Today is one of those days that have
to be marked in the calendar. It is the second consecutive day with clear sky
and sunshine in The Netherlands. Everything is brighter, millions of Dutch
people are on the streets enjoying the sun and for the first time this year we
have temperatures with two digits. To make things a bit more clear to non-Dutch
readers, in The Netherlands, between November and March, the best way to see
the sun is to search for pictures or hope that it will be shown on TV.
But let’s leave the climate and
weather patterns in my host country and think of the following questions were
asked to college students (dating is both important and common):
“How happy are you these days?”
“How many dates did you have in
the last month?”
Do you think that the answers to these questions are related
(correlated)?
It turns out that they are not. The correlation coefficient between
the answers to the two questions is close to zero. A decent conclusion is that happiness and dating frequency are
unrelated.
But, there is a “catch” to this. When the two questions are presented in
the following order, things change.
“How many dates did you have in
the last month?”
“How happy are you these days?”
When the order of the questions is reversed, the correlation
coefficient between the answers goes to an amazing 0.65 (as I remember).
This might not seem “very high”, but when it comes to psychology this is a
really high value.
What happened? How come, when we ask about happiness first
and about dating second there is no correlation and when we ask about dating
first and happiness second there is a high correlation? Are people unaware
of how happy they are?
The answer for all these questions is “the affect heuristic”. Let’s see how it works. When we ask
about happiness first, people simply give an answer to this question. At the
same time this question is not that easy to answer. On the other hand, when we
ask people about the number of dates they had in the last month, the answer is
not a self-evaluation (such as happiness), rather it is a number that can be
easily remembered. There is no wonder that the answers for the two questions
are unrelated.
However, when we ask people first about their dating frequency in the last month,
the easy numeric answer triggers some emotions. For example, if someone
answers that she had 15 dates (one every other day), a positive feeling warms
her heart. When the more difficult question about general happiness is asked,
substitution occurs. As I said, how happy you are these days is not very easy
to answer and when searching for the answer, one will feel good of having 15
dates in the last month (or miserable because of zero dates in the last month)
and subsequently answer that she is generally happy (unhappy in the zero dates
case).
Similar results emerged from a study conducted
over the telephone that asked the following questions:
“How’s the weather there?”
“How happy are you these days?”
As you may have guessed, when
asked in this order, the two answers were highly correlated, but when the order
of the questions was reversed, there was no correlation.
The affect heuristic has very profound implications in our lives other
than just happiness and college students’ dating habits.
Take for example financial
investments. If Joe loves, let’s say, Apple products to the extent that he is
willing to sleep with his gadgets, then Joe might put all his money into Apple
shares. However, this is not necessarily a smart choice. When choosing in which shares to invest money the correct question to
answer is “Is the price of company’s X shares going to rise in the foreseeable future?”.
However, this is a very hard question to answer and one will be likely to
answer the easier question of “Do I like company’s X products?”. The answer
to this second question comes immediately to mind because we know if we like or
not something.
The affect heuristic goes beyond
decisions regarding what kind of investments to make. What we feel or how we feel about something influences our perceptions
on more objective aspects.
For example, people who are against nuclear power simply because they feel that
it is wrong will overestimate the risks
of nuclear power and will underestimate the benefits it brings. If we think
with our feet in cold water, in the entire history there have been only two
major accidents concerning nuclear power – Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in
2012. Despite their disastrous consequences, none of these accidents led to
meltdowns or nuclear explosions. Moreover, there are numerous nuclear power
plants that function without problems (see the example of France) and provide
power without carbon emissions.
People who are against nuclear power will dismiss my arguments as
futile. Moreover, they will ignore
the benefits of building a nuclear power plant close to their city (such as
economic development, cleaner air, an increase in the higher educated
population segment etc.) because they simply have negative feelings towards
nuclear power.
It goes similarly for other
issues which bear a high emotional load such as abortion and the role of the
Church in society. People who are
against abortion, for example, will
dismiss any rational arguments that go against their beliefs, not because they
are stupid or incapable of sound reasoning, but because all rational arguments
are close to zero when faced with the powerful emotional load that the topic
carries.
In politics things go similar. People
who like candidate Y will perceive her as more honest and competent even in the
absence of real proof. If someone hates candidate Z, then virtually no
reasonable arguments in favor of Z will have any influence on voting
intentions. Most interestingly, when
candidate Z is deeply disliked and some really hard facts are in favor of Z,
then people who hate Z will generate counterarguments or even undermine the
hard facts simply to support their feelings towards Z.
In the previous post on the Availability Heuristic, I mentioned that in many cases what is salient in our minds has some
emotional load. For example, people perceive that airplanes are more dangerous
than cars, despite the facts that there are more car accidents and victims of
them than there are airplane accidents and victims of them.
This is a classic example of the
availability heuristic because most people can remember easily examples of
airplane accidents, but it is rather hard to recall (all) car accidents.
At the same time, I believe that
it is not only about availability in memory of instances. This is not to say
that shootings are less available in memory than swimming pool accidents,
rather I argue why shootings are more
easily stored and retrieved from memory than swimming pool accidents.
A shooting or plane crash has
higher emotional load than swimming pool and car accidents do. When we hear about a person dyeing because
she was shot in a supermarket, we feel very powerful emotions such as fear,
insecurity, injustice etc. At the same time when we hear about a person dyeing
because she drowned in a public swimming pool, we feel less of these emotions.
The availability heuristic is
real and in some cases emotions play a role.
In the business area, the affect
heuristic plays huge roles in marketing, management and human resources.
Not only do we buy things we like, we also dismiss alternatives and
generate arguments in favor of what we like. For example if you like to buy
clothes from shop A you will underestimate the quality of clothes from shop B.
Very likely you will do so even in the presence of some hard facts or direct
comparisons.
We take or reject (if affordable) jobs because we feel good about the office environment. Managers
support projects they like and projects proposed by people who they like.
Before ending this post, I’d like
to go back a bit to what emotions are
and to the ups and downs of trusting our emotions.
Emotions are primitive (in an evolutionary sense) responses to outside
stimuli. We feel good about something we like and we feel bad about things
we don’t like. What we like and what we
dislike has, to a certain extent, an evolutionary role. For example we
dislike food that smells bad because “bad smell” is an indicator of potential
threats. Similarly we like (prefer) things that are familiar simply because we
know that what we know is or is not dangerous. Unfamiliar things are perceived
more dangerous than non-dangerous.
To a large extent our emotions provide useful information. Take,
for example a potential job. How you
feel in the office environment, how you feel about your future colleagues could
be valuable indicators of your future job satisfaction and job performance.
The downside of the affect heuristic comes from mismatching the
emotions and their source. Putting things a bit differently, the shortcomings of the affect heuristic
come from answering one question with the answer of “how do I feel?”.
For example, if you have a good feeling about the work environment in a certain job,
you have to be sure that the good feeling actually comes from the work
environment and not because you eat a chocolate 15 minutes before. Similarly,
if you have a good feeling about an apartment you consider renting such as “it
feels like home”, you have to be sure that this feeling comes from the
apartment and not because it is a sunny day and you feel good about it.
Being critical and even doubting our own feelings is a hard thing to
do. However, most likely it will be beneficial.
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