In our addiction to naive logic, we have created a magic-free world of neat economic models, business case studies and narrow technological ideas, which together give us a wonderfully reassuring sense of mastery over a complex world.
When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic.
Most people spend their time at work trying to look intelligent, and for the last 50 years or more, people have tried to look intelligent by trying to look like scientists; if you ask someone to explain why something happened, they will generally give you a plausible-sounding answer that makes them seem intelligent, rational or scientific but that may or may not be the real answer.
When we do put a name to non-rational behavior, it is usually a word like “emotion”, which makes it sound like logic’s evil twin. “You’re being emotional” is used as code for “you’re being an idiot.”
Robert Zion, the social psychologist, once described cognitive psychology as “social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero.” The point he was making is that humans are a deeply social species. In the real world, social context is absolutely critical.
It only takes a very small change in context to make a gift an insult rather than a blessing.
People’s mind are often most resistant to change — perhaps because their status is deeply entwined with their capacity for reason. Highly educated people don’t merely use logic; it is part of their identity. When I told one economist that you can often increase the sales of a product by increasing its price, the reaction was one not of curiosity but of anger.
As a general rule the US Government is run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists. Others interested in helping the lawyers out need not apply.
Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.
In a similar way, it seems illogical to break into a building using the noisiest means possible, until you understand the context in which the offender is operating.
My problem with Marxism is that it makes too much sense.
If you are a technocrat, you’ll generally have achieved your status by explaining things in reverse; the plausible post-rationalization is the stock-in-trade of the commentariat. Unfortunately, it is difficult for such people to avoid the trap of assuming that the same skills that can explain the past can be used to predict the future. Like a criminal investigation, what looks neat and logical when viewed with hindsight is usually much messier in real time.
And what is the single most important finding of the advertising industry? Perhaps it is that advertisements featuring cute animals tend to be more successful than ads that don’t.
Sometimes human behavior that seems nonsensical is because we are judging people’s motivations, aims and intentions the wrong way. And sometimes behavior is nonsensical because evolution is just smarter than we are. Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience.
Church attendance is the most important predictor of marital stability and happiness.
Religion feels incompatible with modern life because it seems to involve delusional beliefs, but if the above results came from a trial of a new drug, we would want to add it to tap water. Just because we don’t know why it works, we should not be blind to the fact that it does.
Around 90% of people have no idea what sort of aircraft they are traveling on or how a jet engine works but will infer a great deal about the safety and quality of the experience offered by an airline from the care and attention it pays to on-board snacks.
Logical ideas often fail because logic demands universally applicable laws but humans, unlike atoms, are not consistent enough in their behavior for such laws to hold very broadly.
The drive to be rational has led people to seek political and economic laws that are akin to the laws of physics — universally true and applicable. The caste of rational decision makers require generalizable laws to allow them confidently to pronounce on matters without needing to consider the specifics of the situation. And in reality “context” is often the most important thing in determining how people thing, behave and act: this simple fact dooms many universal models from the start.
In fact, we derive please from “expensive treats” and also enjoying finding “bargains.” By contrast, the mid-range retailer offers far less of an emotional hit; you don’t get a dopamine rush from mid-market purchases.
Our very perception of the world is affected by context, which is why the rational attempt to contrive universal, context-free laws for human behavior may be largely doomed. Even our politics seems to be context-dependent. For instance, ostensibly right-wing people will engage — at a local event — in behavior that is effectively socialist.
At the federal level I am a Libertarian. At the state level, I am a Republican. At the town level, I am a Democrat. In my family I am a socialist. And with my dog I am a Marxist — from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Adam Smith, the father of economics — but also, in a way, the father of behavioral economics — clearly spotted this fallacy over two centuries ago. He warned against the “man of system,” who is “apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.”
The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say. We simply don’t have access to our genuine motivations, because it is not in our interest to know.
Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man — what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.
Human self-deception makes our job difficult for another reason: no one wants to believe in its existence, and it is something which people seem only to accept at a shallow, theoretical level. People are much more comfortable attributing the success of a business to superior technology or better supply-chain management than to an unconscious, unspoken human desire.
Consider these contrasting statements: “She died yesterday, but I must say the hospital was wonderful.” Or “No, Dad’s fine. No thanks to that bloody hospital, mind. He was kept waiting four days for his operation.”
Restaurants are only peripherally about food: their real value lies in social connection, and status.
So let’s ask again — why might people hate standing on trains? Is it about feeling cheated? After all, you’ve paid for a seat on the train, and the rail company has taken your money and not given you a seat. Is that it?
Or perhaps it’s because it is tiring; it’s not just about having to stand, it’s also about having to keep your balance. Perhaps it’s because they have nowhere to put their bags or they are paranoid about people stealing from their backpack. Maybe though, it’s more a question of status, the people who have a seat have a view, control of their personal space and space for their bags — while the people who stand get nothing. There is no story they can tell themselves about their predicament that puts it in a better light.
The proponents of delivering food in pill form had lost sight of the fact that it is enjoyable to eat and a necessary prop at social occasions. Even if such pills could be produced, it is perfectly plausible that people who ate only such food would be utterly miserable.
In many ways it is the very inefficiency of premium foods that gives them their emotional value.
These have two lenses — market research and economic theory — that together are supposed to provide a complete view of human motivation.
“The economic model told me to do it” is the 21st century equivalent of “I was only following orders,” an attempt to avoid blame by denying the responsibility for one’s actions.
The broken binoculars assume that the way to improve travel is to make it faster, that the way to improve food is to make it cheaper and that the way to encourage environmentally friendly behavior is to convert people into passionate environmentalists. All these ideas are sometimes true — but not always.
Anyone who has waited at home for 5 hours for an engineer knows that it’s a form of mental torture, a little like being under house arrest; you can’t have a bath or pop out for a pint of milk, because you fear that the second you do, the engineer will turn up. How different might the experience feel if the engineer agreed to text you half an hour before showing up at your door? Suddenly you’d be free to get on with your day almost as if it were a day off, with your only obligation being to keep an eye on your phone.
The presence of metal shutters that shop in crime-ridden areas covered their windows with at night may in fact increase the incidence of crime, since they implicitly communicated that this was a lawless area.
The Uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90% less frustrating. We are much bothered by the uncertainty of waiting than by the duration of a wait.
Whether we use logic or psycho-logic depends on whether we want to solve the problem or to simply to be seen to be trying to solve the problem.
Context is everything: strangely, the attractiveness of what we choose is affected by comparisons with what we reject. As one friend remarked, “Everyone likes to go to a nightclub in the company of a friend who’s slightly less attractive than them.”
Drama is just real life with the boring bits edited out.
We constantly rewrite the past to form a narrative which cuts out the non-critical points — and which replaces luck and random experimentation with conscious intent. For instance, a friend of mine once mentioned that he had been attracted to buy his current home because it was close to an excellent restaurant, forgetting that the establishment opened after he had moved in.
There are two key steps that a mathematician uses. He uses intuition to guess the right problem and the right solution and then logic to prove it.
It is a never-mentioned, slightly embarrassing but nevertheless essential facet of free market capitalism that it does not care about reasons — in fact it will often reward lucky idiots.
Later on, Newton really didn’t help the cause by filling our heads with thermodynamics and the conservation of energy — where science hopelessly misled us was that it imbued in all of us the idea that you can’t create something out of nothing. It taught us that you can’t create a valuable metal out of a cheap one, or that you can’t create energy in one place or form without destroying it somewhere else.
We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.
Wine tastes better when poured from a heavier bottle. Painkillers are more effective when people believe they are expensive. Almost everything becomes more desirable when people believe it is in scarce supply, and possessions become more enjoyable when they have a famous brand name attached.
To reduce journey times by 40 minutes, you don’t have to reduce the amount of time people spend on the train — which is in any case the most enjoyable part of their journey — you could simply reduce the amount of time they waste waiting for the train. Provided their end-to-end journey is 40 minutes quicker, they’ve saved 40 minutes.
The reason the alchemists gave up in the Middle Ages was because they were looking at the problem the wrong way — they had set themselves the impossible task of trying to turn lead into gold, but had got it into their heads that the value of something lies solely in what it is. This was a false assumption, because you don’t need to tinker with atomic structure to make lead as valuable as gold — all you need to do is to tinker with human psychology so that it feels as valuable as gold. At which point, who cares that it isn’t actually gold?
No one is going to pay $20 for a plate of Patagonian toothfish — call it Chilean sea bass, however, and the rules change.
One menus, there seems to be more money in adjectives than in nouns. Even adjectives that have no precise definition such as “succulent” can raise the popularity of items. Give it an ethnic label such as an Italian name, and people will rate the food as more authentic.
A label directs a person’s attention toward a feature in a dish, and hence helps bring out certain flavors and textures.
The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience.
Advertising often also works in this way. A great deal of the effectiveness of advertising derives from its power to direct attention to favorable aspects of an experience, in order to change the experience for the better. Strangely, there is one form of enhancement to a menu that seems to be the kiss of death: adding photographs of dishes to a menu seems to heavily limit what you can charge for them.
Create a name, and you’ve created a norm.
The three principal modern forms of media consumption device, the laptop / desktop computer, the tablet and the mobile phone, are also products of the human form. Of the millions of hypothetical possibilities there are, effectively, three comfortable modes for the human body: 1) standing up, 2) lying down and 3) sitting upright.
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” was never the company’s official slogan — but when it gained currency among corporate buyers of IT systems, it became what several commentators have called “the most valuable marketing mantra in existence.” The strongest marketing approach in a B2B context comes not from explaining that your product is good, but from sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt around the available alternatives. The desire to make good decisions and the urge not to get fired or blamed may at first seem to be similar motivations, but they are, in fact, never quite the same thing, and may sometimes be diametrically different.
It is in the interests of all honest cab drivers to maintain a standard of trust; if only 0.5% of cab journeys resulted in a rip-off or a mugging, faith in the whole system would evaporate and the entire business would collapse.
Medieval guilds existed for this reason. Trust is always more difficult to gain in cities because of the anonymity they afford, and guilds help to offset this problem. If it is costly and time-consuming to join one, the only people who enter are those with a serious commitment to a craft. Guilds are also self-policing; the upfront cost of being admitted adds to the fear of being ejected.
Many things which do not make sense in a logical context suddenly make perfect sense if you consider what they mean rather than what they are. For instance, an engagement ring serves no practical purpose as an object. However, the object — and its expense — make it highly redolent with meaning; an expensive ring is a costly bet by a man in his belief that he believes — and intends — his marriage to last.
Above the door is a notice that reads “Established 1958.” The shopkeeper has clearly invested in his premises and stock, and it’s unlikely he will have survived in business for several decades if his business model depended on ripping off the local population. He is at a point where the loss of his reputation will be far more costly than whatever he might gain by refusing to honor our exchange, which allows me to derive trust from the context in which the exchange takes place. Upfront investment is proof of long-term commitment, which is a guarantor of honest behavior. Reputation is a form of skin in the game: it takes far longer to acquire a reputation than to lose one.
All these things only make sense if we assume that some signaling is going on — they are examples of a behavior which is costly in the short term and which will only pay off, if at all, in the long term. They are thus reliable signals that the person, animal or business engaging in that behavior is acting on the basis of long-term self-interest rather than short-term expediency.
This distinction matters a great deal. Unlike short-term expediency, long-term self-interest often leads to behaviors that are indistinguishable from mutually beneficial cooperation.
There are two contrasting approaches to business. There is the “tourist restaurant” approach, where you try to make as much money from people in a single visit. And then there is the “local pub” approach, where you may make less money from people on each visit, but where you will profit more over time by encouraging them to come back.
Odd, until you realize that solving a problem for a customer at your own expense is a good way of signaling your commitment to a future relationship.
One of the reasons why customer service is such a strong indicator of how we judge a company is because we are aware that it costs money and time to provide. A company which is willing to spend time after you have bought and paid for a product to make sure you are not disappointed with it is more likely to be trustworthy and decent than one which loses all interest in you as soon as the cheque has cleared. The same applies in interpersonal relations; being rude isn’t so different from being polite, but it requires less effort. Politeness demands that we perform hundreds of little rituals, from opening doors to standing up when someone enters the room, all of which are more effortful than the alternative. By such oblique means we convey that we care about their opinion — and about our reputation.
We did that to convey to them not only that the product existed, but that it was a highly significant launch, to which Microsoft had committed a great deal of money. We also needed to convey the fact that every few people were in the privileged position of being able to test the software for free. We could have said that in the letter, but it would have meant nothing. It’s what’s called “cheap talk,” something that anybody selling anything can tell you — it is merely a claim, not an item of proof.
Steve was effectively describing what biologists call “costly signaling theory”, the fact that the meaning and significance attached to a something is in direct proportion to the expense with which it is communicated.
Bits deliver information, but costliness carries meaning.
“I believe it because it is ridiculous.” We attach meaning to things precisely because they deviate from what seems sensible. It is hardly surprising that we have evolved to invest more significance in unusual, surprising or unexpected stimuli and signals than to routine, everyday “noise.”
He thinks that the human taste mechanism has been calibrated not to notice the taste of water, so it is optimally attuned to the taste of anything that might be polluting it.
Effective communication will always require some degree of irrationality in its creation because if it’s perfectly rational it becomes, like water, entirely lacking in flavor. This explains why working with an advertising agency can be frustrating: it is difficult to produce good advertising, but good advertising is only good because it is difficult to produce. The potency and meaningfulness of communication is in direct proportion to the costliness of its creation — the amount of pain, effort, talent consumed in its creation and distribution. This may be inefficient — but it’s what makes it work.
Quite simply, all powerful messages must contain an element of absurdity, illogicality, costliness, disproportion, inefficiency, scarcity, difficulty or extravagance — because rational behavior and talk, for all their strengths, convey no meaning.
It is therefore impossible to generate trust, affection, respect, reputation, status, loyalty, generosity or sexual opportunity by simply pursuing the dictates of rational economic theory. If rationality were valuable in evolutionary terms, accountants would be sexy.
Economists tend to dislike the idea of branding and are inclined to see it as an inefficiency, but then they might view a flower as an inefficient form of weed.
Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut.
Here again, we have a case where doing something ostensibly irrational conveys more meaning than something that makes sense. It has meaning precisely because it is difficult to do.
Wearing gold jewelllery in South Central LA as a man is a doubly costly signal: it requires that you have the money to acquire the jewellery, but also conveys that you are hard enough to display it in public without fear of theft.
How should a female choose? She relies on a mixture of sensory cues to spot the mating partners most likely to produce viable and successful offspring; age, size and resistance to parasites and illness may all be useful indicators. A creature that survives long enough to reach a great size or age clearly has what it takes to survive.
Modern environmentalists also suggest that status-signaling competition between humans is destroying the planet.
Most people will avoid giving credit to sexual selection where they possibly can because, when it works, sexual selection is called natural selection.
Why is there a reluctance to accept that life is not just a narrow pursuit of greater efficiency and that there is room for opulence and display as well? Yes, costly signaling can lead to economic efficiency, but at the same time this inefficiency establishes valuable social qualities such as trustworthiness and commitment — politeness and good manners are costly signaling in a face-to-face form. Why are people happy with the idea that nature has an accounting function, but much less comfortable with the idea that it also has a marketing function? Should we despise flowers because they are less efficient than grasses? Even Darwin’s great contemporary and collaborator Wallace hated the idea of sexual selection; for some reason, it sits in the category of ideas that most people — and especially intellectuals — simply do not want to believe.
He claimed that it was only after the advent of penicillin that he became a true medic: before antibiotics, he was partly a glorified witch doctor.
The placebo effect, like many other forms of alchemy, is an attempt to influence the mind of body’s automatic processes.
We don’t pretend that we can sleep at will or control our levels of contentment, but much of the time we pretend that conscious human agency is the only force that drives our behavior, and therefore disparage other less obvious behaviors that we have adopted to hack our unconscious processes as if they were irrational, wasteful or absurd.
The fact that no money changes hands during a trip is one of the most powerful — it makes using it feel like a service rather than a transaction.
This is because the mammalian brain has a deep-set preference for control and certainty. The single best investment ever made by the London Underground in terms of increasing passenger satisfaction was not to do with money spent on faster, more frequent trains — it was the addition of dot matrix displays on platforms to inform travelers of the time outstanding before the next train arrived.
It turns out that more is spent on female beauty than on education.
What makes an effective placebo is that there must be some effort, scarcity or expense involved.
“If we position the product as a night-time cold and flue remedy, the drowsiness isn’t a problem — it’s a selling point. It will not only minimize your cold and flu symptoms, but it will help you sleep through them too.” Night Nurse was born: a masterclass in the magic of reframing.
For something to be effective as a self-administered drug, it has to involve an element of illogicality, waste, unpleasantness, effort or costliness. Things which involve a degree of sacrifice seem to have a heightened effect on the unconscious, precisely because they do not make logical sense.
The qualities we notice, and the things which often affect us most, are the things that make no sense — at some level, perhaps it is necessary to deviate from standard rationality and do something apparently illogical to attract the attention of the subconscious and create meaning. Cathedrals are an over-elaborate way of keeping rain off your head. Opera is an inefficient way of telling a story. Even politeness is effectively a mode of interaction that involves an amount of unnecessary effort. And advertising is a hugely expensive way of conveying that you are trustworthy.
People want cheap, abundant and nice-tasting drinks, surely? And yet the success of Red Bull proves that they don’t.
At some point, we have to ask a vital question: do these various things work despite the fact that they are illogical, or do they work precisely because they are?
Moreover, the kind of skill that we tend to prize in many academic settings is precisely the kind that is easiest to automate. Remember, your GPS is computationally much more capable than you are.
The reason is that the first question is tailor-made for computation, being what you might call a “narrow context” problem. It assumes an artificially simplified, regularized world (where buses miraculously travel at a constant speed), it involves very few variables (all of which are numerically expressible, and allow for no ambiguity) and it has one single, incontrovertibly correct answer.
Blurry “pretty good” decision-making has simply proven more useful than precise logic. Now, I accept that the need to solve “narrow context” problems is much greater today than it was a million years ago, and there’s no denying the contribution that rational approaches have made to our lives. But I would also contend that our environment has not changed all that much: most big human problems, and the majority of business decisions, are still “wide context” problems.
The problems occur when people try to solve “wide” problems using “narrow” thinking. It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
The question we were asking, “Who can I find who won’t rip me off?”, was a sensible one: the one thing you can’t afford to do when your budget is so tight, is fall victim to a con artist, which is why we needed someone with reputation at stake.
However, what they discovered was fascinating: without these rogue bees, the hive would get stuck in what complexity theorists call “a local maximum”; they would be so efficient at collecting food from known sources that, once these existing sources of food dried up, they wouldn’t know where to go next and the hive would starve to death. So the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s R&D function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food. It is precisely because they do not concentrate exclusively on short-term efficiency that bees have survived so many million years.
Such questions as whom to marry, where to live, where to work, whether to buy a Toyota or a Jaguar or what to wear to a conference don’t submit to any mathematical solution. There are too many future unknowns and too many variables, many of which are either not mathematically expressible or measurable.
People with approval ratings below 97% can barely sell equivalent goods for half the price of sellers with a track record of 100% satisfaction.
A few years ago we discovered that men were reluctant to order a cocktail in a bar — in part because they had no foreknowledge of the glass in which it would be served. They would order a beer instead.
Because JFK is more popular, it is seen as a less eccentric choice. Flying to JFK is the equivalent of buying an IBM: an easy default. The great thing about making the “default” choice is that it feels like not making a decision at all, which is what businesspeople and public sector employees tend to really like doing — because every time you don’t visibly make a decision, you’ve ducked a bullet.
Blame, unlike credit, always find a home, and no one ever got fired for booking JFK. By going with the default, you are making a worse decision overall, but also insuring yourself against a catastrophically bad personal outcome.
However, what they had done was change the shapes of the blocks you would break off a bar, rounding their corners. And smoother shapes taste sweeter. Truly.
The new Boing 787 Dreamliner is, in many ways, a triumph of psychophysics. Lighting, pressurization and humidity all mitigate the effects of jet lag. Moreover, visual illusions — in particular a spacious entranceway — create an impression of spaciousness; it is actually 16 inches narrower than a Boing 777, but to many passengers it feels significantly wider. Adding a little space when people enter the aircraft creates an impression of airlines that carries through into the main cabin, even though the main cabin is no less densely packed than usual.
Purple does not exist at all: indigo and violet are in a rainbow, but magenta isn’t — the color exist only in our heads.
The reason for all this is that have trichromatic vision. We have three sets of cones (or color sensors) in our retinas, each of which is sensitive to a different part of the color spectrum; the brain then constructs the rest of the spectrum by extrapolating from the relative strength of these three.
If you take any two languages at random, you may find that the two are sometimes immensely different, containing concepts unique to one or the other.
The job of a designer is hence that of a translator. To play with the source material of objective reality in order to create the right perceptual and emotional outcome.
However, misunderstandings are all too common, because Dutch conversation tends to be astoundingly direct, while British English is oblique and often coded to the point of derangement.
Like many things that emerge from the technology sector, we become so drunk on the early possible benefit of a technology that we forget to calculate the second-order problems. The evangelists of big data imply that “big” equals “good”, yet it by no means follows that more data will lead to decisions that are better or more ethical and fair.
In both cases, the strategy was a commercial disaster. People didn’t want low prices — they wanted concrete savings. One possible explanation for this is that we are psychologically rivalrous, and like to feel we are getting a better deal than other people. If everyone can pay a low price, the thrill of having won out over the other people disappears; a quantifiable saving makes one feel smart, while paying the same low prices as everyone else just makes us feel like cheapskates. Another possible explanation is that a low price, unlike a discount, does not allow people any scope to write a more cheerful narrative about a purchase after the event — “I savd $33,” rather than “I spent $45.”
It is worth remembering that costly signaling may also play a role in this: certain things need to be expensive for symbolic reasons. A $200 dress reduced to $75 is fine, but women may not feel happy wearing a $75 dress to a wedding.
If you put “low in fat” or any other health indicators on the packaging, you’ll make the contents taste worse.
Nothing is as important as we think it is while we are thinking about it. Marketers exploit the focusing illusion. When people are induced to believe that they “must have” a good, they greatly exaggerate the difference that this good might make to the quality of their life.
Products are easier to sell if they offer one quality that the other do not. Even if this feature is slightly gratuitous, by highlighting a unique attribute, you amplify the sense of loss a buyer might feel if they buy a competing product.
What this all means is that no living create can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured and proportionate manner. Some degree of bias and illusion is unavoidable.
Simply adding colored flecks to a plain white powder will make people believe it is more effective, even if they do not know what role these flecks perform.
All these solutions seem like bullshit from a logical point of view, and they do all involve an element of smoke and mirrors. If we were capable of objectively viewing the world we would regard this as deception, but alas we can’t. Also, it’s not as if, without these smoke and mirrors, we’d suddenly see the world with perfect accuracy — we’d just see different smoke and mirrors.
One of their explanations was guilt: the product was so damned easy to make compared to traditional baking that people felt they were cheating. The fact that the cake tasted excellent and received plaudits didn’t help — this simply meant that the “cook” felt awkward about getting more credit than they had earned.
We both feel that the placebo effect might be strengthened if the drug requires some preparation, whether prior dilution or mixing. In addition, by creating a routine around the preparation of a drug before you take it, you also create a ritual, which makes it much harder to forget.
“Use by Friday, 12/11/17” is a much more useful reminder than a numerical date.
It is only the behavior that matters, not the reasons for adopting it. Give people a reason and they may not supply the behavior; but give people a behavior and they’ll have no problem supplying the reasons themselves.
The moral of the fable is that many pretend to despise and belittle that which is beyond their reach. That seems fair enough, though it is worth asking how our lives would feel if we did not play this mental trick on ourselves — we might go about in a constant state of resentment because we were not the billionaire recipient of a Nobel Prize.
The opposite phenomenon to sour grapes is often called “sweet lemons”, where we “decide” to put a positive spin on a negative experience. Both these mental tricks are types of “regret minimization” — given the chance, our brain will do its best to lessen any feeling of regret, though it does need a plausible alternative narrative to do this. Thinking back to my experience at the airport, the reason I had previously hated being bussed to the terminal was not because it was intrinsically bad, but because there didn’t seem to be anything that would help me frame it in a more positive light. As Shakespeare wrote, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
As a result, we end up resenting taxation more than expenditure that goes towards something we can see, feel or even imagine.
Similarly, perhaps no 26-year-old will ever buy a financial product, however advantageous it may be to them, if it is called a pension.
Antelope might be able to find slightly better grass by escaping their herd and wandering off on their own, but a lone one would need to spend a large proportion of its time looking out for predators rather than grazing; even if the grass is slightly worse with the herd, they are able to safely spend most of their time grazing, because the burden of watching for threats is shared by many pairs of eyes rather than one.
The scent was not to make the soap effective, but to make it attractive to consumers.