The Invisible Lens

The last post left off declaring that - as in AA - the first step toward curing our irrationalities is to admit we have them.

That's the tricky part. The thing about being irrational is that you think you're being completely rational at the same moment that your mind is messing with you. How can you see it?

Enter behavioral psychologists and all their gadgets - controlled experiments, MRIs, heart monitors, etc.

Daniel Ariely, a professor at MIT, gets a particular kick out of running experiments on his students - who always seem to be ready guinea pigs for games and surveys that involve chocolate, beer, computer simulations - even Playboy.

The men's magazine provided a particularly titillating example of both how much our emotions hold sway over our reason and how little we are aware of the power of our emotions.

For $10 each, a set of impoverished - or just horny - male students at Berkeley, where Ariely was teaching at the time, volunteered to participate in an experiment that studied the effect of arousal on common sense and morality. Suspects were asked a series of questions about their willingness to participate - or forgo - certain activities when in a state of arousal, for example telling a woman you loved her to increase your chances of getting some, or passing on getting a condom, lest a girl change her mind in the meantime. The trick was asking the same set of questions while they were not aroused and then later while jerking off with a centerfold in hand (a saran-wrapped computer was doing the actual asking). In all questions, the young males underestimated the power of their endorphins. While only 30% of un-aroused guys thought they'd fib about love while on the make, with hormones rushing 51% said they might let slip the "love" word. Similarly, 86% of sexually sober college men thought they'd go for a condom no matter what, but 60% of turned on dudes would let a condom slide if not directly at hand.

But at least in the case of sex, young men have a clue that they may not be so rational in flagrante delicto - even though they underestimate how much so. Are there cases where we're not even aware of how much our subconscious is playing with us?

Indeed there are. Kool-Aid Konfidential's intent is to look at all the places we think we, as citizens, are being rational but are in fact are being duped by our brains. But we don't have to start with politics to see how clever our minds are at deceiving us.

Ariely talks about a few concepts in behavioral economics to show how our choices, opinions and actions are determined by hidden forces.

One of those forces is "anchoring." Humans, it turns out, are really keen on comparing things - finding the relative value of, say, a cell-phone or a potential boyfriend - but aren't so good at judging their real value. We instinctively compare choices to an "anchor," which can be the first price we consider paying for a cell-phone or the handsomeness of our last boyfriend. If the first cell-phone the TMobile associate tries to foist on you is $50, you will end up paying a different price than if they tried to start you off with a $200 job. That's because you have to compare your ultimate selection to some price "anchor" and - unbeknownst to you (but perhaps known to your savvy sales agent) - that anchor is set subconsiously simply by the first price to consider.

Let's say you end up with a sportin' $150 razor phone with video capacity. Now another force is working on you. Because you've made your choice to shell out for the snazzy cell, you will begin to value your selection even more - convincing yourself that you made the right choice. Anyone who tries to tell you you were swindled, will hear from you how superior your phone is to any $50 lemon. This is the power of "ownership" - once we've committed to something, whether a phone, a relationship or a political cause, we automatically begin to overvalue it.

What's particularly cagey about our brain is that it not only distorts how we think about something - it also has a way of playing with our perceptions. We all know we walk around with stereotypes (bad and good), but we may not realize how much those stereotypes influence our perceptions. If you tend to think men with British accents and tweed jackets are cleverer than the average bloke, when you come across one you'll not only be ready to hear witticisms, but you'll likely also imagine the dullest drivel that might come out to be terribly charming. Ariely, again, tested the power of expectations on MIT's collegians' taste buds and found exactly that - that expectation of positive or negative sensations will produce those positive or negative sensations.

So it goes from bad to worse: we're not only not aware of the irrational forces at work on our minds, those irrational forces also distort the perceptions that come into our minds in the first place.

More on their tricks in future posts.