Fig. 13. Variety increases pleasure when consumption is rapid.
Fig. 14. Variety reduces pleasure when consumption is slow.
Now, when you and your friend sat down at the imaginary restaurant together, you ordered two dishes to be eaten simultaneously. You knew that you wouldn’t have much time between bites, so you asked for variety to spice things up. Good call. But when the maître d’ asked you to order a sequence of meals in advance, you asked for variety then too. Why did you ask for variety when you already had time? Blame the spatial metaphor (see figure 15). Because you thought of dishes that were separated in time by imagining dishes that were separated by a few inches on a single table, you assumed that what was true of spatially separated dishes would be true of temporally separated dishes as well. When dishes are separated by space, it makes perfectly good sense to seek variety. After all, who would want to sit down at a table with twelve identical servings of partridge? We love sampler plates, pupu platters, and all-you-can-eat buffets because we want—and should want—variety among alternatives that we will experience in a single episode. The problem is that when we reason by metaphor and think of a dozen successive meals in a dozen successive months as though they were a dozen dishes arranged on a long table in front of us, we mistakenly treat sequential alternatives as though they were simultaneous alternatives. This is a mistake because sequential alternatives already have time on their side, hence variety makes them less pleasurable rather than more.
Fig. 15. Simultaneous consumption (left) and sequential consumption (right).
Starting Now
Because time is so difficult to imagine, we sometimes imagine it as a spatial dimension. And sometimes we just don’t imagine it at all. For example, when we imagine future events, our mental images will usually include the relevant people, places, words, and actions, but they rarely include a clear indication of the time at which those people in those places are speaking and acting. When we imagine ourselves discovering our spouse’s infidelity on New Year’s Eve, our mental image looks very much like a mental image of ourselves discovering the infidelity on Purim, Halloween, or Russian Orthodox Easter. Indeed, the mental image of finding your spouse in bed with the mailman on New Year’s Eve changes dramatically when you substitute barber for spouse, or conversation for bed, but hardly at all when you substitute Thanksgiving for New Year’s Eve. In fact, it is just about impossible to make this substitution because, alas, there is nothing in the mental image to change. We can inspect a mental image and see who is doing what and where, but not when they are doing it. In general, mental images are atemporal.11
So how do we decide how we will feel about things that are going to happen in the future? The answer is that we tend to imagine how we would feel if those things happened now, and then we make some allowance for the fact that now and later are not exactly the same thing. For instance, ask a heterosexual teenage boy how he would feel if one of the Budweiser babes were to show up at his door right now, bikini-clad, cooing, and in desperate need of a massage. His reaction will be visible. He will smile, his eyes will widen, his pupils will contract, his cheeks will flush, and other systems will respond as nature intended. Now, if you ask a different teenage boy precisely the same question but substitute the phrase in fifty years for right now, you will notice approximately the same initial response. Indeed, for a moment you might even suspect that this second teenager is focusing entirely on his mental image of the barefoot goddess with the bee-sting lips and that he is failing to consider the fact that this imaginary event is supposed to be taking place a half-century hence. But give him some time—say, a few hundred milliseconds. As the milliseconds pass, you will notice that his initial rush of enthusiasm fades as he considers the date of the imaginary event, realizes that adolescent males have one set of needs and grandfathers another, and correctly concludes that a cameo appearance by a nubile nymphet will probably not be quite as stimulating in his golden years as it would be in his testosterone-charged present. His initial flip and subsequent flop are quite revealing because they suggest that when he was asked to imagine the future event, he began by imagining the event as though it were happening in the present and only then considered the fact that the event would take place in the future, when maturity will have taken its inevitable toll on his eyesight and his libido.
Why does this matter? After all, in the final analysis the teenager did take into account the fact that now and five decades from now are not the same thing, so who cares if he considered this fact only after he was momentarily transfixed by his mental image of the airbrushed vixen from Planet Bud? I care. And you should care too. By imagining the event happening now and then correcting for the fact that it was actually going to happen later, the teenager used a method for making judgments that is quite common but that inevitably leads to error.12 To understand the nature of this error, consider a study in which volunteers were asked to guess how many African countries belonged to the United Nations.13 Rather than answering the question straightaway, the volunteers were asked to make their judgments by using the flip-then-flop method. Some volunteers were asked to give their answer by saying how much larger or smaller it was than ten, and other volunteers were asked to answer by saying how much larger or smaller it was than sixty. In other words, volunteers were given an arbitrary starting point and were asked to correct it until they reached an appropriate ending point—just as the teenager used an image of a beautiful woman in the present moment as a starting point for his judgment (“I’m wildly excited!”) and then corrected it to achieve an ending point for his judgment (“But since I’ll be sixty-seven years old when all this happens, I probably won’t be quite as excited as I am now”).
The problem with this method of making judgments is that starting points have a profound impact on ending points. Volunteers who started with ten guessed that there were about twenty-five African nations in the U.N., whereas volunteers who started with sixty guessed that there were about forty-five. Why such different answers? Because volunteers began their task by asking themselves whether the starting point could be the right answer, and then, realizing that it could not, moved slowly toward a more reasonable one (“Ten can’t be right. How about twelve? No, still too low. Fourteen? Maybe twenty-five?”).14 Alas, because this process requires time and attention, the group that started with ten and the group that started with sixty got tired and quit before they met in the middle. This really isn’t so strange. If you asked a child to count upward from zero and another child to count downward from a million, you could be pretty sure that when they finally got exhausted, gave up, and went off in search of eggs to throw at your garage door, they would have reached very different numbers. Starting points matter because we often end up close to where we started.
When people predict future feelings by imagining a future event as though it were happening in the present and then correcting for the event’s actual location in time, they make the same error. For example, volunteers in one study were asked to predict how much they would enjoy eating a bite of spaghetti and meat sauce the next morning or the next afternoon.15 Some of the volunteers were hungry when they made this prediction, and some were not. When volunteers made these predictions under ideal conditions, they predicted that they would enjoy spaghetti more in the afternoon than in the morning, and their current hunger had little impact on their predictions. But some of the volunteers made these predictions under less-than-ideal conditions. Specifically, they were asked to make these predictions while simultaneously performing a second task in which they had to identify musical tones. Research has shown that performing a simultaneous task such as this one causes people to stay very close to their starting points. And indeed, when volunteers made predictions while identifying musical tones, they predicted that they would like spaghetti just as much in the morning as in the afternoon. What’s more, their current hunger had a strong impact on their predictions, so that hungry volunteers expected to like spaghetti the next day (no matter when they
ate it) and sated volunteers expected to dislike spaghetti the next day (no matter when they ate it). This pattern of results suggests that all volunteers made their predictions by the flip-then-flop method: They first imagined how much they would enjoy eating the spaghetti in the present (“Yum!” if they were hungry and “Yuck!” if they were full) and used this prefeeling as a starting point for their prediction of tomorrow’s pleasures. Then, just as the hypothetical teenager corrected his judgment when he considered the fact that his current appreciation of a curvaceous coquette would probably be different fifty years later, the volunteers corrected their judgments by considering the time of day at which the spaghetti would be eaten (“Spaghetti for dinner is terrific, but spaghetti for breakfast? Yuck!”). However, volunteers who had made their predictions while identifying musical tones were unable to correct their judgments, and as such, their ending point was quite close to their starting point. Because we naturally use our present feelings as a starting point when we attempt to predict our future feelings, we expect our future to feel a bit more like our present than it actually will.16
Next to Nothing
If you have no special talents or intriguing deformities but are still harboring a secret desire to get into Guinness World Records, here’s something you might try: March into your boss’s office on Monday morning and say, “I’ve been with the company for some time, I believe my work has been excellent, and I’d like a fifteen percent pay cut . . . though I could settle for ten if that’s all the firm can manage right now.” The Guinness folks will be taking careful notes because in the long and often contentious history of labor relations, it is unlikely that anyone has ever before demanded a pay cut. Indeed, people hate pay cuts, but research suggests that the reason they hate pay cuts has very little to do with the pay part and everything to do with the cut part. For instance, when people are asked whether they would prefer to have a job at which they earned $30,000 the first year, $40,000 the second year, and $50,000 the third year, or a job at which they earned $60,000 then $50,000 then $40,000, they generally prefer the job with the increasing wages, despite the fact that they would earn less money over the course of the three years.17 This is quite curious. Why would people be willing to reduce their total income in order to avoid experiencing a cut in pay?
Comparing with the Past
If you’ve ever fallen asleep one night with the television blaring and been awakened another night by a single footstep, then you already know the answer. The human brain is not particularly sensitive to the absolute magnitude of stimulation, but it is extraordinarily sensitive to differences and changes—that is, to the relative magnitude of stimulation. For example, if I blindfolded you and asked you to hold a wooden block in your hand, would you be able to tell if I then placed a pack of gum on top of it? The right answer is “It depends,” and what it depends on is the weight of the block. If the block weighed only an ounce, then you’d immediately notice the 500 percent increase in weight when I added a five-ounce pack of gum. But if the block weighed ten pounds, then you’d never notice the .03 percent increase in weight. There is no answer to the question “Can people detect five ounces?” because brains do not detect ounces, they detect changes in ounces and differences in ounces, and the same is true for just about every physical property of an object. Our sensitivity to relative rather than absolute magnitudes is not limited to physical properties such as weight, brightness, or volume. It extends to subjective properties, such as value, goodness, and worth as well.18 For instance, most of us would be willing to drive across town to save $50 on the purchase of a $100 radio but not on the purchase of a $100,000 automobile because $50 seems like a fortune when we’re buying radios (“Wow, Target has the same radio for half off!”) but a pittance when we’re buying cars (“Like I’m going to schlep across the city just to get this car for one twentieth of a percent less?”).19
Economists shake their heads at this kind of behavior and will correctly tell you that your bank account contains absolute dollars and not “percentages off.” If it is worth driving across town to save $50, then it doesn’t matter which item you’re saving it on because when you spend these dollars on gas and groceries, the dollars won’t know where they came from.20 But these economic arguments fall on deaf ears because human beings don’t think in absolute dollars. They think in relative dollars, and fifty is or isn’t a lot of dollars depending on what it is relative to (which is why people who don’t worry about whether their mutual-fund manager is keeping 0.5 or 0.6 percent of their investment will nonetheless spend hours scouring the Sunday paper for a coupon that gives them 40 percent off a tube of toothpaste). Marketers, politicians, and other agents of influence know about our obsession with relative magnitudes and routinely turn it to their own advantage. For instance, one ancient ploy involves asking someone to pay an unrealistically large cost (“Would you come to our Save the Bears meeting next Friday and then join us Saturday for a protest march at the zoo?”) before asking them to pay a smaller cost (“Okay then, could you at least contribute five dollars to our organization?”). Studies show that people are much more likely to agree to pay the small cost after having first contemplated the large one, in part because doing so makes the small cost seems so . . . er, bearable.21
Because the subjective value of a commodity is relative, it shifts and changes depending on what we compare the commodity to. For instance, every morning on my walk to work I stop at my neighborhood Starbucks and hand $1.89 to the barista, who then hands me twenty ounces of better-than-average coffee. I have no idea what it costs Starbucks to make this coffee, and I have no idea why they have chosen to charge me this particular amount, but I do know that if I stopped in one morning and found that the price had suddenly jumped to $2.89, I would immediately do one of two things: I would compare the new price to the price I used to pay, conclude that coffee at Starbucks had gotten too damned expensive, and invest in one of those vacuum-sealed travel mugs and start brewing my coffee at home; or I would compare the new price to the price of other things I could buy with the same amount of cash (e.g., two felt-tip markers, a thirty-two-inch branch of artificial bamboo, or 1/100th of the twenty-CD boxed set The Complete Miles Davis at Montreux) and conclude that the coffee at Starbucks was a bargain. In theory I could make either of these comparisons, so which one would I actually make?
We both know the answer to that: I’d make the easy one. When I encounter a $2.89 cup of coffee, it’s all too easy for me to recall what I paid for coffee the day before and not so easy for me to imagine all the other things I might buy with my money.22 Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible. And that is indeed what I ought to be doing because it really doesn’t matter what coffee cost the day before, the week before, or at any time during the Hoover administration. Right now I have absolute dollars to spend and the only question I need to answer is how to spend them in order to maximize my satisfaction. If an international bean embargo suddenly caused the price of coffee to skyrocket to $10,000 per cup, then the only question I would need to ask myself is: “What else can I do with ten thousand dollars, and will it bring me more or less satisfaction than a cup of coffee?” If the answer is “more,” then I should walk away. If the answer is “less,” then I should get a cup of coffee. And an accountant with a whip.
The fact that it is so much easier to remember the past than to generate the possible causes us to make plenty of weird decisions. For instance, people are more likely to purchase a vacation package that has been marked down from $600 to $500 than an identical package that costs $400 but that was on sale the previous day for $300.23 Because it is easier to compare a vacation package’s price with its former price than with the price of other things one might buy, we end up preferring bad deals that have become decent deals to great deals that were once amazing deals. The same tendency leads us to treat commodities that have a
“memorable past” differently from those that don’t. For example, imagine that you have a $20 bill and a $20 concert ticket in your wallet, but when you arrive at the concert you realize that you’ve lost the ticket en route. Would you buy a new one? Most people say no.24 Now imagine that instead of a $20 bill and a $20 ticket, you have two $20 bills in your wallet, and when you arrive at the concert you realize that you’ve lost one of the bills en route. Would you buy a concert ticket? Most people say yes. It doesn’t take a logician to see that the two examples are identical in all the ways that matter: In both cases you’ve lost a piece of paper that was valued at $20 (a ticket or a bill), and in both cases you must now decide whether to spend the money that remains in your wallet on a concert. Nonetheless, our stubborn insistence on comparing the present to the past leads us to reason differently about these functionally equivalent cases. When we lose a $20 bill and then contemplate buying a concert ticket for the first time, the concert has no past, hence we correctly compare the cost of seeing the concert with other possibilities (“Should I spend twenty dollars to see the concert, or should I buy some new sharkskin mittens?”). But when we lose a ticket we’ve previously purchased and contemplate “replacing it,” the concert has a past, and hence we compare the current cost of seeing the concert ($40) with its previous cost ($20) and feel disinclined to see a performance whose price has suddenly doubled.
Comparing with the Possible
We make mistakes when we compare with the past instead of the possible. When we do compare with the possible, we still make mistakes. For example, if you’re like me, your living room is a mini-warehouse of durable goods ranging from chairs and lamps to stereos and television sets. You probably shopped around a bit before buying these items, and you probably compared the one you ultimately bought with a few alternatives—other lamps in the same catalog, other chairs on the showroom floor, other stereos on the same shelf, other televisions at the same mall. Rather than deciding whether to spend money, you were deciding how to spend money, and all the possible ways of spending your money were laid out for you by the nice folks who wanted it. These nice folks helped you overcome your natural tendency to compare with the past (“Is this television really that much better than my old one?”) by making it extremely easy for you to compare with the possible (“When you see them side by side here in the store, the Panasonic has a much sharper picture than the Sony”). Alas, we are all too easily fooled by such side-by-side comparisons, which is why retailers work so hard to ensure that we make them.
Stumbling on Happiness Page 15