'Predictably Irrational'

In one of your studies, you asked college students two times to answer a series of questions relating to their interest in certain sexual activities—first while imagining they were sexually aroused, and then again when they were actually sexually aroused. You had them answer questions like: would you always use a condom if you didn't know the sexual history of your partner? What was the point there?
The broader takeaway was to determine to what extent we become different people under emotional states. And when they were aroused, students were more likely to give different answers. If we were like Jekyll and Hyde and understood that when we're aroused, we behave differently, we would know how to deal with the consequences. But people don't estimate correctly the extent to which they will change. I think of it as intra-empathy gaps. Empathy is how much I understand you. Intra-empathy is how much we understand ourselves. The results show very clearly that we don't understand ourselves very well. By the way, there are some interesting mistakes we make based on this. Nobody will say they want an unwanted pregnancy, or to get a sexually transmitted disease. But when the moment comes, their behavior changes.

In another study, you told students you'd auction off sets for a reading of Walt Whiman's "Leaves of Grass." Before you asked them to bid, you asked half the students if, hypothetically, they'd be willing to pay $10 to hear a 10-minute recitation, and the other half to write down if, hypothetically, they'd be willing to listen to you recite poetry for $10? Why?
This was about measuring the effect of the initial decision on later decisions. The basic idea is that if we make a particular decision, if we remember we made it, it can influence our next decision, and the next one. So I asked people to engage in a hypothetical thought process, and then wanted to see if doing so would change their behavior when they had to bid. And it did. The ones whom I had asked if they'd be willing to pay were willing to pay about $3 to hear me recite poetry. The others said I'd have to pay them $4.80 to make them listen to me. Nobody knew if it was good or bad to listen to me, but once the first decision was made for them, it influenced the next decision. It's like the scene in "Tom Sawyer" where he gets the kids to help him paint the fence.

Can we school ourselves to recognize when we're being irrational?
I think we can sometimes. It's hard. We can also learn to bypass. Lets say you know that every time you go to the supermarket hungry, you buy too much food. You can bypass that by deciding never to go to the supermarket when you're hungry. The challenge for government is to provide tools that will help us behave better, to help us bypass the irrationality we all succumb to.

© 2008