Brain Trust (8 page)

You can hear examples of the tritone paradox
and more cool auditory illusions at Diana Deutsch’s faculty homepage:
deutsch.ucsd.edu
.

You know how to pull a song out of your music
library that rocks or soothes. And you know about services like the Internet radio station Pandora or the iTunes “Genius” feature that similarly recommend new music. But what about Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” or other songs that first soothe and then rock, or vice versa, or ping-pong moods from verse to chorus? Drexel University’s Youngmoo Kim created an online game, MoodSwings, (
music.ece.drexel.edu/mssp
) to gather real-time data about songs. As you listen to a song, you move your cursor around quadrants labeled with emotions and for the time your cursor overlaps the areas most chosen by previous users, you rack up points. “Imagine you feel like crap but want to be uplifted,” says Kim. With your help, MoodSwings will soon know which songs fit the desired mood trajectory.

Why do people have such a hard time reaching a compromise? Blame fairness.

That’s the message of behavioral economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University. In many types of negotiations, he says, “People aren’t trying to get the maximum payoff, they’re
just trying to get what they see as fair.” And if there’s wiggle room in what’s fair, parties on opposing sides are likely to wiggle toward opinions of fairness that are personally beneficial, eventually entrenching like four-hundred-pound sumo wrestlers staring each other down across the ring.

Loewenstein offers the following example: Imagine you and I are splitting twenty poker chips. When all’s said and done, each chip you’re holding will be worth five dollars and each chip I’m holding will be worth twenty dollars (ha!). Now we have to negotiate how to split the twenty chips.

What do you think is fair? Maybe you propose keeping sixteen chips and giving me four. That way, we each get eighty dollars. That’s fair.

But wait—the chips are worth more to me than they are to you! What are you going to do with a measly eighty dollars? If I keep all the chips I’ll have four hundred dollars. Now that’s worth something. Certainly you can see it’s better to squeeze the most out of the system, even if you don’t happen to be the beneficiary this time, right?

This is an example of a self-serving bias—your idea of fairness is influenced by what’s best for you. But there’s still hope for agreement. If the top range of my fairness overlaps the bottom range of your fairness, there’s shared territory for a deal. But if I’m only willing to give eight chips max, and you’re only willing to accept twelve chips min, then we’re at loggerheads. In this case, Loewenstein explains, “People are frequently willing to incur a loss rather than take what they see as an unfair payoff.”

In other words, we’d rather burn money than share with a cheater. No deal.

To see if self-serving bias jumps the confines of abstract poker chip games, Loewenstein and his colleague Linda Babcock sent letters to all the school board presidents (on one side) and heads of teachers’ unions (on the other) in Pennsylvania. The letters
asked the boards or unions to make a fair list of the nearby towns that are comparable to their own—like valuing a house, salaries in comparable districts help negotiators set teacher salaries in a target district. Loewenstein and Babcock found that the school board heads consistently listed towns with low teacher salaries, while the heads of teachers’ unions consistently listed towns with high teacher salaries.

Which towns were fairly comparable? Well, whichever ones allowed school board presidents to propose lower salaries or union heads to propose higher ones. And generating lists with little overlap was a strong predictor of an eventual strike.

So if you believe you’re on the fair side of the fence and I believe I’m on the other fair side of the fence, and between these fences is a gaping demilitarized zone, what’s the negotiation solution? “Well,” says Loewenstein, “we did a lot of research trying to debias it.” How can you remove this pesky self-serving bias? Nix writing an essay about the other side’s point of view. It didn’t work. Having both sides list the holes in their own case helped a bit.

But check this out: Rather than trying to diffuse self-serving bias, Loewenstein recommends using it to create a solution—the stronger the bias, the better. That’s because a strong bias can blind combatants to the idea that a third party could see it any way but their own.

It’s not just that I would like at least eight poker chips, but that I believe the abstract idea of fairness is certain to award me at least these eight chips. And you’re equally certain you’ll get at least the twelve chips at the bottom end of your fairness scale. So we’re both happy to let a fair third party make the call, both blithely confident that the outcome will be the one we want. Self-serving bias makes us both likely to agree to arbitration.

When you notice a demilitarized zone between the two fences of entrenched parties, rather than trying to nudge these fences
closer together—toward the shared space of agreement—let them stand apart. And pick an arbitrator to split the difference. We’re likely to be equally surprised when this impartial third party awards us ten chips each, but you gotta admit it’s fair.

George Loewenstein explored the difference
between how much people want something and then how much they like it once they get it. With drugs, people almost universally want them more than they end up liking them. With sex, it can be the other way around: People can end up liking sex more than they initially wanted it, especially as both men and women get older, and with more time in a relationship.

One second you’re standing at the 7-Eleven checkout counter with a Slim Jim and a Styrofoam cup of syrupy hazelnut espresso and the next second—bam!—you’re a gazillionaire! Hello château on the French Riviera!

That’s the lottery.

The lottery’s also a stack of one-dollar slips of toilet paper, which eventually leave you unable to afford Slim Jims and gas station coffee.

Assuming drawings actually are random, science can’t help you pick the winning numbers. But, that said, some fiendishly simple stats can make the dollar you put down likely to win back that dollar and more. Here’s how.

“Find a drawing in which the jackpot is unusually large and
the number of tickets is unusually low,” says Emory mathematician Skip Garibaldi. The March 6, 2007, Mega Millions drawing reached a record $390 million; 212 million tickets were sold. Elaine and Barry Messner, of New Jersey, split the pot with truck driver Eddie Nabors, of Dalton, Georgia, who, when asked what he would do with the money famously said, “I’m going to fish.”

But it was a bad bet.

Despite the massive prize, the huge number of tickets sold meant that a dollar spent on this lottery returned only $0.74 (versus $0.95 for roulette). In fact, Mega Millions and Powerball have never once been a good bet: Extreme jackpots generate extreme ticket sales, increasing the chance of a split pot—the average return on a one-dollar Mega Millions ticket is only about $0.55.

“But state lotteries don’t get the same kind of press,” says Skip. In rare cases, a state lottery jackpot will roll over a couple times without jacking ticket sales.

Here’s the formula for finding a good lottery bet: Look for an after-tax, cash value of the jackpot that exceeds 0.8 times the odds against you, and in which the number of tickets sold remains less than one-fifth this jackpot. If this makes absolutely no sense or if you happen to be away from your spreadsheets, here’s how to approximate the formula: Look for a jackpot that’s rolled over at least five times and that remains below $40 million. It’s a good bet that it’s a good bet. And by a good bet, I mean a positive expected rate of return—over time, a dollar invested returns more than a dollar. To wit: a $1.00 ticket for the March 7, 2007, Lotto Texas drawing had an expected rate of return of $1.30. That rocks.

Take a minute to scroll through online lottery listings till you find one that meets the criteria for a good bet.

OK, OK, so you finally found one—what now?

Pick the most unpopular numbers, that’s what. By playing unpopular numbers you won’t win any more or less often, but you’ll less often split the pot with other winners.

Don’t pick the number one. It’s on about 15 percent of all tickets. Similarly, avoid lucky numbers 7, 13, 23, 32, 42, and 48. Better are 26, 34, 44, 45, and especially overlooked number 46. Avoid any recognizable pattern, but give slight preference to numbers at the edge of the ticket, which are underused. In mathematical terms, picking a unique ticket makes the jackpot look bigger.

If players in a 1995 UK National Lottery drawing had played unpopular numbers, they might’ve avoided splitting a £16 million pot 133 ways. That’s right—133 people picked the numbers 7, 17, 23, 32, 38, 42, and 48, all straight down the ticket’s central column. Each got £120,000. Play smart over enough drawings, and eventually you’ll win more than you spend. That is, if you don’t run out of money first.

If you want to get deeper into the lottery
thing, Garibaldi has accessible and not-so-accessible versions of the paper linked from his faculty bio.

Once you win the lottery, you’ll certainly
have more time to look deep into your conversation partner’s eyes and know her true feelings, right? Wrong. In a series of studies at the University of California–San Francisco researchers found that people of low socioeconomic status were better than wealthier subjects at recognizing and interpreting others’ emotions, including being better at predicting emotion from snapshots of eyes.

Imagine M&M’s. There’s the crinkle of the bag, the tinkling sound of hard shells shifting inside; when you pop one in your mouth, a brief hint of sweetness as the shell starts to dissolve, followed by the meaty burst of chocolate. Do you let the shell melt slowly or do you crunch immediately into the center?

I bet your mouth is watering (mine is …). I bet you’d really like an M&M right about now (I do). And according to Carey Morewedge, decision science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, you should. “There’s a long history of research showing that cues of desired stimulants—the smell or the thought of steak or cigarettes—sensitizes you to the stimulus,” he says. A whiff or a remembrance makes you want it more.

Sure enough, when Morewedge had subjects imagine moving M&M’s from one bowl to another, they then ate more M&M’s from a bowl he gave them to snack on. They were sensitized—primed and ready to munch.

But when Morewedge had subjects imagine actually eating the M&M’s, they then ate fewer when given the chance. The more candy subjects imagined eating, the less they actually ate. The same was true of cheddar cheese squares—subjects who imagined eating more actually ate fewer.

The lesson here is obvious. If you imagine consuming any specific food, you can inoculate yourself against gorging on it in real life.

Try imagining eating potato chips before sitting down with a bag to watch football. Or imagine eating Cherry Garcia before touring the Ben & Jerry’s factory. Or chocolate chip cookies while baking them for your kids. In all cases, you’ll be likely to eat less once temptation is at hand.