A dollar is a dollar is a dollar…Right?

The purpose of money is to provide a uniform method for valuing things.  It doesn’t matter whether I have a crisp new $1 bill in my pocket, an old dollar bill, four quarters, or even a check made out to me for a $1.  They all have the same value.  This currency system allows us great freedom to buy and sell things and services.

Despite the great flexibility that money permits us, people have trouble treating every dollar the same as every other dollar.  Here are two examples.

First, sociologist Viviana Zelizer in her fantastic book The Social Meaning of Money has done an extensive analysis of the way that people use money.  One thing that becomes clear quickly is that people really do create different types of money to help them organize their lives.  As a simple example, people treat birthday money differently than other money.  For example, if a relative gives you $25 for your birthday, you are likely to spend it on something nice for yourself rather than on bills, even though the gift money is part of your total pile of money once it has been given to you.  That is, we keep the money psychologically separate. 

One way to see this idea of different types of money is in gambling behavior.  There is a phenomenon that arises in research on gambling called the “house money effect.”  Basically, people get more risky in their bets when gambling after they have won a bit.  The idea is that the money that they have won isn’t really theirs.  They are gambling with the house’s money.  Somehow, that money is less valuable, and so people are more willing to risk it. 

The second example ties the value of money to our motivational system as well.  A study by Adam Alter and Danny Oppenheimer in the October, 2008 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, looked at how the ease of thinking about money influences the value of money.  This ease of thinking is usually called fluency.  Alter and Oppenheimer suggested that being more fluent with a type of money would make that money seem more valuable.

To test this idea, they did a number of studies in which they contrasted the value of a familiar form of money with an unfamiliar form of money.  For example, in one study, the familiar form of money was a one-dollar bill.  The unfamiliar form of money was a Sacagawea dollar.  They gave people a list of inexpensive items (like paper clips and Hershey’s kisses) and asked how many of them they thought they could buy for a dollar.  People suggested that they would be able to buy far more of the items with the familiar one-dollar bill than with the unfamiliar Sacagawea dollar.  This result suggests that people found the familiar form of money more valuable than the unfamiliar form of money.

Findings like these suggest that the psychology of money is far more complex than the economics of money.  For economists, every dollar is the same as every other dollar.  For people, though, some dollars have different uses than others.  Perhaps more importantly, some dollars have more value than others.  

There are important implications for research like this.  Politicians tend to assume that the free-hand of the market will work to ensure that businesses run efficiently.  However, this belief makes many assumptions.  Among these assumptions are that there are no systematic biases in people’s economic behavior that will distort the way markets operate.  These results suggest that there are systematic biases in the way people treat money all the way down to the level of the value of a single dollar.

Dream Global, Act Local

When you want to motivate someone to do something, you tell them to Dream Big, and to Reach for the Stars.  That is, of course, important advice.  It is hard to achieve greatness without ever dreaming of greatness.  An important question, though, is how you should go about achieving that greatness after you have dreamed it?

An interesting study in the November, 2008 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Linda Houser-Marko and Kennon Sheldon sheds some light on that question.  They point out that there is lots of previous research (much of it by Dan Wegner and Robin Vallacher) that points out that people are able to identify the actions they are carrying out at a variety of different levels of generality. For example, imagine that you are talking on the phone in order to ask your friend whether you can borrow her car.  If someone stopped you in the middle of the conversation and asked you what you were doing, you could say “begging for a car,” or perhaps “asking a question” or even “speaking into the phone.”  The first of these is a very general statement of what you are doing.  The last of these is a very specific action that is part of the more general action of begging for a car. 

When you dream big, you are usually thinking about a grand and general action.  You might want to become a great musician, get a good grade in a class, or perhaps get a rewarding job, or even make the world a safer place.  To carry out any of these big goals, you also need to carry out a series of smaller steps.  For example, getting an A in a class might require studying a certain number of hours each week, or practicing skills from the class, or spending an amount of time writing.

When you are in the process of trying to achieve a big goal, how should you think about your actions?

Houser-Marko and Sheldon’s data suggest that you should focus on the specific actions that are part of the broader goal.  The reason why you should focus on actions, is that you may sometimes fail along the way toward trying to achieve the broader goal.  For example, if you want to get an A in the class, you might set the goal of studying at least 10 hours a week for the class.  Imagine you have a difficult week, or perhaps a strong temptation comes up.  You might study only 6 hours for the class in one week.  If you focus on the general goal of getting an A, then you will feel worse about this failure than if you focus just on the local goal of studying for 10 hours.  The idea is that small failures along the way are more likely to be seen as chipping away at the possibility that you will achieve the broader goal when you focus only on that general goal than if you focus on the specific actions.  If you start to feel bad about your prospects for success at the larger goal, you may give up altogether. 

So, these findings suggest that when you dream, you should dream globally.  Set your sights on high achievement.  But when it comes time to actually achieve your goal, act locally.  Find specific actions that will bring you toward your goal. Even if you stumble on the way to the goal, if you focus on the specific actions, you will not see your failure as a sign that you will not succeed at your dreams.

What is your pain and suffering worth?

The civil courts are one of the most humane systems society has invented.  We take property damage, pain, suffering, and lost wages that have been caused by the negligence or even the willful actions of others and translate them into a dollar amount.  This system allows people to settle their disputes peacefully.  But it does rely on our ability to translate things like pain and suffering into a monetary value.

What factors influence the way we judge the value of intangible elements like pain and suffering?

There was an  interesting paper exploring this issue in the August, 2008 issue of Psychological Science by Eugene Caruso, Dan Gilbert, and Tim Wilson.  They looked at the value that people give to things in the past and in the future.  Consider, for example, an auto accident.  A woman in her car is struck head-on by another car driven by a man who didn’t pay attention to a stop-sign.  The man is clearly at fault.  The woman is injured and it will take 6 months for her to heal.  How much should she be awarded by the insurance company for her pain and suffering?  The researchers asked this question in two ways.  In one situation, the accident was 6 months ago, and the woman is now completely healed.  In the other, the accident just happened, and she is beginning her recovery period.  They found that people were willing to award the woman twice as much when the pain and suffering was yet to happen than when it was now over.  So, future pain and suffering was more valuable than past pain and suffering. 

One interesting side-note, people do not believe that they ought to value the present and future differently.  The researchers did some studies in which they asked both the past and future questions to the same people.  In this case, people gave the same value to past and future events.  However, if they saw the past question first, then the values they gave to both events was lower than if they saw the future question first. 

It is also worth pointing out that this effect was not limited to negative events.  In another study, people were asked how much they would want to be paid for 10 days worth of boring work.  People asked for more money if they were asking for work they had yet to do than if they were being asked for payment for work they had already completed.

So, what does this mean?  I guess that depends on whether you are the insurance company or the person who has suffered damage…Insurance companies ought to wait to place any value on pain and suffering until they are over.  They will seem less valuable when they are finished than while they are ongoing.  On the other hand, if you have suffered damage, your pain and suffering will have the most value while you are going through it.   

If you’re not in a group, you better have a plan.

Much of your life is spent doing routine things.  On weekdays, you have a set of actions you take out of habit to wake up, get ready to leave your house, go to work or school and so on through the day.  You also have some strategies for helping you to remember things that vary from day to day.  You may have a to-do list or an agenda.  You might place little post-it notes around your home or office to remind you to do things.

But how do you make sure that you do things that are really rare?  By definition, you have no routines for those.

A study by David Nickerson and Todd Rogers in the February, 2010 issue of Psychological Science examined this question by looking at voting behavior.

There is research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues that it can often be helpful to envision a specific plan (which he calls an implementation intention) when you need to perform an action that is out of the ordinary.  Voting can be a pain, for example.  If election day is during the week (as it often is), you have to arrange your day to get to a polling station at a time when you can afford to wait if there is a line.  That requires thinking carefully about your schedule for that day and choosing a time of day that makes sense to go. 

Do these plans actually help you?

Nickerson and Rogers built a study into calls made to nearly 300,000 voters in the Democratic Presidential Primary election in Pennsylvania 2008.  They selected only registered voters who rarely vote in the primary elections.  Some voters were just called and reminded to vote.  A standard “Get out the vote” call.  Some were called and asked to predict whether they thought they would vote in the upcoming primary.  A third group was asked to think specifically about how they would get to the polls on election day in order to vote.  That is, they had to form an implementation intention.  Later, the voting records were checked to determine the proportion of people receiving each type of call who actually voted.

The results were interesting.

People who lived in a family with 2 or more registered voters in the house were completely unaffected by the type of call they received.  They were just as likely to vote whether they got a call or not and the type of call they received did not matter.

The results were quite different for people who were the only registered voter in their home.  These people were much more likely to vote if they were asked to form a specific plan than if they were just reminded to vote or asked to predict whether they would vote. 

What does this mean?  Obviously, performing actions that go beyond the ordinary is difficult.  In this primary election, only about 45% of registered Democrats actually voted, so most people either were not interested or could not find a way to get to the polls. 

If you live with a group, then it is easier for everyone in the group to talk about their plans.  It is also easier get support from others to help you satisfy your goals.  For example, all of you might go to the polls together.

When you are the only one responsible for an action, though, you don’t have other people to discuss your plans with.  You also don’t have social support for carrying out an action.  So, being forced to think through the details of a plan is particularly important when you are acting alone.

There are two important conclusions to draw from this research.

First, if you know you are going to have to do something out of the ordinary (like voting or perhaps starting a new exercise program), you should try to enlist a few others to help you out.  It is easier to generate intentions and stick to them when you are in a group.

Second, if you can’t enlist a group, then make sure you really think through the details of a plan to carry out an action.  That detailed plan will help you to overcome the variety of obstacles that often keep you from succeeding when you have to go beyond the ordinary actions of the day.

What’s the harm in asking?

As the parent of high school kids, I see the number of surveys that go to kids trying to determine their risky behavior.  They are frequently asked about drug use and sex.  On the one hand, it seems like a good idea to have a sense of what high school students are doing as a group.  On the other hand, there can be a real downside to asking questions.  For example, a 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research had a nice research dialogue on the influence of asking questions on a person’s future behavior.

The target article was written by Gavan Fitzsimons and Sarah Moore.  Gavan, along with his colleague Vicky Morwitz have done quite a bit of research over the past few years on the paradoxical effect that asking people questions about future behavior may actually influence the behavior itself.  To take a simple example, there is a classic study by Jim Sherman demonstrating that asking people whether they will volunteer for a good cause leads them to overestimate how likely they will be to volunteer relative to people who are not asked to predict whether they will volunteer.  However, this over-prediction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because this group ends up volunteering more often than a control group that is not asked to predict their future volunteer behavior.

The question of interest in the target article by Fitzsimons and Moore is whether asking teens about risky behaviors like sex and drug use will actually increase the likelihood that these kids will engage in the risky behavior.  There is a growing body of data suggesting that this question-behavior effect does occur.  (There is a commentary on the Fitzsimons and Moore article by Jim Sherman who argues that a lot more research is required to really demonstrate how pervasive this effect is, but there is certainly enough data around to be concerned.)

To be clear, the issue here is that asking kids about whether they plan to use drugs in the near future might make them more likely to use drugs in the near future.  Asking kids whether they plan to have unprotected sex in the near future might make them more likely to have unprotected sex.  Furthermore, there are number of large-scale studies that are being conducted in which these kinds of questions are asked of teens, so this is not an idle concern.

Happily, there are some ways to guard against the question-behavior effect.  Most importantly, there is evidence that if people are told about the question-behavior effect in advance, they don’t seem to be affected by the questions they are asked.  One reason why knowing about the effect may reduce the question-behavior effect is that if you respond to a question about a risky behavior, it will bring to mind both the knowledge that the behavior is risky as well as knowledge about the attractive aspects of the behavior.  The positive feeling about the risky behavior may hang around even after the memory of the survey has faded, leaving you with a positive feeling about a potentially dangerous behavior and no clear source of where that positive feeling came from.  If the opportunity to engage in that risky behavior then arises, this residual positive feeling may lead you to engage in the behavior, because you mistakenly think this positive feeling indicates you want to engage in that behavior.  Knowing about the question-behavior effect in advance gives you an explanation for the positive feelings about the risky behavior, making it less likely that you will believe that these feelings indicate that you want to engage in the behavior.

As a parent, that means that if you find out that your kids are going to participate in a survey or if you find out that they are going to get any kind of sex or drug education in school, you should talk to them beforehand about the fact that being asked a question about a risky behavior can affect future behavior, but primarily when you don’t know that being asked a question can affect that behavior. 

In addition, as a parent, you should talk to your kids about the survey or education program after it is over.  We all hate to talk to our kids about sex and drugs.  It is easier to hope or assume that they are not having sex and taking drugs.  However, just asking about the survey or education program is much easier than having to talk to your kid about why they are taking drugs or having sex (protected or unprotected).  So intervene with your kids before and after a survey to eliminate the impact of questions on future behavior.

And by the way, kids are not the only ones who are susceptible to the question-behavior effect.  In one study, adults who were asked how likely they would be to buy a car in the next six months were significantly more likely to buy a car in that period than a control group that was not asked that question.  So, before you participate in any kind of questionnaire, remind yourself that being asked questions about your future behavior can affect that future behavior.

And finally, even though you now know about the question-behavior effect, if you are given the chance to volunteer your time, do it. 

Why is it so hard to quit smoking?

If you take even a quick look at the newspaper, you can see that there are massive public policy efforts aimed to curb smoking.  States are raising their cigarette taxes.  Cities around the world are banning smoking in restaurants.  Even Holland (where it seems like almost every vice is legal) no longer allows cigarette smoking in restaurants and public places.  What makes it so hard to quit smoking?

That would, of course, be a topic for a whole book, and not just one blog entry.  It does provide a good excuse for me to talk a bit about some research that I have done with Miguel Brendl, Claude Messner, and Kyungil Kim.  The question of interest to us is how a goal or a need affects what you like.  For now, let’s think about smoking.

The need to smoke is affected by many factors.  Some of them involve a physiological addiction to nicotine.  However, the situation also affects the need to smoke.  Smoking is often associated with drinking coffee, for example, so a cup of coffee will often trigger the need to smoke in a smoker.  So, the strength of a goal will grow and shrink.  Sometimes, the need will seem desperate, but at other times (say right after having a cigarette), it won’t seem so strong at all.

When the need to smoke is triggered, it affects what you like and dislike at that moment.  The idea that likes and dislikes can change over short periods of time shouldn’t be surprising.  After all, you may grab a CD to listen to in the car in the morning, only to find that you no longer feel like listening to it in the evening.  Foods that were quite appealing on one day may be much less appealing on another day.

One factor that changes your preferences is the goals that are engaged at any given moment. Most of us have the intuition that if you have any strong goal, then your preference for things that would help you satisfy that goal will increase.  If you really need to smoke, then suddenly, cigarettes will look really good to you.  We call this effect of goals valuation.  That is, having an active goal makes things related to that goal more valuable.  There is some experimental evidence for this kind of valuation.

What is potentially more interesting, though, is that in a 2003 paper in the Journal of Consumer Behavior, and a 2007 paper in Emotion, we find strong evidence for devaluation.  That is, having an active goal will decrease your liking for things that are unrelated to that goal.  So, a smoker with a high need to smoke is less interested in things like DVD players, french fries, and camping tents than that same person is when the need to smoke is low. 

We found evidence for this in many ways.  In one study with smokers, we had smokers participate in a study after sitting in a long lecture class.  They could not smoke during class.  One group was asked to stay in a classroom and was given a cup of coffee (to stimulate the need to smoke).  This group really had a high need to smoke.  The other group went outside the classroom. They were also given a cup of coffee, but the experimenter lit up a cigarette, and all of the participants did too.  For this group, the coffee was a way to help us make sure enough time went by that the nicotine would help dull the need to smoke.

Before getting on to what they thought the study was really about, the participants were asked if they were interested in buying raffle tickets.  For half of the people, the prize was three cartons of cigarettes that would be given out in a drawing a week later.  For the other half of the people, the prize was an amount of money equivalent to what you’d pay for three cartons of cigarettes.  So what happened?

People who were offered the raffle to win cigarettes were somewhat more likely to buy tickets if they had a high need to smoke than if they had a low need to smoke.  That is, there was some evidence for this idea of valuation. 

People who were offered the raffle to win cash bought tickets if they had a low need to smoke.  The group in the classroom (who had a high need to smoke) bought almost no tickets at all.  That is, when people had a high need to smoke, they were really uninterested in cash. 

There are two important things to take away from this.  First, even though people know abstractly that cash can be used to purchase cigarettes, their goals have a very concrete effect on their preferences.  So, things that are not obviously related to smoking are devaluated.  Second, the people who are inside the classroom and need a cigarette probably walked out of the classroom after the study and smoked a cigarette.  Presumably, if we had offered this raffle to them after having their cigarette instead, they would have been more interested in buying tickets to win cash.  So, cigarettes can change people’s preferences pretty rapidly.

This means that a smoker trying to quit smoking can talk quite a bit about how they are going to resist the urge to smoke.  But when that need gets strong, the goal system is going to make cigarettes more and more attractive and is going to make everything else less and less attractive to help make the smoker satisfy their need to smoke.  This operation of the motivational system is usually a good thing.  It operates for all sorts of beneficial goals that people have.  But for habitual smokers, it creates a lot of problems. 

Death and other anxieties

Psychological research on motivation has proposed a lot of strange theories.  Perhaps the strangest (to my mind) is Terror Management Theory.  I realize that this sounds like a psychological theory that ought to be part of the Department of Homeland Security, but actually, it proposes that people have specific motivational mechanisms that permit them to deal with the fact that they can contemplate their own mortality. 

The idea that death is a source of anxiety isn’t new.  Indeed, Woody Allen would have had much less material without this fact.  However, research suggests that there are interesting consequences of being reminded about your own mortality.  This evidence was first put forward in a paper by Rosenblatt and colleagues in a 1989 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and research in this area is still growing strong. 

The work suggests that when people are reminded of their own mortality, they tend to be more likely to stick to the norms or rules that their society puts forward as part of ideal behavior.  So, for example, a recent paper by Matthew Gailliot and his colleagues in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin finds that people reminded that they will die some day are more likely to want to treat ethnic minorities with respect and are more likely to engage in helping behaviors than are people who are not reminded that they will die some day, but only if these societal beliefs are reinforced as part of the experimental procedure.

Anxiety about death also makes people more likely to punish others for violating social norms.  In one early study, judges were asked to give sentences for prostitution, which is a crime that has a strong moral component to it.  Those judges who were made aware of the possibility of their own death gave harsher sentences to prostitutes than those who did not, suggesting that they were reacting to the moral wrong. 

Before going on, it is worth pointing out that studies have developed some ingenious ways of reminding people that they are mortal.  Some are really overt, like making people imagine what it would be like to die (as compared to a control condition in which people imagine dental pain).  Others are more a bit more subtle. One study in the Gailliot paper mentioned earlier either conducted the study on a sidewalk in front of a cemetery or on a sidewalk nearby that was not near a cemetery.

According to Terror Management Theory, people are more likely to stick with the societal rules when they face their own mortality, because society provides the best protection that anyone has against death.  Society doesn’t prevent death, but acting as a group and affiliating with others does make death less likely at any given moment. 

I must admit, I have always been a bit skeptical of Terror Management Theory, though I believe the data that have been collected.  That is, I do think that when people are reminded of their own mortality, their level of anxiety goes up, and this results in changes in behavior.  Often, behavior changes by making people more helpful and more likely to treat others with respect.  Think back, for example, to the days after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, when there was a general spirit of good will toward others.

The question I have is whether the root cause of this change in behavior is specific to fears about one’s own mortality.  As one good case for comparison, let’s consider Fear of Isolation.  If you have been reading this blog for a while, you might remember Fear of Isolation, which is the anxiety someone might feel because of social or physical isolation from others.  I talked about Fear of Isolation in the context of cultural differences in thinking, because members of East Asian cultures tend to have a higher Fear of Isolation than members of Western cultures. 

Now, Fear of Isolation also tends to make people affiliate with others.  There have not been extensive experimental tests comparing Fear of Isolation and Mortality Salience (which is the technical term that has been used for being reminded of your own mortality).  However, I suspect that deep down they are quite similar. 

If Mortality Salience and Fear of Isolation are indeed similar, then it opens the door to the possibility that there are a number of different social factors that lead to types of anxiety that cause people to become more attuned to social norms.  That doesn’t change the core fact that social anxiety tends to make people more likely to bond with other people in positive ways.  It only means that the cause of this bonding may be more general than Terror Management Theory predicts.    

What happens when you think about death?