Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

by Adam Alter

  One team of researchers showed that women who were recently diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer were far more capable of completing challenging mental tasks when they immersed themselves in natural environments for two hours each week for approximately two months. The interventions began when the women were diagnosed, and continued beyond surgery into the recovery period. Like many distressed patients who begin to battle life-threatening illnesses, the women struggled to complete difficult mental tasks shortly after they were diagnosed. Those who spent time in natural environments improved progressively, regaining their capacity to devote attention to demanding mental puzzles. Meanwhile, the patients who were not exposed to the nature-based intervention tended to struggle with similar tasks throughout the test period. Paying better attention is obviously a long way from recovery, but patients with sharper minds often respond better to treatment, stick to their treatment regimens, and behave more proactively during recovery.

  Unfortunately, nature occupies an ever-smaller portion of the earth’s surface, and millions of urbanites live miles from forests, lakes, and oceans. Instead, we’re faced with urban clutter in the form of billboards, signs, and other written material, and recent estimates suggest that we process thousands of these written messages each day. Children and teens between the ages of eight and eighteen are especially overloaded, spending almost every minute of leisure time attached to TVs, smartphones, and computers. Research shows that in the absence of natural restoration, the human brain copes with this clutter by going into overdrive, briefly scanning the environment more clearly and deeply than it usually does, until fatigue forces it to return to a stable state of shallower mental processing. As two game-show contestants demonstrated, this capacity to engage additional mental resources is sometimes triggered by subtle cues in the environment.

  Disfluency and the Tendency to Think More Deeply

  Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is one of the most successful TV game shows in history. It’s also an excellent place to watch people grapple with disfluency—the experience of struggling to make sense of information. The show has more than a hundred international variants, but in each case contestants answer trivia questions that become increasingly difficult as they’re worth larger sums of money. Two of the U.S. show’s most famous contestants are John Carpenter and Ogi Ogas, who both walked away with impressive winnings. On November 19, 1999, Carpenter became the first contestant to win $1 million on the U.S. show. For the million-dollar question the show’s host Regis Philbin asked Carpenter which one of the following presidents appeared on the television show Laugh-In: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, or Gerald Ford. Carpenter smiled briefly, then asked to phone his parents. In using this “lifeline,” Carpenter implied that he was stumped by the question and sought help by “phoning a friend.” Usually, when contestants phone a friend, they rush to ask the question as quickly as possible within the thirty-second time limit, and hope their chosen friend will be able to help. In this case, Carpenter used a very different tack. When Philbin told him to ask the question, he said:

  Hi, Dad . . . I don’t really need your help, I just wanted to let you know that I’m gonna win the million dollars . . . because the U.S. president that appeared on Laugh-In is Richard Nixon. That’s my final answer.

  Carpenter was right, and he’d known the answer from the second he saw the question. The smirk that briefly crossed his face was the hallmark of fluent—smooth and effortless—mental processing. A small space in his long-term memory bank housed the link between Richard Nixon and Laugh-In, and the answer appeared to him without demanding much mental effort. For all the ease in Carpenter’s response, Philbin might as well have told him that for a million dollars, he’d need to state his own name aloud or calculate the sum of one and one.

  Seven years after Carpenter’s suave exhibition, cognitive neuroscientist Ogi Ogas faced his own million-dollar question. Meredith Vieira, the show’s new host, asked Ogas which one of these ships was not one of the three taken over by colonists during the Boston Tea Party: Eleanor, Dartmouth, Beaver, or William? Ogas agonized, and you could see him frantically searching the long aisles of his memory. Over the course of four agonizing minutes, he narrowed down the options and almost decided to answer “William.” Just before he answered, a more conservative voice chimed in and told him to take the $500,000 he’d already won, rather than risk the prospect of walking away with a comparatively measly $25,000. An aversion to risk had cost him the chance of winning $1 million. Later, Ogas wrote about the experience:

  I immediately had an intuition that one of the ships at the Tea Party was Dartmouth. I reflected on Dartmouth, using it as a prime. I repeated the ship’s name aloud and silently to myself. Gradually, the name of another ship formed in my mind, echoing each repetition of Dartmouth: Beaver . . . And then, faintly, like the reflection of the moon on a midnight lake, the name of a third ship dimly waxed upon the murk of my mind: Eleanor . . .

  I blinked. Suddenly, I became aware of the wobble of the chair, the murmurs of the audience . . . Intuition? What are you thinking?! You’re risking a house! You can’t possibly know the answer to this arcane question! There’s no such thing as intuition! . . .

  ”I believe I’ll walk with the money I’ve got. That’s my final answer.”

  With the wobble of a chair and the murmurs of the audience—environmental triggers that tempered his confidence—Ogas suddenly realized that $475,000 was too much to risk on a hunch. In the face of environmental disfluency, he paused, reconsidered, and chose to take the more conservative route. The differences between Carpenter’s and Ogas’s experiences show that disfluency often functions as a useful gauge for determining confidence. Carpenter’s response arose fluently, and he was right to be confident, whereas Ogas’s response arose haltingly without the same sense of ease that people generally associate with certainty. In a series of experiments I ran with three other psychologists, I tested whether disfluency might be a useful signal that tells people to commit extra mental resources to a problem. We may be cognitive misers most of the time, thinking as little as possible, but that’s not true all the time. There must be prompts that tell us to think more deeply when the situation demands more effort.

  In the world at large, most of the information we process arrives in the form of letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs arranged to form coherent statements. Most of the time those pieces of information are easy to read, because designers have perfected fonts and typefaces that print clearly and legibly. Sometimes, though, for one reason or another, people choose to print written information in fonts that have the same effect as Ogi Ogas’s wobbly chair—they’re difficult to read, so they disrupt the mental reverie that accompanies most of our thinking. While most written words are printed in clear fonts, from to , and to , some are printed in elaborate and condensed alternatives, like and , or and . Advertisers rely on these fonts to distinguish their messages from their competitors’ messages, often written in simple, clear, overused fonts. One classic example is the widely used and eminently readable , which is the font of New York City subway signs and dozens of company logos, including those of Nestlé, American Airlines, Lufthansa, American Apparel, and Jeep. But how do people think differently when the environment features words printed in complex fonts that are far more difficult to read?

  My colleagues and I tried to answer that question when we asked students to answer a set of three brainteasers that form a measure of intelligence known as the Cognitive Reflection Test. The questions are devilishly tricky, because they inspire immediate answers that are both wrong and intuitively appealing. Those answers arise fluently, like John Carpenter’s response to the million-dollar question. People with patience eventually notice that the answer is wrong, and with extra mental commitment they’re able to answer with the correct alternative. Here’s one of the questions from the test (the others are printed in this chapter’s notes at the end of the book):

 
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

  Most people arrive instinctively at the conclusion that the bat costs $1 and the ball costs 10 cents—which is wrong when you think more carefully. Yes, the two sum to $1.10, but the bat costs only 90 cents more than the ball. The right answer, which anyone with basic arithmetic skills can verify, is that the ball costs 5 cents. Many people answer this question incorrectly precisely because they’re cognitive misers, impatient and ready to move on to the next task that demands mental resources. In the experiment, we wondered whether disfluency might signal to people that the question demanded more mental effort, so half the students answered the questionnaire printed in a fluent font, whereas the other half answered the questionnaire printed in a smaller, gray, italicized text:

  A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

  As expected, people answered the three questions correctly more often when they were difficult to read. On average, they correctly answered 2.45 of the three questions correctly, whereas the students who read the questionnaire printed in a clear font averaged only 1.90 correct answers to the three questions. Later, we showed the same effect with complex logic problems, again showing that people answered them correctly more often when they were printed in a disfluent font.

  The complex fonts that populate modern environments function like an alarm, signaling that we need to recruit additional mental resources to overcome that sense of difficulty. Just like other alarms, sometimes it proves faulty. Though we need to know when to think more deeply, the same alarm also makes us more conservative, sending a warning that something in the environment is risky or dangerous.

  This link between disfluency and riskiness probably explains why cognitive psychologist Danny Oppenheimer and I found that people began submitting increasingly revealing confessions on the website Grouphug.us in August 2008. The website invites people to share anonymous confessions in exchange for hugs from sympathetic readers. Some confessions are very revealing, whereas others are tame and barely warrant anonymity. Before August 2008, the site was formatted quite disfluently, with gray text against a similarly dark black background:

  Then in August 2008 the site’s creator had a change of heart. He decided to make the text darker and the background lighter—the standard black text on white background format:

  Now the text on the site was far easier to read, and people who considered submitting their own confessions were greeted with a fluent mental experience. When Danny Oppenheimer and I combed the site for confessions, we found that the confessions were more revealing after the site’s creator adopted the new, fluent format. In other studies, we found that people were more willing to disclose revealing personal flaws when prompted by a request that was printed in a clear font, rather than a light gray font on a white background.

  The same mental alarms that prevent people from revealing personal information also signal the presence of immorality. Imagine, for example, that you’re told the following tale about a questionable culinary decision:

  A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.

  The family wasn’t hurting anyone (or anything—the dog was already dead), but most Westerners would consider eating a dead pet dog morally questionable. If I asked you to rate the family’s behavior on a scale that ranged from zero to ten, where zero indicates not morally wrong at all and ten indicates very morally wrong, what rating would you assign? What about a case where a brother and sister kiss passionately on the lips? How wrong is that behavior? Again, assuming the kiss is consensual and it doesn’t harm anyone, it’s difficult to find moral fault with the act except to say that it doesn’t feel right, or offends some higher notion of religious or transcendent propriety. When fellow psychologists Simon Laham, Geoff Goodwin, and I asked people to rate the moral wrongness of these acts, we also introduced a fluency manipulation. For some of the raters, the acts were described in writing against a speckled gray background, whereas for others the text was much easier to read. Here’s another example in similar formats:

  Moral transgression printed in disfluent format.

  Moral transgression printed in fluent format.

  People generally found the violations quite offensive, rating them around 9 out of 10 on the moral wrongness scale—but these ratings dropped to 7.5 when the violations were printed fluently after earlier violations had been printed disfluently. When the later violations were surprisingly easy to read, the raters interpreted that experience to imply that the violations were less morally offensive.

  The written words that fill modern urban environments shape how deeply we think, and whether we’re more likely to open up to other people or judge them for behaving immorally. Just as disfluent experiences direct us to think more deeply, other cues in the environment tell us how to behave in novel situations. Like chameleons we blend into the background, unconsciously adopting the behaviors that strike a balance between appropriate and rewarding.

  Mental Chameleons

  Artificial illumination is a modern miracle, blurring a line that separated night and day for millions of years before mankind found a way to reliably turn darkness into light. Today lighting is taken for granted to such an extent that we barely notice the light fixtures as we enter a room for the first time. It takes some effort and attention to direct your gaze toward the ceiling, to determine whether the lightbulb is incandescent, halogen, or fluorescent, and to decide whether you might be more comfortable if the resulting glow were slightly brighter or dimmer. Though we’re apt to overlook a room’s brightness, U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis was onto something when he said, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

  In a recent paper, three psychologists tested the truth of Brandeis’s statement. Students at the University of North Carolina participated in an experiment that gave them the opportunity to earn up to $10. The students had five minutes to complete as many of twenty math problems as they could. For each problem, they searched for three numbers from an array of twelve that summed to ten. The problems were time-consuming and took plenty of mental effort. Following is a sample question to give you a sense of the students’ task—and keep in mind that they had only five minutes to complete twenty similar problems.

  Three of these numbers sum to ten. The solution is in this chapter’s notes, at the end of the book.

  Each of the students completed the experiment in the same small room, but the room was brightly lit with twelve lightbulbs for some of them, and more dimly lit with only four bulbs for others. The dimly lit room was still bright enough to allow the students to complete the task without difficulty, but it was noticeably darker than most rooms in an average university building. After five minutes had elapsed, the students told the experimenter how many problems they had answered correctly, and collected 50 cents for each completed problem. The students struggled regardless of the room’s illumination, completing about seven problems during the five-minute period—but their claims varied greatly depending on the room’s brightness. Students in the bright room were reasonably honest, reporting that they completed between seven and eight problems. Meanwhile, those in the dimly lit room inflated their scores by roughly 50 percent, claiming an average of more than eleven completed problems! Somehow, the students in the dimly lit room were liberated from the moral constraints of behaving honestly, a result that the authors attributed to the illusion that the darkness preserved their anonymity.

  A room’s lighting remains largely unchanged as time passes, but locations change as they come to reflect the people who inhabit them. Some of that social residue inspires good behavior, but some pegs the location as a hotbed of immorality and crime. For example, the heavily debated broken windows theory sugges
ts that would-be offenders are encouraged to commit crimes in neighborhoods with broken windows, which suggest that the area’s residents don’t care enough to maintain their property. The theory’s authors, James Wilson and George Kelling, gave two examples to illustrate the theory:

  Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

  Since 1982, when Wilson and Kelling proposed their theory, the second littering example has received plenty of experimental support. In one study, social psychologists placed flyers on 139 cars in a large hospital parking lot. They were curious about whether the cars’ drivers would throw the flyers in the trash, or whether they would instead litter by leaving them in the parking lot. Before some of the cars’ drivers emerged from the parking lot elevator, the researchers scattered discarded flyers, candy wrappers, and coffee cups throughout the parking lot. At other times, they removed every last cigarette butt and piece of trash from the parking lot floor, conveying the idea that littering was both unusual and inappropriate. Nearly half of all drivers littered when the parking lot was already covered in litter—what’s one more piece of trash atop a foundation of garbage?—but only one in ten drivers littered when the parking lot was spotless. The researchers added another twist, asking a stooge to conspicuously drop an unwanted flyer on the ground just as some of the drivers were exiting the elevator. This act drew the drivers’ attention to the existing state of the parking lot, either emphasizing that it was already full of litter, or highlighting how neat it was before the stooge callously cast aside his discarded flyer. When the stooge drew the drivers’ attention to the state of the parking lot, only 6 percent littered in the clean parking lot, whereas a dramatically higher 54 percent littered in the already cluttered parking lot. The drivers adopted the behavior that seemed most appropriate given their understanding of the area’s prevailing norms.