You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  In their study, subjects read a paragraph like the one above and were told the description came from one of a set of interviews with thirty engineers and seventy lawyers. Now, pretend you are in this study and answer the following question: Is it more likely Donald is an engineer or a lawyer?

  This is where the representativeness heuristic sends you down the wrong path. If you are like most people, you think Donald is probably an engineer. He certainly matches the general vision you see when thinking of one. You completely ignore the fact there is a 70 percent chance he is a lawyer because, out of one hundred people, they interviewed only thirty engineers. Kahneman and Tversky say you make predictions with representativeness—the degree to which new information matches the existing information you have in your head. Sometimes, this information in your head is just a caricature of the actual thing. You think of a sheik, and you see a man in white robes and sandals. You think of a cowboy, and you see a hat, chaps, lasso, and gunbelt. You see an engineer and a lawyer, and the image above matches the engineer better. You toss aside the numbers. Your mental models aren’t accurate, nor do they usually need to be. They just need to pop right into your mind automatically and without effort. If your ancestors heard a rustling in the bushes, they were better off assuming something bad and hungry was headed their way. If you need medical attention, you would be correct to assume the big red cross above the sign that reads EMERGENCY indicates the right building to head toward, even though you can’t be sure it isn’t abandoned or some elaborate amusement park ride. Kahneman and Tversky’s research suggests that intuition ignores statistics. Intuition is bad at math.

  Try again with this description:

  Tom is a twice-divorced man who spends most of his free time playing golf. He enjoys fine suits and drives an expensive luxury car. He is quick to argue and has to win or he becomes furious. He went to college for longer than he wanted to and tries to make up for it by socializing as much as he can.

  Now, pretend in this study they interviewed seventy engineers and thirty lawyers. Knowing how the representativeness heuristic works, is it more likely Tom is an engineer or a lawyer? That’s right. It is more likely, statistically, that he is an engineer, no matter how well the description matches your heuristic model for lawyers.

  The representativeness heuristic helps fuel several other cognitive missteps, like the conjunction fallacy. Here is another example from Kahneman and Tversky’s research:

  Linda is a thirty-one-year-old woman who is single. She is considered outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy in college. As a student, she was deeply concerned with discrimination and social issues. She participated in several demonstrations.

  Is it more likely Linda is a bank teller or that she is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement? Most people who read the above description pick the second answer, although it is statistically more likely she is a bank teller. There are more bank tellers in the world than bank tellers who are feminists, no matter what sort of background they may have.

  The conjunction fallacy builds on your representativeness heuristic. The more things you hear about which match your mental models, the more likely they seem. In the example above, you can match both bank tellers and feminists with the description, so it seems twice as likely. Statistically though, it goes in the other direction. You don’t naturally think in statistical, logical, rational terms. You first go to your emotional core and think of people in terms of narratives and characters that match your preconceived notions of the sort of people you have been exposed to in the past or have imagined thanks to cultural osmosis.

  Kahneman and Tversky proved this by trying the same sort of experiment on professional futurists—people who forecast the likelihood of future events. In 1982 they asked 115 forecasters to predict which of two options was more likely to happen in the next year. They divided them into two groups, and asked one to estimate the chances of the United States and the Soviet Union suspending all relations. The other group estimated the odds Russia would invade Poland in addition to suspending diplomacy with the U.S. The second group said that their scenario, with twice the number of events, was more likely to happen. Their representativeness reserves had been tapped twice, which made it seem more possible than the single event.

  Representativeness heuristics are useful, but also dangerous. They can help you avoid danger and seek help, but they can also lead to generalizations and prejudices. When you expect people to be a certain way because they seem to represent your notions of the sort of people in that category, you are not so smart.

  46

  Expectation

  THE MISCONCEPTION: Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception.

  THE TRUTH: Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.

  You scan the aisles in the liquor store looking for a good wine. It’s a little overwhelming—all those weird bottle shapes with illustrations of castles and vineyards and kangaroos. And all those varieties? Riesling, Shiraz, Cabernet—this is serious business. You look to your left and see bottles for around $12; to your right you see bottles for $60. You think back to all the times you’ve seen people tasting wine in movies, holding it up to the light and commenting on tannins and barrels and soil quality—the most expensive wine has to be the better one, right?

  Well, you are not so smart. But don’t fret—neither are all those connoisseurs who swish fermented grape juice around and spit it back out.

  Wine tasting is a big deal to a lot of people. It can even be a professional career. It goes back thousands of years, but the modern version, with all the terminology like “notes,” “tears,” “integration,” and “connectedness,” goes back a few hundred. Wine tasters will mention all sorts of things they can taste in a fine wine, as if they were a human spectrograph with the ability to sense the molecular makeup of their beverage. Research shows, however, this perception can be hijacked, fooled, and might just be completely wrong.

  In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux.

  In one experiment, he got fifty-four oenology (the study of wine tasting and wine making) undergraduates together and had them taste one glass of red wine and one glass of white wine. He had them describe each wine in as much detail as their expertise would allow. What he didn’t tell them was both were the same wine. He just dyed the white one red. In the other experiment, he asked the experts to rate two different bottles of red wine. One was very expensive, the other was cheap. Again, he tricked them. This time he had put the cheap wine in both bottles. So what were the results?

  The tasters in the first experiment, the one with the dyed wine, described the sorts of berries and grapes and tannins they could detect in the red wine just as if it really was red. Every single one, all fifty-four, could not tell it was white. In the second experiment, the one with the switched labels, the subjects went on and on about the cheap wine in the expensive bottle. They called it “complex” and “rounded.” They called the same wine in the cheap bottle “weak” and “flat.”

  Another experiment, at Caltech, pitted five bottles of wine against one another. They ranged in price from $5 to $90. Similarly, the experimenters put cheap wine in the expensive bottles—but this time they put the tasters in a brain scanner. While they tasted the wine, the same parts of the brain would light up in the machine every time, but with the wine the tasters thought was expensive, one particular region of the brain became more active. Another study had tasters rate cheese eaten with two different wines. One wine they were told was from California, the other from North Dakota. The same wine was in both bottles. The tasters rated the cheese they ate with the California wine as being better quality, and they ate more of it.

  So is the fancy world of wine tasting all pretentious bunk? Not exactly. The wine tasters in the experiments above were being influenced by the nasty beast of expectation. A wine
expert’s objectivity and powers of taste under normal circumstance might be amazing, but Brochet’s manipulations of the environment misled his subjects enough to dampen their acumen. An expert’s own expectation can act like Kryptonite on the expert’s superpowers. Expectation, as it turns out, is just as important as raw sensation. The buildup to an experience can completely change how you interpret the information reaching your brain from your otherwise objective senses. In psychology, true objectivity is pretty much considered to be impossible. Memories, emotions, conditioning, and all sorts of other mental flotsam taint every new experience you gain. In addition to all this, your expectations powerfully influence the final vote in your head over what you believe to be reality. So when tasting a wine, or watching a movie, or going on a date, or listening to a new stereo through $300 audio cables—some of what you experience comes from within and some comes from without. Expensive wine is like anything else that is expensive: The expectation it will taste better actually makes it taste better.

  In one Dutch study, participants were put in a room with posters proclaiming the awesomeness of high-definition and were told they would be watching a new high-definition program. Afterward, the subjects said they found the sharper, more colorful television to be a superior experience to standard programming. What they didn’t know was they were actually watching a standard definition image. The expectation of seeing a better-quality image led them to believe they had. Recent research shows about 18 percent of people who own high-definition televisions are still watching standard definition programming on the set, but they think they are getting a better picture.

  In the early eighties, Pepsi ran a marketing campaign where they touted the success of their product over Coca-Cola in blind taste tests. They called this “The Pepsi Challenge.” Psychologists had already determined you choose your favorite products often not by their inherent value, but because the marketing campaigns and logos and such have cast a spell over you called brand awareness. You start to identify yourself with one marketing campaign over another. That’s what happened in all the taste tests up until the Pepsi Challenge. People liked Coca-Cola’s advertising more than Pepsi’s, so even though they tasted pretty much the same, when they saw that bright red can with a white ribbon people chose Coke. So for the Pepsi Challenge, they removed the logos. At first, the researchers thought they should put some sort of label on the glasses. So they went with M and Q. People said they liked Pepsi, labeled M, better than Coke, labeled Q. Irritated by this, Coca-Cola did their own study and put Coke in both glasses. Again, M won the contest. It turned out it wasn’t the soda; people just liked the letter M better than the letter Q.

  You look for cues from our environment whenever you find things you like. These cues help you to get back to the good stuff by recognizing what got you the reward last time. For the testers, the two products tasted pretty much the same. So, forced to make a choice, they moved to another set of cues to make their decision—which letter was more pleasant. Apparently, M is better than Q, and in other research people tend to pick A instead of B and 1 instead of 2. Branding works the same way. Vodka, for instance, has no flavor. So advertisers can’t sell you on how great it tastes. Instead, they hijack your natural affinity for visual shortcuts by pummeling your brain with advertising. When you are standing in front of all those vodka bottles in the liquor store, the brands hope their marketing campaign has built enough expectation in your consciousness to lead you to their product.

  In blind taste tests, longtime smokers can’t tell their brand from any of the competitors and wine connoisseurs have a hard time telling $200 bottles from $20 ones. When presented with microwaved food from the frozen food section in the setting of a fine restaurant, most people never notice. Taste is subjective, which is another way of saying you are not so smart when it comes to choosing one product over another. All things being equal—you refer back to the advertising or the packaging or conformity with your friends and family. Presentation is everything.

  Restaurants depend on this. Actually, just about every retailer depends on this. Presentation, price, good marketing, great service—it all leads to an expectation of quality. The actual experience at the end of all this is less important. As long as it isn’t total crap, your experience will match up with your expectations. A series of bad reviews will make the movie worse, and a heap of positive buzz can sway you in the other direction. You rarely watch films in a social vacuum with no input at all from critics and peers and advertisements. Your expectations are the horse, and your experience is the cart. You get this backward all the time because you are not so smart.

  47

  The Illusion of Control

  THE MISCONCEPTION: You know how much control you have over your surroundings.

  THE TRUTH: You often believe you have control over outcomes that are either random or are too complex to predict.

  If you were to flip a coin and have it come up heads five times in a row, you would have a strong feeling deep in your gut the next toss would land on tails because it needed to. You think it must balance out.

  This is called the gambler’s fallacy, or the Monte Carlo fallacy after a casino roulette game there in 1913 where black came up twenty-six times in a row. As you can imagine, the betting on red got out of hand as black came up over and over again, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen times. It was unbelievable, and in the minds of the gamblers the odds became astronomical that black would come up again; red just had to be next. Order must be restored. The excitement, the clamoring, and the noise as the ball bearing bounced across the numbers and colors was a great fit of delusion, because the odds never changed. It was just as likely to come up black, as it had twenty-six times before.

  In gambling, whether it be on a slot machine, a roulette table, or in a game of cards, you have the tendency to see yourself as being lucky or unlucky, on a streak or in a rut. You say things like “The cards are about to turn.” You see a change of dealers as a positive sign, or you notice when people get up from the table and change the rotation of the deal. You get two out of three cherries and decide to go for another spin; you bet on red after black comes up ten times in a row, because you think red is due.

  You might even have your own system devised to maximize your chances. You never sit in the outer seats in blackjack. You play only slot machines with real handles, or you blow on the dice before tossing them down the craps table. None of this, of course, has any real effect on the odds. The odds are fixed, but sometimes you think you can beat them, because you are not so smart.

  When you watch someone play a slot machine for twenty minutes and then walk away, you might rush and take over because it seems as if the one-armed bandit is ready to pay off after so many losses, but it isn’t. This is the gambler’s fallacy, assuming the odds change based on the history of the outcomes so far. Sure, over a long enough period of time the odds will return to normal, but in the short run there is no way to outsmart random chance. If you flip a coin five hundred times, you’ll come across runs of heads and tails, some very long, on your way to an overall split of something close to 50 percent. If you just flip five times, the chances are better you’ll streak. This is how casinos always win; when you are winning, you find it difficult to walk away. The longer you play, however, the more the odds balance out, but you never know when a streak will begin or end.

  Your ancestors lived long enough to meet a partner and have children one after the other, generation upon generation, for millions of years because they were great at pattern recognition. Predators, prey, friends, and foes all stood out from the background because your kin could see signals amid noise. Thanks to them, you’ve inherited the same powers, but you can’t turn them off. Your brain is always looking for patterns and sending little squirts of happy throughout your body when it finds them, but like faces in clouds, you often see patterns where none exist.

  If you roll a die and it lands on one, and then roll again and get a two, and again and see a three, there is no force
in the universe that is pushing the odds of a four out of the realm of random chance. But wouldn’t it feel like it had to be? That’s pattern recognition messing with your judgment. Each roll of a die is statistically independent of the next roll. Despite this, a study by James Henslin in 1967 showed people tend to throw harder when they need high numbers in a game of craps and toss gently when they want low ones. Since you briefly control the action, you start to feel like the control extends beyond just the toss, into the randomness that results.

  Have you ever crossed your fingers while watching someone shoot for a free throw in basketball? Have you ever wished someone would get hurt, and then they did? In 2006, Emily Pronin and Sylvia Rodriguez at Princeton, along with Daniel Wegner and Kimberly McCarthy at Harvard, decided to see if they could study this behavior in the lab.

  They had college students agree to participate in a study on psychosomatic symptoms, those that arise from merely thinking about being sick. This wasn’t really the goal of the study though. They actually wanted to see if under the right conditions normal people would believe their own thoughts could harm or help others.

  Students were told they would be participating with a partner who was also a student, but the partner was really an actor. In one group, the actor was ten minutes late and wore a shirt that said STUPID PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BREED. He then proceeded to act rude and obnoxious to the experimenter and chewed gum with his mouth open. In the second group, the actor was pleasant and agreeable. The actors and the students pulled slips of paper out of a hat after reading about voodoo for a while. Both slips read “witch doctor,” but the students were told that one slip read “victim.” The actors then pretended to get the victim slips.