Brain Trust (20 page)

Fifteen types of behavior, three factors to create it, each with subclasses—Fogg boils it down to nine words, which he calls his mantra for behavior change: “Put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.” Again, let
BehaviorWizard.org
be your guide. It will lead you sheeplike to a better tomorrow.

“The function of evolution is not to make it possible to drink martinis at my age. It’s to get us to child-producing age,” says Gerald Weissmann, professor emeritus at the NYU School of Medicine. A major way your body does this is by responding immediately and aggressively to infection.

“When microbes invade our tissue, throat, or gut, our cells produce hydrogen peroxide in defense,” explains Weissmann. It’s like the body’s chemotherapy, killing the microbes, but at the cost of collateral damage in the surrounding tissue. This collateral damage is nothing compared to the havoc the microbes could otherwise wreak, and if you died at age forty as Nature intended, you wouldn’t even notice it. But the degenerative effect of all this hydrogen peroxide adds up. Especially in those genetically predisposed, this tissue damage can result in arthritis and other autoimmune diseases.

But even when not fighting infection, the body produces hydrogen peroxide.

Your cells take in more oxygen than they really need. This makes sense—the body errs on the side of caution, and it’s certainly better to have too much rather than too little oxygen. But excess has to be disposed of, which your cells do by combining excess oxygen with water to form H
₂
O
₂
.

Where does this hydrogen peroxide go? Over time, it accumulates in hair follicles, eventually poisoning away their ability to produce the coloring pigment melanin. This is why your hair goes gray. But, again, this should happen after you’ve reproduced, so evolutionarily speaking, who cares?

So the conclusion is obvious. If you want to avoid arthritis and gray hair, stop oxygen at its source: Don’t breathe. But, as Weissmann points out, “This wouldn’t work so well.” Instead, you can try eating things that soak up this extra oxygen before it can become the corrosive fourth atom hooked onto a benevolent water molecule.

While, Weissmann says, it’s extremely difficult to measure possible benefits of antioxidation from dietary supplements (how can you disentangle diet from all the other environmental and genetic factors?), he sees the most potential benefit in polyphenols such as those in most fruits (especially berries), most vegetables (especially ones you can imagine British people cooking, like cabbage), honey, and green tea. Weissmann specifically recommends resveratrol, which you might recognize as the wonder drug in red wine, and which Weissmann calls “my polyphenol of choice.”

You’ve heard it before: red wine is good for
your body. But did you know that it improves cognitive function, too? A seven-year study of 5,033 Norwegians found that moderate consumption of red wine (but not beer or spirits) improved cognitive function in both men and women.

I am mariam abacha, widow of the late nigerian head of state, gen. Sani abacha. How many words did it take—two? three?—before you knew this was spam? But once you get past desperately lame e-mails and people in trench coats selling “designer” watches, scams can get a little trickier, a little more borderline, and a little more appealing. Just ask Bernie Madoff’s investors.

Or look at Vegas. Just after getting hitched, my wife and I found ourselves passing through Sin City as the cheapest way to visit West Coast schools, where she was looking at PhD programs. Being nearly indigent, we thought it’d be great to jump on a time-share tour, collect the free show tickets and meal vouchers, and use them to paint the town.

Fitting the classic profile of rubes, we were bussed out to a brand-spanking-new time-share high-rise, planted atop what was recently desert and would otherwise have been a strip mall. After an agent showed us around, we were placed in a holding tank and required to meet with a salesperson before we would be given our swag. Great—we were five minutes from show tickets and a free meal.

The salesperson asked us to estimate how many days we travel every year, and how much we spend on hotels while traveling, and explained that we could trade our weeks in Vegas for accommodations at any of their properties worldwide. Wow! It would take only twenty-five years to pay back our initial $80,000 investment, which, of course, would be doing nothing but gaining equity during this time. When we regretfully declined, the price went down to $40,000, and then eventually to $20,000.

And the thing is, it started to seem like a pretty good deal. Could we sleep on it? No. The offer was on the table—we had to decide now or never, and if “now,” we could proceed directly to their financing center.

We chose “never.” But it was much, much closer than it should’ve been. And I remember on the van ride back to the Strip, couples talked about how they’d done. The old hands had beat the system out of hundreds of dollars in casino chips in addition to the show and meal vouchers. And the few couples who’d become proud owners of a time-share in Vegas were just then realizing they’d been duped.

How, oh how, could they possibly have been so stupid?

“Think of gullibility as a threshold,” says Stephen Greenspan, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Connecticut and author of the book
The Annals of Gullibility
. Below this threshold you realize that with each “owner” paying $20,000 for ten days a year, that’s a combined $730,000 for two rooms of slapdash construction in the desert. (Not to mention the fine print of astronomically high dues, blackout days, etc.) And above this threshold, well … you become an “owner.” Greenspan lists four factors that push you toward this threshold: situation, cognition, personality, and affect. Ratchet them all high enough and anyone will tip into the abyss of foolishness. Learn to dial them down, and you can proof yourself against gullibility.

First, situation. This is a believable scam, or a “situation so
compelling few people could resist,” says Greenspan—like a time-share that takes only five years to pay for itself in reduced travel costs, which you can trade for travel anywhere in the world, and which you can sell at any time for more than you paid. That’s believable, right? (OK, OK, I was young and foolish and in love!)

But if you have cognition—that is, background information and the mental firepower to use it—you still have hope of smelling the rat. I wish I could say that’s how my wife and I snubbed the time-share scammers. However, I’m afraid I have to admit that we were just slightly out of their target demographic, having lied about our income to get the proffered free stuff. If we’d had the money, I’m not sure our cognition could have fended off the time-share. Certainly that was the case for many, many young couples that looked not so different from us.

Thirdly, woe be unto ye who are predisposed by personality to be unusually trusting. According to Greenspan, a trusting personality was a major factor in the success of a California scam targeting Mormons. The scammers, themselves posing as Mormons, promised to triple investors’ money if they would contribute to a legal fund pushing for the sale of gold bullion from Israel to the Middle East. And these California Mormons were taken in, “in part due to their tendency to be trusting, especially of people in their religious community,” explains Greenspan.

Finally, your affect matters. This is the in-the-moment version of personality and it’s why there’s free wine at art auctions. It’s also why my wife and I weren’t allowed to sleep on the rock-bottom offer of $20,000 for a Vegas time-share. “Gullibility happens under pressure, when you don’t have time to think about things,” says Greenspan, “and it helps explain why smart people do dumb things.”

With the stamp of legal legitimacy, the Vegas time-share system had evolved to become nearly the perfect scam. You’ve got a believable situation, assault on cognition in the form of seemingly
airtight logic to buy, the perfect rube personality in the demographics of the people they stick on the bus in the first place, and heightened affect through the pressure to buy it now or never.

But you, dear reader, are now armed with the tools to avoid the fate of so many rubes. You can’t do much about the situation (that’s up to the scammers), and it’s tricky to alter your trusting personality, so focus on cognition and affect when making yourself scam-proof. First, you can be almost assured that any offer that’s on the table now-or-never is something you’ll wake up regretting. If you find yourself pressured to make a decision in the heat of the moment, always ask to sleep on it. Any legit offer will be there in the morning.

This also buys time to increase cognition. Try the phone-a-friend option. Outside the framework of the scammers’ believable situation, does a trusted friend think it sounds like a good deal? And do your research—all it takes is a quick online search for “Vegas time-share scam” to return enough chatter to make even the most wide-eyed rube think twice.

So just chill out. Think. Do your homework. And you’ll realize that the widow of the late Nigerian head of state is unlikely to transfer $20 million to your bank account, if only you pay the legal costs.

After I admitted to him how close I came to
buying a sucker time-share, Greenspan told me the following story.

“When I was dating my now ex-wife, my mom called up and said that my aunt Ruby was selling her jewelry and she could get me a great deal on an engagement ring. I said I wasn’t ready, but my mom pressed, and finally said she’d already bought the ring for me. My fatal mistake was saying ‘Yeah, OK, fine,’ and the next thing I knew I was getting congratulated on being engaged.”

Greenspan’s mother had duped him into marriage.

First, she created a believable situation—Aunt Ruby’s jewelry—which Greenspan hadn’t the cognitive background information or tenacity to fend off. And his personality was predisposed to trust his mother. And then his mom did something especially slick—when she said she’d already bought the ring, she ratcheted Greenspan’s affect, requiring an immediate decision.

Greenspan cracked. And so would you.

“On an airplane, you pick up SkyMall and you think Ooh, that’s cool!” says Stanford neuroscientist Brian Knutson. “And then you look at the price and say No way!” In a nutshell, this is the theory of oh-wow/oh-yikes shopping (my words). Knutson can see it in the brain.

He had undergrads evaluate items in a catalog and, “Sure enough, when people saw products they liked, a reward area in their brain lit up,” says Knutson. “Independently, a prefrontal area that monitors price lit up.” Whichever of these two ignitions was the most powerful—“oh wow!” or “oh yikes!”—won the shopping battle.

The application on the marketing side is obvious: You could use fMRI imaging to perfectly price a product so that the reward for
the target market is ever so slightly greater than the cost. People would buy and you’d make the max on each sale.