unSpun

by Brooks Jackson

  Today it might better be called the Grey Goose effect, after the hot-selling French vodka that came on the U.S. market in 1997 selling for $27 a bottle, nearly triple the price of the top-of-the-market Smirnoff brand. Grey Goose sales exploded. Vodka is officially defined by U.S. government regulations as “neutral spirits…without distinctive character, aroma, or taste,” so it is hard to see how one vodka can be three times better than another on any objective basis. The drink is basically distilled alcohol cut with water.

  Now, when our sharp-eyed Random House editor, Tim Bartlett, first saw this he objected: “Expensive vodkas on average are significantly smoother than cheap ones, which taste like rubbing alcohol.” We’re quite sure that’s how it seems to Tim and many others, but they’re not judging only on the basis of what their taste buds tell them. They are also taking into account, perhaps unconsciously, the price they have paid for the vodka, the amount of advertising they have seen telling them that the expensive vodka is superior and is drunk by sophisticated, in-the-know people, and even the fancy design of the bottle. We might agree that the Grey Goose bottle is prettier than the Smirnoff bottle, but that has nothing to do with what the bottles contain. Try comparing brands without any predisposition to think one is better than the other, and see what happens. The New York City artist (and blogger) Andrea Harner did just that. She and her husband, Jonah Peretti, invited over some friends in March 2006 for a blindfold test comparing Smirnoff to Grey Goose. Result: eight of sixteen correctly picked which was which. That’s exactly 50 percent, the same result you would expect from tossing a coin. Harner’s testers did much better telling regular Coke from regular Pepsi: 70 percent got the cola right.

  Taste is subjective, and you might well conclude that the illusion of better taste is worth paying for. Or perhaps your palate is more sensitive than the palates of Ms. Harner and her friends. Our point is, simply, that higher price predisposes us to think that a product is better, even when it’s not. With respect to vodka, soda, or any other beverage, you can’t know for sure what really tastes better unless you do a blindfold test yourself. As Ms. Harner wrote: “The point is that this challenge was A LOT harder than people expected. A LOT. I dare you to give it a try.” At the very least, her test results suggest you could pour Smirnoff into a Grey Goose bottle and your friends would never know the difference.

  The price-equals-quality fallacy is exploited by others besides the booze industry. Many second-tier private colleges and universities make sure the “sticker price” of their tuition is close to (or even higher than) Harvard’s, Princeton’s, and Yale’s, in the hope that parents and students will take the mental shortcut of equating price with quality. Consumer Reports magazine, which conducts carefully designed tests on all sorts of products from automobiles to toasters to TV sets, often finds lower-priced goods to be of higher quality than those costing much more. For example, in a comparison of upright vacuum cleaners on the magazine’s website in 2006, the $140 Eureka Boss Smart Vac Ultra 4870 was rated better overall than the $1,330 Kirby Ultimate G Diamond Edition or the $700 Oreck XL21-700. The Eureka was better than the highly advertised $500 Dyson DC15. Dyson claims that its vacuum “never lose[s] suction,” and maybe that’s true. But the independent testers at Consumer Reports found that the Eureka did a better job of cleaning carpets, at less than a third the price.

  The mismatch between price and quality has been apparent for a long time. Back in 1979, the University of Iowa business professor Peter C. Riesz checked the Consumer Reports ratings of 679 different packaged foods over fifteen years. He found that the correlation between quality and price “is near zero.” In other words, price had very little if anything to do with quality; the cheaper product was the better one about half the time.

  So don’t get spun by price tags. Shop around, and keep in mind that sometimes less expensive options are good enough, and in some cases just as good as the pricier alternative. It pays to check the facts.

  Selling False Hope

  Getting facts wrong not only can cost you money or get you in trouble with the law: it can put you in the hospital, or worse. Consider the harrowing story of a cancer patient named Chuck Hysong, of Hendersonville, North Carolina. According to his wife, Pamela, he’d been improving while taking a new medication prescribed by his oncologist. But at nine P.M. on April 12, 2002, he took a preparation called Optimizer ENG-C, sold to him by a man recommended by a relative who was skeptical of doctors and a believer in “alternative” medicine.

  Mrs. Hysong says she had begged her husband not to take the “optimizer” preparation. For one thing, the man who sold it “told my husband that he has a 100 percent cure rate for bone cancer,” Mrs. Hysong recalls. That was obviously too good to be true, and there were other clear warning signs. The seller refused to list the ingredients of his “supplements,” Mrs. Hysong says, adding that he also demanded $5,000 payment, in advance, not covered by any medical insurance. She refused to pay, but the relative put up the first $2,000. “Chuck was desperate,” Mrs. Hysong recalls. “He was still a relatively young man, and he wasn’t ready to go, and he was ready to try anything within what he considered reason.” That’s typical of many seriously ill people for whom science offers little hope; they fall prey to quackery and medical fraud, losing money and sometimes suffering further damage to their health.

  Mrs. Hysong describes what happened when her husband took the $2,000 Optimizer preparation:

  “By nine-thirty, he had uncontrollable diarrhea; almost constant discharge from his nose; he was hallucinating that he had smoke coming off his body; he was burning hot; he made uncontrollable noises; he was nauseated; he was scared; and he was angry. After about an hour of diarrhea, when he tried to stand, he could not do so without bracing himself. He could not walk back to bed.”

  Mr. Hysong was rushed to the hospital, where he spent the night. He was left “dehydrated, weak, and ashamed that he had been sucked into this,” according to his wife. His earlier improvement ceased. “About a week later he started going south again,” Mrs. Hysong said. “I don’t know if it was coincidence, or the stress to his body.” Chuck Hysong died three months later. Cancer killed him, but as Mrs. Hysong describes it, the pills added to his suffering and weakened him in his final days.

  The red flags still fly. Robert Dowling, the man Mrs. Hysong says sold the pills to her husband, runs something he calls the North Carolina Institute of Technology. Though he claims no formal medical training, in 2006 his website—www.cancercured.org—claimed to have a method of finding and curing breast cancer before it develops. Dowling had done business in South Carolina before coming north, but South Carolina authorities shut down his operation in September 2001 after the death of a client, a seventy-one-year-old woman suffering from stomach cancer. A few months earlier, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had warned Dowling that he was illegally selling an unapproved medical device by marketing “Bioscan 2010” home kits, which could supposedly predict disease. Dowling moved on to an even smaller town, giving his address as Hot Springs, North Carolina.

  What Really Kills Women?

  Far more lethal than any quack healer, however, is the misinformation about our bodies and our health that millions of us carry around unquestioned. As recently as 1997, for example, adult women and men were most likely to name breast cancer as the leading killer of women, which isn’t close to being true and never has been. The plain fact is women are nine times more likely to die of heart disease, and more than twice as likely to die from stroke. Lung cancer kills far more women than breast cancer, and so do other chronic lung diseases, such as emphysema. Furthermore, many of these deaths could be avoided if women had a more accurate mental picture of their true health risks and acted accordingly.

  To be sure, the attention to breast cancer has done a great deal of good, making women more likely to detect cancers at a curable stage through regular mammograms and self-examinations. That’s one reason breast cancer deaths have been declining. But the hard fac
ts imply that women should be many times more concerned about heart attacks, stroke, and lung disease than about breast cancer. They should educate themselves about the warning signs of heart attack (these signs are somewhat different in women than in men, by the way), and consider preventive diet and exercise habits. For the millions of women who smoke, the facts might convince them to try quitting. Everybody knows smoking increases the risk of lung disease and heart attack, but a more accurate picture of how many women die from these could provide smokers with added motivation to drop the habit. In short, facts can save lives.

  It’s easy to see why so many had the wrong idea, not because of any intentional deception but because breast cancer gets enormous attention in the news media and that’s where most people get their information. When a CBS/New York Times poll asked people where they learned most about health-related issues, only one in ten said from a doctor; six in ten said they learned most from television, newspapers, or magazines. However, what reporters and editors find newsworthy often is a poor measure of what people really need to know. We get spun by mistaking how often we hear about something for how often it really occurs. For example, as we’ve already mentioned, the more crime stories people see on TV, the more crime-ridden they believe their communities to be, even when crime is declining. Psychologists call this effect the availability heuristic, a mental bias that gives more weight to vividness and emotional impact than to actual probability.

  Ironically, breast cancer gets so much attention partly because so many women survive it and become advocates, producing and participating in publicity-grabbing events such as the annual Race for the Cure. That’s not a bad thing, as we’ve noted. But the deadlier risks deserve even more publicity and attention.

  A poll taken in March 2005 showed 55 percent of women correctly identified heart disease as their leading killer. The percentage of respondents who get this question right had doubled since 1997. But that change required a massive campaign by the federal government as well as the American Heart Association and other groups. First Lady Laura Bush made women’s heart disease a personal project, and the government’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute scored big in 2003 with its “Red Dress Project,” hooking up with the glitzy Mercedes Benz Fashion Week and nineteen designers. Yet 25 percent of women still think breast cancer is a bigger threat than heart disease. No quack or con man told them that—it is simple misinformation. But that misinformation can kill them—and getting the facts straight can save their lives.

  Dangerous Ignorance

  Teenagers put their health at risk by getting the facts wrong about sex. In 2005 researchers from the University of California–San Francisco reported in the medical journal Pediatrics on a survey of 580 ninth-graders, whose average age was just under fifteen. Of that group, 14 percent stated there was “absolutely zero chance” of contracting chlamydia through oral sex, and 13 percent said it was impossible to contract HIV through oral sex. In fact, studies have shown herpes, hepatitis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, and even HIV can be transmitted through oral sex, the study’s authors said. Here, ignorance can lead to a nasty infection or even a life-threatening disease.

  Figures from the same study illustrate another type of dangerous sexual ignorance: teens thought others were having sex far more than was actually the case. Only 13.5 percent of the ninth-graders said they had experienced vaginal sex, for example, but the group estimated that 41 percent of others their age had done so—three times the actual number. So it’s probably no coincidence that 26 percent said they intended to have vaginal sex soon, within the next six months—double the percentage that had already experienced it. Peer pressure and peer acceptance are important to adolescents, so thinking that three times as many of their peers are having sex as is really the case probably leads some to try it who might not if they knew the truth.

  A similar ignorance prevails among college students. A 2003 study at Virginia’s James Madison University surveyed attitudes about casual sexual behavior while “hooking up”—on a first date with no future commitment. Students were asked how comfortable they felt about engaging in a variety of acts during a hookup, from petting above the waist to sexual intercourse. “Our study suggests that men believe women are more comfortable engaging in these behaviors than in fact they are, and also that women believe other women are more comfortable engaging in these behaviors than they are themselves,” the authors said. “As a consequence, some men may pressure women to engage in intimate sexual behaviors, and some women may engage in these behaviors or resist only weakly because they believe they are unique in feeling discomfort about engaging in them.”

  In other words, if teens and college students got their facts straight about what others were really doing and how those others really felt, fewer might feel pressured to have sex. Unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and even sexual assaults could well decline.

  Psychologists call this gap between perception and facts pluralistic ignorance, and it doesn’t apply only to sex. Consider heavy drinking, for example: college students tend to think others are more comfortable with it than is actually the case. Studies suggest that male students, especially, may become heavy drinkers because they think—wrongly—that it’s expected. Some college campuses are trying a campaign called Most of Us to provide students with statistical evidence about the true attitudes of their peers regarding booze, in the hope that abuse of alcohol will decline when those with more cautious attitudes realize they are in the majority.

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  Killer Facts

  What you don’t know can kill you. But some life-saving information is on the way.

  Federal health researchers estimate that 125 to 150 persons die each year because of anaphylaxis caused by food allergies. They also estimate that 1 out of every 50 adults and 1 out of every 20 infants suffer to some degree from food allergies, which send an estimated 30,000 persons each year to hospital emergency rooms.

  People don’t always know what they’re eating. An FDA survey in 1999 and 2000 found that 25 percent of sampled baked goods, ice cream, and candy contained peanuts or eggs although these were not included on the ingredients list. However, in January 2006 a new federal law took effect, the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, which requires that manufacturers label for eight types of allergens that together account for 90 percent of allergic reactions: soybeans, eggs, milk, fish, wheat, peanuts, tree nuts (such as almonds and walnuts), and crustacean shellfish (such as shrimp and crab).

  But be careful: the new law only applies to packaged foods, not to food sold by restaurants, neighborhood bakeries, kiosks, carry-out establishments, or street vendors.

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  Facts Change History

  Misperceptions of the truth about majority opinion may even have held back the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, surveys showed Americans grossly underestimated the strength of public support for desegregation, even in the Deep South. One famous study, by the sociologist Hubert J. O’Gorman, showed that in 1968, for example, only one in three white Southerners said he or she actually favored segregation, but nearly two in three said they believed a majority of whites were segregationists. To put it another way, desegregationist whites were a big majority in the South but thought they were a minority. Would they have spoken up sooner and pushed their political leaders harder for more liberal civil rights and voting laws if they had known their own political strength? Would Alabama’s George C. Wallace have carried five southern states in his 1968 presidential campaign had all whites known how others felt about segregation? We can never know for sure, but O’Gorman’s study suggests that history might have been different if people hadn’t been mistaken about how the majority felt.

  We also have reason to speculate that mistaking the true attitudes of others might have contributed to the rash of business scandals and corporate crime that started coming to light in 2001. After the Enron scandal, a study conducted at the University of Oklahoma showed that lawy
ers think other lawyers are more likely to be unethical than they themselves are. Likewise, business students believed that businesspeople have less stringent ethical standards than their own. One implication, said the authors, is that “if they were to observe an ethical infraction, they might be less likely to speak up.” Or, to turn that around, there might be more whistle-blowers and less corruption if more business executives and lawyers realized that the ethical standards of others aren’t as lax as they suppose.

  Fighting Words

  Getting the facts wrong can—in fact, often does—lead to the worst of human calamities, war. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is only the most recent example. Six weeks before it began, 76 percent of Americans in a Time/CNN/Harris Interactive poll answered “yes” when asked, “Do you think Saddam Hussein currently provides assistance to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network, or don’t you think so?” Only 15 percent said “no.” The widespread belief that Saddam was aiding Al-Qaeda was later declared unfounded by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. Nothing that can fairly be called evidence has ever surfaced to support the notion. And of course, now we know that Saddam Hussein had dismantled his nuclear weapons program and gotten rid of stockpiles of chemical and germ weapons, contrary to what the public was told by the president and the CIA before the war.

  But the Iraq War isn’t the first one Americans have fought on the basis of false beliefs. We’ve been making that mistake for more than a century.

  On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the hull of the American battleship U.S.S. Maine and sank her in Havana harbor with the loss of 266 lives. Soon the cry “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain” was on the lips of war hawks; the incident led to the Spanish-American War and the loss of another 3,000 American lives. But did the Spanish sink the Maine? Probably not.