Why we make the stupid choices we make

Being a university psychology researcher is basically just an excuse for doing all sorts of fun stuff and getting paid taxpayers’ money for it. For example, you can spend all day asking attractive members of the opposite sex on dates (Dutton and Aron, 1974; they’re more likely to agree, it was found, if you ask them on a swaying rope-bridge than on solid ground). Or you can question people about the personalities they believe different vegetables possess (Sommer, 1988; the conclusion: onions are stupid, mushrooms are over-ambitious). In contrast, a study by the US researchers Barbara Davis and Eric Knowles sounds pretty boring: they went from door to door, selling greetings cards for charity. But what it reveals about us all, and why we make the stupid choices we make, is anything but dull.

They were using a dastardly sales technique called “disrupt-then-reframe”, which involves confusing the customer, then immediately rescuing them from their confusion by saying something simple and familiar. When they offered the cards at eight for $3, they had a 40% success rate. Then, at different houses, they offered them, confusingly, at eight for “300 pennies” (“penny” being a legitimate word for “cent” in the US) and then adding, “which is a bargain”. Sales doubled to 80%. According to a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, similar methods can be used to sell more chocolate bars in a supermarket, or to persuade students to agree to an increase in tuition fees.

The reason, as the psychiatrist Milton Erickson first figured out, is our overwhelming need for “cognitive closure”: when things get confusing and uncertain, tension is created, and we feel an urge to get rid of it by grabbing on to something solid and unambiguous. Naturally, I couldn’t possibly endorse your exploiting this trick to get people to do what you want.

But perhaps the more important point is how much we stand to benefit if we ourselves become more comfortable with uncertainty, and not just because we’d be better at resisting sneaky salespeople. Keats called this “negative capability” and thought it was the pinnacle of human achievement – to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. So much of our stress and unhappiness comes from straining for certainty when we don’t have it. It gives us miserable political opinions, too: studies show a correlation between a high need for cognitive closure and support for authoritarian parties.

People “have so little trust in their ability to rest with negativity and uncertainty,” writes the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, “that whenever they detect a hint of paradox, or not knowing, they become afraid, and do all kinds of conformist, fundamentalist things to become secure again.” It’s the striving to “get ground under our feet”, to make the uncertainty go away, that makes us unhappy, she argues, not the uncertainty itself. Uncertainty is just the way things are.