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

by Adam Alter

  Even subtler cues that you might expect to fade into the background shape how we think about the world. In a series of studies, social psychologist Virginia Kwan and I asked a researcher to approach people in various parts of New York City. All of them were Caucasian Americans, but some were walking through Chinatown, while others were walking through Manhattan’s Financial District and Upper East Side. The researcher asked them to complete a few brief questions, some that asked them to predict how financial stocks would perform in the coming six months, and others that asked them to predict weather conditions following a string of sunny or rainy days. As I mentioned in chapter 6, on culture, American and Chinese people have very different ideas about how the world changes. Americans are often surprised by change, expecting financial stocks that have performed well in the past to continue to do well in the future, and similarly expecting weather conditions to remain relatively consistent. In contrast, many Chinese people subscribe to the Taoist I Ching principles, which suggest that change is inevitable; financial stocks and weather conditions that seem favorable today are likely to take a turn for the worse tomorrow, but a downturn in the stock market and rainy weather today are likely to precede a burst of stock appreciation and sunny weather tomorrow.

  As you might expect, then, the Americans in the Financial District and Upper East Side completed the questionnaires like typical Americans: they preferred to invest in stocks that appreciated, and expected weather patterns to continue unabated. But the Americans passing through Chinatown, who were otherwise indistinguishable from those in the more typical American neighborhoods, perceived the world very differently. For that brief moment, they thought more like Chinese people than like Americans. They expected the appreciating stocks to depreciate over the coming six months, and they expected sunny days to be replaced by rain, and rainy days to be replaced by sun. These effects were strongest, as you might expect, among the Americans who were aware of the Chinese belief in change embodied in the I Ching. Merely responding in a location filled with Chinese paraphernalia led those people to adopt Chinese cultural norms.

  We found the same patterns of results when a research assistant approached people outside a Chinese supermarket in New Jersey. Some of them were entering the market—not yet exposed to the plethora of Chinese sights and sounds—while others were leaving after finishing their shopping trip, already bombarded by reminders of Chinese culture. Those who were leaving the supermarket adopted a mind-set associated with Chinese cultural beliefs, expecting appreciating stocks to depreciate imminently and investing $300 less of a fictional $1,000 sum in those stocks, whereas those who were yet to enter the market tended to think like typical Americans, investing almost the entire sum in appreciating stocks.

  These studies tell us something profound and perhaps a bit disturbing about what makes us who we are: there isn’t a single version of “you.” When you’re surrounded by litter, you’re more likely to be a litterbug; when you’re walking past buildings with broken windows, you’re more likely to disrespect the property that surrounds you. These norms change from minute to minute, as quickly as a New Yorker walks from one part of the city to another. It’s comforting to believe that there’s an essential version of each of us, that good people are good, bad people are bad, and that those tendencies reside within us rather than in the sights, sounds, and symbols that populate the landscapes that surround us from moment to moment. But social psychology calls that belief into question. In fact, even our memories—the building blocks that construct the evolving story of who we are across time—are tagged with the locations where they were formed. Emotionally jarring memories adhere to this tag with particular determination, which explains why people remember where they were when they learned of JFK’s assassination, the death of Princess Diana, and the string of tragedies on September 11, 2001. These memories aren’t always perfectly accurate, but as their name suggests, so-called flashbulb memories are vivid snapshots of a moment and place in time when we learn an emotional and personally relevant piece of news. These tags, which bind events to the places where they occurred, explained a strange anomaly forty years ago, when thousands of Vietnam War veterans returned to the United States with a potentially calamitous drug addiction.

  Context Reinstatement

  During the Vietnam War, a combination of boredom and anxiety pushed many enlisted soldiers to try heroin and opium. In 1970, at the height of the epidemic, 40 percent of all enlisted men had tried at least one of the two drugs. When the U.S. government discovered that soldiers had been using heroin, they feared that the war’s end would herald a public health crisis. Heroin relapse rates are as high as 90 percent in the short term, so the government had good reason to worry. The men returned from the war with many problems, but to the surprise of many drug experts, very few of them relapsed. Psychologists and doctors continue to debate the issue today, but most agree that the critical difference between most heroin users and the soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam was that the soldiers were forced to leave the location in which they had used the drug. Unlike most recovering addicts, who find themselves in locations that reinstate the drug-using context, few Vietnam vets found themselves in the tropical jungle setting that colored their original exposure to the drug.

  Part of the reason why context reinstatement—returning to an emotionally charged location—plagues heroin users is that the location forces them to relive old, related memories. Wise teachers turn this fact on its head by telling students to study for exams in a situation that mirrors the exam context as closely as possible. Their advice draws on a classic psychology experiment that showed that locations form a lens through which we perceive newly acquired information. The researchers asked eighteen scuba divers from a university diving club to memorize lists of words. Sometimes the divers memorized the lists underwater, and sometimes they memorized them onshore. Randomly selected words would be just as easy to remember on land as underwater if they weren’t somehow associated with the location where they were first encountered. But the scholars found that the divers who memorized the words underwater recalled them much more accurately when they were again immersed in the water, whereas the divers who memorized the words on land recalled them with greater accuracy when they were again perched on dry land. The divers who learned the lists underwater perceived them through a watery mental lens, and that location-based tag was activated when they were again immersed in the water, pushing those words to rise more rapidly to the surface of their minds. Similar studies have shown that studying while drunk is beneficial only if you’re also drunk during the exam. In a famous example that later inspired the scuba diving study, seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke told the story of a man who learned to dance in a room containing an old trunk, and couldn’t dance thereafter unless he shared the room with the same trunk.

  Locations vary along countless dimensions, each playing a distinct role in shaping our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. At the one end of the spectrum, Locke’s man was fixated on the narrowest of cues—a particular trunk—but at the other end some environmental cues are considerable in scope. Perhaps the grandest of all cues in the world around us are the weather conditions that define every moment we spend outdoors. Each time you leave the sheltered indoors, you subject yourself to the whims of the seasons. As the New York Mets discovered during one baseball game in 2009, it’s much harder to remain coolheaded when a hot day compounds the heat of competition.

  9.

  WEATHER AND WARMTH

  Summertime War, Wintertime Love

  On a warm afternoon in August 2009, as the mercury hovered near 90°F (32°C), the New York Mets hosted the San Francisco Giants at Citi Field baseball stadium in New York City. The game remained tense into the fourth inning as both teams were unable to break the scoreless deadlock. San Francisco pitcher Matt Cain threw a clumsy 93 mph fastball that slipped just as it left his fingers, sailing right into the helmet of Mets all-star and fan favorite David Wrig
ht. Wright collapsed to the ground and lay facedown and completely still. Eerily quiet at first, the crowd watched as trainers tended to the injured player; then people began jeering, which built to a crescendo that shook the stadium. Everyone on the field acknowledged that Cain’s errant pitch was a mistake; he didn’t intend to hit Wright, and based on the state of the game, Wright’s injury conferred very little strategic advantage. Still, Wright’s teammates were angry, and it fell to Mets pitcher Johan Santana to exact revenge. Three innings later, Santana earned a warning from the umpire when he threw a pitch that came dangerously close to striking the Giants’ Pablo Sandoval. Flouting the warning, Santana struck the very next batter, Bengie Molina, in the elbow, and later claimed without apology that he had “to protect” his teammates who were “all in it together.”

  It’s impossible to know whether Santana would have responded differently on a cooler afternoon, but social psychologists have shown that baseball pitchers tend to hit more batters, and to retaliate more often, as the temperature rises. In one study, researchers tallied how many batters were hit during hundreds of Major League Baseball games played during the 1986, 1987, and 1988 seasons, and plotted the number of hit batters alongside the maximum temperature in each city on game day. Batters were much more likely to be struck by errant pitches on hotter days. The researchers also ruled out the possibility that hotter days produced greater inaccuracy because, for example, pitchers were struggling with sweaty hands, by showing that their pitches were just as accurate on warm days as they were on cool days.

  A second group of researchers scoured an even larger database of almost sixty thousand MLB games, from 1952 to 2009, and found that pitchers were far more likely to retaliate when their teammates were struck by the opposing team as the temperature climbed. After crunching thousands of data points, they concluded that pitchers retaliated 22 percent of the time on days that peaked at 55°F, whereas their rate of retaliation rose to 27 percent when the temperature reached 95°F. This 5 percent difference may not seem particularly large, but across the course of one MLB season, 121 additional batters would be hit in retaliation if every day of the season peaked at 95° rather than 55°.

  Beyond the sports field, road rage also escalates when the temperature rises. In one experiment, two social psychologists paid a female research assistant to sit in her car at a particular intersection in Phoenix, Arizona, for fifteen consecutive Saturdays, from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The temperatures during that period, from April to August, ranged between 84°F and 108°F (29°C and 42°C). The research assistant was paid to sit in her car, immobile, as the traffic light in the single-lane intersection turned green and cars piled up behind her. Meanwhile, a second observer sat nearby, just out of sight, timing how long it took the increasingly annoyed drivers to honk their horns. The hidden observer tallied how many times the cars honked, how long those honks lasted, and how long it took them to honk in the first place. As the researchers expected, the honks were more urgent, lasted longer, and were more frequent on warmer days, showing that road rage escalates as the temperature rises.

  What is it about the heat that provokes aggression during baseball games and on the road? One popular explanation is that heat makes people physically excited—their hearts beat more quickly and they sweat more—and they later mistake this sense of excitement for anger when confronted with a frustrating situation. The same logic explains why, in another study, male college students were more strongly attracted to a female researcher after crossing a precariously swaying suspension bridge than after crossing a wider, solid bridge. Like the overheated baseball players and drivers who confused physical excitement for anger, the fearful men on the rickety bridge mistook the rush of blood and adrenaline for sexual arousal.

  A second possible explanation is that heat causes discomfort, which in turn conjures related thoughts of anger and aggression. According to this explanation, people repeatedly associate relaxation and calm with an absence of threat and aggravation, so when they experience occasional bouts of discomfort, they vigilantly scan the environment for threats and prompts of frustration. On a cool night, a pitcher who strikes your teammate might be pardoned with a mental warning, but the same behavior might demand retaliation on an uncomfortably warm night.

  Panning back thousands of miles from baseball diamonds to the planet at large, scientists have found that civil conflicts in tropical regions between 1950 and 2004 were driven substantially by changes in climate. The tropics, warm regions north and south of the equator, oscillate between two major climatic states, known as El Niño and La Niña phases—literally Spanish for “The Boy” and “The Girl.” El Niño years are characterized by warmer, dryer weather and unsettled stormy conditions, whereas La Niña years tend to be cooler, wetter, and more meteorologically stable. The results showed that civil conflicts in tropical regions are twice as likely to erupt during warmer El Niño years as during cooler La Niña years, and El Niño weather systems appear to contribute to one-fifth of all tropical conflicts. These effects are strongest in the tropics, because regions beyond the tropics, toward the poles, are more weakly affected by El Niño and La Niña oscillations.

  Warm weather, which tends to occur during El Niño periods, also spawns violence between individuals. Judges and police officers across the United States have learned to be especially vigilant on hot days, as the rate of domestic violence tends to mirror the temperature. Some criminologists even believe that the southern states are particularly prone to violent crime because they endure hotter summers than other parts of the country. The same southern states actually experience lower nonviolent crime rates, including theft and motor vehicle robbery, which suggests that they aren’t simply more crime-ridden across the spectrum of offenses; rather, they experience more aggression-related crime specifically. Of course, this relationship might be driven by other factors, since the south differs from other parts of the country in many ways beyond weather (e.g., the retaliatory culture of honor discussed in chapter 6). Interestingly, though, the same patterns persist in many other countries; assaults occur twice as often in southern France as in the cooler central and northern regions of France, while nonviolent property crimes are far more common in northern France; similarly, violent crimes become progressively less common in the cooler, northern Italian and Spanish regions.

  These broadly painted results are fascinating, but they aren’t entirely convincing in isolation. For example, it’s possible that crime rates are higher in southern regions of European countries, like the U.S. south, but not because those regions are warmer per se. One possibility is that southern cultures in the Northern Hemisphere tend to be more passionate than their northern counterparts—fiery cultures that formed centuries ago perhaps partly in response to warmer temperatures. It’s possible, then, that cultural differences rather than the warmer weather are responsible for increased aggression, and it’s largely irrelevant that those regions happen to be warmer than more northerly regions.

  To rule out that possibility, researchers have analyzed crime data using numerous clever techniques to show that weather conditions rather than regional cultural differences fuel violent crime when the temperature rises. In some studies, they “control for” all sorts of possible irrelevant factors, which allows researchers to rule out the possibility that these factors are responsible for apparent links between the weather and violent crime. For example, even controlling for the contribution of education levels, wealth, income, religiosity, and many other potential differences between the northern and southern parts of the United States, they find that the south still has higher crime rates. Crime rates also rise during the hotter months of the year within each city, and those escalations are more pronounced during unusually hot summers. These results are true for numerous violent crimes, including homicide, assault, sexual assault, domestic violence, and riots, each of which spikes during June, July, and August and plummets again as the weather cools.

  The heat of summ
er breeds war, but it’s the cold of winter that breeds love. In a yearlong study during 2004 and 2005, two Polish researchers approached a hundred heterosexual men and asked them to share their opinions about female attractiveness. The men rated their impressions of silhouetted women in swimsuits and female breasts of various sizes. They completed the same questionnaire during different seasons throughout the year, and their ratings rose as the weather cooled. The same images that produced lukewarm responses in the summer inspired more positive responses in the winter, which the researchers attributed to a so-called contrast effect. They explained colorfully that the men were spoiled in the summer because they were exposed to female body shapes “in a swimming suit or partly covered breasts or tightly fitting T-shirts.” In contrast to these images, the silhouettes and breasts were only moderately appealing. In the wintertime, as the weather cooled, they were deprived of the same images and the swimsuit silhouettes and breasts were especially alluring.

  Ten years earlier and a thousand miles to the northwest in Tromsø, Norway, five medical researchers proposed a very different explanation for why men preferred to look at female bodies in the wintertime. They had measured the testosterone levels of 1,500 Norwegian men between 1994 and 1995, and their findings confirmed what many other researchers had claimed: men experience seasonal testosterone peaks in the winter months, and similar troughs in the summer months, producing about 30 percent more testosterone in the wintertime. The authors cleverly ensured that the men weren’t merely drinking more beer in the summer months—which tends to lower testosterone counts—and the effects persisted even when they excluded seasonal differences in exercise and body fat.