The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [26]
Such an insight is useful in all kinds of situations where someone is trying to get men to spend money. Sexy female bartenders get bigger tips, probably because men at the bar misinterpret their attention as sexual interest. Pharmaceutical companies notoriously hire attractive female sales reps to market their drugs to mostly male doctors. Case in point: I came across a 2005 article describing how two dozen University of Kentucky cheerleaders had become drug reps over the previous few years; my guess is that they didn’t land those jobs because of any particular understanding of pharmacology.24 This effect also explains why I long ago bought a leather jacket I didn’t need—I eagerly misinterpreted the attractive sales lady’s pitch as interest in me rather than my money. As soon as she had the money and I had the jacket, I stopped getting any signals to misinterpret. I still have the jacket somewhere.
There are thousands of such studies showing various tendencies in the way we think and choose. Consider the “familiarity effect.” We tend to like things that are familiar—whether people, beliefs, or products—and we like them even more when we feel threatened or stressed.25 We also are guilty of “motivated reasoning,” meaning that we scrutinize ideas we disagree with more than those we agree with. Our brains are prone to noticing facts that confirm what we already think—“confirmation bias”—and disregarding things that would tend to disprove our preexisting notions.26 Our brains are biased toward attractive people, who we see not only as beautiful but also as more competent and more intelligent, even when judged on activities that have nothing to do with looks. Better-looking students get better evaluations from teachers. Also, attractive people who are observed doing something bad or illegal are more likely to be seen as having a bad day or acting aberrantly. Less-attractive people are judged more harshly, with worse motives projected onto them, and receive harsher prison sentences.27 Remember this the next time you serve on a jury.
The way you think about a question or issue can be manipulated if you are focused on a component part of it. In one study, teenagers were asked how happy they were. If they were first asked how many dates they had had in the previous month, their self-reported happiness index fell.28 The dating question focused the teenagers’ thinking on one aspect of their happiness and skewed their answers. The preliminary question focused their thoughts in a predictable and manipulable way.
This kind of “mental contamination,” to use Gary Marcus’s term, occurs even if the focus is on something completely irrelevant. In one famous experiment, Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky asked people to spin a “wheel of fortune” with the numbers 1 to 100 on it, and then asked them how many nations were in Africa.29 The number the person spun affected his or her answer—a low number on the wheel meant that answers to the Africa question tended to be low, and vice versa. The numbers on the wheel had a kind of gravitational pull for those thinking about completely unrelated matters. This is called priming, since the brain is primed to think a certain way, like old water pumps that had to be primed before they worked.
Some of this mental contamination is benign and best used as fodder for brain teasers and jokes. One of my son’s go-to jokes when he is at a table of grown-ups is to ask someone to say “toast” twelve times fast. He is priming his audience. Then he asks, “What is it that you put in a toaster?” Most people will say “toast,” because their brains are primed to give that answer. He will then slyly explain that at our house we usually