The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

by Dan Ariely

  To set the economy right, the world’s central banks tried to infuse money into the system, give short-term loans to banks, increase liquidity, buy back mortgage-backed securities, and every other trick in the book. But these extreme measures did not achieve the desired effect in terms of economic recovery, especially if you consider the relatively pitiful impact that the massive injection of money actually had on restoring the economy.* The public remained livid, because the central issue of rebuilding trust was neglected. In fact, I suspect that the public trust was further eroded by three things: the version of the bailout legislation that eventually passed (which involved multiple unrelated tax cuts); the outrageous bonuses paid to people in the financial industry; and the back-to-business-as-usual attitude on Wall Street.

  Customer Revenge: My Story, Part I

  When our son, Amit, was three years old and Sumi and I were expecting our second child, Neta, we decided to buy a new family car and ended up with a small Audi. It was not a minivan, but it was red (the safest color!) and a hatchback (versatile!). Moreover, the company had a reputation for great customer service, and the car came with four years of free oil changes. This little Audi felt great—it was peppy and stylish, it handled well, and we loved it.

  We were living in Princeton, New Jersey, at the time, and the distance from our apartment at the Institute for Advanced Study to Amit’s day care was two hundred yards. The distance to my office was about four hundred yards, so driving opportunities were limited to occasional grocery-shopping trips and my bimonthly visits to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the nights before I was due at MIT, I would usually leave Princeton at about 8:00 P.M. in order to avoid the traffic, and I would arrive in Cambridge sometime after midnight; on the way back to Princeton, I followed the same procedure.

  On one such occasion, I left MIT at about 8:00 P.M. with Leonard Lee, a colleague from Columbia University whose visit to Boston coincided with mine. Leonard and I hadn’t had a lot of time to talk over the previous few months, so we were both looking forward to the ride. About an hour into our journey, I was driving about seventy miles per hour in the left-hand lane on the busy Massachusetts Turnpike when, all of a sudden, the engine stopped responding to the gas pedal. I let my foot off the pedal and pressed it again. The car revved in response, but there was no change in speed. It was as if we were coasting in neutral.

  The car was losing speed fast. I switched on the right-turn signal and looked over my right shoulder. Two eighteen-wheeler trucks, one after the other, were bearing down on me and seemed unimpressed with my signaling. There was no way to get over. After the trucks passed, I tried to push my way into the right lane, but the distance Boston drivers generally maintain from the car in front of them is visible only with a good microscope.

  Meanwhile, my typically chatty, smiling colleague was noticeably unchatty and unsmiling. When the speed of the car dropped to 30 mph, I finally managed to push my way into the right lane and from there onto the shoulder, my heart in my throat. I didn’t make it all the way to the extreme right because the car had lost all of its speed, but at least we were out of the driving lanes.

  I turned the car off, waited a few minutes, and then tried to restart it to see whether the transmission would engage. It would not. I opened the hood and gazed at the engine. When I was younger, I could make sense of a car engine. In the old days, you could see the carburetor, the pistons, the spark plugs, and some of the hoses and belts; but this new Audi had a big block of metal with no visible parts. So I gave up and called roadside assistance. An hour later, we were towed back to Boston.

  In the morning, I called Audi customer service and described the experience, as vividly and graphically as I could, to the customer service representative. I went into fine detail about the trucks, the fear of not being able to make it off the highway, the fact that I had a passenger whose life was in my hands, and the difficulty of navigating a car without a functioning engine. The woman on the other end of the line sounded as if she were reading from a script. “I am sorry about your inconvenience,” she sniffed.

  Her tone made me want to grab her throat through the phone line. Here I was, having had what felt like a near-death experience—not to mention having had a five-month-old car break down on me—and the best description she could come up with for the ordeal was “inconvenience.” I could just see her sitting there, filing her fingernails.

  The subsequent dialogue went something like this:

  SHE: Are you currently in your hometown?

  ME: No. I currently live in New Jersey, and I am stuck in Massachusetts.

  SHE: Strange. Our records indicate that you live in Massachusetts.

  ME: I usually live in Massachusetts, but I am spending two years in New Jersey. Also, I purchased the car in New Jersey.

  SHE: We have a reimbursement policy for people who get stuck out of town. We can pay their flight or train ticket to help them get back home. But since our records show that you live in Massachusetts, you are not eligible for any of these.

  ME (voice rising): You mean to tell me that it is my fault that your record-keeping is faulty? I can provide all the proof you want that I’m now living in New Jersey.

  SHE: Sorry. We go by our records.

  ME (deciding not to push the point for the sake of getting my car fixed quickly): What about my car?

  SHE: I will call the dealership and keep you posted.

  Later that day, I learned that it would take the dealership at least four days to even look at my car. I rented a car, and Leonard and I struck out again—this time with more success.

  I called Audi customer service two or three times each week over the next month, talking with customer service representatives and supervisors of all levels, asking each time for more information about the state of my car, to no good effect. After each call, my mood took a turn for the worse. I realized three things: that something very bad had happened to my car; that Audi customer service was going to take as little responsibility as possible; and that from then on, I would not be able to enjoy driving my car in the same way because my experience was now tainted by a lot of negative feelings.

  I have a friend in the district attorney’s office in Massachusetts who gave me the regulations for the “lemon law.”* So I called Audi’s customer service in order to talk to the people there about it. The person on the other end of the phone was surprised to learn that there was something called a lemon law. She invited me to pursue a legal recourse (I could imagine her smiling and thinking “And our lawyers will be very pleased to engage your lawyer in a long and costly process”).

  After that conversation, it was clear that I didn’t stand a chance. Hiring a lawyer to resolve the dispute would cost me much more than simply selling the car and accepting the loss. About a month after the car originally broke, it was finally fixed. I drove the rental car back to Boston, got into my Audi, and returned to Princeton with much less joy than usual. I felt helpless and frustrated by the whole experience. Of course I was disappointed that the car had broken down in the first place, but I also understood that cars are mechanical things that break from time to time—there’s nothing much to be done about it. It just happened that I’d had the bad luck to buy a defective car. What really annoyed me was the way I was treated by the people in customer service. Their clear lack of concern and their strategy of playing a game of attrition with me angered me. I wanted the people at Audi to feel some pain as well.

  Don’t Touch That Phone

  Later on, I had a wonderful venting session with one of my good friends, Ayelet Gneezy (a professor at the University of California at San Diego). She understood my desire to get back at Audi and suggested that we look into the phenomenon together. We decided to carry out some experiments on consumer revenge, hoping that in the process we would be able to better understand our own vengeful feelings and behavior.

  Our first task was to create experimental conditions that would make our participants want to take revenge against us. That
doesn’t sound like a good thing, but we needed to do it to measure the extent of vengeful behavior. The ideal setup for such an experiment would be to re-create a high level of customer annoyance—something like my Audi customer service story. Though Audi seemed very happy to annoy me, we suspected that it would not be willing to annoy half the people who called its customer support line and not annoy the other half—just to help with our research project. So we had to try to set up something analogous.

  Though in some ways it would have been nice—for experimental reasons—to create a dramatic irritation for our participants, we didn’t want people to go to jail or blood to be spilled—especially ours. Not to mention that it would be at least slightly unethical to subject participants to substantial emotional duress for the purpose of studying revenge. For research reasons, we also preferred an experiment that would involve only a low level of consumer annoyance. Why? Because if we could establish that even a low level of irritation is sufficient to make people feel and act vengeful, we could extrapolate that in the real world, where annoying actions can be much more potent, the probability of vengeance would be much higher.

  We had lots of fun coming up with ways to annoy people. We contemplated having the experimenter eat garlic and breathe on the participants while explaining a task, spill something on them, or step on their toes. Eventually, though, we decided to have the experimenter pick up his cell phone in the middle of explaining a task, talk to someone else for a few seconds, hang up, and, without acknowledging the interruption, continue explaining the task to them from the place where he had left off. We figured that this was less invasive and unsanitary than our other ideas.

  So we had our annoyance of choice, but what opportunity for revenge would we give participants, and how would we measure it? We can divide the types of vengeful acts into two classes that we call “weak” and “strong.” Weak revenge is the type that falls within acceptable moral and legal behavioral norms, as when I complain loudly to neighbors and friends (and you, dear reader) about Audi’s abysmal customer service. It is perfectly okay to behave this way, and no one will say that I have sidestepped any norms when expressing myself. Revenge becomes strong when one strays beyond the acceptable norms to inflict revenge upon the offending party, in the form of, say, breaking a window, creating some physical damage, or stealing from the offending party. We decided to go for the strong revenge type, and here is what we came up with.

  Daniel Berger-Jones, age twenty, talented, bright, and good-looking (tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, and blessed with a swashbuckling scar on his left cheek). An unemployed acting student at Boston University, he was exactly what we were looking for. Ayelet and I hired Daniel for the summer to annoy people in the ubiquitous Boston coffee shops. Being a good actor, Daniel could easily irritate people while maintaining a charmingly straight face; he could also repeat his performances consistently, time after time.

  Having established himself in a coffee shop, Daniel watched for people entering alone. After they’d settled into a chair with their drink, he approached them and said, “Excuse me, would you be willing to participate in a five-minute task in return for five dollars?” Most people were delighted to do so, since the $5 would more than cover the cost of their coffee. When they agreed, Daniel handed them ten sheets of paper covered with random letters (much like the ones we used in the letters experiment described in chapter 2, “The Meaning of Labor”).

  “Here’s what I’d like you to do,” he would instruct each person. “Find as many adjacent Ss as possible and circle them. If you finish all the letter pairs in one sheet, move on to the next one. Once the five minutes are up, I will come back, collect the sheets, and pay you the five dollars. Do you have any questions?”

  Five minutes later, Daniel would return to the table, collect the sheets, and hand the participants a small stack of $1 bills, along with a prewritten receipt that read:

  I, _______________________, received $5 for participating in an experiment.

  (name here)

  Signature: _____________________ Date: _____________________

  “Please count the money, sign the receipt, and leave it on the table. I’ll be back to collect it later,” Daniel said. Then he left to look for another eager participant. This was the control, the no-annoyance condition.

  Another set of customers—those in the annoyance condition—experienced a slightly different Daniel. In the midst of explaining the task, he pretended that his cell phone was vibrating. He reached into his pocket, took out the phone, and said, “Hi, Mike. What’s up?” After a short pause, he would enthusiastically say, “Pizza tonight at eight thirty. My place or yours?” Then he would end his call with “Later.” The whole fake conversation took about twelve seconds.

  After Daniel slipped the cell phone back into his pocket, he made no reference to the disruption and simply continued describing the task. From that point on, everything was the same as in the control condition.

  We expected the people who experienced the phone call interruption to be more annoyed and more willing to seek revenge, but how did we measure the extent to which they sought it? When Daniel handed all the participants the stack of bills, he told them, “Here is your five dollars. Please count it and sign the receipt.” But in fact, he always gave them too much money, as if by mistake. Sometimes he gave them $6, sometimes $7, and sometimes $9. We were interested in finding out whether the participants, thinking that they were overpaid by mistake, would exhibit strong revenge by violating a social norm (in this case, keeping the extra change) or give it back. We particularly wanted to measure the extent to which people would keep the extra cash would increase following the twelve-second phone interruption—which would give us our measure of revenge. We also chose this approach because it was similar to the revenge opportunities people have every day. Imagine you go to a restaurant and discover that the server made some mistake with the bill—do you let him know or keep the loot? And what if the server has annoyed you? Would you be even more likely to turn a blind eye to the mistake?

  Faced with this basic dilemma, what did our participants do? The amount of extra money participants received ($1, $2, or $4) had no impact on their tendency to turn a blind eye to the extra cash. Daniel’s taking the phone call in the midst of instructing them, however, made a big difference. A mere 14 percent of the participants who experienced Daniel’s rude side returned the additional money, compared to 45 percent of those in the no-annoyance condition. The fact that only 45 percent of people returned the extra cash even when they were not annoyed is a sad state of affairs, to be sure. But it was truly disturbing that a twelve-second phone call vastly decreased the likelihood that the participants would return the cash to the point where just a small minority of people made the honest choice.

  The Very Bad Hotel and Other Stories

  Amazingly, I discovered I am not the only human who has taken offense after being mistreated by customer representatives. Take the businessmen Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison, for example. If you search for them on the Internet, you will find an amusing presentation called “Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel,”10 an interesting PowerPoint act of comeuppance against the management of the Doubletree Club hotel in Houston.

  One cold night in 2001, the two businessmen showed up at the hotel, where they had guaranteed and confirmed reservations. Sadly, upon arrival, they were told that the hotel was overbooked and that there was only one room available, but it was off limits due to air-conditioning and plumbing problems. Though the news was obviously annoying, what really irritated Farmer and Atchison was the nonchalant attitude of Mike, the night clerk.

  Mike failed to make any effort to find them alternate accommodations or help them in any way. In fact, his rude, unapologetic, and dismissive behavior infuriated Farmer and Atchison far more than the problem with the room itself. Since Mike was the service representative, they felt it was his job to demonstrate some compassion, and when he didn’t, they got mad and got even. Like all good consultan
ts, they prepared a PowerPoint presentation. Theirs described the sequence of events—complete with humorous quotes from “Night Clerk Mike.” They included the calculated potential income that his incompetence would cost the hotel chain, along with the likelihood that they would ever return to the Doubletree Club hotel.

  For example, in slide 15 of their presentation, entitled “We Are Very Unlikely to Return to the Doubletree Club Houston,” Tom and Shane describe their probability of ever going back:

  * * *

  WE ARE VERY UNLIKELY TO RETURN TO THE DOUBLETREE CLUB HOUSTON

  • Lifetime chances of dying in a bathtub: 1 in 10,455

  (National Safety Council)

  • Chance of Earth being ejected from the solar system by the gravitational pull of a passing star: 1 in 2,200,000

  (University of Michigan)

  • Chance of winning the UK Lottery: 1 in 13,983,816

  (UK Lottery)

  • Chance of us returning to the Doubletree Club Houston: worse than any of those

  (And what are the chances you’d save rooms for us anyway?)

  * * *

  The businessmen e-mailed the file to the general manager of the Doubletree Club hotel and their clients in Houston. After that, the presentation enjoyed viral fame on the Internet. In the end, Doubletree offered to make amends with Farmer and Atchison. The two asked only that Doubletree fix the customer service problem, which it reportedly did.