Anchoring is such a basic part of human cognition that it extends not just to how we value puppies or material goods, but even to intangibles like life itself. One recent study, for example, asked people how much they would pay for safety improvements that would reduce the annual risk of automobile fatalities. Interviewers would start by asking interviewees whether they would be willing to pay some fairly low price, either £25 or £75. Perhaps because nobody wished to appear to be a selfish lout, answers were always in the affirmative. The fun came after: the experimenter would just keep pushing and pushing until he (or she) found a given subject’s upper limit. When the experimenter started with £25 per year, subjects could be driven up to, on average, £149. In contrast, when the experimenter started at £75 per year, subjects tended to go up almost 40 percent higher to an average maximum of £232.
Indeed, virtually every choice that we make, economic or not, is, in some way or another, influenced by how the problem is posed. Consider, for example, the following scenario:
Imagine that the nation is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:
If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved.
Most people would choose Program A, not wanting to put all the lives at risk. But people’s preferences flip if the same choices are instead posed this way:
If Program A is adopted, 400 people will die.
If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.
“Saving 200 lives” for certain (out of 600) somehow seems like a good idea, whereas letting 400 die (out of the same 600) seems bad—even though they represent exactly the same outcome. Only the wording of the question, what psychologists call framing, has been changed.
Politicians and advertisers take advantage of our susceptibility to framing all the time. A death tax sounds far more ominous than an inheritance tax, and a community that is described as having a crime rate of 3.7 percent is likely to get more resources than one that is described as 96.3 percent crime free.
Framing has the power that it does because choice, like belief, is inevitably mediated by memory. And, as we have already seen, the memory that evolution equipped us with is inherently and inevitably shaped by momentary contextual details. Change the context (here, the actual words used), and you often change the choice. “Death tax” summons thoughts of death, a fate that we all fear, whereas “inheritance tax” may make us think only of the truly wealthy, suggesting a tax scarcely relevant to the average taxpayer. “Crime rates” makes us think of crime; “crime-free rates” triggers thoughts of safety. What we think of — what we summon into memory as we come to a decision — often makes all the difference.
Indeed, the whole field of advertising is based on that premise: if a product brings pleasant associations to mind, no matter how irrelevant, you’re more likely to buy it.[24]
One Chicago law firm recently put the power of memory and suggestion to the ultimate test, flogging not potato chips or beer but the dissolution of marriage. Their tool? A 48-foot-wide billboard made of three panels — the torso of an exceptionally attractive woman, breasts all but bursting out of her lacy black bra; the torso of a man no less handsome, shirtless, with his well-oiled muscles bulging; and, just above the law firm’s name and contact information, a slogan containing just five words: LIFE’s SHORT — GET A DIVORCE.
In a species less driven by contextual memory and spontaneous priming, I doubt that sign would have any impact. But in a species like ours, there’s reason to worry. To seek a divorce is, of course, to make one of the most difficult choices a human being can make. One must weigh hopes for the future against fears of loneliness, regret, financial implications, and (especially) concerns about children. Few people make such decisions lightly. In a rational world, a titillating billboard wouldn’t make a dime’s difference. In the real world of flesh-and-blood human beings governed by klugey brains, people who weren’t otherwise thinking of divorce might well be induced to start. What’s more, the billboard might frame how people think about divorce, leading them to evaluate their marriage not in terms of companionship, family, and financial security, but whether it includes enough ripped bodices and steamy sexual encounters.
If this seems speculative, that’s because the law firm took the sign down, under pressure, after just a couple of weeks, so there’s no direct evidence. But a growing literature of real-world marketing studies backs me up. One study, for example, asked people how likely they were to buy a car in the next six months. People who were asked whether they’d buy a car were almost twice as likely to actually do so than those who weren’t asked. (Small wonder that many car dealers ask not whether you are going to buy a car but when.) The parallel to a lawyer’s leading question is exact, the mechanism the same. Just as context influences belief by jostling the current contents of our thoughts, it also affects choice.
The cluster of phenomena I’ve just discussed — framing, anchoring, susceptibility to advertising, and the like — is only part of the puzzle; our choices are also contaminated by memories retrieved from within. Consider, for example, a study that examined how office workers, some feeling hungry, some not, would select which snack they’d like to have a week hence, in the late afternoon. Seventy-two percent of those who were hungry at the time of the decision (several days before they would be having the snack in question) chose unhealthful snacks, like potato chips or candy bars. Among the people who weren’t feeling hungry, only 42 percent chose the same unhealthful snacks; most instead committed themselves to apples and bananas. Everybody knows an apple is a better choice (consistent with our long-term goal of staying healthy), but when we feel hungry, memories of the joys of salt and refined sugar win out.
All of this is, of course, a function of evolution. Rationality, pretty much by definition, demands a thorough and judicious balancing of evidence, but the circuitry of mammalian memory simply isn’t attuned to that purpose. The speed and context-sensitivity of memory no doubt helped our ancestors, who had to make snap decisions in a challenging environment. But in modern times, this former asset has become a liability. When context tells us one thing, but rationality another, rationality often loses.
Evolutionary inertia made a third significant contribution to the occasional irrationality of modern humans by calibrating us to expect a degree of uncertainty that is largely (and mercifully) absent in contemporary life. Until very recently, our ancestors could not count on the success of next year’s harvest, and a bird in hand was certainly better than two, or even three, in the bush. Absent refrigerators, preservatives, and grocery stores, mere survival was far less assured than it is today — in the immortal words of Thomas Hobbes, life was “nasty, brutish, and short.”
As a result, over hundreds of millions of years, evolution selected strongly for creatures that lived largely in the moment. In every species that’s ever been studied, animals tend to follow what is known as a “hyperbolic discounting curve” — fancy words for the fact that organisms tend to value the present far more than the future. And the closer temptation is, the harder it is to resist. For example, at a remove of 10 seconds, a pigeon can recognize (so to speak) that it’s worth waiting 14 seconds to get four ounces of food rather than a single ounce in 10 seconds — but if you wait 9 seconds and let the pigeon change its choice at the last moment, it will. At the remove of just 1 second, the desire for food now overwhelms the desire for more food later; the pigeon refuses to wait an extra 4 seconds, like a hungry human noshing on chips while he waits for dinner to arrive.
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The future of advertising on the Internet is no doubt going to revolve around