by Adam Alter
The researchers explained that gloomy weather hampers our mood, which in turn makes us think more deeply and clearly. Humans are biologically predisposed to avoid sadness, and they respond to sad moods by seeking opportunities for mood repair and vigilantly protecting themselves against whatever might be making them sad. In contrast, happiness sends a signal that everything is fine, the environment doesn’t pose an imminent threat, and there’s no need to think deeply and carefully. These contrasting mental approaches explain why the shoppers remembered the ten trinkets more accurately on rainy days; the rainy days induced a generally negative mood state, which the shoppers subconsciously tried to overcome by grazing the environment for information that might have replaced their dampened sad moods with happier alternatives. If you think about it, this approach makes sense. Mood states are all-purpose measurement devices that tell us whether something in the environment needs to be fixed. When we’re facing major emotional hurdles—extreme grief, an injury that brings severe pain, blinding anger—our emotional warning light glows red and compels us to act. For most of the time we sail smoothly through calm waters, allowing much of the world—including small trinkets on a store countertop—to pass by unnoticed.
The same vigilance brought on by poor weather also tempers the enthusiasm of financial experts, who tend to avoid investing on rainy days. In the early 1990s, an economist managed to gather data on weather conditions and stock exchange data in New York City between 1927 and 1989. Noting that stock traders, like all people, tend to be happier and therefore more optimistic on sunny days, the economist predicted that the stock markets would appreciate in value on sunny rather than cloudy days. Indeed, traders were more bullish on sunny days, driving prices upward as they invested with relative abandon. Meanwhile, returns on Monday, which usually decline as people lament the close of the weekend, barely fell at all on sunny days, dropping by only five basis points (five-hundredths of a percent) rather than the usual eighteen basis points. Taking this analysis one step further, two finance professors showed that twenty-six financial markets across the globe experienced larger gains on sunny than on cloudy days. The result held in markets as diverse as Helsinki, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, and Vienna, each of them receiving a small upward nudge on sunny days.
There’s not much we can do about adverse weather conditions, but some researchers argue that government policymakers exacerbate sunshine-related problems by insisting on daylight saving policies. Daylight saving time mandates that clocks advance an hour in the spring, increasing the number of waking hours we spend in daylight during the spring and summer months. The policy is popular largely because it allows people to enjoy the warmth of summer dusk well into the evening. Accordingly, much of the world, including most of the fifty U.S. states, recognizes daylight saving time, which gained a strong foothold between 1942 and 1945 during Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime presidency. Roosevelt appealed to patriotic ideals, claiming that valuable fuel resources would be conserved if Americans spent more waking hours in daylight, and less time relying on electric lighting. In fact, decades of research have shown that the policy contributes to overconsumption, as people spend more of the day using power-hungry air conditioners and cooling devices that demand fewer resources during nighttime hours.
More recently, researchers have shown that altering people’s body clocks twice a year has its own significant costs, especially when they lose an hour of sleep in the spring. The day after daylight saving time begins, thousands of drivers labor under a regional case of jet lag, and accident rates rise by 7 percent on that day. Even more damaging, one anti–daylight saving researcher has claimed that students in daylight saving regions spend seven months of the year out of phase with their natural biorhythms. Consequently, when the researcher compared the SAT scores of students in Indiana counties that observe daylight saving time, he found that they scored sixteen fewer points than their fellow students in counties that chose to observe standard time all year long. Indiana is one of a few states where students who attend schools separated by county lines, no more than a few miles apart, spend seven months a year living in different time zones. Education policymakers devote millions of dollars each year to closing small SAT performance gaps that unfairly disadvantage one group of students relative to another, and these results suggest that eliminating daylight saving time might offer one relatively inexpensive solution.
Humans have harnessed nuclear energy, and sent a spacecraft more than 12 billion miles from the earth, but we still haven’t found a way to control the weather. Some of the world drowns in flood while other parts wither in drought, and tornadoes and hurricanes are more and more powerful and unpredictable in the wake of global warming. In contrast to the other mental forces in the world around us—colors and locations—weather conditions are difficult to tame. But the volatility of weather patterns also has an unexpected upside, because it tells us something fascinating about the human mind. The story of their overlap begins more than fifty years ago, as an American scientist grappled with the Sisyphean task of forecasting the weather.
EPILOGUE
Lorenz’s Butterfly
On a winter’s day in 1961, celebrated American meteorologist Edward Lorenz tinkered with a weather prediction model he’d created a year earlier. Each time he punched in a string of numerical values, the model spat out a meteorological forecast. Those numbers were very precise, accurate to the nearest millionth, and he grew tired of entering them one after another: 79.325532, 68.698787, 57.056473 . . .
Late in the day, the model delivered an interesting result, and like any careful scientist, Lorenz decided to replicate the effect before continuing. Wearied by a full day of typing, he took a shortcut and entered the numbers to the nearest thousandth instead of the nearest millionth. The loss of precision seemed immaterial, and it saved him plenty of time. Now instead of typing 65.506127, for example, he typed 65.506. Lorenz left his primitive computer to crunch the data, and returned to inspect the output an hour later.
Much to his frustration, the new forecast looked nothing like its predecessor. He checked the sluggish computer’s vacuum tubes, but everything was functioning perfectly. Changing the temperature from 87.123432°F to 87.123°F seemed trivial, but the model saw radically different weather conditions when it peered into the future. A few millionths of a degree appeared to turn sunshine into rain. Some years later Lorenz described the epiphany in a talk that he famously titled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” With one part laziness and one part serendipity, Lorenz had stumbled on the butterfly effect.
At its heart, this book is designed to show that your mind is the collective end point of a billion tiny butterfly effects. Your thoughts, feelings, and actions are the products of chaotic chain reactions, fueled in no small part by the nine forces described in this book. Human behavior is hard to predict, then, in part because it’s so sensitive to each wing beat of Lorenz’s proverbial butterfly. With a few early tweaks, you might have turned out to be a very different person, as this hypothetical case study illustrates.
A Tale of Two Tims
Imagine that Jane Davis and John MacEochagan marry and decide to take on Jane’s simpler surname. Their son, Tim Davis, becomes a mediocre lawyer, strong enough to garner a couple of borderline promotions, but far from the firm’s rising star. In a parallel world, Jane and John adopt John’s surname instead, and their son—the same person at birth apart from his name—lives his life as Tim MacEochagan. He also becomes a mediocre lawyer, but as we saw in chapter 1, his name ever so slightly hampers his quest for partnership. Where Tim Davis gets the benefit of the doubt, the partners pass over “that Tim guy with the long surname.”
As luck would have it the two Tims have a rebellious streak. In their late thirties, they decide to reward their wives with a gift of cosmetics. Tim Davis walks into a department store and pilfers a tube of mascara and a bottle of nail polish. A security guard happens to
catch him as he leaves the store, the manager decides to press charges, and Tim’s legal career hangs in the balance. Meanwhile, when Tim MacEochagan picks up the same items, he sees that the mascara packaging features a pair of long-lashed eyes. With the sudden sense that someone’s watching, he feels compelled to behave honestly and leaves both items in the store.
Later in life, each Tim has a son. With their wives and little Timmy they look for a new apartment. They fall in love with a small but modern apartment in a thirty-floor high-rise, not too far from a noisy highway. The high-rise has two vacancies: one on the third floor and another on the thirtieth floor. Tim Davis decides to pay an extra $200 each month for the higher floor’s view, but Tim MacEochagan chooses the third-floor apartment instead. The noise is maddening on the third floor, and little Timmy struggles to hear when his parents are talking. He learns to read slightly more slowly than his little Timmy counterpart who lives in an alternate universe on the thirtieth floor, and his parents choose to hold him back from school for an extra year. Because he’s older, he’s also slightly bigger and more mature than the other children when he reaches high school, so he gets plenty of attention from the school’s football coach. With that extra attention, he becomes Timmy MacEochagan, star quarterback. Timmy Davis follows in his dad’s footsteps and becomes a mediocre lawyer.
And so on. This is just an invented story, but the tale it tells isn’t particularly far-fetched. The features that distinguish their lives—different names, the opportune presence or absence of a pair of eyes, and a poorly or well-chosen apartment—have magnified effects downstream. And those differences begin at the level of our nine cues: the forces within us, between us, and around us.
The forces in Drunk Tank Pink affect us every day: at work, at play, when we’re alone, when we’re interacting with other people, and when we’re making decisions that range from the trivial to the life-changing. And once we know that they exist, we’re better placed to capitalize on them when they help and resist them when they hurt. Request a hospital room with a view; pay more for an urban apartment on the top floor—not just because of the view, but because you’ll be farther from the noise below; and keep in mind that your decisions are likely to change as you move from Chinatown to Little Italy, from summer to winter, and from rooms painted blue to rooms painted red. No matter where you go, Drunk Tank Pink and other cues will follow—and, having read this book, you’ll be in a much better place to identify them, recognize how they’ll affect you, and harness or overcome them to maximize your health, wisdom, wealth, and well-being.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To borrow from Edward Lorenz, this book is the tornado that arrived some time after a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil. The wing beat that put this chaotic process in motion was an article on some of my research in the Boston Globe, written beautifully by Drake Bennett. My agent, Katinka Matson, read the article and suggested I write a book proposal, without which there would be no Drunk Tank Pink. Katinka coaxed a far stronger proposal from me than I could have managed alone, and she’s remained a constant source of insight and support since the book found a home. A huge thank-you to my first editor, Eamon Dolan, who saw promise in the proposal and taught me to turn mildly interesting nuggets into narrative bars of gold. Laura Stickney stepped in ably as my second editor, and Colin Dickerman has done a wonderful job of steadily and patiently turning the rough manuscript into a polished book. Thanks also to Kaitlyn Flynn, Mally Anderson, Samantha Choy, and the entire team at Penguin Press.
Thanks to my parents, Ian and Jenny, for always encouraging me despite how far my journey has carried me from home, and to my brother, Dean, for his constant support. To Sara, my biggest supporter and sharpest editor: I couldn’t imagine the journey of the past couple of years without your sweetness, intelligence, and love.
I was lucky to have the support and advice of an army of family and friends, near and far. In particular, for reading earlier drafts and offering advice, thanks to (alphabetically): Corinne Alter, Dean Alter, Ian Alter, Jenny Alter, Jessica Alter, Peter Alter, Chloe Angyal, Amitav Chakravarti, Adrian de Froment, Greg Detre, Louise Frenkel, Svetlana German, Nicole Golembo, Geoff Goodwin, Dena Gromet, Hal Hershfield, Tom Meyvis, Sara Ricklen, Dave Schneider, Romy Schneider, Anuj Shah, Eesha Sharma, Hana Shepherd, Joe Simmons, Abby Sussman, Alison Swartz, Les Swartz, and Rebecca Swartz. For research assistance, and facilitating my quest for anecdotes, thanks to: Bill Bokoff, Gabriella Chiriños, Casey Greulich, Sarah Jones, Karen Olsoy, Anna Paley, Eva Sharma, and Evelyn Wang.
Thanks to Michael Olesker, a fearless and talented writer, for advice about the writing process, to Suzy Olesker for moral support and nourishment in the form of Berger Cookies, and to both Mike and Suzy for an endless tide of care and encouragement. To Alex Schauss, the godfather of the color Drunk Tank Pink, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed, and for telling the story of the color’s origin so vividly.
Thanks also to my four academic advisers: Joe Forgas and Bill von Hippel at the University of New South Wales, and John Darley and Danny Oppenheimer at Princeton—four intellectual giants who graciously allowed me to stand on their shoulders.
NOTES
Prologue
Paper in Orthomolecular Psychiatry: Schauss, A. G. (1979). Tranquilizing effect of color reduces aggressive behavior and potential violence. Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 8, 218–221.
Anecdotes on miraculous tranquilizing power: Much of the anecdotal information comes from a telephone interview with Alex Schauss, May 30, 2012. See also Schauss (1979), above, and Schauss, A. G. (1985). The physiological effect of colour on the suppression of human aggression: Research on Baker-Miller Pink. International Journal of Biosocial Research, 2, 55–64; and Walker, M. (1991). The power of color. New York: Avery.
Frenzy of academic interest; some found weaker effects: Schauss, ever the scholar, continued to test the effect, sometimes but not always finding support for the color’s tranquilizing effect. Today he remains convinced that there’s something to the effect, and he’s lent his name to Schauss, a company that sells sheets of Baker-Miller Pink for personal use. A partial list of publications that found partial or full support: Pellegrini, R. J., Schauss, A. G., Kerr, T. J., and Ah You, B. K. (1981). Grip strength and exposure to hue differences in visual stimuli: Is postural status a factor? Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 17, 27–28; Pelligrini, R. J., and Schauss, A. G. (1980). Muscle strength as a function of exposure to hue differences in visual stimuli: An experimental test of the kinesoid hypothesis. Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 9, 148–150; Profusek, P. A., and Rainey, D. W. (1987). Effects of Baker-Miller Pink and red on state anxiety, grip strength, and motor precision. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 65, 941–942. A partial list of publications that found little or no support: Gilliam, J. E., and Unruh, D. (1988). The effects of Baker-Miller Pink on biological, physical, and cognitive behavior. Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, 3, 202–206; Smith, J. M., Bell, P. A., and Fusco, M. E. (1986). The influence of color and demand characteristics on muscle strength and affective ratings of the environment. Journal of General Psychology, 113, 289–297; Dunwoody, L. (1998). Color or brightness effects on grip strength? Perceptual and Motor Skills, 87, 275–278; Keller, L. M., and Vautin, R. G. (1998). Effect of viewed color on hand-grip strength. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 87, 763–768; Pellegrini, R. J., Schauss, A. G., and Miller, M. E. (1981). Room color and aggression in a criminal detention holding cell: A test of the “tranquilizing pink” hypothesis. Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 10, 174–181.
Chapter 1: Names
Jung and nominative determinism: Many of the examples are from a Wikipedia catalog of aptronyms, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym. The discussion about nominative determinism took place in the Feedback column in two issues of the New Scientist magazine: November 5, 1994, and December 17, 1994. Some of the information here is based on an e-mail exchange with the Feedback column’s editors at the time (and still today), John H
oyland and Mike Holderness. The term is attributed to a contributor, C. R. Cavonius.
Splatt and Weedon: Splatt, A. J., and Weedon, D. (1977). The urethral syndrome: experience with the Richardson urethroplasty. British Journal of Urology, 49, 173–176.
Nigerian naming practices: Lapidos, J. (September 9, 2010). Is Goodluck Jonathan lucky? Naming practices in Nigeria. Available at http://www.slate.com/articles/news _and_politics/explainer/2010/09/is_goodluck_jonathan_lucky.html.
Story of Boch (BOHdVF260602): Russian Times news video and interviews, available at http://rt.com/news/digit-named-boy-ignored-by-authorities/.
Decline of names Adolf, Donald, and Ebenezer: Lieberson, S. (2000). A matter of taste: How names, fashions, and culture change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Demographic baggage of names like Dorothy and Ava: Namipedia website: http://www.babynamewizard.com/namipedia. See also Levitt, S. D., and Dubner, S. J. (2005). Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. New York: Morrow.
Sending out job applications with black and white names: Bertrand, M., and Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94, 991–1013.