You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (28 page)

Your friend goes out on a date and tells you the other person was spontaneous, unpredictable, funny, and maybe a little dangerous. Your friend thinks she is in love. When you ask what this date does for a living, your friend says he is a podiatrist. Would this surprise you? Probably so, but why? What do you really know about foot doctors anyway? Are they the kind of people who would go skydiving one weekend and gamble on an illegal cockfight the next? Does this seem like the kind of thing a foot specialist would do, or do you see the foot specialist relaxing with a cluster of cats while perusing photo albums of exotic toenail fungi?

Unless you have spent time as a secretary of state, chances are you don’t know a lot about people who are different from you. For everyone else you haul around prejudices, some benign, some less so. It helps you think faster, to build models of the unknown in a way that allows you to make decisions effortlessly. Without filters, the world around you is chaos. Over time you develop shortcuts to cognition. Categories are a great way to make sense of things. When it comes to strangers, your first instinct is to fit them into archetypes to quickly determine their value or threat. These constructs are called the representativeness heuristic.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published a paper in 1973 that ferreted out the representative heuristic from the cluster of cognitive biases squirming in your mind. The following example is a mishmash of their research and others into the behavior:

In their study, subjects read a paragraph like the one above and were told the description came from one of a set of interviews with thirty engineers and seventy lawyers. Now, pretend you are in this study and answer the following question: Is it more likely Donald is an engineer or a lawyer?

This is where the representativeness heuristic sends you down the wrong path. If you are like most people, you think Donald is probably an engineer. He certainly matches the general vision you see when thinking of one. You completely ignore the fact there is a 70 percent chance he is a lawyer because, out of one hundred people, they interviewed only thirty engineers. Kahneman and Tversky say you make predictions with representativeness—the degree to which new information matches the existing information you have in your head. Sometimes, this information in your head is just a caricature of the actual thing. You think of a sheik, and you see a man in white robes and sandals. You think of a cowboy, and you see a hat, chaps, lasso, and gunbelt. You see an engineer and a lawyer, and the image above matches the engineer better. You toss aside the numbers. Your mental models aren’t accurate, nor do they usually need to be. They just need to pop right into your mind automatically and without effort. If your ancestors heard a rustling in the bushes, they were better off assuming something bad and hungry was headed their way. If you need medical attention, you would be correct to assume the big red cross above the sign that reads EMERGENCY indicates the right building to head toward, even though you can’t be sure it isn’t abandoned or some elaborate amusement park ride. Kahneman and Tversky’s research suggests that intuition ignores statistics. Intuition is bad at math.

Try again with this description:

Now, pretend in this study they interviewed seventy engineers and thirty lawyers. Knowing how the representativeness heuristic works, is it more likely Tom is an engineer or a lawyer? That’s right. It is more likely, statistically, that he is an engineer, no matter how well the description matches your heuristic model for lawyers.

The representativeness heuristic helps fuel several other cognitive missteps, like the conjunction fallacy. Here is another example from Kahneman and Tversky’s research:

Is it more likely Linda is a bank teller or that she is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement? Most people who read the above description pick the second answer, although it is statistically more likely she is a bank teller. There are more bank tellers in the world than bank tellers who are feminists, no matter what sort of background they may have.

The conjunction fallacy builds on your representativeness heuristic. The more things you hear about which match your mental models, the more likely they seem. In the example above, you can match both bank tellers and feminists with the description, so it seems twice as likely. Statistically though, it goes in the other direction. You don’t naturally think in statistical, logical, rational terms. You first go to your emotional core and think of people in terms of narratives and characters that match your preconceived notions of the sort of people you have been exposed to in the past or have imagined thanks to cultural osmosis.

Kahneman and Tversky proved this by trying the same sort of experiment on professional futurists—people who forecast the likelihood of future events. In 1982 they asked 115 forecasters to predict which of two options was more likely to happen in the next year. They divided them into two groups, and asked one to estimate the chances of the United States and the Soviet Union suspending all relations. The other group estimated the odds Russia would invade Poland in addition to suspending diplomacy with the U.S. The second group said that their scenario, with twice the number of events, was more likely to happen. Their representativeness reserves had been tapped twice, which made it seem more possible than the single event.

Representativeness heuristics are useful, but also dangerous. They can help you avoid danger and seek help, but they can also lead to generalizations and prejudices. When you expect people to be a certain way because they seem to represent your notions of the sort of people in that category, you are not so smart.

You scan the aisles in the liquor store looking for a good wine. It’s a little overwhelming—all those weird bottle shapes with illustrations of castles and vineyards and kangaroos. And all those varieties? Riesling, Shiraz, Cabernet—this is serious business. You look to your left and see bottles for around $12; to your right you see bottles for $60. You think back to all the times you’ve seen people tasting wine in movies, holding it up to the light and commenting on tannins and barrels and soil quality—the most expensive wine has to be the better one, right?

Well, you are not so smart. But don’t fret—neither are all those connoisseurs who swish fermented grape juice around and spit it back out.

Wine tasting is a big deal to a lot of people. It can even be a professional career. It goes back thousands of years, but the modern version, with all the terminology like “notes,” “tears,” “integration,” and “connectedness,” goes back a few hundred. Wine tasters will mention all sorts of things they can taste in a fine wine, as if they were a human spectrograph with the ability to sense the molecular makeup of their beverage. Research shows, however, this perception can be hijacked, fooled, and might just be completely wrong.

In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux.

In one experiment, he got fifty-four oenology (the study of wine tasting and wine making) undergraduates together and had them taste one glass of red wine and one glass of white wine. He had them describe each wine in as much detail as their expertise would allow. What he didn’t tell them was both were the same wine. He just dyed the white one red. In the other experiment, he asked the experts to rate two different bottles of red wine. One was very expensive, the other was cheap. Again, he tricked them. This time he had put the cheap wine in both bottles. So what were the results?

The tasters in the first experiment, the one with the dyed wine, described the sorts of berries and grapes and tannins they could detect in the red wine just as if it really was red. Every single one, all fifty-four, could not tell it was white. In the second experiment, the one with the switched labels, the subjects went on and on about the cheap wine in the expensive bottle. They called it “complex” and “rounded.” They called the same wine in the cheap bottle “weak” and “flat.”

Another experiment, at Caltech, pitted five bottles of wine against one another. They ranged in price from $5 to $90. Similarly, the experimenters put cheap wine in the expensive bottles—but this time they put the tasters in a brain scanner. While they tasted the wine, the same parts of the brain would light up in the machine every time, but with the wine the tasters thought was expensive, one particular region of the brain became more active. Another study had tasters rate cheese eaten with two different wines. One wine they were told was from California, the other from North Dakota. The same wine was in both bottles. The tasters rated the cheese they ate with the California wine as being better quality, and they ate more of it.

So is the fancy world of wine tasting all pretentious bunk? Not exactly. The wine tasters in the experiments above were being influenced by the nasty beast of expectation. A wine expert’s objectivity and powers of taste under normal circumstance might be amazing, but Brochet’s manipulations of the environment misled his subjects enough to dampen their acumen. An expert’s own expectation can act like Kryptonite on the expert’s superpowers. Expectation, as it turns out, is just as important as raw sensation. The buildup to an experience can completely change how you interpret the information reaching your brain from your otherwise objective senses. In psychology, true objectivity is pretty much considered to be impossible. Memories, emotions, conditioning, and all sorts of other mental flotsam taint every new experience you gain. In addition to all this, your expectations powerfully influence the final vote in your head over what you believe to be reality. So when tasting a wine, or watching a movie, or going on a date, or listening to a new stereo through $300 audio cables—some of what you experience comes from within and some comes from without. Expensive wine is like anything else that is expensive: The expectation it will taste better actually makes it taste better.

In one Dutch study, participants were put in a room with posters proclaiming the awesomeness of high-definition and were told they would be watching a new high-definition program. Afterward, the subjects said they found the sharper, more colorful television to be a superior experience to standard programming. What they didn’t know was they were actually watching a standard definition image. The expectation of seeing a better-quality image led them to believe they had. Recent research shows about 18 percent of people who own high-definition televisions are still watching standard definition programming on the set, but they think they are getting a better picture.

In the early eighties, Pepsi ran a marketing campaign where they touted the success of their product over Coca-Cola in blind taste tests. They called this “The Pepsi Challenge.” Psychologists had already determined you choose your favorite products often not by their inherent value, but because the marketing campaigns and logos and such have cast a spell over you called brand awareness. You start to identify yourself with one marketing campaign over another. That’s what happened in all the taste tests up until the Pepsi Challenge. People liked Coca-Cola’s advertising more than Pepsi’s, so even though they tasted pretty much the same, when they saw that bright red can with a white ribbon people chose Coke. So for the Pepsi Challenge, they removed the logos. At first, the researchers thought they should put some sort of label on the glasses. So they went with M and Q. People said they liked Pepsi, labeled M, better than Coke, labeled Q. Irritated by this, Coca-Cola did their own study and put Coke in both glasses. Again, M won the contest. It turned out it wasn’t the soda; people just liked the letter M better than the letter Q.

You look for cues from our environment whenever you find things you like. These cues help you to get back to the good stuff by recognizing what got you the reward last time. For the testers, the two products tasted pretty much the same. So, forced to make a choice, they moved to another set of cues to make their decision—which letter was more pleasant. Apparently, M is better than Q, and in other research people tend to pick A instead of B and 1 instead of 2. Branding works the same way. Vodka, for instance, has no flavor. So advertisers can’t sell you on how great it tastes. Instead, they hijack your natural affinity for visual shortcuts by pummeling your brain with advertising. When you are standing in front of all those vodka bottles in the liquor store, the brands hope their marketing campaign has built enough expectation in your consciousness to lead you to their product.