always possible to submit papers earlier without a penalty, so why take a chance and select an earlier deadline than needed? Delaying the deadlines to the end was clearly the best decision if students were perfectly rational. But what if the students are not rational? What if they succumb to temptation and are prone to procrastination? What if they realize their weakness? If the students are not rational, and they know it, they could use the deadlines to force themselves to behave better. They could set early deadlines and by doing so force themselves to start working on the projects earlier in the semester.
&n
bsp; What did my students do? They used the scheduling tool I provided them with and spaced the timing of their papers across the whole semester. This is fine and good, as it suggests that the students realize their problems with procrastination and that if given the right opportunities they try to control themselves—but the main question is whether the tool was indeed helpful in improving their grades. To find out about this, we had to conduct other variations of the same experiments in other classes and compare the quality of papers across the different conditions (classes).
NOW THAT I had Gaurav and his classmates choosing their individual deadlines, I went to my other two classes—with markedly different deals. In the second class, I told the students that they would have no deadlines at all during the semester. They merely needed to submit their papers by the end of the last class. They could turn the papers in early, of course, but there was no grade benefit to doing so. I suppose they should have been happy: I had given them complete flexibility and freedom of choice. Not only that, but they also had the lowest risk of being penalized for missing an intermediate deadline.
The third class received what might be called a dictatorial treatment: I dictated three deadlines for the three papers, set at the fourth, eighth, and twelfth weeks. These were my marching orders, and they left no room for choice or flexibility.
Of these three classes, which do you think achieved the best final grades? Was it Gaurav and his classmates, who had some flexibility? Or the second class, which had a single deadline at the end, and thus complete flexibility? Or the third class, which had its deadlines dictated from above, and therefore had no flexibility? Which class do you predict did worst?