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

by Dan Ariely

  ANOTHER REVENGE STORY with a relatively good ending is that of the Neistat brothers, who created a video detailing their experience with Apple’s customer service. When one of the brothers’ iPod batteries died and they called to ask about a replacement, the customer service representative told them that since he’d had the iPod for more than the year of warranty, there would be a charge of $255, plus a mailing fee, to fix it. And then he added, “But at that price, you know, you might as well go get a new one.”

  In response, the brothers spray-painted the words “IPOD’S UNREPLACEABLE BATTERY LASTS ONLY 18 MONTHS” onto all the multicolored iPod posters they could find on the streets of New York City. They also filmed their experience and posted it as “iPod’s Dirty Secret” on YouTube and other Web sites. Their actions forced Apple to change its policy about battery replacement. (Unfortunately, Apple continues to make iPods and iPhones with batteries that are difficult to replace.)*

  Of course, the sine qua non of terrible customer service in the public consciousness is the airline business. Flying can often be a hostility-building exercise. On the security side, there are those invasive scans, including pat-downs of old ladies with hip replacements. We must take off our shoes and make sure our toothpaste, moisturizer, and other liquid items are limited to three ounces each and fit into a quart-sized, clear Ziploc bag. And, of course, there are countless other annoyances and frustrations including long lines, uncomfortable seats, and flight delays.

  Over the years, airlines have started charging for just about everything, packing flights with as many seats and people as possible, leaving space between seats that are comfortable only for a small child. They charge for checked bags, water, and in-flight snacks. They’ve even optimized airtime by getting planes to spend more time in the air and less time on the ground, and, as a consequence, guess what happens when there is one delay? You got it—a long sequence of delays across numerous airports that are all attributed to bad weather somewhere (“Not our fault,” says the airline). As a result of all of these injuries and insults, passengers often feel angry and hostile, and express their frustration in all kinds of ways.

  One such flying revenge seeker made me suffer on a flight from Chicago to Boston. On boarding the flight, I had the pleasure of being seated in a middle seat, 17B, stuffed between two hefty individuals who were spilling into my seat. Soon after takeoff, I reached for the airline magazine in the seat pocket. Instead of feeling the firm touch of paper, I felt a cold glob of what might politely be called leftovers. I took my hand out and squeezed my way out of the seat to the toilet in order to wash my hands. There I found the surfaces covered with toilet paper, the floor wet with urine, and the soap dispenser empty. The passengers on the previous flight, as well as the one whose seat I was now occupying, must have been angry indeed (this feeling might have also infected the cleaning and maintenance crew). I suspect that the person who left me the wet gift in the seat pocket, as well as the passengers who messed up the toilet, did not hate me personally. However, in their attempt to express their anger at the airline, they took out their feelings on other passengers, who were now more likely to take further revenge.

  Look around. Do you notice a general revenge reaction on the part of the public in response to the increase of bad treatment on the part of companies and institutions? Do you encounter more rudeness, ignorance, nonchalance, and sometimes hostility in stores, on flights, at car rental counters, and so on than ever before? I am not sure who started this chicken-and-egg problem, but as we consumers encounter offensive service, we become angrier and tend to take it out on the next service provider—whether or not he or she is responsible for our bad experience. The people receiving our emotional outbursts then go on to serve other customers, but because they are in a worse mood themselves, they aren’t in a position to be courteous and polite. And so goes the carousel of annoyance, frustration, and revenge in an ever-escalating cycle.

  Agents and Principals

  One day, Ayelet and I went to lunch to talk about the experiments involving Daniel and his cell phone. A young waitress, barely out of her teens and seeming particularly distracted, took our order. Ayelet ordered a tuna sandwich and I asked for a Greek salad.

  Several minutes later the waitress reappeared, bearing a Caesar salad and a turkey sandwich. Ayelet and I looked at each other and then at her.

  “We didn’t order these,” I said.

  “Oh, sorry. I’ll just take them back.”

  Ayelet was hungry. She looked at me, and I shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll just eat these.”

  The waitress gave us a despairing look. “I’m sorry,” she said and then disappeared.

  “What if she makes a mistake on our bill and undercharges us?” Ayelet asked me. “Would we tell her about this mistake, or would we take revenge and not say anything?” This question was related to our first experiment, but it was also different in one important way. If the question was about the size of the tip we would leave the waitress, then the issue would be simple: she was the person offending us a bit (the principal in economics-speak), and as a punishment we would tip her a bit less. But a mistake on the bill would cost the restaurant, and not the waitress, in reduced revenues; in terms of the bill, the waitress was the agent, while the restaurant was the principal. If we detected a mistake in our bill but didn’t call attention to it because we were annoyed with her performance, the principal would pay for the mistake of the agent. Would we take revenge against the principal even if the mistake was the agent’s fault? And “what if,” we asked ourselves, “the waitress owned the restaurant?” In that case she would be both the principal and the agent. Would that situation make us more likely to take revenge against her?

  Our speculation was that we would be much less likely to take revenge against the restaurant/principal if the waitress were just an agent and much more likely not to report the billing mistake if she were the principal. (In the end, there was no mistake on the bill, and though we were unhappy with the waitress’s service, we tipped her 15 percent anyway.) The idea that the distinction between agents and principals would make a difference in our tendency to take revenge looked reasonable to us. We decided to put our intuition to the test and study this problem in more detail.

  Before I tell you what we did and what we found, imagine going into a corporate-owned clothing store one day and encountering a very annoying salesperson. She stands behind the counter, yakking with a colleague about the latest episode of American Idol, while you try to get her attention. You’re more than miffed by the fact that she’s ignoring you. You think about leaving, but you really like the shirts and sweater you’ve picked out, so in the end you toss down your plastic. Then you notice that the salesperson mistakenly forgets to scan the price of the sweater. You realize that underpaying will penalize the owner of the store (principal) and not the salesperson (agent). Do you keep quiet, or do you point out her mistake?

  Now consider a slightly different case: You go to a privately owned clothing store, and here, too, you meet an annoying salesperson, who also happens to be the owner. Again, you have a chance to get a “free” sweater. In this case, the principal and the agent are the same person, and so not mentioning the omission would punish both. What would you do now? Would it make a difference if the person suffering from your revenge was also the one responsible for your anger?

  THE SETUP FOR our next experiment was similar to the previous one in the coffee shop. But this time around, Daniel introduced himself to some of the coffee drinkers by saying “Hello, I’ve been hired by an MIT professor to work on a project.” In this condition, he was the agent, equivalent to the waitress or salesperson, and if an annoyed person decided to keep the extra cash, he would be hurting the principal (me). To other participants, Daniel said, “Hello, I’m working on my undergraduate thesis project. I’m paying for this project with my own funds.” Now he was the principal, like the owner of the restaurant or the store. Would the coffee-drinking Beantownies b
e more likely to seek revenge when their action would punish Daniel himself? Would they react in a similar way regardless of who got hurt?

  The results were depressing. As we had discovered in our first experiment, people who were annoyed by the phone call were much less likely to return the extra cash than those whose conversations were uninterrupted. More surprisingly, we found that the tendency to seek revenge did not depend on whether Daniel (the agent) or I (the principal) suffered. This reminded us of Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison. In their case too they were annoyed mostly with Mike, the night clerk (an agent), but their PowerPoint presentation was aimed mostly at the Doubletree Club hotel (the principal). It seems that at the moment we feel the desire for revenge, we don’t care whom we punish—we only want to see someone pay, regardless of whether they are the agent or the principal. Given the number of agent-principal dualities in the marketplace and the popularity of outsourcing (which further increases these dualities), we thought this was indeed a worrisome result.

  Customer Revenge: My Story, Part II

  We have learned that even relatively simple transgressions can ignite the instinct for revenge. Once we feel the need to react, we often don’t distinguish between the person who actually made us angry and whoever suffers the consequences of our retaliation. This is very bad news for companies that pay lip service (if that) to customer support and service. Acts of revenge are not easy to observe from the CEO’s office. (And when engaging in acts of strong revenge, consumers try very hard to keep their actions under cover.) I suspect that companies like Audi, Doubletree, Apple, and many airlines don’t have a clue about the cause-and-effect relationship between their offending behavior and the retaliatory urges of their annoyed customers.

  So how did I express my revenge to Audi? I have seen many amusing YouTube videos in which people vent about their problems, but that approach did not suit me. Instead, I decided to write a fictional case study for the well-known business magazine Harvard Business Review (HBR). The story was about a negative experience that Tom Zacharelli had with his brand-new Atida car (I made up “Atida” and used Tom Farmer’s first name; notice, too, the similarity between “Ariely” and “Zacharelli”). Here is the letter Tom Zacharelli wrote to the CEO of Atida:

  Dear Mr. Turm,

  I am writing to you as a longtime customer and former Atida fan who is now close to desperation. Several months ago, I purchased the new Andromeda XL. It was peppy, it was stylish, it handled well. I loved it.

  On September 20, while I was driving back to Los Angeles, the car stopped responding to the gas. It was as if we were driving in neutral. I tried to make my way to the right. Looking over my right shoulder, I saw two big trucks bearing down on me as I tried to move over. The drivers barely missed me, and somehow I managed to make it onto the shoulder alive. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.

  From there the experience only got worse thanks to your customer service. They were rude, unhelpful and they refused to reimburse me for my expenses. A month later I got my car back, but now I’m angry, spiteful, and I want you to share in my misery. I feel the need for revenge.

  I’m now seriously thinking of making a very slick and nasty little film about your company and posting it on YouTube. I guarantee you won’t be happy with it.

  Sincerely,

  Tom Zacharelli

  The main question posed by my HBR case was this: how should Atida Motors have reacted to Tom’s anger? It was not clear that the manufacturer had any legal obligation to Tom, and the company’s managers wondered whether they should ignore or appease him. After all, they asked, why would he be willing to spend additional time and effort on making a video that would reflect poorly on Atida Motors? Hadn’t he spent enough time dealing with his car issues already? Didn’t he have anything better to do? As long as Atida made it clear that it was not going to take one little step toward appeasing him, why would he want to waste his time taking revenge?

  My HBR editor, Bronwyn Fryer, asked four experts to reflect on the case. One was none other than Tom Farmer of “Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel” fame, who, not surprisingly, censured Atida and took Tom Zacharelli’s side. He opened his comment with the statement that “whether the company knows it or not, Atida is a service organization that happens to sell cars, not a car-making organization that happens to provide service.”

  In the end, all four reviewers thought that Atida had treated Tom poorly and that he had the potential to do a lot of damage with his threatened video. They also suggested that the potential benefits of making amends with one understandably upset customer outweighed the cost.

  When the case study appeared in December 2007, I mailed a copy to the head of customer service at Audi with a note saying that this article was based on my experience with Audi. I never heard back from him, but I now feel better about the whole thing—though I am not sure whether that’s because I took revenge or because enough time has passed since the incident.

  The Power of Apologies

  When I finally got my car, the head mechanic gave me the keys. As we parted, he said, “Sorry, but sometimes cars break.” The simple truth of his statement had a surprisingly calming effect on me. “Yes,” I said to myself, “cars do break. This is not a surprise, and there is no reason to get so upset about it, just as there is no reason to get upset when my printer jams.”

  So why did I get so angry? I suspect that if the customer service representative had said, “Sorry, but sometimes cars break,” and had showed me some sympathy, the whole sequence would have played out very differently. Could it be that apologies can improve interactions and soothe the instinct for revenge in business and in personal exchanges?

  Given my frequent personal experience apologizing to my lovely wife, Sumi, and given that it often works well for me (Ayelet is basically a saint, so she never needs to apologize for anything), we decided in the next iteration to examine the power of the word “sorry.”

  Our experimental setup was very similar to that of the original experiment. Again, we sent Daniel to ask coffee shop customers if they would complete our letter-pairing task in exchange for $5. This time, however, we had three conditions. In the control (no-annoyance) condition, Daniel first asked the coffee shop patrons if they would be willing to participate in a five-minute task in return for $5. When they agreed (and almost all agreed), he gave them the same letter sheets and explained the instructions. Five minutes later, he returned to the table, collected the sheets, handed the participants four extra dollars (four $1 bills and one $5 bill), and asked them to fill out a receipt for $5. For those in the annoyance condition, the procedure was basically the same, except that while going over the instructions, Daniel again pretended to take a call.

  The third group was basically in the same condition as those in the annoyance group, but we threw in a little twist. This time, as Daniel was handing the participants their payment and asking them to sign the receipt, he added an apology. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t have answered that call.”

  Based on the original experiment, we expected the annoyed people to be much less likely to return the extra cash, and indeed that is what the results showed. But what about the third group? Surprise!—the apology was a perfect remedy. The amount of extra cash returned in the apology condition was the same as it was when people were not annoyed at all. Indeed, we found that the word “sorry” completely counteracted the effect of annoyance. (For handy future reference, here’s the magic formula: 1 annoyance + 1 apology = 0 annoyance.) This showed us that apologies do work, at least temporarily.

  Before you decide it’s okay to start acting like a jerk and saying “sorry” immediately after you annoy someone, a word of caution is in order. Our experiment was a onetime interaction between Daniel and the coffee shop customers. It is unclear what would have happened if Daniel and the customers had gone through the experiment and apology for many days in a row. As we know from the story of “The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf,’ ” it’s possible to
overuse a word, and an overworn “sorry” may well lose its power.

  We also discovered one other remedy for the revenge that the coffee drinkers in Boston took against us. As it turned out, increasing the time between Daniel’s disrespectful phone call and the participants’ opportunity for revenge (when he gave them the payment and asked them to sign a receipt), even by fifteen minutes, muted some of the vengeful feelings and got us more of our money back. (Here, too, a word of caution is important: when annoyance is very high, I am not sure that simply letting some time pass is sufficient to eliminate the urge for revenge.)

  If You’re Tempted

  A number of wise men have warned us against the would-be benefits of vengeance. Mark Twain said, “Therein lies the defect of revenge: it’s all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it.” Walter Weckler further observed that “revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst.” And Albert Schweitzer noted that “Revenge . . . is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.”

  * * *

  WHEN DOCTORS APOLOGIZE

  As much as some people seem to think otherwise, physicians are in fact human and do make mistakes from time to time. When this happens, what should they do? Is it better for them to admit medical errors and apologize? Or should they deny their mistakes? The reasoning behind the latter is clear: in a litigious society, a doctor who comes clean is much more likely to lose a lawsuit if one is filed. But on the other hand, you could argue that a doctor’s apology can placate the patient and thereby lower the likelihood that he might be sued in the first place.