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

by Dan Ariely

  The benefits of randomness range from the personal to the romantic to our work life. As the economist Tibor Scitovsky argued in The Joyless Economy, we have a tendency to take the safe and predictable path at work, and by extension in our personal life, and do the things that provide steady and reliable progress. But, Scitovsky argues, real progress—as well as real pleasure—comes from taking risks and trying very different things. So the next time you have to make a presentation, work with a team, or pick a project to work on, try doing something new. Your attempt at humor or cross-corporate collaboration may fail, but on balance it might make a positive difference.

  ANOTHER LESSON IN adaptation has to do with the situations of the people around us. When other people have things that we don’t, the comparison can be very apparent and, as a consequence, we can be slower to adapt. For me, being in the hospital for three years was relatively easy because everyone around me was injured and my abilities and inabilities were within the range of the people around me. Only when I left the hospital did I understand the full extent of my limitations and difficulties—a realization that was very difficult and depressing.

  On a more practical level, let’s say you want a particular laptop but decide that it’s too expensive. If you settle for a cheaper one, you’ll most likely get used to it over time. That is, unless the person in the cubicle next to you has the laptop that you originally wanted. In the latter case, the daily comparison between your laptop and your neighbor’s will slow down your adaptation and make you less happy. More generally, this principle means that when we consider the process of adaptation, we should think about the various factors in our environment and how they may influence our ability to adapt. The sad news is that our happiness does depend to some degree on our ability to keep up with the Joneses. The good news is that since we have some control over what environment we put ourselves into—as long as we pick Joneses to whom we don’t feel bad in comparison, we can be much happier.

  THE FINAL LESSON is that not all experiences lead to the same level of adaptation and not all people respond to adaptation in the same way. So my advice is to explore your individual patterns and learn what pushes your adaptation button and what doesn’t.

  In the end, we are all like the metaphorical frogs in hot water. Our task is to figure out how we respond to adaptation in order to take advantage of the good and avoid the bad. To do so, we must take the temperature of the water. When it begins to feel hot, we need to jump out, find a cool pond, and identify and enjoy the pleasures of life.

  Chapter 7

  Hot or Not?

  Adaptation, Assortative Mating, and the Beauty Market

  A large, full-length mirror awaited me in the nurses’ station. As I hadn’t walked more than a few feet for months, traveling the length of the hallway to the nurses’ station was a true challenge. It took ages. Finally I turned the corner and inched closer and closer to the mirror, to take a good, hard look at the image reflecting back at me. The legs were bent and thickly covered in bandages. The back was completely bowed forward. The bandaged arms collapsed lifelessly. The entire body was twisted; it seemed foreign and detached from what I felt was me. “Me” was a good-looking eighteen-year-old. It was impossible that the image was me.

  The face was the worst. The whole right side gaped open, with yellow and red pieces of flesh and skin hanging down like a melting wax candle. The right eye was pulled severely toward the ear, and the right sides of the mouth, ear, and nose were charred and distorted.

  It was hard to comprehend all the details; every part and feature seemed disfigured in one way or another. I stood there and tried to take in my reflection. Was the old Dan buried somewhere in the image that stared back from the mirror? I recognized only the left eye that gazed at me from the wreckage of that body. Was this really me? I simply could not understand, believe in, or accept this deformed body as my own. During the various treatments, when my bandages were removed, I had seen parts of my body, and I knew how terrible some of the burns looked. I had also been told that the right side of my face was badly injured. But somehow, until I stood before the mirror, I hadn’t put it all together. I was torn between the desire to stare at the thing in the mirror and the compulsion to turn away and ignore this new reality. Soon enough the pain in my legs made the decision for me, and I returned to my hospital bed.

  Dealing with the physical aspects of my injury was torture enough. Dealing with the terrible blow to my teenage self-image added a different type of challenge to my recovery. At that point in my life, I was trying to find my place in society and understand myself as a person and as a man. Suddenly I was condemned to three years in a hospital and demoted from what my peers (or at least my mother) might have considered attractive to something else altogether. In losing my looks, I’d lost something crucial to how we all—particularly young people—define ourselves.

  Where Do I Fit In?

  Over the next few years, many friends came to visit. I saw couples—healthy, beautiful, pain-free people who had been my pals and peers in school—flirt, get together, and split up; naturally, they fully immersed themselves in their romantic pursuits. Before my accident, I had known exactly where I belonged in the social hierarchy. I had dated a few of the girls in this group and generally knew who would and would not want to date me.

  But now, I asked myself, where did I fit into the dating scene? Having lost my looks, I knew I had become less valuable in the dating market. Would the girls I used to go out with reject me if I asked them now? I was quite sure they would. I could even see their logic in doing so. After all, they had better options, and wouldn’t I do the same if our fortunes were reversed? If the attractive girls rejected me, would I have to marry someone who also had a disability or deformity? Must I now “settle”? Did I need to accept the idea that my dating value had dropped and that I should think differently about a romantic partner? Or maybe there was some hope. Would someone, someday, overlook my scars and love me for my brains, sense of humor, and cooking?

  There was no escape from realizing that my market value for romantic partners had vastly diminished, but at the same time I felt that only one part of me, my physical appearance, was damaged. I didn’t feel that I (the real me) had changed in any meaningful way, which made it all the more difficult to accept the idea that I was suddenly less valuable.

  Mind and Body

  Not knowing much about extensive burns, I initially expected that once my burns were healed, I would go back to how I was before my injury. After all, I’d had a few small burns in the past, and, aside from slight scars, they’d disappeared in a few weeks without much of a trace. What I didn’t realize was that these deep and extensive burns were very different. As my burns began to heal, much of my real struggle was only starting—as was my frustration with my injury and my body.

  As my wounds healed, I faced the hourly challenges of shrinking scars and the need to fight continuously against the tightening skin. I also had to contend with the Jobst pressure bandages that covered my entire body. The numerous contraptions that extended my fingers and held my neck steady, though medically useful, made me feel all the more alien. All of these foreign additions that supported and moved my body parts prevented my physical self from feeling anything like it used to. I started to actively resent my body and think of it as an enemy that betrayed me. Like the Frog Prince or the Man in the Iron Mask, I felt as if no one could discern the real me trapped inside.*

  I was not the philosophical type as a teenager, but I started thinking about the separation of mind and body, a duality I experienced every day. I struggled with my feelings of imprisonment in this awful pain-racked body, until, at some point, I decided that I would prevail over it. I started stretching my healing skin as much as I could. I worked against the pain, with the feeling that my mind was taming my body into submission and achieving victory over it. I embraced the mind-body dualism that I felt so strongly and tried very hard to make sure that my mind won the battle.

  A
s part of my campaign, I promised myself that my actions and decisions would be directed by my mind alone and not by my body. I would not let pain rule my life, and I would not allow my body to dictate my decisions. I would learn to ignore the calls from my body, and I would live in the mental world where I was still the old me. I would be in control from that moment on!

  I also resolved to evade the problem of my declining value in the dating market by avoiding the issue altogether. If I was going to ignore my body on every front, I certainly wouldn’t submit to any romantic needs. With romance out of my life, I wouldn’t need to worry about my place in the dating hierarchy or about who might want me. Problem solved.

  BUT A FEW months after my injury, I learned the same lesson that countless ascetics, monks, and purists have learned time and time again: getting the mind to triumph over the body is easier said than done.

  My daily via dolorosa in the burn department included the dreaded bath treatment, in which the nurses would soak me in a bath with disinfectant. After a short time, they would start ripping off my bandages one by one. Having completed this process, they would scrape the dead skin away, put some ointment on my burns, and cover me up again. That was the usual routine, but on the days immediately following each of my many skin-transplant operations, they would skip the bath treatment because the water could potentially carry infections from other parts of my body to the fresh surgical wound. Instead, on those days, I would get a sponge bath in bed, which was even more painful than the regular treatment because the bandages could not be soaked, making their removal even more agonizing.

  One particular day, my sponge bath routine took a different turn. After removing all the bandages, a young and very attractive nurse named Tami washed my stomach and thighs. I suddenly experienced a sensation coming from somewhere in the middle of my body that I had not felt in months. I was mortified and embarrassed to find I had an erection, but Tami laughed and told me that it was a great sign of improvement. Her positive spin helped a bit with the embarrassment, but not much.

  That night, alone in my room and listening to the symphony of beeps from the various medical instruments, I reflected on the day’s events. My teenage hormones were back in action. They were oblivious to the fact that I looked quite different from the young man I once was. My hormones were also displaying a shocking lack of respect for my decision not to let my body dictate my actions. At that point, I realized that the strong separation I felt between mind and body was, in fact, inaccurate, and that I would have to learn to live in mind-body harmony.

  NOW THAT I was back in the land of relative normalcy—that is, of people with both mental and physical demands—I started thinking again about my place in society. Particularly during the times when my body was functioning better and the pain was less, I would wonder about the social process that drives us toward some people and away from others. I was still in bed most of the time, so there was nothing I could actually do, but I started thinking about what my romantic future might hold. As I analyzed the situation over and over, my personal concerns soon developed into a more generalized interest in the romantic dance.

  Assortative Mating and Adaptation

  You don’t need to be an astute observer of human nature to realize that, in the world of birds, bees, and humans, like attracts like. To a large degree, beautiful people date other beautiful people, and “aesthetically challenged”* individuals date others like them. Social scientists have studied this birds-of-a-feather phenomenon for a long time and given it the name “assortative mating.” While we can all think of examples of bold, talented, rich, or powerful yet aesthetically challenged men coupled with beautiful women (think of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts, or almost any British rock star and his model/actress wife), assortative mating is generally a good description of the way people tend to find their romantic partners. Of course, assortative mating is not just about beauty; money, power, and even attributes such as a sense of humor can make a person more or less desirable. Still, in our society, beauty, more than any other attribute, tends to define our place in the social hierarchy and our assortative mating potential.

  Assortative mating is good news for the men and women sitting on the top rung of the attractiveness ladder, but what does it mean for the majority of us on the middle or lower rungs? Do we adapt to our position in the social hierarchy? How do we learn, to paraphrase the old Stephen Stills song, to “love the ones we’re with”? This was a question that Leonard Lee, George Loewenstein, and I started discussing one day over coffee.

  Without indicating which of us he had in mind, George posed the following question: “Consider what happens to someone who is physically unattractive. This person is generally restricted to date and marry people of his own attractiveness level. If, on top of that, he is an academic, he cannot compensate for his bestowed ugliness by making lots of money.” George continued with what would become the central question of our next research project: “What will become of that individual? Will he wake up every morning, look at the person sleeping next to him, and think ‘Well, that’s the best I can do’? Or will he somehow learn to adapt in some way, change, and not realize that he has settled?”

  * * *

  A DEMONSTRATION OF ASSORTATIVE MATING, OR AN IDEA FOR AN AWKWARD DINNER PARTY

  Imagine that you have just arrived at a party. As you walk in, the host writes something on your forehead. He instructs you not to look at the mirror or ask anyone about it. You look around the room and see that the other men and women have numbers from 1 to 10 written on their foreheads. The host tells you that your goal is to pair up with the highest-numbered person who is willing to talk to you. Naturally, you walk up to a 10, but he or she gives you one look and walks away. You then look for 9s or 8s and so on, until a 4 extends a hand to you and you go together to get a drink.

  This simple game describes the basic process of assortative mating. When we play this game with potential romantic partners in the real world, it is often the case that people with high numbers find others with high numbers, medium numbers match with their equivalents, and low numbers connect with their likes. Each person has a value (in the party game, the value is clearly written); the reactions we get from other people help us figure out our position in the social hierarchy and find someone who shares our general level of desirability.

  * * *

  One way to think about the process by which an aesthetically challenged person adapts to his or her own limited appeal is what we might call the “sour grapes strategy,” named after Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes.” While walking through a field on a hot day, a fox sees a bunch of plump, ripe grapes trained over a branch. Naturally, the grapes are just the things to sate his thirst, so he backs up and takes a running leap for them. He misses. He tries again and again, but he simply can’t reach them. Finally, he gives up and walks away, mumbling “I’m sure they were sour anyway.” The sour grapes concept derived from this tale is the idea that we tend to scorn that which we cannot have.

  This fable suggests that when it comes to beauty, adaptation will work its magic on us by making the highly attractive people (grapes) less desirable (sour) to those of us who cannot attain them. But true adaptation can go farther than just changing how we look at the world. Instead of simply rejecting what we can’t have, real adaptation implies that we play psychological tricks on ourselves to make reality acceptable.

  How exactly do these tricks of adaptation work? One way aesthetically challenged individuals might adapt would be to lower their aesthetic ideals from, say, a 9 or a 10 on the scale of perfection to something more comparable to themselves. Maybe they start finding large noses, baldness, or crooked teeth desirable traits. Someone who has adapted this way might react to the picture of, say, Halle Berry or Orlando Bloom by shrugging his or her shoulders and saying “Eh, I don’t like her small, symmetrical nose” or “Blech, all that dark, lustrous hair.”

  Those of us who aren’t gorgeous might utilize
a second approach to adaptation. We might not change our sense of beauty, but instead look for other qualities; we might search for, say, a sense of humor or kindness. In the world of “The Fox and the Grapes,” this would be equivalent to the fox reevaluating the slightly less juicy-looking berries on the ground and finding them more delicious because he just can’t get the grapes from the branch.

  How might this work in the dating world? I have a middle-aged, average-looking friend who met her husband on Match.com a few years ago. “Here was someone,” she told me, “who was not much to look at. He was bald, overweight, had a lot of body hair, and was several years older than me. But I have learned that these things aren’t that important. I wanted somebody who was smart, had great values and a good sense of humor—and he had all this.” (Ever notice how “a sense of humor” is almost always code for “unattractive” when someone tries to play matchmaker?)

  So now we have two ways by which we aesthetically challenged individuals adapt: either we alter our aesthetic perception so that we start to value a lack of perfection, or we reconsider the importance of attributes we find important and unimportant. To put these somewhat more crudely, consider these two possibilities: (a) Do women who attract only short, bald men start liking those attributes in a mate? Or (b) would these women still rather date tall men with lots of hair, but, realizing that this is not possible, they change their focus to nonphysical attributes such as kindness and sense of humor?