probability that no people will be saved.
Most people would choose Program A, not wanting to put all the lives at risk. But people’s preferences flip if the same choices are instead posed this way:
If Program A is adopted, 400 people will die.
If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.
“Saving 200 lives” for certain (out of 600) somehow seems like a good idea, whereas letting 400 die (out of the same 600) seems bad—even though they represent exactly the same outcome. Only the wording of the question, what psychologists call
Politicians and advertisers take advantage of our susceptibility to framing all the time. A death tax sounds far more ominous than an inheritance tax, and a community that is described as having a crime rate of 3.7 percent is likely to get more resources than one that is described as 96.3 percent crime free.
Framing has the power that it does because choice, like belief, is inevitably mediated by memory. And, as we have already seen, the memory that evolution equipped us with is inherently and inevitably shaped by momentary contextual details. Change the context (here, the actual words used), and you often change the choice. “Death tax” summons thoughts of death, a fate that we all fear, whereas “inheritance tax” may make us think only of the truly wealthy, suggesting a tax scarcely relevant to the average taxpayer. “Crime rates” makes us think of crime; “crime-free rates” triggers thoughts of safety. What we think of — what we summon into memory as we come to a decision — often makes all the difference.
Indeed, the whole field of advertising is based on that premise: if a product brings pleasant associations to mind, no matter how irrelevant, you’re more likely to buy it.[24]
One Chicago law firm recently put the power of memory and suggestion to the ultimate test, flogging not potato chips or beer but the dissolution of marriage. Their tool? A 48-foot-wide billboard made of three panels — the torso of an exceptionally attractive woman, breasts all but bursting out of her lacy black bra; the torso of a man no less handsome, shirtless, with his well-oiled muscles bulging; and, just above the law firm’s name and contact information, a slogan containing just five words: LIFE’s SHORT — GET A DIVORCE.
In a species less driven by contextual memory and spontaneous priming, I doubt that sign would have any impact. But in a species like ours, there’s reason to worry. To seek a divorce is, of course, to make one of the most difficult choices a human being can make. One must weigh hopes for the future against fears of loneliness, regret, financial implications, and (especially) concerns about children. Few people make such decisions lightly. In a rational world, a titillating billboard wouldn’t make a dime’s difference. In the real world of flesh-and-blood human beings governed by klugey brains, people who weren’t otherwise thinking of divorce might well be induced to start. What’s more, the billboard might frame
If this seems speculative, that’s because the law firm took the sign down, under pressure, after just a couple of weeks, so there’s no direct evidence. But a growing literature of real-world marketing studies backs me up. One study, for example, asked people how likely they were to buy a car in the next six months. People who were asked whether they’d buy a car were almost twice as likely to actually do so than those who weren’t asked. (Small wonder that many car dealers ask not
The cluster of phenomena I’ve just discussed — framing, anchoring, susceptibility to advertising, and the like — is only part of the puzzle; our choices are also contaminated by memories retrieved from
All of this is, of course, a function of evolution. Rationality, pretty much by definition, demands a thorough and judicious balancing of evidence, but the circuitry of mammalian memory simply isn’t attuned to that purpose. The speed and context-sensitivity of memory no doubt helped our ancestors, who had to make snap decisions in a challenging environment. But in modern times, this former asset has become a liability. When context tells us one thing, but rationality another, rationality often loses.
Evolutionary inertia made a third significant contribution to the occasional irrationality of modern humans by calibrating us to expect a degree of uncertainty that is largely (and mercifully) absent in contemporary life. Until very recently, our ancestors could not count on the success of next year’s harvest, and a bird in hand was certainly better than two, or even three, in the bush. Absent refrigerators, preservatives, and grocery stores, mere survival was far less assured than it is today — in the immortal words of Thomas Hobbes, life was “nasty, brutish, and short.”
As a result, over hundreds of millions of years, evolution selected strongly for creatures that lived largely in the moment. In every species that’s ever been studied, animals tend to follow what is known as a “hyperbolic discounting curve” — fancy words for the fact that organisms tend to value the present far more than the future. And the closer temptation is, the harder it is to resist. For example, at a remove of 10 seconds, a pigeon can recognize (so to speak) that it’s worth waiting 14 seconds to get four ounces of food rather than a single ounce in 10 seconds — but if you wait 9 seconds and let the pigeon change its choice at the last moment, it will. At the remove of just 1 second, the desire for food
Life is generally much more stable for humans than for the average pigeon, and human frontal lobes much larger, but still we humans can’t get over the ancestral tendency to live in the moment. When we are hungry, we gobble French fries as if driven to lard up on carbs and fat now, since we might not find any next week. Obesity is chronic not just because we routinely underexercise, but also because our brain hasn’t caught up with the relative cushiness of modern life.[25] We continue to discount the future enormously, even as we live in a world of all-night grocery stores and 24/7 pizza delivery.
Future discounting extends well beyond food. It affects how people spend money, why they fail to save enough for retirement, and why they so frequently rack up enormous credit card debt. One dollar now, for example, simply seems more valuable than $1.20 a year hence, and nobody seems to think much about how quickly compound interest rises, precisely because the subjective future is just so far away — or so we are evolved to believe. To a mind not evolved to think about money, let alone the future, credit cards are almost as serious a problem as crack. (Fewer than 1 in 50 Americans uses crack regularly, but nearly half carry regular credit card debt, almost 10 percent owing over $10,000.)
Our extreme favoritism toward the present at the expense of the future would make sense if our life span were vastly shorter, or if the world were much less predictable (as was the case for our ancestors), but in countries where bank accounts are federally insured and grocery stores reliably restocked, the premium we place on the present is often seriously counterproductive.
The more we discount the future, the more we succumb to short-term temptations like drugs, alcohol, and overeating. As one researcher, Howard Rachlin, sums it up, in general, living a healthy life for a period of ten years, say, is in trinsically satisfying… Over a ten-year period, virtually all would prefer living a healthy life to being a couch potato. Yet we also (more or less) prefer to drink
I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that this tension between the short term and the long term defines much of contemporary Western life: the choice between going to the gym now and staying home to watch a movie, the joy of the French fries now versus the pain of winding up later with a belly the size of Buddha’s.
