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

by Dan Ariely

  It turns out that in the battle between humility and bedside manners on one side and a calculating, legalistic approach on the other, saying “sorry” often wins the day. For example, when researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore11 showed participants videos of doctors responding to medical errors, participants rated the doctors who expressed an apology and who took personal responsibility far more favorably. What’s more, another research team from the University of Massachusetts Medical School found that people expressed less interest in suing doctors who had assumed responsibility, apologized, and planned a means of avoiding the error in the future.12

  Now, if you are a surgeon who operates on the wrong knee or leaves a tool inside a patient’s body, an apology makes a lot of sense. Your patient might not feel so outraged and won’t have a desire to stomp into your office, kick you with his good leg, and throw your favorite paperweight through the window. It may also make you appear much more human and keep you from getting sued. In line with these findings, many medical voices are now suggesting that physicians should be encouraged to apologize and admit when they are wrong. But of course denying our mistakes and blaming others is a part of being human—even when doing so can escalate the anger and revenge cycle.

  * * *

  With all this good advice about not engaging in revenge, is it really something we can avoid? For my part, I think that the desire for revenge is one of the most basic of human responses; it’s linked to our incredible ability to trust others, and since it’s a part of our nature, it’s a difficult instinct to overcome. Maybe we can adopt a more Zen-like approach to life. Maybe we can take the long-term view. Maybe we can count to ten—or ten million—and let the passage of time help us. Most likely, such steps offer only slight mitigation of what is sadly an all-too-common feeling. (For another tour of the dark side of our emotions, see chapter 10, “The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions.”)

  When we can’t fully suppress our vengeful feelings, perhaps we can figure out how to blow off steam without incurring negative consequences. Maybe we can prepare a laminated sign that reads “HAVE A NICE DAY” in large letters on one side and “f**k you” in much smaller letters on the other side. We can keep this sign in the glove compartment of our car, and when someone drives too fast, cuts into our lane, or generally endangers us with their driving, we can show the driver the sign through our window, with the “HAVE A NICE DAY” side facing them. Maybe we can write down vengeful jokes about an offending party and post them anonymously on the Web. Maybe we can vent with some of our friends. Maybe we can make a PowerPoint presentation about the event or write a case study for the Harvard Business Review.

  Useful Revenge

  Other than my near brush with death on the highway, I’d say that my experience with Audi was overall beneficial. I got to reflect on the phenomenon of revenge, do a few experiments, share my perspective in print, and write this chapter. Indeed, there are many success stories built on the motivation for revenge. These stories often involve entrepreneurs and businessmen, whose self-worth is tightly bound to their work. When they are ousted from their positions as CEOs or presidents, they make revenge their life’s mission. Sometimes they succeed in either regaining their former position or creating a new and successful competitor to their former company.

  Near the end of the nineteenth century, for example, Cornelius Vanderbilt owned a steamship company called Accessory Transit Company. Everything was going well for him until he decided to vacation in Europe on his yacht. When he returned from his trip, he found that the two associates he had left in charge had sold his interest in the company to themselves. “Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you,” he said. Then he converted his yacht into a passenger ship and started a rival company, aptly named “Opposition.” Sure enough, his new company quickly succeeded and Vanderbilt eventually regained control of his first company. Though Vanderbilt’s company was larger, it contained at least two fewer questionable employees.13

  Here’s another revenge success story:14 after being fired from the Walt Disney Company, Jeffrey Katzenberg not only won $280 million in compensation; he cofounded DreamWorks SKG, a Disney competitor that went on to release the highly successful movie Shrek. Not only did the movie make fun of Disney’s fairy tales, but its villain is also apparently a parody of the head of Disney at the time (and Katzenberg’s former boss), Michael Eisner. Now that you know Shrek’s background, I recommend you revisit the movie to see just how constructive (and entertaining) revenge can be.

  Part II

  The Unexpected Ways We

  Defy Logic at Home

  Chapter 6

  On Adaptation

  Why We Get Used to Things

  (but Not All Things, and Not Always)

  Man is a pliant animal, a being who gets accustomed to anything.

  —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

  The late nineteenth century was a rough time for frogs, worms, and a number of other creatures. As the study of physiology blossomed in Europe and America (thanks in part to Charles Darwin), scientists went wild dividing, dismembering, and relocating these unfortunate subjects. According to scientific legend, they also slowly heated some of the animals in order to test the extent to which they could adapt to changes in their environments.

  The most famous example of this kind of research is the apocryphal story of the frog in boiling water. Supposedly, if you place a frog in a pot of very hot water, it will scramble around and quickly leap out. However, if you put one in a pot of room-temperature water, the little guy will stay there contentedly. Now, if you slowly increase the temperature, the frog will stay put as it acclimates to the rising change in temperature. And if you continue to turn up the heat, the frog will eventually boil to death.

  I can’t say for sure if this frog experiment works since I’ve never tried it (and I suspect the frog would, indeed, jump out), yet the boiling-frog story is the quintessence of the principle of adaptation. The general premise is that all creatures, including humans, can get used to almost anything over time.

  The frog story is usually used pejoratively. Al Gore has found it a handy analogy for pointing out people’s ignorance about the effects of global warming. Others have used it to warn about the slow erosion of civil liberties. Business and marketing people use it to illustrate the point that changes in products, services, and policies—such as price increases—must be gradual, so that customers have time to adjust to them (preferably without noticing). This analogy to adaptation is so common, in fact, that James Fallows of The Atlantic argued, in a Web column called “Boiled-frog Archives,” that “Frogs have a hard enough time as it is, what with diminishing swampland and polluted waters. Political rhetoric has its problems too. For the frogs’ sake, and that of less-idiotic public discourse, let’s retire this stupid canard, or grenouille.”15

  In fact, frogs are remarkably adaptive. They can live in water and on land, they change their colors to blend in with their environments, and some even mimic their toxic cousins in an effort to scare off predators. Humans, too, have an amazing ability to adapt physically to their environments, from the frigid, barren Arctic to scorching, arid deserts. Physical adaptation is a much-touted skill on mankind’s collective résumé.

  TO GET A better view of the wonders of adaptation, let’s consider the way that our visual system functions. If you’ve ever gone to a matinee and walked from the dark movie theater to the sunny parking lot, the first moment outside is one of stunning brightness, but then your eyes adjust relatively quickly. Moving from a dark theater into bright sunshine demonstrates two aspects of adaptation. First, we can function well in a large spectrum of light intensities, ranging from broad daylight (where luminance can be as high as 100,000 lux) to sunset (where luminance can be as low as 1 lux). Even with the light of the stars (where luminance can be as low as 0.001 lux), we can function to some degree. Second, it takes a little bit of time for
our eyes to adjust. When we first move from darkness to light, we are unable to open our eyes fully, but after a few minutes we get used to the new environment and can function in it perfectly. In fact, we acclimate so readily that after a while we barely notice the intensity of the light around us.

  Our ability to adapt to light is just one example of our general adaptive skills. The same process takes place when we first encounter a new smell, texture, temperature, or background noise. Initially, we are very aware of these sensations. But as time passes, we pay less and less attention to them until, at some point, we adapt and they become almost unnoticeable.

  The bottom line is that we have only a limited amount of attention with which to observe and learn about the world around us—and adaptation is a very important novelty filter that helps us focus our limited attention on things that are changing and might therefore pose either opportunities or danger. Adaptation allows us to attend to the important changes among the millions that occur around us all the time and ignore the unimportant ones. If the air smells the same as it has for the past five hours, you don’t notice it. But if you start smelling gas as you read on the couch, you quickly notice it, get out of the house, and call the gas company. Thankfully, the human body is a master at adaption on many levels.

  What Can Pain Teach Us about Adaptation?

  Another kind of adaptation is called hedonic adaptation. This has to do with the way we respond to painful or pleasurable experiences. For instance, try this thought experiment. Shut your eyes and think about what would happen if you were badly injured in a car accident that paralyzed you from the waist down. You see yourself in a wheelchair, no longer able to walk or run. You imagine dealing with the daily hassles and pain of disability and being unable to resume many of the activities that you currently enjoy; you think that many of your future possibilities will now be closed to you. In imagining such a thing, you probably think that the loss of your legs will make you miserable for as long as you live.

  It turns out that we are very good at conceiving the future but we can’t foresee how we will adapt to it. It’s difficult to imagine that, over time, you might get used to the changes in your lifestyle, adapt to your injury, and find that it’s not as terrible as you once thought. It’s even harder to imagine discovering new and unexpected joys in your new situation.

  Yet numerous studies have shown that we adapt more quickly and to a larger degree than we imagine. The question is: how does adaptation work, and to what degree does it change our contentedness, if at all?

  DURING MY FIRST year at Tel Aviv University, I had the opportunity to reflect and later empirically test the idea of adaptation to pain.* One of the first classes I took was a course on the physiology of the brain. The purpose of the class was to understand the structure of different brain parts and relate them to behavior. How, Professor Hanan Frenk asked us, do hunger, epilepsy, and memory work? What enables the development and production of language? I did not have particularly high expectations going into a physiology class, but it turned out to be extraordinary in many ways—including the fact that Professor Frenk relied on his own personal history to direct his research interests.

  Hanan was born in the Netherlands and emigrated to Israel in 1968 when he was about eighteen. Soon after he joined the Israeli army, an armored vehicle in which he was riding went over a land mine and exploded, leaving him with two amputated legs. Given this experience, one of Hanan’s main research interests was—not surprisingly—pain, and we covered the topic in some detail in class. Since I also had a substantial personal interest in the topic, I stopped by Hanan’s office from time to time to talk with him in more depth. Because of our similar experiences, our discussions of pain were both personal and professional. Soon we discovered many shared experiences with pain, healing, and the challenges of overcoming our injuries. We also found that we had been hospitalized in the same rehabilitation center and treated by some of the same physicians, nurses, and physical therapists, albeit years apart.

  During one of these visits I mentioned to Hanan that I had just been to the dentist and that I hadn’t taken any novocaine or other painkillers during the drilling. “It was an interesting experience,” I said. “It was clearly painful, and I could feel the drilling and the nerve, but it didn’t bother me that much.” Surprised, Hanan told me that he too had refused novocaine at the dentist’s since his injury. We began to wonder whether we were just two strangely masochistic individuals or whether there was something about our long exposure to pain that made the relatively minor experience of tooth drilling seem less daunting. Intuitively, and perhaps egotistically, we concluded that it was likely the latter.

  ABOUT A WEEK later, Hanan asked me to stop by his office. He had been thinking about our conversation and suggested that we empirically test the hypothesis that, assuming we were otherwise normal, our experiences had made us less concerned about pain. And thus my first hands-on experience with social science research was born.

  We set up a small testing facility in the infirmary of a special country club for people who had been injured while serving in the army. The country club was a fabulous place. There were basketball games for people in wheelchairs, swimming lessons for those missing legs or arms, and even basketball for the blind. (Blind basketball looks a lot like handball. It’s played on the entire width of the court, and the ball has a bell inside.) One of my physical therapists in the rehabilitation center, Moshe, was blind and played on one of the teams, and I especially enjoyed watching him play.

  We posted signs around the country club that read “Research volunteers wanted for a quick and interesting study.” When the eager participants, all of whom had endured a variety of injuries, arrived at our testing facility, we greeted them with a tub of hot water outfitted with a heating generator and a thermostat. We’d heated the water to 48˚ centigrade (118.4˚ Fahrenheit) and asked each participant to put one arm into it. At the moment a participant’s hand entered the hot water, we started a timer and asked him (all the participants were male) to tell us the exact point when the sensation of heat became a feeling of pain (which we termed “pain threshold”). We then asked the participant to keep his hand in the hot water until he could no longer stand it and at that point to pull his arm out of the tub (this was our measure of pain tolerance). We then repeated the same procedure using the other arm.

  Once we finished inflicting physical pain on our participants, we asked them questions about the history of their injuries and about their experience with pain during their initial hospitalization period (on average, our participants had sustained their injuries fifteen years before submitting to our test) as well as in recent weeks. It took us some time, but we managed to collect information on about forty participants.

  Next, we wanted to find out whether our participants’ ability to sustain pain had increased due to their injuries. To do this, we had to find a control group and contrast the pain thresholds and tolerances across the two groups. We thought about recruiting people who were not afflicted by any serious injuries—maybe students or people at a mall. But on reflection, we worried that a comparison with such populations would introduce too many other factors. Students, for instance, were much younger than our experimental group, and people selected randomly at the mall would likely have wildly varying histories, injuries, and life experiences.

  So we decided on a different approach. We took the medical files of our forty participants and showed them to a doctor, two nurses, and a physical therapist at the rehabilitation hospital where Hanan and I had spent so much time. We asked them to split the sample into two groups, the mildly injured and the more grievously injured. Once that was done, Hanan and I had two groups that were relatively similar to each other in many respects (all participants had been in the army, injured, and hospitalized, and were part of the same veterans country club) but differed in the severity of their injuries. By comparing these two groups, we hoped to see if the severity of our participants’ injuries influenced the way
they experienced pain many years later.

  The severely injured group was made up of people like Noam, whose army job had been to disassemble land mines. At some unfortunate point, a land mine had exploded in his hands, piercing his body with numerous shrapnel wounds and costing him a leg and the sight in one eye. In the mildly injured group were men like Yehuda, who had broken his elbow while on duty. He had undergone an operation that had involved restoring the joint by adding a titanium plate, but he was otherwise in good health.

  The participants who had been mildly injured reported that the hot water became painful (pain threshold) after about 4.5 seconds, while those who had been severely injured started feeling pain after 10 seconds. More interestingly, those in the mildly injured group removed their hands from the hot water (pain tolerance) after about 27 seconds, while the severely injured individuals kept their hands in the hot water for about 58 seconds.

  This difference particularly impressed us since, in order to make sure that no one really got burned, we did not allow participants to keep their hands in the hot water for more than sixty seconds. We did not tell them in advance about the sixty-second rule, but if they reached the sixty-second mark we asked them to take their hands out. We did not need to enforce this rule for any participant in the mildly injured group, but we had to tell all but one of the severely injured participants to take their hands out of the hot water.

  The happy ending? Hanan and I discovered that we were not as odd as we thought, at least not in respect to our pain response. Moreover, we found that there seems to be generalized adaptation involved in the process of acclimating to pain. Even though the people in our study had endured their injuries many years before, their overall approach to pain and ability to tolerate it seemed to have changed, and this change lasted for a long time.