Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

soup with signs that say LIMIT 12 PER CUSTOMER rather than LIMIT 4 PER CUSTOMER.

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In March 2006, in Sierra Vista, Arizona, Bob Kasun, dead for nine days, won by a margin of nearly three to one.

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Some (thankfully not all) of those who believe in creationism rather than evolution appear eager to take just about any evidence as further confirmation of their views. One religious news site, for example, took the recent discovery that human DNA is more variable than once thought to “debunk evolution.” The argument ran thusly (and I quote verbatim):

Given that humans are ten times [more] different than one another [than expected], it would seem that a four percentage point difference between the chimpanzee and the human genome could mean hundreds of times differences between each individual human and each individual chimpanzee. And this difference would demolish any reasonable defense of evolution… the more scientists find, the more the Bible is proven.

If there had been less genetic variation, the argument might well have run, “We are all made in God’s image; therefore it’s no surprise that our DNA is all the same,” but in the quoted passage there seems to be no discernible logic relating the premise (that there is an unexpectedly large amount of genetic variation) to its rather antiscientific conclusion.

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Why didn’t von Rundstedt listen? He was too attached to his own strategy, an elaborate but ultimately pointless plan for defending Calais. Hitler, for his part, trusted von Rundstedt so much that he spent the morning of D-Day asleep, evidently untroubled by Rommel’s fear that Normandy might be invaded.

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The converse wasn’t true: interrupting people’s consideration of true propositions didn’t lead to increased disbelief precisely because people initially accept that what they hear is true, whether or not they ultimately get a chance to properly evaluate it.

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How do you get people to lust after money? Let them imagine they’ll win a significant amount of money in the lottery, then ask them to think about how they would spend it. The more money they are asked to envision, the more lust is engendered. In the particular experiment I describe, people in the “high desire for money” condition spent a few minutes thinking about how they’d spend a ?25,000 prize, while people in the “low desire for money” condition spent a few minutes contemplating how they’d spend a ?25 prize. A remarkable indicator of the influence of induced money lust came from a follow-up question: people were asked to estimate the size of coins. The bigger the lust, the larger their estimate.

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As a final illustration, borrowed from maverick economist Richard Thaler, imagine buying an expensive pair of shoes. You like them in the store, wear them a couple of times, and then, sadly, discover that they don’t actually fit properly. What happens next? Based on his data, Thaler predicts the following: (1) The more you paid for the shoes, the more times you will try to wear them. (2) Eventually you stop wearing the shoes, but you do not throw them away. The more you paid for the shoes, the longer they will sit in the back of your closet before you dispose of them. (3) At some point, you throw the shoes away, regardless of what they cost, the payment having been fully “depreciated.” As Thaler notes, wearing the shoes a few more times might be rational, but holding on to them makes little sense. (My wife, however, notes that your feet could shrink. Or, she adds brightly, “You never know, you might get some sort of foot surgery.” Never give up on a nice pair of shoes!)

This is not to say that prices need to be fixed, as they are on The Price Is Right. On this long-running show, the eternally young Bob Barker would, at the end of every segment (until he finally retired in June 2007), intone that “the actual retail value” of some product was such and such: $242 for this watch, $32,733 for this car. But in real life prices don’t work that way. Some prices really are fixed, but most vary to some degree or other. Even as a child I found the whole concept puzzling. How could Barker tell us that a Hershey bar cost 30C — didn’t it matter which store he got the candy from? After all, as I well knew, the neighborhood convenience store charged more than the supermarket. (No economist would object to this particular discrepancy; if you need milk at 2 A.M. , and the convenience store is the only place open, it makes sense to pay a premium, and in this regard humans are perfectly rational.)

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I’m neither a dog owner nor a “dog person,” but if my wife’s experience is at all typical, a fluffy golden may be among the best things money can buy. She’s had hers for a dozen years, and he still brings her pleasure every day, far more than I can say for any of the myriad electronic gadgets I’ve ever acquired.

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The future of advertising on the Internet is no doubt going to revolve around personalized framing. For example, some people tend to focus on achieving ideals (what is known in the literature as having a “promotion focus”) while others tend toward a “prevention focus,” aimed at avoiding failure. People with promotion focus may be more responsive to appeals pitched in terms of a given product’s advantages, while people with a prevention focus may be more responsive to pitches emphasizing the cost of making do without the product.

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