by Dan Ariely
How We Herd Ourselves
Eduardo and I decided to take our experiment one step further by reversing the roles of the participants so that they would play the role of senders as well. The procedure was basically as follows: First, we showed the participants one of the two video clips, which created the intended emotions. Then we had them play the game in the role of the receivers (in this game they made DECISIONS influenced by the emotions of the clip) and accept or reject an unfair offer. Next came the delay to allow the emotions to dissipate. Finally came the most important part of this experiment: they played another ultimatum game, but this time they acted as senders rather than receivers. As senders they could propose any offer to another participant (the receiver)—who could then accept it, in which case they would each get their proposed share, or reject it, in which case they would both get nothing.
Why reverse the roles in this way? Because we hoped that doing so could teach us something about the way self-herding works its magic on our decisions in the long term.
Let’s step back for a moment and think about two basic ways in which self-herding could operate:
The Specific Version. Self-herding comes from remembering the specific actions we have taken in the past and mindlessly repeating them (“I brought wine the last time I went to dinner at the Arielys’, so I’ll do that again”). This kind of past-based decision making provides a very simple decision recipe—“do what you did last time”—but it applies only to situations that are exactly the same as ones we’ve been in before.
The General Version. Another way to think about self-herding involves the way we look to past actions as a general guide for what we should do next and follow the same basic behavior pattern from there. In this version of self-herding, when we act in a certain way, we also remember our past decisions. But this time, instead of just automatically repeating what we did before, we interpret our decision more broadly; it becomes an indication of our general character and preferences, and our actions follow suit (“I gave money to a beggar on the street, so I must be a caring guy; I should start volunteering in the soup kitchen”). In this type of self-herding, we look at our past actions to inform ourselves of who we are more generally, and then we act in compatible ways.
NOW LET’S THINK for a minute about how this role reversal could give us a better understanding about which of the two types of self-herding—the specific or the general one—played a more prominent part in our experiment. Imagine you are a receiver-turned-sender. You might have seen poor Kevin Kline’s character being treated like s**t, followed by his bashing of miniature houses with a baseball bat. As a consequence, you ended up rejecting the unfair offer. Alternatively, you might have chuckled in response to the Friends clip and accordingly accepted the uneven offer. In either case, time has passed, and you no longer feel the initial anger or happiness that the movie clip evoked. But now you are in your new role as a sender. (The following is a little intricate, so get ready.)
If the specific version of self-herding was the one operating in our earlier experiment, then in this version of the experiment your initial emotions as a receiver would not affect your later decision as a sender. Why? Because, as a sender, you can’t simply rely on a decision recipe that tells you to “do what you did last time.” After all, you’ve never been a sender before, so you are looking at the situation with fresh eyes, making a new type of decision.
On the other hand, if the general version of self-herding was operating and you were in the angry condition, you might say to yourself, “When I was on the other end, I was pissed off. I rejected a $7.50:$2.50 split because it was unfair.” (In other words, you are mistakenly attributing your motivation to rejecting the offer to its unfairness, rather than to your anger.) “The person I am sending the offer to this time,” you might continue, “is probably like me. He is likely to reject such an unfair offer too, so let me give him something that is more fair—something I would have accepted if I had been in his situation.”
Alternatively, if you had watched the Friends clip, you accordingly accepted the uneven offer (again, misattributing your reaction to the offer and not to the clip). As a sender, you might now think, “I accepted a $7.50:$2.50 split because I felt okay about it. The person I am sending the offer to this time is probably like me, and he is likely to also accept such an offer, so let me give him the same $7.50:$2.50 split.” This would be an example of the general self-herding mechanism: remembering your actions, attributing them to a more general principle, and following the same path. You even assume that your counterpart would act in a similar way.
The results of our experiments weighted in favor of the general version of self-herding. The initial emotions had an effect long after the fact, even when the role was reversed. Senders who first experienced the angry condition offered more even splits to recipients, while those who were in the happy condition extended more unfair offers.
BEYOND THE PARTICULAR effects of emotions on decisions, the results of these experiments suggest that general self-herding most likely plays a large role in our lives. If it were just the specific version of self-herding that was operating, its effect would be limited to the types of decisions we make over and over. But the influence of the general version of self-herding suggests that decisions we make on the basis of a momentary emotion can also influence related choices and decisions in other domains even long after the original DECISION is made. This means that when we face new situations and are about to make decisions that can later be used for self-herding, we should be very careful to make the best possible choices. Our immediate decisions don’t just affect what’s happening at the moment; they can also affect a long sequence of related decisions far into our future.
Don’t Cross Him
We look for gender differences in almost all of our experiments, but we rarely find any.
This is, of course, not to say that there are no gender differences when it comes to how people make decisions. I suspect that for very basic types of decisions (as in most of the decisions that I study), gender does not play a large role. But I do think that as we examine more complex types of decisions, we will start seeing some gender differences.
For example, when we made the situation in our ultimatum game experiment more complex, we stumbled on an interesting difference in the ways men and women react to unfair offers.
Imagine that you are the receiver in the game and you are getting an unfair offer of $16:$4. As in the other games, you can accept the offer and get $4 (while your counterpart gets $16), or you can reject it, in which case both you and the other player get $0. But, in addition to these two options, you can also take one of two other deals:
1. You can take a deal of $3:$3, which means that you both get less than the original offer but the sender loses more. (Since the original split was $16:$4, you would give up $1, but your counterpart would lose $13.) Plus, by taking this $3:$3 deal, you can teach the other person a lesson about fairness.
2. You can take a deal of $0:$3, which means that you get $3 ($1 less than the original offer) but you get to punish the sender with $0—thus demonstrating to the other person what it feels like to get the bum end of the deal.
What did we find in terms of gender differences? In general, it turned out that the males were about 50 percent more likely to accept the unfair offer than the females in both the angry and happy conditions. Things got even more interesting when we looked at what alternative deals the participants took ($3:$3 or $0:$3). In the happy condition, not much happened: the women had a slightly higher tendency to choose the equal $3:$3 offer, and there was no gender difference in the tendency to select the revengeful $0:$3 offer. But things really heated up for the participants who watched the Life as a House clip and then wrote about analogous situations in their lives. In the angry condition, the women went for the equal $3:$3 offer, while the men opted mostly for the revengeful $0:$3 offer.
Together, these results suggest that though women are more likely to reject unfair of
fers from the get-go, their motives are more positive in nature. By picking the $3:$3 offer over the $0:$3 one, the women were trying to teach their counterpart a lesson about the importance of equality and fairness. Leading by example, they basically told their counterparts, “Doesn’t it feel better to get an equal share of the money?” The men, by contrast, selected the $0:$3 offer over the $3:$3 offer—basically telling their counterparts, “F**k you.”
Can You Canoe?
What have we learned from all of this? It turns out that emotions easily affect decisions and that this can happen even when the emotions have nothing to do with the decisions themselves. We’ve also learned that the effects of emotions can outlast the feelings themselves and influence our long-term DECISIONS down the line.
The most practical news is this: if we do nothing while we are feeling an emotion, there is no short- or long-term harm that can come to us. However, if we react to the emotion by making a DECISION, we may not only regret the immediate outcome, but we may also create a long-lasting pattern of DECISIONS that will continue to misguide us for a long time. Finally, we’ve also learned that our tendency toward self-herding kicks into gear not only when we make the same kinds of DECISIONS but also when we make “neighboring” ones.
Also, keep in mind that the emotional effect of our video clips was fairly mild and arbitrary. Watching a movie about an angry architect doesn’t hold a candle to having a real-life fight with a spouse or child, receiving a reprimand from your boss, or getting pulled over for speeding. Accordingly, the daily DECISIONS we make while we’re upset or annoyed (or happy) may have an even larger impact on our future DECISIONS.
I THINK ROMANTIC relationships best illustrate the danger of emotional cascades (although the general lessons apply to all relationships). As couples attempt to deal with problems—whether discussing (or yelling about) money, kids, or what to have for dinner, they not only discuss the problems at hand, they also develop a behavioral repertoire. This repertoire then determines the way they will interact with each other over time. When emotions, however irrelevant, inevitably sneak into these discussions, they can modify our communication patterns—not just in the short term, while we’re feeling whatever it is we’re feeling, but also in the long term. And as we now know, once such patterns develop, it’s very difficult to alter them.
Take, for instance, a woman who’s had a bad day in the office and arrives home with a trunkload of negative emotions. The house is a mess, and she and her husband are both hungry. As she enters the door, her husband asks, from his chair by the TV, “Weren’t you going to pick up something for dinner on the way home?”
Feeling vulnerable, she raises her voice. “Look, I’ve been in meetings all day. Do you remember the shopping list I gave you last week? You forgot to buy the toilet paper and the right type of cheese. How was I supposed to make eggplant Parmesan with cheddar cheese? Why don’t you go and get dinner?” Everything devolves from there. The couple gets into an even deeper argument, and they go to bed in a bad mood. Later her touchiness develops into a more general pattern of behavior (“Well, I wouldn’t have missed the turn if you’d given me more than five seconds to switch lanes!”), and the cycle continues.
SINCE IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to avoid either relevant or irrelevant emotional influences altogether, is there anything we can do to keep relationships from deteriorating this way? One simple piece of advice I’d offer is to pick a partner who would make this downward spiral less likely. But how do you do this? Of course, you can avail yourself of hundreds of compatibility tests, from astrological to statistical, but I think that all you need is a river, a canoe, and two paddles.
Whenever I go canoeing, I see couples arguing as they unintentionally run aground or get hung up on a rock. Canoeing looks easier than it is, and that may be why it quickly brings couples to the brink of battle. Arguments occur far less frequently when I meet a couple for drinks or go to their home for dinner, and it isn’t just because they are trying to be on their best behavior (after all, why wouldn’t a couple also try to be on good behavior on the river?). I think it has to do with the well-established patterns of behavior people have for their normal, day-to-day activities (arguing vehemently at the table in front of strangers is pretty much a no-no in most families).
But when you’re on a river, the situation is largely new. There isn’t a clear protocol. The river is unpredictable, and canoes tend to drift and turn in ways you don’t anticipate. (This situation is very much like life, which is full of new and surprising stresses and roadblocks.) There’s also a fuzzy kind of division of labor between the front and back (or bow and stern, if you want to be technical). This context offers plenty of opportunities to establish and observe fresh patterns of behavior.
So if you’re half of a couple, what happens when you go canoeing? Do you or your partner start blaming each other every time the canoe seems to misbehave (“Didn’t you see that rock?”)? Do you get into a huge battle that ends with one or both of you jumping overboard, swimming to shore, and not speaking for an hour? Or, when you hit a rock, do you work together trying to figure out who should do what, and get along as best you can?*
This means that before committing to any long-term relationship you should first explore your joint behavior in environments that don’t have well-defined social protocols (for example, I think that couples should plan their weddings before they decide to marry and go ahead with the marriage only if they still like each other). It also means that it is worthwhile to keep an eye open for deteriorating patterns of behavior. When we observe early-warning signs, we should take swift action to correct an undesirable course before the unfortunate patterns of dealing with each other fully develop.
THE FINAL LESSON is this: both in canoes and in life, it behooves us to give ourselves time to cool off before we DECIDE to take any action. If we don’t, our DECISION might just crash into the future. And finally, should you ever think about scheduling a makeup session on top of mine, remember how I DECIDED to respond last time. I am not saying I would do it again, but when emotions take over, who knows?
Chapter 11
Lessons from Our Irrationalities
Why We Need to Test Everything
We humans are fond of the notion that we are objective, rational, and logical. We take pride in the “fact” that we make decisions based on reason. When we decide to invest our money, buy a home, choose schools for our kids, or pick a medical treatment, we usually assume that the choices we make are the right ones.
This is sometimes true, but it is also the case that our cognitive biases often lead us astray, particularly when we have to make big, difficult, painful choices. As an illustration, allow me to share a personal story about several of my own biases that resulted in a major decision—the outcome of which affects me every day.
AS YOU KNOW by now, I was pretty badly damaged after my accident. Among other charred parts of my body, my right hand was burned down to the bone in some places. Three days after I arrived at the hospital, one of my doctors entered my room and told me that my right arm was so swollen that the pressure was preventing blood flow to my hand. He said that he would have to operate immediately if we were to have the slightest chance of salvaging it. The doctor neatly arranged a tray of what seemed like dozens of scalpels and explained that in order to reduce the pressure, he would have to cut through the skin to drain the liquid and reduce the inflammation. He also told me that since my heart and lungs were not functioning very well, he would have to perform the operation without anesthesia.
What followed was the type of medical treatment that you might expect if you lived in the Middle Ages. One of the nurses held my raw left arm and shoulder in place, and another used all of her weight to press down my right shoulder and arm. I watched the scalpel pierce my skin and advance slowly downward from my shoulder, tearing slowly to my elbow. I felt as if the doctor were ripping me open with a blunt, rusty garden hoe. The pain was unimaginable; it left me gasping. I thought I would die fr
om it. Then it came again, a second time, starting at my elbow and moving downward to my wrist.
I screamed and begged them to stop. “You’re killing me!” I cried. No matter what I said, no matter how much I begged, they did not stop. “I can’t stand it anymore!” I screamed, over and over again. They only held me tighter. I had no control.
Finally the doctor told me he was almost finished and that the rest would pass quickly. Then he gave me a tool to help me through my torture: counting. He told me to count to ten, as slowly as I could bear. One, two, three . . . I felt time slow down. Engulfed in pain, all I had was the slow counting. Four, five, six . . . the pain moved up and down my arm as he cut me again. Seven, eight, nine . . . I will never forget the feeling of the tearing flesh, the excruciating anguish, and the waiting . . . as long as I could . . . before yelling “TEN!”
The doctor stopped cutting. The nurses released their hold. I felt like an ancient warrior who had nobly conquered his suffering while being torn limb from limb. I was exhausted. “Very good,” the doctor said. “I have made four incisions in your arm, from shoulder to wrist; now we have just a few more cuts and it will really be over.”
My imagined warrior dissolved into defeat. I had used all my energy to convince myself to hold on as long as possible, certain that the ten count would bring the end. I perceived the new, impending pain—which had seemed almost manageable a few seconds earlier—with full-blown terror. How could I survive this again?