You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (24 page)

In another study by Seligman, he grafted cancer cells into rats so they would develop fatal tumors. The rats were then given routine electric shocks, but some had an opportunity to escape by pressing a lever. Another group received no shocks at all. One month later, 63 percent of the rats who could escape rejected their tumors. By comparison, 54 percent of the group who were not shocked rejected theirs. The survival rate of the group forced to bear the shocks was only 23 percent. Rats suffering from cancer will die faster if placed in an inescapable situation.

A study in 1976 by Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin showed in nursing homes where conformity and passivity are encouraged and every whim is attended to, the health and well-being of the patients declines rapidly. If, instead, the people in these homes are given responsibilities and choices, they remain healthy and active. This research was repeated in prisons. Sure enough, just letting prisoners move furniture and control the television kept them from developing health problems and staging revolts. In homeless shelters where people can’t pick out their own beds or choose what to eat, the residents are less likely to try and get a job or find an apartment. When you are able to succeed at easy tasks, hard tasks feel possible to accomplish. When you are unable to succeed at small tasks, everything seems harder.

Psychologist Charisse Nixon at Penn State Erie shows her students how learned helplessness works by having them complete word unscrambling tests. She asks her students to rearrange the letters in words so they create new words. She asks her class to do this one word at a time: “whirl,” “slapstick,” “cinerama.” Try it yourself, but don’t move to the next word until you finish the first. If you were in Nixon’s classroom, as you were working on the first word she would ask for everyone who was already finished to raise their hands, and then you would look up and see half the class was ready to move on. Nixon then tells everyone to go to the next word, and once again everyone but you and a few others raises a hand. Again, she repeats this for the third word, and again half the class gets it quickly while the rest sits dumbfounded. The trick in her informal study is that half the class gets the words above, and the other half gets: “bat,” “lemon,” “cinerama.” “Bat” is easily turned into “tab,” and “lemon” becomes “melon” just as easily. So when the half with the easy words gets to “cinerama,” they find it simple to unscramble it into American. If you acted like most people, you would feel weird and inadequate as the hands went in the air while you looked at “whirl” and turned it over in your head searching for another word to make from the letters. “If this is so easy, what is wrong with me?” Then comes “slapstick,” and now you feel even dumber, as half your peers seem to have no problem figuring it out. Now, with learned helplessness in full effect, you see “cinerama” differently from the now confident others with the easy word tasks. Even though it shouldn’t be too tough, learned helplessness tells you to give up. In Nixon’s classes, this is what usually happens. The half with the impossible words gives in by the third word.

The leading theory as to how such a strange behavior would evolve is that it springs from all organisms’ desire to conserve resources. If you can’t escape a source of stress, it leads to more stress, and this positive feedback loop eventually triggers an automatic shutdown. At its most extreme, you think if you keep struggling you might die. If you stop, there is a chance the bad thing will go away.

Every day you feel like you can’t control the forces affecting your fate—your job, the government, your addiction, your depression, your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customize your ring tone, you paint your room, you collect stamps. You choose.

Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can’t stop there. You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.

You are not so smart, but you are smarter than dogs and rats. Don’t give in yet.

Imagine this scene.

You brush the snow off your shoulders as you step into a home where a fire crackles in the corner. You slip on a sweater, wrap your hands around a cup of steaming cider, and sit back in a comfortable chair across from the fireplace. Sound cozy?

As strange as this is going to sound, people think in metaphors—words like “warm” and “cold,” “fast” and “slow,” “bright” and “dark,” “hard” and “soft.” These words mean two things. “Cold” can be a physical sensation but also a mood, demeanor, or style. “Dark” can describe a shade of color, or the way a song sounds. “Hard” can be a type of bargaining technique or the resistance of a chair to your back.

The scene above is warm—physically warm—and as a result, all of your interactions and observations in such a setting will be interpreted as being emotionally warm. Warm sensations bring up word associations that include warmth, and those thoughts prime you to behave in a way that could be metaphorically described as warm.

In 2008, Lawrence Williams and John Bargh conducted a study where they had people meet strangers. One group held a cup of warm coffee, and the other group held iced coffee. Later, when asked to rate the stranger’s personality, the people who held the warm coffee said they found the stranger to be nice, generous, and caring. The other group said the same person was difficult, standoffish, hard to talk to. In another round of research subjects held either a heating pad or a cold pack and then were asked to look at various products and judge their overall quality. Once they had done this, the experimenters told them they could choose a gift to keep for participating or they could give the gift to someone else. Those who held the heating pad chose to give away their reward 54 percent of the time, but only 25 percent of the cold pack group shared. The groups had turned their physical sensations into words, and then used those words as metaphors to explain their perceptions or predict their own actions.

There’s a lot of research showcasing this phenomenon. You see people with bright clothes as being friendly and smart—bright. You see people who speak slowly as being less intelligent—slow. Whatever metaphors your culture uses will change the way you feel about the world around you, should it match up with those words. The sensation of touch is also a powerful form of this phenomenon—the way things feel to your skin can translate to how they feel to your heart.

In a 2010 study conducted by Josh Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera, and their associates, subjects pretended to conduct job interviews. They took their interviewing job more seriously and saw résumés as being more impressive if those résumés were attached to heavy clipboards. Resumes attached to light clipboards were regarded as being from less-qualified applicants. The weight and heaviness of the participants’ physical sensation translated not only into the weight and heft of their duty but the import of what they read. In another of the researchers’ studies people pretending to buy a car who sat in hard-backed chairs haggled more and expected better bargains than did those who sat in cushioned ones. The chair was hard, so they drove a hard bargain.

In experiments where people sat in a cold room and watched videos of chess games, they later described the video in empirical terms. If they instead were seated in a warm room, they describe the video with emotions and anecdotes. The next time you watch a movie, notice how great filmmakers put words in your mind so you will interpret the following scenes with the emotions they want you to feel. If the angle is askew, you then see the characters or the situation as being off-kilter. If the room is empty and silent, you then see the characters as distant and lonely.

Settings prime you to see the world a certain way, and all it takes to see things differently is a change of temperature, or the sturdiness of a surface. Texture matters. The way something feels to your touch begins a series of associations in your brain. Your thoughts change based on the words you conjure. You should be aware, advertisers and retailers are already jumping on this bandwagon. The field of neuromarketing is keen to test embodied cognition and has been buzzing about its potential since Bargh’s research began circulating the Internet. If you start to see products with shapes and surfaces designed to begin a long chain of thoughts and feelings, this research is probably the source.

The next time the doctor puts an ice-cold stethoscope on your chest, remember you are not so smart before you assume the MD is hard to get along with. Likewise, if someone asks you out for a cup of coffee, remember the cup in your hands can change the way your heart responds to that person’s smile.

You walk into a clothing store and see what is probably the most badass leather jacket you’ve ever seen. You try it on, look in the mirror, and decide you must have it. While wearing this item, you imagine onlookers will clutch their chests and gasp every time you walk into a room or cross a street. You lift the sleeve to check the price—$1,000.

“Well, that’s that,” you think. You have started to head back to the hanger when a salesperson stops you.

“You like it?”

“I love it, but it’s just too much.”

“No, that jacket is on sale right now for $400.”

It’s expensive, and you don’t need it really, but $600 off the price seems like a great deal for a coat that will increase your cool by a factor of eleven. You put it on your card, unaware you’ve been tricked by the oldest retail con in the business.

One of my first jobs was selling leather coats, and I depended on the anchoring effect to earn commission. Each time, I figured it was obvious to customers the company I worked for marked up the prices to unrealistic extremes. Yet, over and over, when people heard the sale price, they smiled and wrestled with their better judgment.

The prices you expect to pay, where did those expectations originate?

Answer this: Is the population of Uzbekistan greater or fewer than 12 million?

Go ahead and guess.

OK, another question, how many people do you think live in Uzbekistan?

Come up with a figure and keep it in your head. We’ll come back to this in a few paragraphs.

In 1974, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman conducted a study and asked people to estimate how many African countries were part of the United Nations, but first they spun a wheel of fortune. The wheel was painted with numbers from zero to one hundred, but rigged to always land on ten or sixty-five. When the arrow stopped spinning, they asked people in the experiment to say if they believed the percentage of countries was higher or lower than the number on the wheel. They then asked people to estimate what they thought the actual percentage of nations was. They found people who landed on ten in the first half of the experiment guessed around 25 percent of Africa was part of the UN. Those who landed on sixty-five said around 45 percent.

The participants had been locked in place by the anchoring effect.

The trick here is no one really knew what the answer was. They had to guess, yet it didn’t feel like a guess. As far as they knew, the wheel was a random number generator, but they still worked off of that number.

Back to Uzbekistan. The populations of Central Asian states probably aren’t numbers you have memorized. You need some sort of cue, a point of reference. You searched your mental assets for something of value concerning Uzbekistan—the terrain, the language,
Borat
—but the population figures aren’t in your head. What
is
in your head is the figure I gave you, 12 million, and it’s right there up front. When you have nothing else to go on, you fixate on the information at hand.

The population of Uzbekistan is about 28 million people. How far away was your answer? If you are like most people, you assumed something much lower. You probably thought it was more than 12 million but less than 28 million.

You depend on anchoring every day to predict the outcome of events, to estimate how much time something will take or how much money something will cost. When you need to choose between options, or estimate a value, you need footing to stand on. How much should you be paying for cable? How much should your electricity bill be each month? What is a good price for rent in this neighborhood? You need an anchor from which to compare, and when someone is trying to sell you something, that salesperson is more than happy to provide one. The problem is, even when you know this, you can’t ignore it.

When shopping for a car, you know it isn’t a completely honest transaction. The real price the dealer can charge you and still make a profit is surely lower than what the dealer is asking for on the window sticker, yet the anchor price is still going to affect your decision. As you look over the vehicle, you don’t consider how many factories the company owns, how many employees they pay. You don’t pore over engineering diagrams or profit reports. You don’t consider the price of iron or the expensive investments the manufacturer is making in safety testing. The price you are willing to pay has little to do with these considerations because they are as far from you at the point of purchase as the population of Uzbekistan. Even if you’ve done some research online, you don’t know for sure exactly what the car is worth or what the dealer paid for it. The focus instead is the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and no matter how unrealistic it is, you can’t help but be tethered to it. Any discussion of price has to start at that anchor.