The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [27]
Other times, mental contamination can be more serious and can undermine good decision making. One study showed that when students taking a test were primed beforehand by being asked about their race, African American students did worse than when they were not so primed. The negative stereotype of African Americans as poor students was in-grained in the students, and the priming influenced them to meet that expectation.30
Mental contamination can also be used to manipulate people into thinking a certain way. In the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the Bush team ran what looked at first to be a run-of-the-mill television ad attacking Gore’s prescription drug plan. Bush used the rhetorical power of choice to contrast his drug plan with Gore’s—in Bush’s plan “seniors choose,” while in Gore’s “bureaucrats decide.” As the word “bureaucrats” appears and grows larger, the word “RATS” floods the screen for one frame. Although “RATS” lasts only one-thirtieth of a second, it is in capital letters and larger than any other word in the ad. Democrats accused the Bush campaign of using a subliminal trick to influence viewers. The Bush campaign denied any malicious intent and eventually pulled the ad, though not before it ran over four thousand times at a cost of $2.5 million.31 While it is difficult to know how big an effect such an ad could have had, I’ll venture a guess that the word’s appearance was not inadvertent. And you’ll remember that the 2000 election was decided by a handful of votes in Florida, where voters would care quite a bit about a prescription drug plan for seniors. Moreover, at least one study has suggested that such a quick, subconscious association of a candidate with a negative word could significantly affect voters’ perceptions of that candidate. The reason is our old friend the amygdala, which can respond to threatening stimuli even without our registering the threat consciously.32
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Mental contamination can work wonders for marketers of products. Consumer choice for an item is affected drastically by other items offered around it. For example, the prices of suits that shoppers will not buy affect their decisions about suits they will buy. As Barry Schwartz describes in The Paradox of Choice, in a fancy department store displaying suits costing over $1,500, an $800 pinstripe may seem like a bargain. In a store where most suits cost less than $500, that same $800 suit will seem extravagant and will likely be left on the shelf.33 So one way to sell something is to place it next to something that costs more.
Another example comes from a mail-order seller of high-end kitchen equipment, which was offering a bread maker for $279.34 The bread maker was not selling. So the firm added a deluxe version for $429. The company did not sell many of the expensive ones, but the sales of the $279 version almost doubled. One might expect that people looking to buy bread makers would be unaffected by extraneous information, such as the price of a product they wouldn’t buy. But people’s choices can be manipulated in predictable ways, and marketers take advantage of these irrationalities all the time.
All of these examples show the kind of tricks our brains play on us when we’re doing something relatively simple—making decisions in the present. When we try to make decisions about the future, or remember the past, our brains do an even worse job. You might think that a mistake about the future or the past would not necessarily be a big deal, but it is. Our ability to make anything close to a good decision in the present depends not only on our judgments about what we want, think, and feel right now but on our memories of what we wanted, thought, and felt in the past and our predictions about what we will want, think, and feel in the future.
We have a hard time correctly keeping track of what made us happy in the past. The human brain collapses past experiences and stores them as memories in ways that distort their accuracy. According to some studies, humans remember