Collectable experiences are defined as unique, unusual, novel, or extreme experiences. Instead of viewing the Super Bowl blackout of 2013 as a frustrating experience, view it as a “collectable experience” and you will enjoy it more.

That’s what researchers did one New Years Eve in Times Square with a similarly frustrating event. Spectators were increasingly nervous about the oncoming snow. However, when the researchers reframed the night as “the first New Years Eve snow in recent history,” spectators enjoyed the event much more as they became part of a unique story—a collectable experience.

We all want to be part of stories and to collect experiences to tell stories about. Some of us want this more than others (known as people high in productivity orientation), but all of us are looking to some degree to build our experiential resumes full of unique and fascinating experiences (e.g. staying in Ice-Hotels, going to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, eating at a weird restaurant).

Last night, millions of Americans collected an experience. An experience that other generations did not have and will not have. This blackout was a good thing, especially if we can get ourselves to think of it as a good thing. For happiness is often found simply in how one looks at things.

 ~Troy Campbell~

When faced with a decision (e.g., like what to do on a week night), our final decisions are based less on what options are available, and more on what options we consider.

The options that come to mind most easily are the options that form our consideration set, and then we choose from that set. The problem is that often our consideration sets are limited—we are tired, we are in a “week night” state of mind, or we have only seen advertisements for certain things lately.

To increase your happiness, keep a running “to do sometime” list of things you want to do. That way when your consideration set fails to include a highly desirable option, you can simply turn to your this list for an idea.

For the original research on this topic, see: http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/Courses/Spring2000/BA269D/Negungadi90.pdf

~Troy Campbell~

Journalists, businesses, comedians, and the rest of us have been crying out to politicians, “Why so much fighting?” and asking, “Can’t we all just get along?” Despite these calls for bipartisanship and peace in Washington, the quarrels rage on. Why?

Although politicians say they wish the fighting would end, they may actually take pleasure in the brawl. It may be emotionally rewarding for partisans to be in the “smarter” and “morally superior” party.

Psychological research shows how derogating members of other cultural groups can make oneself feel superior and can even increase one’s self-esteem.

This may explain why partisans’ lives are so often full of tweeting, Facebooking, and protesting about how other parties are terrible. Such actions may be motivated more by the desire to immediately improve their self-esteem and feel self-righteous than by the desire to improve policy.

For instance, many liberals tweet claims that conservatives do not care for the poor. One explanation for this could be that liberals really do care for the poor, but they may also tweet this because it makes them feel better to be the good guy fighting for the poor compared the conservatives that they claim are evil and selfish.

Because viewing the other party as evil can make oneself feel better by comparison, partisans might actually want the other party to be evil. Conservatives may actually want Obama to be a communist and liberals may actually want Romney to be universally against women’s rights. These claims fit the self-flattering good versus evil narrative, where the opposing party is the Evil Empire and the partisan’s own team is the heroic Rebel Alliance fighting for good.

So when we ask the question, “Can’t we stop the fighting?”  The answer seems to be, “No, the self-righteous fighting is too much fun!”

~Troy Campbell & Rachel Anderson~

Today many Americans find themselves thinking: how are politicians so comfortable lying?

The answer may be found in the important element of how they lie. Specifically, politicians rarely lie straightforwardly; instead, they bend the truth. Because “truth bending” is rooted in some version of the truth, it creates enough wiggle room for politicians to maintain the belief that they are good, honest people.

Moral psychology shows that people lie to the extent that they can still see themselves as good people. Their wrongful or shady actions need to allow enough wiggle room such that they do not perceive themselves as bad, and truth-bending conveniently provides this flexibility.

Most of the popular 2012 elections lies are examples of truth bending. When we examine this component, we can better understand why politicians feel so comfortable making false claims. Let’s take a look at two of the most popular bends.

 “The 47 Percent” Attack Ads

The Bend: 

Obama for America ads use the 47% comments to say Romney doesn’t care about veterans, the elderly, and at least 47% of the country. 

The Truth: 

Romney commented in a discussion of his campaign strategy, “My job is not is not to care about … the 47%.” However, he did not mean that he did not care about these people nor did he state that he does not want their lives to be improved. Instead, Romney meant that he would not focus on courting these voters because he believes that those efforts would be a waste of the Romney campaign’s time.

“You didn’t build that”

The Bend:

The Romney campaign publicizes the following quote from Obama:  “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.” This quote is used by the Romney Campaign to express that Obama does not think that businesses build themselves and instead rely completely on the government to succeed.

The Truth:

Obama stated that, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.” In this quote, Obama expresses his belief that government can help create the environment that permits businesses to thrive. Obama says businesses did not build the roads that the businesses use. He does not claim people didn’t build their own businesses.

Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind that when people want to do or believe something, they ask themselves, “Can I do this?” and search for an argument to support their desired actions.

Thus, when deciding whether an action is morally permissible, people have to convince themselves that it is. Without enough wiggle room, people cannot always rationalize their actions. However, as in the examples above, the combination of three factors create enough wiggle room for the campaigns to carry out such truth bending.

1. There is a bit of truth in the lie. These bends are grounded in direct quotes, or what high school students would call “primary evidence.” A politician may feel morally wrong putting words in another politician’s mouth, but taking the words that another politician said out of context may feel less wrong.

2. The essence of the message is true. Even if politicians realize they are bending the truth, technically, they may believe that they are still expressing the truth. The Obama campaign believes Romney only cares about the individuals at the top and the Romney campaign believes that Obama doesn’t care for individualism or the private sector. Their political ads may distort the truth of an isolated statement, but they also believe that the ads communicate a larger truth about the other candidate.

3. Both firmly believe they are the good guy fighting for the world. When people believe they are doing something altruistic (e.g., helping a family member), their wiggle room (and, consequently, their dishonest behavior) grows. Since politicians believe they are fighting for the good of the entire world, their wiggle room is proportionately greater.

A final caveat. One view may be that politicians are intentionally lying as much as possible and only curbing their lies out of fear of media scrutiny. Though the media does play a role in curbing bends, a richer understanding of the 2012 election comes from understanding politicians as somewhat normal moral beings who are in the perfect situation to bend the truth.

~Troy Campbell and Rachel Anderson~

Ten minutes into the Presidential debate, my democratic friends were sure it was a failure. They tweeted, “Nothing he is saying is making me feel anything.”

A lot of Democrats have walked away from Romney’s monologues unaware of how moving Romney’s comments can be. They have felt absolutely secure that an Obama victory is in the bag. They have assumed that because they did have not found Romney’s words exciting, no one else would either.

However, Democrats were never going to feel excited by a Romney-Ryan speech. And if these Democrats gauge Romney-Ryan’s success by their own feelings, they’ll never understand how well the Romney-Ryan is doing with the electorate. Yet, people consistently make this mistake and predict that others’ reactions will be the same as theirs. When people do this, it leads them, their businesses, and their political parties to be overconfident about their lead in the market place

This inability to predict how different people will react can be costly for individuals, political strategists, and businesses. Should an Apple product designer predict the success of a Microsoft product based on how unimpressed she herself is? No. Should a bleeding heart liberal use her own outrage about Romney’s 47% comment as an estimate of how Republicans will react? No. Should a social conservative use his feelings about President Obama’s comment about Americans clinging to God and guns? No.

With the vice-presidential debates happening tonight, I am confident that partisans on both sides will think that the other failed to emotionally connect with the electorate. The truth however is that partisans cannot emotionally connect with each other.

~Troy Campbell~

Over the past week I have blogged about the amorality of drunk driving and critiqued some of the policies attempting to curb drunk driving. Drawing from behavioral economics research and the comments I received, I have drafted 4 ways to combat Drunk Driving. Finally, I included a one-way caveat about why this problem will remain difficult.

#1 Friends need to speak up.  “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” is a great slogan and I have followed that slogan my entire life. However, most nights I am working late in the Center for Advanced Hindsight. Thus most nights I am not with my peers while they are drinking and potentially driving.  I think a better slogan would be “Friends tell their friends that drunk driving is wrong.”  I find myself always nodding and laughing to others’ stories of drunk driving, when I should be expressing my disapproval. Jonathan Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind) argues that gossip and social disapproval can help regulate morality.

#2 Clean Slate.  One problem with drunk driving is that most people likely to offend have already offended and may have even been arrested. We need a way for people to say, “That was a mistake and I won’t do it again.” I am personally looking into this clean slate idea and hope to provide some clarity in the near future.

#3 Stigmatize.  How to properly calibrate appeals and accomplish this will be difficult but we need to make drunk driving look disgusting rather than sexy (as I think some ad campaigns do). We can call on some of the smoking ads which made smoking seem less attractive and attractive people condemn smoking. Backlash may occur, but a systematic and well-funded experimental research program should discover something nuanced enough to work. This means the government needs to team up with researchers and conduct large-scale experiments. University researchers can come up with theories to guide policy, but policymakers need to calibrate these theories into efficacious policy.

#4 Remove the Fudge Factor.  How many times have you heard people say “I am not drunk, I can drive.” No matter how much you try and convince them they are drunk, they protest. However, if you could show them via a breathalyzer that their blood alcohol content was above the legal limit, then people (even when drunk) might have a harder time justifying getting behind the wheel. Would mandatory breathalyzers at bars reduce drunk driving? It is an empirical question worth answering.

Another possibility is to adopt the Alcohol Anonymous practice of saying, “One drink is one drink too many.” If one could not drink period, then any drinking makes one cross the line. If there was a large public awareness campaign (integrated with alcohol companies’ ads) indicating that designated drivers do not drink one drink, this could potentially be effective.

A Final Caveat.  Some readers used psychological research to claim that threats of punishment might be the only thing that will work. They argued, because people who drive drunk do not think they are endangering others, they do not think they are engaging in any moral violation. Thus if drunk driving is not seen as a moral violation then only the assurance of random checkpoints and breathalyzer tests will curb drunk driving. I think this speaks to my point. All drunk driving policy is shortsighted; it asks what could we do right now to reduce drunk driving. It does not consider the effectiveness of developing national moral standards or engaging in rigorous experimental research (though some does exist). However, as I have argued above, I think we can and need to transform drunk driving into more of a moral issue.

~Troy Campbell~

I want to share with you what appears to me like one of the most ill-advised anti-Drunk Driving campaigns ever created. Ironically, I was walking across the Duke quad on my way to the social psychology building when I passed these ads that so blatantly disregard basic social psychology.

The anti-Drunk Driving ads featured famous celebrities in mug shots and with tag lines such as “Billy Joe supports DUI” (lead singer of Green Day) and “Flo Rida supports DUI” (popular hip hop artist). Most of these were celebrities I personally liked, though there were a few I disliked (such as Paris Hilton).

Quick social psychology quiz! “If a celebrity who you think is the coolest person on the planet is doing something, will telling you about it reduce your likelihood to do it?” No. My immediate response to the Billy Joe ad was to defend my high school hero and downplay the moral wrongness of his drunk driving offense. For some people, these ads might even have made drunk driving seem like a rebellious way to connect with these celebrities.

If you want to reduce illegal alcoholic behavior, then you need to pair the behavior with an outgroup or person one does not want to associated with. This is what I think this campaign may have been trying to go for on some level (e.g. Paris Hilton) but failed to do so. By comparison, Wharton Professor Jonah Berger succeeded at this strategy. Together with his colleagues, he put posters up in undergraduate dorms that associated heavy alcohol consumption with graduate students. Since undergraduates generally wish not to be associated with graduate students, undergraduates’ heavy alcoholic consumption dropped. It is comforting to know that my graduate student outgroup can cause some good in this world.

See you next week for Part 3 of the Amorality of Drunk Driving.

~Troy Campbell~

Recently, the “choose-your-ride” car (pictured here) has been roaming around downtown Durham and Duke University. The car seeks to reduce drunk driving by posing a choice between a $20 taxi or $1,000 fine. At first glance, this seems like a good strategy and it may indeed do some good. However, the car seems to missing one important element and it is the topic of Dan Ariely’s new book: morality.

In “The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty,” Ariely argues that morality matters. He explains how criminal behavior is not a simple cost-benefit analysis, and the threat of punishment only seems to work well when enforcement is nearly certain and extremely severe.  Given that 300,000 of the Americans arrested for drunk driving every year are re-offenders, it seems that the threat and actual experience of consequences are not working so smashingly. Overall, drunk driving is rampant in the states. There are 900,000+ arrests a year. That’s arrest alone! The number of people driving drunk is much higher.

Drunk driving is not a niche offense; it is a social phenomenon that many see as a perfectly acceptable behavior. In movie The Hangover, Zach Galifinakas captures many American’s thoughts on drunk driving when he fondly remembers the night before and laughs it off saying, “Driving drunk, classic!” Many Americans simply feel no moral outrage with drunk driving, especially if they or their friends are the drivers. And what troubles me is that attempts like the “choose-your-ride” car do nothing to address this moral hole in the American conscience. According to Dan Ariely’s research on cheating, people cheat just as long as they can see themselves as good people. It’s no wonder people keep driving drunk, because society has done nothing to convince people that it is wrong.

Here are three specific ways this car fails to appeal to morality:

It makes it a choice. Think of other moral violations such as cheating in a marriage. For many, to even contemplate the idea of marital infidelity would be morally taboo.  It should be the same with drunk driving. People engage in cost-benefit analyses for many actions, but when the action is in the moral domain this happens to a far lesser degree. When something is in the moral domain, hardline rules and concerns for one’s self-concept take over.

It puts a price on the crime. It turns a moral issue into a question of whether you want to pay $1,000 or if you can outwit the cops. According to the message sent by this car, you are not a bad person if you drive drunk. Instead, you are simply a person who is willing to pay a $1,000 fine.

It removes moral feelings. In chapter 9 of “The Upside of Irrationality,” Ariely discusses how thinking of situations like a math problem (rational thinking) can lead to less morality, because moral action is often driven by feelings. Here, the only feeling the car potentially activates is fear and the mathematical nature of the appeal might reduce any potential moral feelings people might have to begin with.

So what can we do?

Like with most socio-political issues, it is easy to criticize others’ solution and hard to put forth your own. Next week, I’ll attempt to put forth my own potential solutions to transform drunk driving into a moral issue.  In the meantime, what do you think?  Do you know people who chronically drive drunk? Can drunk driving be turned into something that is globally seen as morally detestable? If you have any solutions, ideas or articles you think would serve the blog, leave them in the comments and I’ll try to include them in part 2.

~Troy Campbell~

A Chinese tourist destination decided to experiment with offering free toilet paper, the Wall Street Journal reports. Rather than the usual procedure in China, where people bring their own toilet paper, in Qingdao they now encounter a toilet paper dispenser when they enter the public restroom (and, naturally, pass it again on the way out).

Now that the dispensers have been in the bathrooms for a month, it has become clear that visitors to Qingdao’s restrooms take an astonishing amount of care for their personal hygiene. Two kilometers (1.24 miles) of toilet paper disappear each day.

In this case, the excess T.P. use seems to reflect our findings with other forms of cheating and stealing: most people are cheating a little, rather than a few people cheating a lot. Of course, there are exceptions.

The toilet paper scenario meets the right conditions for people to cheat: they’ve got the opportunity and face no consequences for taking a bit extra, they can use the toilet paper later, and they can rationalize their behavior. They might tell themselves that the government is paying for their bathroom use in general, not only for that specific restroom; or that it’s expected that they’d take extra on the way out; or that they’ve already paid for it in the form of taxes; or that the government deserves what it gets. They’ve easily justified a way to walk out with wads of toilet paper and an untroubled conscience.

But why steal something like toilet paper?

One explanation probably has to do with the power of free. Maybe Qingdao’s bathroom users are so enchanted with the idea of FREE toilet paper that they would take it in any case, regardless of what they know about its value or usefulness.

Another explanation that pops up a lot with government-provided goods is the tragedy of the commons. The theory goes that individuals will use a limited resource (like commons for grazing animals) in an unsustainable way, so long as they get the full benefit and the harm is spread across the group. In the case of the toilet paper, the theory suggests that people use no more than they need when they have to pay for it individually. But when the cost is spread out across Qingdao, they are happy to overuse the resource. The usual prescription is to make individuals pay for the resource on their own—in other words, to go back to the days without free toilet paper.

But there might be a better solution. We can take research from behavioral economics to think of ideas that may be less strict than taking away the free toilet paper and, instead, simply push people toward lighter use of the product. How about replacing the landscape paintings above some dispensers with a picture of watching eyes—a tactic that has effectively encouraged people to clean up after themselves and pay on the honor system.

In Qingdao, restroom managers have attempted to confront their problem by posting a poetic reminder of social responsibility:

Convenience for you,
convenience for me,
civility is there for all to see.
My paper use, your paper use,
conservation is up to us.

The sign hasn’t had a noticable effect yet, but it may be on the right track. Reminders like the poem sometimes work (p.41, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty) to keep people from stealing toilet paper. The Qingdao bathroom poets appeal to bathroom users’ social norms (“civility is there for all to see”) and allude to future benefits (convenience and conservation)—tactics that have been shown to work in getting people to wash their hands. But getting some sort of assent—like a signature—may be even more effective.

For example, bathroom visitors could sign in under a poem like this:

Future benefits and social obligations
Should outweigh your current temptations
You agree not to steal by signing below
You’ll take just what you need when you need to go

Sign here:    _______________________

                        _______________________

                        _______________________

Of course, if the bathroom management is going to ask people to sign anywhere, they might also want to keep watch over the “free” pens.

~Susan Wunderink~