You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  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.

  38

  Embodied Cognition

  THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions of people and events are based on objective evaluation.

  THE TRUTH: You translate your physical world into words, and then believe those words.

  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.

  39

  The Anchoring Effect

  THE MISCONCEPTION: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value.

  THE TRUTH: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.

  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 n
eed 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.

  The anchoring effect can also slip in unannounced. Drazen Prelec and Dan Ariely conducted an experiment at MIT in 2006 where they had students bid on items in a bizarre auction. The researchers would hold up a bottle of wine, or a textbook, or a cordless trackball, and then describe in detail how awesome it was. Then each student had to write down the last two digits of their social security number as if it was the price of the item. If the last two digits were 11, then the bottle of wine was priced at $11. If the two numbers were 88, the cordless trackball was $88. After they wrote down the pretend price, they bid. Sure enough, the anchoring effect scrambled their ability to judge the value of the items. People with high social security numbers paid up to 346 percent more than those with low numbers. People with numbers from 80 to 99 paid on average $26 for the trackball, while those with 00 to 19 paid around $9. The source of the number was irrelevant. Any number would have worked as the anchor.

  The auction experimenters conducted another study in which they asked people to listen to annoying sounds for money. The researchers initially offered either 90 cents or 10 cents for a blast of awful electronic screaming, and then they asked the subjects how much would be the lowest possible price they would need to be paid to listen to the sound again. People who were offered 10 cents said it would take about 33 cents to continue. People offered 90 said it would take 73.

  The researchers repeated the experiment in other ways, but no matter how they messed with the sounds or the payouts, those who were first offered a low payment consistently agreed to lower amounts than those used to better wages. People who got more money at first were unwilling to accept lower payments later.

  If you move up to a nice car or a big house, a nice computer or an expensive smartphone, you become anchored and find it difficult to move back down later, even if you should. Those who buy expensive purses know they are being hornswoggled, at least at some level, yet the anchoring effect still reaches into their bank account. Does an $800 Louis Vuitton purse function better than a $25 handbag from Wal-Mart? No, not even if it was hand-made from giraffe leather and stitched by real, magical leprechauns. It’s just a purse. But the anchor is set. Louis Vuitton bags are expensive, and that in itself has social value. People still buy them and are happy with their purchase. If Wal-Mart offered a purse at $800, it would never leave the shelf. The price would be so far from the anchors already set by the store it would seem like a bad deal.

  Like most psychological phenomena, anchoring can be used to manipulate people to do good. The best example is a 1975 study by Catalan, Lewis, Vincent, and Wheeler, where they asked a group of students to volunteer as camp counselors two hours per week for two years. They all said no. The researchers followed up by asking if they would volunteer to supervise a single two-hour trip. Half said yes. Without first being asked for the two-year commitment, only 17 percent agreed.

  Remember this study when you are in a negotiation—make your initial request far too high. You have to start somewhere, and your initial decision or calculation greatly influences all the choices that follow, cascading out, each tethered to the anchors set before. Many of the choices you make every day are reruns of past decisions; as if traveling channels dug into a dirt road by a wagon train of selections, you follow the path created by your former self. External anchors, like prices before a sale or ridiculous requests, are obvious and can be avoided. Internal, self-generated anchors, are not so easy to bypass. You visit the same circuit of Web sites every day, eat basically the same few breakfasts. When it comes time to buy new cat food or take your car in for repairs, you have old favorites. Come election time, you pretty much already know who will and will not get your vote. These choices, so predictable—ask yourself what drives them. Are old anchors controlling your current decisions?

  When you are parting with your money, know the person on the other side of the deal thinks you are not so smart and is depending on the anchoring effect when telling you how much you are about to save.

  40

  Attention

  THE MISCONCEPTION: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera.

  THE TRUTH: You are aware only of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.

  Think of the last time you were in conversation at a crowded party or in a nightclub. The guy in the corner doing the running man, the girl dropping it like it’s hot, the pulse of low-budget techno—it all fades into the background as you strain to hear the other person’s voice and picture the trip to Ireland he or she is describing. The room is still loud, but inside your head, things have changed. When you focus your attention on one thing, everything else blurs into the periphery.

  In science fiction movies like Minority Report and Strange Days people’s memories are played back for others, and they are usually depicted as short films. The way the camera captures the action is the way the memories are played back, but this isn’t how you see and remember the scenes in your life. You tune out sounds all the time at work, in a city, watching television, turning down the volume on what you aren’t interested in—but you don’t notice it as much when you do it visually. When you single out one voice among many, the rest of what is happening is not only getting turned down; most of it is also slipping through your mind without clinging to memory. You accept this easily when it comes to sound, but the same thing happens with the information coming through your eyeballs. The things you pay attention to create your moment-to-moment perception of reality. Everything else is lost or blurred.

  Not only do you see only what you’re focused on, over time you can become so accustomed to seeing familiar environments, everything blends into the background. Where are those damn keys at? You left them right here, didn’t you? Oh, man. You’re running late. How can you lose your keys in your own house? No doubt, you’ve lost your purse, wallet, phone—something�
��and then found it sitting in plain sight. You go on a scavenger hunt among your own possessions wondering why your IQ has dropped thirty points.

  Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness. You believe with confidence your eyes capture everything before them and your memories are recorded versions of those captured images. The truth, though, is you see only a small portion of your environment at any one moment. Your attention is like a spotlight, and only the illuminated portions of the world appear in your perception.

  Psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris demonstrated this in 1999. They had students divide into two teams and pass a basketball back and forth. Half wore white shirts, and the others wore black. Simons and Chabris recorded a video of the action and then showed it to subjects in the lab. Before the video began, they asked people to count while watching it how many times the ball was passed from one person to another. If you want to try it yourself, they put the video online at www.theinvisiblegorilla.com. You should check it out right now before reading on if you don’t want me to spoil the experiment for you. Most people had no problem getting the answer as they stared intensely, hardly blinking. The researchers then asked the subjects if they noticed anything unusual during the action. Most people said they didn’t. What the subjects failed to notice was a woman in a gorilla suit who walked into the middle of the players and waved at the camera before casually strolling out of frame. When people were asked what they could recall, they could describe the background, the appearance of the players, the intensity of the action, but about half missed the gorilla.

  Simons and Chabris showed tunnel vision is a fact of life—it is your default setting. In their research, they point out how easy it is to miss people you recognize in a movie theater as you scan for a seat, or how often you fail to notice when someone gets a new haircut. Your perception is built out of what you attend to. In the gorilla experiment, people are more likely to see the bizarre intruder if they are just allowed to watch the video without expectations, but it doesn’t guarantee they will see it. Your vision narrows to a keyhole view of the world when you are focused, but it doesn’t widen to take in everything when you are relaxed. You are usually ignoring the periphery or thinking about something else. When you end up in the closet wondering why you walked in there, you stand there and blink like a sleepwalker who just awoke because in many ways, this is what you are when the spell of your attention breaks.