Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (4 page)

The observed effects of scarcity in controlled conditions show one more thing. In the real world, the poor and the rich differ in so many ways. Their diverse backgrounds and experiences lead them to have different personalities, abilities, health, education, and preferences. Those who find themselves working at the last minute under deadline may simply be different people. When they are seen to behave differently, scarcity may be one reason, but any of several other differences may be playing a role as well. In Angry Blueberries, a coin flip determined who was “rich” (in blueberries) and who was “poor.” Now, if these individuals are seen to behave differently, it cannot be attributed to any systematic inherent personal differences; it must be due to the one thing that distinguishes between them: their blueberry scarcity. By creating scarcity in the lab in this way, we can untangle scarcity from the knots that usually surround it. We know that scarcity itself must be the reason.

The focus dividend—heightened productivity when facing a deadline or the accuracy advantage of the blueberry poor—comes from our core mechanism: scarcity captures the mind. The word
capture
here is essential: this happens unavoidably and beyond our control. Scarcity allows us to do something we could not do easily on our own.

Here, again, the game provides a suggestive glimpse. In theory, the rich in Angry Blueberries could have employed a strategy that simulated being poor. They could have used only three shots each round (like the poor) and saved the rest. This would have led them to play twice as many rounds as the “truly” poor and thus allowed them to earn twice as many points. In actuality,
the blueberry rich did not earn anywhere near twice as much
in the course of each game. Of course, the players may not have realized this strategy. But even if they had, they would not have been able to do much about it.

It
is very hard to fake scarcity. The scarcity dividend happens because scarcity imposes itself on us, capturing our attention against all else. We saw that this happened in a way that is beyond conscious control—happening in milliseconds. It is why an impending deadline lets us avoid distractions and temptations so readily—it actively pushes them away.
Just as we cannot effectively tickle ourselves
, it is exceedingly difficult to fool ourselves into working harder by faking a deadline. An imaginary deadline will be just that: imagined. It will never capture our mind the way an actual deadline does.

These data show how scarcity captures attention at many time scales. We saw in the introduction that scarcity captures attention at the level of milliseconds—the time it took the hungry to recognize the word
CAKE
. We see it at the scale of minutes (aiming blueberries) and of days and weeks (college seniors getting the most out of their time before graduation). The pull of scarcity, which begins at milliseconds, cumulates into behaviors that stretch over much longer time scales. Altogether, this illustrates how scarcity captures the mind, both subconsciously and when we act more deliberately. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman would say, scarcity captures the mind both when thinking fast and when thinking slow.

At 10 p.m. on April 23, 2005
, Brian Hunton of the Amarillo Fire Department received what was to be his last call.

Some calls turn out to be false alarms. Some—like this burning house on South Polk Street—turn out to be all too real. Not knowing which is which, firefighters take each one seriously. Each alarm creates a literal fire drill: firefighters must go from a relaxed evening at the firehouse to being at the fire scene, ready to face the flames. Not only must they get there quickly, but they must arrive in full gear and fully prepared. They rehearse and optimize each step. They even train getting dressed quickly. All this pays off. Within sixty
seconds of the call, Hunton and the rest of the crew were fully loaded on the truck, their pants, jackets, hoods, gloves, helmets, and boots already on.

Those outside the firefighting community are surprised by how Hunton died. He did not die because of burns from the fire. Nor did he die from smoke inhalation or from building collapse. In fact, Hunton never made it to the fire. As the fire truck raced to South Polk Street, it took a sharp turn. As it turned the corner at full speed, the left rear door swung open. Hunton came tumbling out and his head struck the pavement. The massive force of the strike caused serious trauma to his head, from which he died two days later.

Hunton’s death is tragic because it could have been prevented. If he had been wearing a seat belt when the door accidentally swung open, he might have been rattled but he would have been safe.

Hunton’s death is particularly tragic because it is not unique. Some estimates place
vehicle accidents as the second leading cause of firefighter deaths
, after heart attacks. Between 1984 and 2000, motor vehicle collisions accounted for
between 20 and 25 percent of firefighter fatalities
. In 79 percent of these cases the firefighters were not wearing a seat belt. Though one cannot know for sure, it stands to reason that simply buckling up could have saved many of these lives.

Firefighters know these statistics. They learn them in safety classes. Hunton, for one,
had graduated from a safety class the year before
. “
I don’t know of a firefighter
who doesn’t wear his or her seat belt when driving a personal vehicle,” wrote Charlie Dickinson, the deputy administrator of the U.S. Fire Administration, in 2007. “I don’t know of a firefighter who doesn’t also insist family members buckle up as well. Why is it then that firefighters lose their lives being thrown from fire apparatus?”

Rushing to a call, firefighters confront time scarcity. Not only must they get on the truck and to the fire quickly, but a lot of preparation also needs to take place by the time they arrive at the fire. They strategize en route. They use an onboard computer display to study the structure and layout of the burning building. They decide
on their entry and exit strategies. They calculate the amount of hose they will need. All this must be done in the brief time it takes to get to the fire. And firefighters are terrific at managing this scarcity. They get to distant fires in minutes. They reap a big focus dividend. But this dividend comes at a cost.

Focusing on one thing means neglecting other things. We’ve all had the experience of being so engrossed in a book or a TV show that we failed to register a question from a friend sitting next to us. The power of focus is also the power to shut things out. Instead of saying that scarcity “focuses,” we could just as easily say that scarcity causes us to
tunnel
: to focus single-mindedly on managing the scarcity at hand.

The term
tunneling
is meant to evoke tunnel vision,
the narrowing of the visual field
in which objects inside the tunnel come into sharper focus while rendering us blind to everything peripheral, outside the tunnel. In writing about photography, Susan Sontag famously remarked, “
To photograph is to frame
, and to frame is to exclude.” By
tunneling
, we mean the cognitive equivalent of this experience.

Firefighters, it turns out, do not merely focus on getting to the fire prepared and on time; they tunnel on it. Unrelated considerations—in this case the seat belt—get neglected. Of course, there is nothing unique to firefighters when it comes to tunneling, and there may be other reasons firefighters do not wear seat belts. But a seat belt that never crosses your mind cannot be buckled.

Focus
is a positive: scarcity focuses us on what seems, at that moment, to matter most.
Tunneling
is not: scarcity leads us to tunnel and neglect other, possibly more important, things.

Tunneling changes the way we choose. Imagine that one morning you skip your regular gym session in order to get some work done. You are facing a tight deadline and that is your priority. How did
this choice come about? It is possible that you made a reasoned trade-off. You calculated how often you’ve been to the gym recently. You weighed the benefits of one more visit against the immediate needs of your project and decided to skip. The few extra hours of work that morning were more important to you than exercise. In this scenario, if you were free of the mental influence of scarcity, you still would have agreed that skipping the gym that day was the best choice.

When we tunnel, in contrast, we choose differently. The deadline creates its own narrow focus. You wake up with your mind focused on—buzzing with—your most immediate needs. The gym may never even cross your mind, never enter your already full tunnel. You skip the gym without even considering it. And even if you do consider it, its costs and benefits are viewed differently. The tunnel magnifies the costs—less time for your project now—and minimizes the benefits—those distant long-term health benefits appear much less urgent. You skip the gym whether or not it is the right choice, whether or not a neutral cost-benefit calculation would have led you to the same conclusion. For the very same reason that we are more productive under the deadline—fewer distracting thoughts intrude—we also choose differently.

Tunneling operates by changing what comes to mind. To get a feel for this process, try this simple task: list as many white things as you can. Go ahead and give it a try. To make things easier, we will give you a couple of obvious ones to start you off. Take a minute and see what other white things you can name.

How many could you name? Was the task harder than you thought it would be?

Research shows that there is one way to make this task easier for
you—and that is
not
to give you “milk” and “snow.”
In experiments, people given these “helpers” name fewer total items, even counting the freebies.

This perverse outcome is a consequence of what psychologists call
inhibition
. Once the link between “white” and “milk” is activated in your mind, each time you think, “things that are white,” that activated link draws you right back to “milk” (and activates it further). As a consequence, all other things white are inhibited, made harder to reach. You draw a blank. Even thinking of examples for this paragraph proved hard. “Milk” is such a canonically white object that, once activated, it crowds out any others. This is a basic feature of the mind: focusing on one thing inhibits competing concepts. Inhibition is what happens when you are angry with someone, and it is harder to remember their good traits: the focus on the annoying traits inhibits positive memories.

The mind does not inhibit just words or memories. In one study,
subjects were asked to write down a personal goal
, an attribute that describes a trait (e.g., “popular” or “successful”) that they would like to attain. One half were asked to list a personally important goal. The other half were asked to list just any goal. Following this, as in the milk experiment above, both groups were asked to list as many goals (important or not) as they could. Starting off with an important goal led to 30 percent fewer goals being named. Just as “milk” tends to shut out other white objects, activating an important goal shuts off competing goals. Focusing on something that matters to you makes you less able to think about other things you care about.
Psychologists call this
goal inhibition
.

Goal inhibition is the mechanism underlying tunneling. Scarcity creates a powerful goal—dealing with pressing needs—that inhibits other goals and considerations. The fireman has one goal: to get to the fire quickly. This goal inhibits other thoughts from intruding. This can be a good thing; his mind is free from thoughts about dinner or retirement savings, focusing instead on the upcoming fire. But it can also be bad. Things unrelated to the immediate goal (such as
the seat belt) will not cross his mind; and even if they do, more urgent concerns drown them out. It is in this sense that the seat belt and the risk of an accident get neglected.

Inhibition is the reason for both the benefits of scarcity (the focus dividend) and the costs of scarcity. Inhibiting distractions allows you to focus. In our earlier example, why were we so productive working under a deadline? Because we were less distracted. The colleague’s e-mail does not come to mind, and if it does it is easily dismissed. And goal inhibition is why we were less distracted. The primary goal—to finish writing the chapter—captured our mind. It inhibited all those distractions that create procrastination, like e-mail, a video game, or a light snack. But it also inhibited things we ought to have attended to, such as the gym or an important phone call.

We focus and tunnel, attend and neglect for the same reason: things outside the tunnel get inhibited. When we work on a deadline, skipping the gym may or may not make sense. We just don’t think (or think enough) about it that way when we decide to forgo the gym for the deadline. Our mind is not on that subtle cost-benefit problem; it is on the deadline. Considerations that fall within the tunnel get careful scrutiny. Considerations that fall outside the tunnel are neglected, for better or worse. Think of an air traffic controller who manages several planes in the air. When a large passenger plane reports engine problems, she focuses on it. During that time, she neglects not only her lunch plans but also the other planes under her control, including ones that might suddenly find themselves on a collision course.