Brain Trust (10 page)

The effect is a little stronger when you tick a thousand miles. That’ll cost you $250. But, “while all the 10,000-mile marks were huge,” says Pope, “it seemed like people caught on to the
100,000-mile game.” Even with the human mind’s inability to see $3.99 milk as $4.00, with used cars, it’s too obvious that a seller is trying to unload a car just before it charts 100,000 miles, so the price starts dropping at about 99,900.

So if you’re buying a car, your best deals will be just after it’s hit a round number—following 50,000 or 100,000 is ideal. And if you’re selling, make sure you do it before the car reaches those milestones that make it seem old. If that looming milestone is the big 100,000, sell it before 99,900.

Or at least before the odometer’s last two digits roll from 99 to 100. It’ll bring an extra twenty dollars.

University of Washington accounting
researcher Dave Burgstahler found that businesses act very much like baseball players—if a company’s camped just below the yearly breakeven point, or an influential analyst’s earnings prediction, or last year’s profits, it’ll swing for that fence. Unfortunately, this tendency also creates an incentive to indulge in “creative” accounting, similar to a ballplayer’s morally questionable decision to send in a pinch hitter when batting .300.

Is happiness having the time to listen to milkmaids yodeling, smell the much-honored roses, and watch kittens doing whatever
they do that everyone finds so ungodly cute on YouTube? Or is it cold, hard cash that lights your happiness lamp?

It depends on whether you’re paid a salary or by the hour.

Sanford DeVoe, professor of organizational behavior at Rotman School of Management in Toronto, found that “people who think of time as money are more likely to rely on how much they earn when evaluating what it means to be happy.” But this doesn’t mean that the salaried are necessarily happier. Being paid handsomely by the hour makes you happier than if you’d earned the same amount from a salaried position. But if you’re paid peanuts, it’s better not to have your nose rubbed in the butter by highlighting a paltry hourly pay—you’d be better off salaried.

If you’re a business owner, there’s application here: Because time is money to those paid hourly, DeVoe found that hourly workers are much more likely to give up free time to earn more money. On the other hand, salaried workers take their vacations.

But here’s a cool twist: Because hourly versus salaried pay affects how much you value your time, it also affects how you choose to spend your time. “Even outside lawyer jokes, this explains why lawyers don’t volunteer,” says DeVoe. He asked seniors at Stanford Law how many hours a week they volunteered, and then followed these greenhorn lawyers as they left school and got jobs in which they were either salaried or billed by the hour. After six months, he found their behaviors had changed—while both groups volunteered a bit less (presumably they were busier … or across the board more cynical), those who billed by the hour cut their volunteer hours more drastically than those who were salaried. Across professions and income, people paid hourly are 36 percent less likely to volunteer than those who are salaried.

In a follow-up, DeVoe asked the now battle-tested lawyers if they’d be more likely to volunteer an hour of their time at a charity of their choice, or if they’d rather write a check to the
same charity for the money they made working for one hour. You guessed it: The salaried lawyers volunteered time, while the bill-by-the-hour lawyers wrote checks.

“There’s a lot of personal utility you get from volunteering,” says DeVoe, “but making lawyers aware of their hourly rate made them see volunteering as a purely economic decision, outside any personal utility factors.”

Here’s the obvious significance to your small community nonprofit: If you can guess how your prospective donors are paid, you can decide what to ask for. Should you ask for volunteer hours or should you ask for cash?

If you’re hoping for the cash, take another tip from DeVoe. He had salaried people calculate their hourly rate before exploring their willingness to give money or hours. Sure enough—even the previously time-giving can be tricked into coughing up the cash by bringing time-is-money to the forefront of their minds.

So if your nonprofit needs cash (not volunteer hours), consider a donation flyer with a chart showing how common salaries convert to dollars-per-hour. Putting hourly wage at the top of donors’ minds should help make them cough up the cash.

DeVoe and collaborator Chen-Bo Zhong
showed that even subconscious exposure to fast-food symbols made people read faster and reduced their willingness to save money for a rainy day. In short, priming with fast-food symbols makes people impatient.

A Gallup survey of 153 countries found that a
country’s overall happiness was a better predictor of its population’s charitable giving than was wealth. In overall giving, the United States ranks sixth, behind (in order) Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, and Switzerland. Interestingly, while people in poorer countries were less likely to give money, they were more likely than people in most richer nations to help strangers, with Liberians being the world’s most stranger-friendly. In the United States, 60 percent of people had given money in the past month, 39 percent had donated time, and 65 percent had helped a stranger.

Social networking sites keep you connected with people you swapped sandwiches with in the third grade. Online forums let you argue about DIY lightsaber design with people on the other side of the world. And online dating sites offer the immediate ability to meet hundreds of local singles, some of whom are allowed to live near elementary schools.

But is it just me, or has it gotten much, much harder to meet people in the real world? Earbuds block even the nicety of “Hey, can I get a spot?” at the gym. iPhone Scrabble keeps people from accidentally meeting gazes across a crowded restaurant. And it’s become impossible to tell the schizophrenic from those simply chatting on their cell via hidden mike.

Thank God for speed dating.

True, it’s three minutes of resume-forward romance, but at least it’s face-to-face, right? And being face-to-face suddenly changes
speed dating from a cold comparison of data to a situation beholden to interpersonal psychology. Simply, there are things you can do in person to land a mate that are far beyond the reach of your Internet profile. Here’s how.

First, “there’s a lot to be said for being a liker—if you treat people agreeably, they treat you likewise,” says Paul Eastwick, psychologist at Texas A&M University. “But there’s a wrinkle when it comes to initial romantic attraction,” says Eli Finkel of Northwestern University, Eastwick’s coauthor. It turns out that speed daters who rate everyone highly are liked less in return. Finkel explains that unlike in platonic situations of work, play, and friendship, “In dating, liking everyone can come off as desperate.”

The duo’s research shows that rather than liking everyone, what predicts being liked in return is the difference between your baseline “like” and how much you like a specific person. When sitting across from your dream date, you want to show a “like spike.” Unfortunately it has to be honest. “One thing that’s fascinating is that people can tell so fast—whether the flavor of the liking is unique versus general,” says Finkel. You can’t fake unique attraction, but neither should you try to tamp it down when it wallops you. Showing someone they’re special makes them like you.

A second cool trick comes from the world of embodied cognition, which is a much-studied form of subconscious crossover between actions and thoughts. For example, people excluded from a social group in a lab setting report the lab itself feels colder. Finkel and Eastwick also point to a study of the “attractiveness” of Chinese characters—subjects found characters more attractive when they pulled them toward themselves than they found the same characters when they pushed them away.

In the world of speed dating, embodied cognition means that you want to sit instead of rotate—you tend to like things
you approach. Sure enough, Finkel and Eastwick showed that while women are overall pickier than men, if men stay put while women rotate, it shortens the pickiness gap. (Think about this in terms of gender stereotypes, in which men pursue and women are pursued.) So in addition to letting your “like spike” (as it were) show, find a speed dating situation that allows your sex to sit—dates will approach you and so will like you more.

Mining dating data—try saying that ten times
fast. Now bask in the glory that is a truly massive data set, generated by millions and millions of online dating profiles and their click rates. First, men get more responses to their messages if they don’t smile in their profile pictures. And $20,000 in salary compensates for an inch in height. (Online daters lie, adding an average of two inches and 20 percent to their true heights and salaries.) And there are good and bad words to use in messages. Netspeak like “ur” for “your” hurts message response, as do physical compliments including the words “sexy,” “hot,” and “beautiful.” Instead use words that show interest that runs more than skin-deep like “awesome” and “fascinating.”

Puzzle #4:
Matchmaker

You’re the benevolent facilitator of a speed dating session. John, Jake, Jeremy, and Justin arrive to meet Emma, Ella, Eliza, and Eva. As per regulations, they all chat and then they all score each other—er, evaluate each other. If the chart below shows these scores (girls’ evaluation of guys on the left, and guys’ evaluation of girls on the right—the higher score the better), how should you pair these love-struck contestants in order to create the most overall happiness?

In the immortal words of rapper Skee-Lo, do you wish you were a little bit taller? Wish you were a baller? Wish you had a girl who looked good and you would call her? Wish you had a rabbit in a hat and a bat and a ’64 Impala? It’s a lengthy list.

John Fontanella, physicist at the US Naval Academy, can help
you with the second—being a baller, that is. He wrote the book on basketball, or at least on
The Physics of Basketball
, which you can use to light up the scoreboard regardless of height and/or possession of said Impala.