unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [34]
The “Close Call” Trap
Psychological research shows that when we are confronted with tough decisions and close calls, we tend to exaggerate the differences. The psychologist Jack Brehm demonstrated this in a famous experiment published in 1956. He had women rate eight different products such as toasters and coffeemakers, then let them keep one—but allowed them to choose between only two of the products. He set up some of the decisions as “close calls,” between two products the women had rated alike; others were easy calls, with wide differences in ratings. After the women had made their choices, Brehm asked them to rate the products again. This time, women who had been forced to make a tough choice tended to be more positive about the product they had picked and less positive about the one they had rejected. This change was less evident among women who had made the easy call.
Psychologists call this the “spreading of alternatives” effect, a natural human tendency to make ourselves feel better about the choices we have made, even at the expense of accuracy or consistency. We crave certainty, and don’t want to agonize endlessly about whether we made the right call. This mental habit helps us avoid becoming frozen by indecision, but it also can make changing our minds harder than need be when the facts change, or when we have misread the evidence in the first place. Once in a while we need to ask, “Would I feel this way if I were buying this product (or hearing this argument) for the first time? Have new facts emerged since I made my initial decision?”
It’s easy to fall into traps like the ones we’ve described here, because people manage most of the time on automatic pilot, using mental shortcuts without really having to think everything through constantly. Consider a famous experiment published by the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer in 1978. She and her colleagues repeatedly attempted to cut in front of persons about to use a university copying machine. To some they said, “Excuse me. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?” They were allowed to cut in 94 percent of the time. To others, the cheeky researchers said only, “Excuse me. May I use the Xerox machine?,” without giving any reason. These succeeded only 60 percent of the time. So far, that’s what you would probably expect: we’re likelier to accommodate someone who has a good reason for a request than someone who just wants to push ahead for their own personal convenience. But here’s the illuminating point: Langer showed that giving an obviously bogus reason worked just as well as giving a good one. When Langer’s cohorts said, “Excuse me, may I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make some copies?” they were allowed to cut in 93 percent of the time.
“Because I have to make some copies” is really no reason at all, of course. Langer’s conclusion is that her unwitting test subjects reacted to the word “because” without really listening to or thinking about the reason being offered; they were in a state she called “mindlessness.”
Others have demonstrated the same zombielike tendency, even among university students who supposedly are smarter than average. Robert Levine, a psychology professor at California State University, Fresno, tried different pitches during a campus bake sale. Asking “Would you like to buy a cookie?” resulted in purchases by only two out of thirty passersby. But his researchers sold six times more cookies when they asked “Would you like to buy a cookie? It’s for a good cause.” Of the thirty passersby who were asked that