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This experiment worked much like the previous one, except we returned to the trusty and super-delicious Lindt chocolate truffles (which were by now an experimental staple for us). We offered the chocolates to passing students at a broader range of prices. We’d already seen what economists call a “backward sloping demand curve” when the price was reduced from 1¢ to free (meaning demand went down instead of up when the price decreased). What would happen to demand when we decreased the price from 10¢ to 5¢? From 5¢ to 1¢? Or, as in the first experiment, when we decreased the price from 1¢ to free?
When we dropped the chocolate prices from 10¢ to 5¢, the predictions of both laws of demand were verified, and in total we saw an increase in demand of about 240 percent. Similarly, when the price went from 5¢ to 1¢, the predictions of both laws of demand were verified, and in total we saw an increase in demand of about 400 percent. But, as we saw in our first experiment when we reduced the price from 1¢ to free, the first law of demand was verified (more people stopped for chocolate) but the second law of demand was disconfirmed (the people who took chocolate took less not more), and in total, with more people taking less, we saw a decrease in demand of about 50 percent.
What these results mean is that the theory of demand is a solid one—except when we’re dealing with the price of zero. Whenever the price is not part of the exchange, social norms become entangled. These social norms get people to consider the welfare of others and, therefore, limit consumption to a level that does not place too much of a burden on the available resource. In essence, when prices are zero and social norms are a part of the equation, people look at the world as a communal good. The important lesson from all of this? Not mentioning prices ushers in social norms, and with those social norms, we start caring more about others.
ANOTHER IMPORTANT LESSON from Chapter 4 was about the ability to obfuscate exchanges in nonfinancial terms and, by doing so, avoid squashing (“crowding out,” in economic terms) the benefits of social norms. (Giving your mother-in-law a gift is a good idea, but paying her for a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner is not recommended, even if both gestures would cost you the same amount of money.)
If obfuscation can provide an important wedge that keeps us humming along the social norm track, and if gifts are one mechanism for obfuscating, what about other such mechanisms? What about effort? Over the years, I have been a beta tester for many software products, and in retrospect, it is amazing to realize how much time and effort and how many computer crashes I have endured from this activity. Could it be that because these software companies asked me for my time and effort without offering money, I was eager and happy to help them, even at substantial cost to myself?
Now, effort is clearly not the same as a gift, but could it be that it is also different from money? Perhaps there’s a range with strict financial exchange norms at one extreme, pure social norms at the other, and effort somewhere along this spectrum? What, we wondered, might happen in a nonmonetary exchange involving only effort? Would effort undermine social norms in the same way that financial transactions do? Does an exchange of effort keep the social norms intact, similar to the effect of not mentioning money at all? Or might it fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum?
To explore this notion, we set up a new experiment. This time, we had a research assistant roam around the MIT Media Laboratory with a tray that was always stacked with fifty Lindt truffles. In the “free” condition, she simply asked people, “Would you like some chocolates?” (Note the plural, which indicates that it would be acceptable to take more than one.) In the “monetary” condition, she asked, “Would you like some chocolates? The cost is one cent each.” Finally, in the “effort” condition, she handed people a stack of pages with random arrangements of printed letters. For every pair of s’s they found, she said, they could have a Lindt truffle (but they did not have to take one). They could work as long as they wanted, putting in as much or as little effort as they wished. (There were well over fifty pairs of s’s among all the sheets of letters, and it was very easy to spot them.)
The apparently voracious people in the monetary condition took an average of 30 truffles each. Those in the free condition took a polite average of 1.5. And how do you think effort-as-payment for truffles went over? This group fell somewhere in the middle, but closer to the free condition: our participants took an average of 8.6 truffles each in exchange for finding pairs of s’s (or an average of about 21 fewer than those in the monetary condition).
These results suggest that effort falls somewhere in the middle of the range. It does not produce the same level of social self-consciousness that free does, but participants did seem to consider the implications of their actions on others when they decided how many truffles to take. We found that when effort is part of the equation, it manages to keep a large part of the social norms, though by no means all of it. As it turns out, the old maxim “Time is money”—or, in our case, “Effort is money”—is not exactly correct. Perhaps a more accurate reframing of our findings would be that effort is somewhere on the spectrum between market and social norms.
The main lesson here is that because exchanges involving effort can maintain social norms to a larger degree relative to financial exchanges, we might want to think about how to get people to switch from paying for services to investing more of their own efforts. As we go about our daily lives, we are often asked to invest effort in recycling, spending time on a neighborhood watch, helping in our kids’ schools, volunteering in a soup kitchen, and much more. In each of these cases, one could argue that taking part in these activities makes little economic sense. Why not pay someone to recycle for us, watch our neighborhood, help in our kids’ schools, or hand out food in the soup kitchen? Sure, it might be economically inefficient, but investing effort rather than cash might help keep us in the domain of social norms and consequently take into account the welfare of others.
FOR THE MOST part in this chapter, I’ve discussed instances where prices change from something to nothing. Of course, some things that are generally free or are considered a common resource can be relocated into the realm of market forces. For instance, carbon emissions trading is an area where we ought to consider the intersection between social and market norms.* (#litres_trial_promo) “Cap and Trade” is a program of economic incentives designed to encourage industries and companies to pollute less; the less they pollute, the fewer pollution allowances they have to buy. Moreover, if companies don’t use all their allowances, they can profit from their cleanliness by selling their extra allowances to companies that pollute more. It’s virtue that pays!
However, in light of the experiments described in this chapter (as well as those in Chapter 4), we might want to consider the dark side of putting a price on pollution. If a company can be charged for spewing poisons into the environment, it might well decide, after a cost-benefit analysis, that it can go ahead and pollute a lot more. Once pollution is a market and companies pay for their right to pollute, morality and concern for the environment are nonissues. On the other hand, if pollution is something that cannot be purchased or traded, it would more naturally fall into the domain of social norms.
To be sure, if we want to place pollution under the control of social norms, we can’t stand back and hope that people will start caring. We need to make pollution into an easily measurable and observable quantity and get people to pay attention to it and understand its importance. We could, for example, publically post the pollutant amounts of different countries, states, and companies together with their environmental impact. We could include this information on companies’ financial statements to their shareholders or maybe force companies to post it on their products, much as we do for nutritional information on packaged food.
I’m not saying that Cap and Trade is necessarily a bad idea, but I do think that when public policy or environmental issues are at stake, our task is to figure out which of the two—social or market norms—will produce the most desirable outcome. In particular, policy makers should be careful not to add market norms that could undermine the social ones.
NOW THAT WE’VE learned how social norms get people to care less about their own selfish goals and pay more attention to the welfare of others, you might expect me to propose a brilliant idea for injecting more social norms and civility into the Filene’s Basement “Running of the Brides.” I wish I had a solution for getting these women to behave in a more considerate or at least less violent way. But the haunting memories of watching the live event suggest to me that getting a future bride to concentrate on an abstract idea like “other people” as opposed to the concrete reality of a discounted wedding gown might be nearly impossible. (For weeks afterward, I would look into the faces of my female friends and wonder whether they, too, were capable of trampling each other in an abject act of retail lust.)
And why, you might ask, am I so easily giving up on this social science challenge? Because I suspect that for social norms to operate, people cannot be at their most emotionally piqued state. When you’re focused, mind and body, on one highly emotional objective—grabbing that wedding dress—it’s hard to factor in others’ well-being. As we will see in the next chapter, when emotions run high, social norms inevitably get trampled like so many Vera Wang veils.
CHAPTER 6
The Influence of Arousal
Why Hot Is Much Hotter Than We Realize
Ask most twentysomething male college students whether they would ever attempt unprotected sex and they will quickly recite chapter and verse about the risk of dreaded diseases and pregnancy. Ask them in any dispassionate circumstances—while they are doing homework or listening to a lecture—whether they’d enjoy being spanked, or enjoy sex in a threesome with another man, and they’ll wince. No way, they’d tell you. Furthermore, they’d narrow their eyes at you and think, What kind of sicko are you anyhow, asking these questions in the first place?
In 2001, while I was visiting Berkeley for the year, my friend, academic hero, and longtime collaborator George Loewenstein and I invited a few bright students to help us understand the degree to which rational, intelligent people can predict how their attitudes will change when they are in an impassioned state. In order to make this study realistic, we needed to measure the participants’ responses while they were smack in the midst of such an emotional state. We could have made our participants feel angry or hungry, frustrated or annoyed. But we preferred to have them experience a pleasurable emotion.
We chose to study decision making under sexual arousal—not because we had kinky predilections ourselves, but because understanding the impact of arousal on behavior might help society grapple with some of its most difficult problems, such as teen pregnancy and the spread of HIV-AIDS. There are sexual motivations everywhere we look, and yet we understand very little about how these influence our decision making.
Moreover, since we wanted to understand whether participants would be able to predict how they would behave in a particular emotional state, the emotion needed to be one that was already quite familiar to them. That made our decision easy. If there’s anything predictable and familiar about twentysomething male college students, it’s the regularity with which they experience sexual arousal.
ROY, AN AFFABLE, studious biology major at Berkeley, is in a sweat—and not over finals. Propped up in the single bed of his darkened dorm room, he’s masturbating rapidly with his right hand. With his left, he’s using a one-handed keyboard to manipulate a Saran-wrapped laptop computer. As he idles through pictures of buxom naked women lolling around in various erotic poses, his heart pounds ever more loudly in his chest.
As he becomes increasingly excited, Roy adjusts the “arousal meter” on the computer screen upward. As he reaches the bright red “high” zone, a question pops up on the screen:
Could you enjoy sex with someone you hated?
Roy moves his left hand to a scale that ranges from “no” to “yes” and taps his answer. The next question appears: “Would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?”
Again, Roy selects his answer, and a new question pops up. “Would you always use a condom?”
BERKELEY ITSELF IS a dichotomous place. It was a site of antiestablishment riots in the 1960s, and people in the Bay Area snarkily refer to the famously left-of-center city as the “People’s Republic of Berkeley.” But the large campus itself draws a surprisingly conformist population of top-level students. In a survey of incoming freshmen in 2004, only 51.2 percent of the respondents thought of themselves as liberal. More than one-third (36 percent) deemed their views middle-of-the-road, and 12 percent claimed to be conservatives. To my surprise, when I arrived at Berkeley, I found that the students were in general not very wild, rebellious, or likely to take risks.
The ads we posted around Sproul Plaza read as follows: “Wanted: Male research participants, heterosexual, 18 years-plus, for a study on decision making and arousal.” The ad noted that the experimental sessions would demand about an hour of the participants’ time, that the participants would be paid $10 per session, and that the experiments could involve sexually arousing material. Those interested in applying could respond to Mike, the research assistant, by e-mail.
For this study, we decided to seek out only men. In terms of sex, their wiring is a lot simpler than that of women (as we concluded after much discussion among ourselves and our assistants, both male and female). A copy of Playboy and a darkened room were about all we’d need for a high degree of success.
Another concern was getting the project approved at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (where I had my primary appointment). This was an ordeal in itself. Before allowing the research to begin, Dean Richard Schmalensee assigned a committee, consisting mostly of women, to examine the project. This committee had several concerns. What if a participant uncovered repressed memories of sexual abuse as a result of the research? Suppose a participant found that he or she was a sex addict? Their questions seemed unwarranted to me, since any college student with a computer and an Internet connection can get hold of the most graphic pornography imaginable.
Although the business school was stymied by this project, I was fortunate to have a position at MIT’s Media Lab as well, and Walter Bender, who was the head of the lab, happily approved the project. I was on my way. But my experience with MIT’s Sloan School made it clear that even half a century after Kinsey, and despite its substantial importance, sex is still largely a taboo subject for a study—at least at some institutions.
IN ANY CASE, our ads went out; and, college men being what they are, we soon had a long list of hearty fellows awaiting the chance to participate—including Roy.
Roy, in fact, was typical of most of the 25 participants in our study. Born and raised in San Francisco, he was accomplished, intelligent, and kind—the type of kid every prospective mother-in-law dreams of. Roy played Chopin études on the piano and liked to dance to techno music. He had earned straight A’s throughout high school, where he was captain of the varsity volleyball team. He sympathized with libertarians and tended to vote Republican. Friendly and amiable, he had a steady girlfriend who he’d been dating for a year. He planned to go to medical school and had a weakness for spicy California-roll sushi and for the salads at Cafe Intermezzo.
Roy met with our student research assistant, Mike, at Strada coffee shop—Berkeley’s patio-style percolator for many an intellectual thought, including the idea for the solution to Fermat’s last theorem. Mike was slender and tall, with short hair, an artistic air, and an engaging smile.
Mike shook hands with Roy, and they sat down. “Thanks for answering our ad, Roy,” Mike said, pulling out a few sheets of paper and placing them on the table. “First, let’s go over the consent forms.”
Mike intoned the ritual decree: The study was about decision making and sexual arousal. Participation was voluntary. Data would be confidential. Participants had the right to contact the committee in charge of protecting the rights of those participating in experiments, and so on.
Roy nodded and nodded. You couldn’t find a more agreeable participant.
“You can stop the experiment at any time,” Mike concluded. “Everything understood?”
“Yes,” Roy said. He grabbed a pen and signed. Mike shook his hand.
“Great!” Mike took a cloth bag out of his knapsack. “Here’s what’s going to happen.” He unwrapped an Apple iBook computer and opened it up. In addition to the standard keyboard, Roy saw a 12-key multicolored keypad.
“It’s a specially equipped computer,” Mike explained. “Please use only this keypad to respond.” He touched the keys on the colored pad. “We’ll give you a code to enter, and this code will let you start the experiment. During the session, you’ll be asked a series of questions to which you can answer on a scale ranging between ‘no’ and ‘yes.’ If you think you would like the activity described in the question, answer ‘yes,’ and if you think you would not, answer ‘no.’ Remember that you’re being asked to predict how you would behave and what kind of activities you would like when aroused.”
Roy nodded.
“We’ll ask you to sit in your bed, and set the computer up on a chair on the left side of your bed, in clear sight and reach of your bed,” Mike went on. “Place the keypad next to you so that you can use it without any difficulty, and be sure you’re alone.”
Roy’s eyes twinkled a little.
“When you finish with the session, e-mail me and we will meet again, and you’ll get your ten bucks.”
Mike didn’t tell Roy about the questions themselves. The session started by asking Roy to imagine that he was sexually aroused, and to answer all the questions as he would if he were aroused. One set of questions asked about sexual
preferences. Would he, for example, find women’s shoes erotic? Could he imagine being attracted to a 50-year-old woman? Could it be fun to have sex with someone who was extremely fat? Could having sex with someone he hated be enjoyable? Would it be fun to get tied up or to tie someone else up? Could “just kissing” be frustrating?
A second set of questions asked about the likelihood of engaging in immoral behaviors such as date rape. Would Roy tell a woman that he loved her to increase the chance that she would have sex with him? Would he encourage a date to drink to increase the chance that she would have sex with him? Would he keep trying to have sex after a date had said “no”?
A third set of questions asked about Roy’s likelihood of engaging in behaviors related to unsafe sex. Does a condom decrease sexual pleasure? Would he always use a condom if he didn’t know the sexual history of a new sexual partner? Would he use a condom even if he was afraid that a woman might change her mind while he went to get it?* (#litres_trial_promo)
A few days later, having answered the questions in his “cold,” rational state, Roy met again with Mike.
“Those were some interesting questions,” Roy noted.
“Yes, I know,” Mike said coolly. “Kinsey had nothing on us. By the way, we have another set of experimental sessions. Would you be interested in participating again?”
Roy smiled a little, shrugged, and nodded.
Mike shoved a few pages toward him. “This time we’re asking you to sign the same consent form, but the next task will be slightly different. The next session will be very much the same as the last one, but this time we want you to get yourself into an excited state by viewing a set of arousing pictures and masturbating. What we want you to do is arouse yourself to a high level, but not to ejaculate. In case you do, though, the computer will be protected.”
Mike pulled out the Apple iBook. This time the keyboard and the screen were covered with a thin layer of Saran wrap.
Roy made a face. “I didn’t know computers could get pregnant.”
“Not a chance,” Mike laughed. “This one had its tubes tied. But we like to keep them clean.”
Mike explained that Roy would browse through a series of erotic pictures on the computer to help him get to the right level of arousal; then he would answer the same questions as before.
WITHIN THREE MONTHS, some fine Berkeley undergraduate students had undergone a variety of sessions in different orders. In the set of sessions conducted when they were in a cold, dispassionate state, they predicted what their sexual and moral decisions would be if they were aroused. In the set of sessions conducted when they were in a hot, aroused state, they also predicted their decisions—but this time, since they were actually in the grip of passion, they were presumably more aware of their preferences in that state. When the study was completed, the conclusions were consistent and clear—overwhelmingly clear, frighteningly clear.
In every case, our bright young participants answered the questions very differently when they were aroused from when they were in a “cold” state. Across the 19 questions about sexual preferences, when Roy and all the other participants were aroused they predicted that their desire to engage in a variety of somewhat odd sexual activities would be nearly twice as high as (72 percent higher than) they had predicted when they were cold. For example, the idea of enjoying contact with animals was more than twice as appealing when they were in a state of arousal as when they were in a cold state. In the five questions about their propensity to engage in immoral activities, when they were aroused they predicted their propensity to be more than twice as high as (136 percent higher than) they had predicted in the cold state. Similarly, in the set of questions about using condoms, and despite the warnings that had been hammered into them over the years about the importance of condoms, they were 25 percent more likely in the aroused state than in the cold state to predict that they would forego condoms. In all these cases they failed to predict the influence of arousal on their sexual preferences, morality, and approach to safe sex.
The results showed that when Roy and the other participants were in a cold, rational, superego-driven state, they respected women; they were not particularly attracted to the odd sexual activities we asked them about; they always took the moral high ground; and they expected that they would always use a condom. They thought that they understood themselves, their preferences, and what actions they were capable of. But as it turned out, they completely underestimated their reactions.
No matter how we looked at the numbers, it was clear that the magnitude of underprediction by the participants was substantial. Across the board, they revealed in their unaroused state that they themselves did not know what they were like once aroused. Prevention, protection, conservatism, and morality disappeared completely from the radar screen. They were simply unable to predict the degree to which passion would change them.* (#litres_trial_promo)
IMAGINE WAKING UP one morning, looking in the mirror, and discovering that someone else—something alien but human—has taken over your body. You’re uglier, shorter, hairier; your lips are thinner, your incisors are longer, your nails are filthy, your face is flatter. Two cold, reptilian eyes gaze back at you. You long to smash something, rape someone. You are not you. You are a monster.
Beset by this nightmarish vision, Robert Louis Stevenson screamed in his sleep in the early hours of an autumn morning in 1885. Immediately after his wife awoke him, he set to work on what he called a “fine bogey tale”—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—in which he said, “Man is not truly one, but truly two.” The book was an overnight success, and no wonder. The story captivated the imagination of Victorians, who were fascinated with the dichotomy between repressive propriety—represented by the mild-mannered scientist Dr. Jekyll—and uncontrollable passion, embodied in the murderous Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll thought he understood how to control himself. But when Mr. Hyde took over, look out.
The story was frightening and imaginative, but it wasn’t new. Long before Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the war between interior good and evil had been the stuff of myth, religion, and literature. In Freudian terms, each of us houses a dark self, an id, a brute that can unpredictably wrest control away from the superego. Thus a pleasant, friendly neighbor, seized by road rage, crashes his car into a semi. A teenager grabs a gun and shoots his friends. A priest rapes a boy. All these otherwise good people assume that they understand themselves. But in the heat of passion, suddenly, with the flip of some interior switch, everything changes.
Our experiment at Berkeley revealed not just the old story that we are all like Jekyll and Hyde, but also something new—that every one of us, regardless of how “good” we are, underpredicts the effect of passion on our behavior. In every case, the participants in our experiment got it wrong. Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was. Moreover, it is not just that people make wrong predictions about themselves—their predictions are wrong by a large margin.
Most of the time, according to the results of the study, Roy is smart, decent, reasonable, kind, and trustworthy. His frontal lobes are fully functioning, and he is in control of his behavior. But when he’s in a state of sexual arousal and the reptilian brain takes over, he becomes unrecognizable to himself.
Roy thinks he knows how he will behave in an aroused state, but his understanding is limited. He doesn’t truly understand that as his sexual motivation becomes more intense, he may throw caution to the wind. He may risk sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies in order to achieve sexual gratification. When he is gripped by passion, his emotions may blur the boundary between what is right and what is wrong. In fact, he doesn’t have a clue to how consistently wild he really is, for when he is in one state and tries to predict his behavior in another state, he gets it wrong.
Moreover, the study suggested that our inability to understand ourselves in a different emotional state does not seem to improve with experience; we get it wrong even if we spend as much time in this state as our Berkeley students spend sexually aroused. Sexual arousal is familiar, personal, very human, and utterly commonplace. Even so, we all systematically underpredict the degree to which arousal completely negates our superego, and the way emotions can take control of our behavior.
WHAT HAPPENS, THEN, when our irrational self comes alive in an emotional place that we think is familiar but in fact is unfamiliar? If we fail to really understand ourselves, is it possible to somehow predict how we or others will behave when “out of our heads”—when we’re really angry, hungry, frightened, or sexually aroused? Is it possible to do something about this?
The answers to these questions are profound, for they indicate that we must be wary of situations in which our Mr. Hyde may take over. When the boss criticizes us publicly, we might be tempted to respond with a vehement e-mail. But wouldn’t we be better off putting our reply in the “draft” folder for a few days? When we are smitten by a sports car after a test-drive with the wind in our hair, shouldn’t we take a break—and discuss our spouse’s plan to buy a minivan—before signing a contract to buy the car?
Here are a few more examples of ways to protect ourselves from ourselves:
Safe Sex
Many parents and teenagers, while in a cold, rational, Dr. Jekyll state, tend to believe that the mere promise of abstinence—commonly known as “Just say no”—is sufficient protection against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. Assuming that this levelheaded thought will prevail even when emotions reach the boiling point, the advocates of “just saying no” see no reason to carry a condom with them. But as our study shows, in the heat of passion, we are all in danger of switching from “Just say no” to “Yes!” in a heartbeat; and if no condom is available, we are likely to say yes, regardless of the dangers.
What does this suggest? First, widespread availability of condoms is essential. We should not decide in a cool state whether or not to bring condoms; they must be there just in case. Second, unless we understand how we might react in an emotional state, we will not be able to predict this transformation. For teenagers, this problem is most likely exacerbated, and thus sex education should focus less on the physiology and biology of the reproductive system, and more on strategies to deal with the emotions that accompany sexual arousal. Third, we must admit that carrying condoms and even vaguely understanding the emotional firestorm of sexual arousal may not be enough.
There are most likely many situations where teenagers simply won’t be able to cope with their emotions. A better strategy, for those who want to guarantee that teenagers avoid sex, is to teach teenagers that they must walk away from the fire of passion before they are close enough to be drawn in. Accepting this advice might not be easy, but our results suggest that it is easier for them to fight temptation before it arises than after it has started to lure them in. In other words, avoiding temptation altogether is easier than overcoming it.
To be sure, this sounds a lot like the “Just say no” campaign, which urges teenagers to walk away from sex when tempted. But the difference is that “Just say no” assumes we can turn off passion at will, at any point, whereas our study shows this assumption to be false. If we put aside the debate on the pros and cons of teenage sex, what is clear is that if we want to help teenagers avoid sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and unwanted pregnancies, we have two strategies. Either we can teach them how to say no before any temptation takes hold, and before a situation becomes impossible to resist; or alternatively, we can get them prepared to deal with the consequences of saying yes in the heat of passion (by carrying a condom, for example). One thing is sure: if we don’t teach our young people how to deal with sex when they are half out of their minds, we are not only fooling them; we’re fooling ourselves as well. Whatever lessons we teach them, we need to help them understand that they will react differently when they are calm and cool from when their hormones are raging at fever pitch (and of course the same also applies to our own behavior).
Safe Driving
Similarly, we need to teach teenagers (and everyone else) not to drive when their emotions are at a boil. It’s not just inexperience and hormones that make so many teenagers crash their own or their parents’ cars. It’s also the car full of laughing friends, with the CD player blaring at an adrenaline-pumping decibel level, and the driver’s right hand searching for the french fries or his girlfriend’s knee. Who’s thinking about risk in that situation? Probably no one. A recent study found that a teenager driving alone was 40 percent more likely to get into an accident than an adult. But with one other teenager in the car, the percentage was twice that—and with a third teenager along for the ride, the percentage doubled again.
To react to this, we need an intervention that does not rely on the premise that teenagers will remember how they wanted to behave while in a cold state (or how their parents wanted them to behave) and follow these guidelines even when they are in a hot state. Why not build into cars precautionary devices to foil teenagers’ behavior? Such cars might be equipped with a modified OnStar system that the teenager and the parents configure in a cold state. If a car exceeds 65 miles per hour on the highway, or more than 40 miles per hour in a residential zone, for example, there will be consequences. If the car exceeds the speed limit or begins to make erratic turns, the radio might switch from 2Pac to Schumann’s Second Symphony (this would slow most teenagers). Or the car might blast the air conditioning in winter, switch on the heat in summer, or automatically call Mom (a real downer if the driver’s friends are present). With these substantial and immediate consequences in mind, then, the driver and his or her friends would realize that it’s time for Mr. Hyde to move over and let Dr. Jekyll drive.
This is not at all far-fetched. Modern cars are already full of computers that control the fuel injection, the climate system, and the sound system. Cars equipped with OnStar are already linked to a wireless network. With today’s technology, it would be a simple matter for a car to automatically call Mom.
Better Life Decisions
Not uncommonly, women who are pregnant for the first time tell their doctors, before the onset of labor, that they will refuse any kind of painkiller. The decision made in their cold state is admirable, but they make this decision when they can’t imagine the pain that can come with childbirth (let alone the challenges of child rearing). After all is said and done, they may wish they’d gone for the epidural.
With this in mind, Sumi (my lovely wife) and I, readying ourselves for the birth of our first child, Amit, decided to test our mettle before making any decisions about using an epidural. To do this, Sumi plunged her hands into a bucket of ice for two minutes (we did this on the advice of our birth coach, who swore to us that the resulting pain would be similar to the pain of childbirth), while I coached her breathing. If Sumi was unable to bear the pain of this experience, we figured, she’d probably want painkillers when she was going through the actual birth. After two minutes of holding her hands in the ice bucket, Sumi clearly understood the appeal of an epidural. During the birth itself, any ounce of love Sumi ever had for her husband was completely transferred to the anesthesiologist, who produced the epidural at the critical point. (With our second child, we made it to the hospital about two minutes before Neta was born, so Sumi did end up experiencing an analgesic-free birth after all.)
LOOKING FROM ONE emotional state to another is difficult. It’s not always possible; and as Sumi learned it can be painful. But to make informed decisions we need to somehow experience and understand the emotional state we will be in at the other side of the experience. Learning how to bridge this gap is essential to making some of the important decisions of our lives.
It is unlikely that we would move to a different city without asking friends who live there how they like it, or even choose to see a film without reading some reviews. Isn’t it strange that we invest so little in learning about both sides of ourselves? Why should we reserve this subject for psychology classes when failure to understand it can bring about repeated failures in so many aspects of our lives? We need to explore the two sides of ourselves; we need to understand the cold state and the hot state; we need to see how the gap between the hot and cold states benefits our lives, and where it leads us astray.
What did our experiments suggest? It may be that our models of human behavior need to be rethought. Perhaps there is no such thing as a fully integrated human being. We may, in fact, be an agglomeration of multiple selves. Although there is nothing much we can do to get our Dr. Jekyll to fully appreciate the strength of our Mr. Hyde, perhaps just being aware that we are prone to making the wrong decisions when gripped by intense emotion may help us, in some way, to apply our knowledge of our “Hyde” selves to our daily activities.
How can we try to force our “Hyde” self to behave better? This is what Chapter 7 is about.
APPENDIX: CHAPTER 5
A complete list of the questions we asked, with the mean response and percentage differences. Each question was presented on a visual-analog scale that stretched between “no” on the left (zero) to “possibly” in the middle (50) to “yes” on the right (100).
TABLE 1
RATE THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES
TABLE 2
RATE THE LIKELIHOOD OF ENGAGING IN IMMORAL BEHAVIORS LIKE DATE RAPE (A STRICT ORDER OF SEVERITY IS NOT IMPLIED)
TABLE 3
RATE YOUR TENDENCY TO USE, AND OUTCOMES OF NOT USING, BIRTH CONTROL
CHAPTER 7
The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control
