The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think (9 page)

An evolutionary perspective also provides a second important insight.
By understanding the adaptive function of a given tendency, we are in a better position to predict when that tendency will be strong and when it won’t.
This second insight could chip away at a cornerstone assumption of classic economics—that people have stable preferences.
The idea is that we’re supposed to behave consistently from one situation to another.
You should be loss averse at this moment, in an hour, tomorrow, and the day after.
Some have even stated a precise number when it comes to the stability of loss aversion: a person should experience a loss as 2.75 times more psychologically impactful than a gain of the same magnitude.

But the idea of subselves suggests a radically different way of thinking about how people behave across situations.
Rather than being one monolithically consistent decision maker, we are—led by our subselves—predictably inconsistent.
If a particular bias, like loss aversion, were adaptive for solving a particular ancestral problem, we would expect this bias to ebb and flow according to the evolutionary goal currently most important to a person.
We would thus expect people to be strongly loss averse in some situations but not in others.

Along with our colleagues Jessica Li and Steve Neuberg, we set out to test this possibility in a series of experiments.
As other researchers
had done in past studies demonstrating loss aversion, we asked people how they would feel if they gained $100 or lost $100.
Before people answered these questions, though, they first read a short story designed to activate either the self-protection or the mate-acquisition subself.

If you were being primed for self-protection, you would read a story imagining yourself alone in your house at night.
You hear suspicious noises outside your window.
At first, you dismiss them as merely rustlings of the night winds, but as things progress, it becomes clear that someone has broken into your house.
You call out, and no one replies, but then you hear footsteps right outside your bedroom.
You pick up the phone to make an emergency call, but the line has been cut.
Finally, the intruder lets out an evil cackle, then turns the handle to your bedroom door.
The scenario ends as you see his shadow appear ominously in your doorway.

If you were instead being primed for mate acquisition, you’d have read a story about being away on vacation and meeting someone to whom you are instantly attracted.
Not only is this person attractive to you, but he or she also finds you irresistible, and the two of you keep finding excuses to be around one another for hours on end.
Your feelings become more and more romantic, and the scenario ends as you share a passionate kiss.

Both men and women who read the vacation story found it romantic and even sexually arousing.
People who read the other story about the creepy break-in, on the other hand, experienced not the pleasure of sexual arousal but the foreboding of abject fear.
What effect did priming fear versus romance have on people’s loss aversion?
Activating the self-protection subself made people even more loss-averse than usual.
For these individuals, losses loomed much larger than gains.
This finding makes sense to the extent that loss aversion was adaptive for solving ancestral challenges related to survival.
When dangers lurk, it pays to worry.
We would expect our inner night watchman to be particularly loss averse.

But while losses loomed large in the self-protection condition, something very different happened with those primed for mate acquisition.
In fact, when this subself was running the show, loss aversion
didn’t just disappear, it reversed itself for men, who became oblivious to losses and amped up the importance of gains.

For men primed to attract a mate, then, gains loomed larger than losses.
Why?
Across the animal kingdom, failure to gain a mate puts mammalian males at critical risk of not being able to pass on their genes.
Remember those young skateboarding blokes in Australia, who threw caution to the wind when a pretty young woman came to watch them perform.
Potential gains in the mating domain loom large because ancestral males who were overly safe failed the most critical step in evolution.

Whereas many biases have been considered stable, it turns out that biases like loss aversion vary dramatically from situation to situation—they can be amplified, turned off, and even inverted.
These variations are neither arbitrary nor irrational; instead, they reflect the operation of our deeply rational subselves.
Some subselves are loss averse, like our inner night watchman seeking to protect us from danger.
But others are not, like men’s inner swinging-single subself seeking to find a mate.
Predicting whether a person will be loss averse or not requires knowing which of the seven people in his or her head is currently at the controls.

WHO WAS THE REAL MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.?

When Martin Luther King Jr.
acted very differently in different situations, was he being a hypocrite or suffering from a breakdown of his true, more rational self?
And assuming that you do not always act in a perfectly consistent manner, are you a hypocrite?

The idea of subselves suggests that there is more to hypocrisy than meets the eye.
If each of us is really multiple people, then we should not be surprised by hypocrisy.
It might be tempting (but wrong) to think of our subselves as playing different characters at different times, like when our demeanor at a Halloween party changes to match our costume.
We all realize that sometimes we pretend to be someone we really are not.
But subselves are not roles.
The idea of role-playing presumes that there is a single “real” you when you get off the stage or take off the mask.
But if you think about yourself as encompassing several
different subselves, this single you is a mirage—an illusion created by your hyperrationalizing consciousness.
The notion of subselves implies that there are many real yous, not one.
The you with your friends, the you on a date, the you with your family, and the you striving for a promotion are all equally the real you.

Some of your subselves have common objectives; befriending a neighbor could simultaneously serve affiliative, self-protective, and kin-care goals, for example.
But some of your subselves have incompatible goals, pulling you in opposite directions.
And when one subself is in charge, it doesn’t much care what your other off-duty subselves might normally desire.
The self-protection subself compelling you to dine at a popular, well-lit restaurant doesn’t care that your idle mate-acquisition subself would rather explore the unique little out-of-the-way joint a few blocks down a dark street.
When you are worried about the band of knife-wielding thugs who just walked around the corner, you are not thinking about romancing your date.

The mate-retention subself and the mate-acquisition subself are especially likely to be at odds with one another.
Just because someone’s mate-retention subself has chosen to wear a wedding ring and has sworn eternal faithfulness, that doesn’t mean that the mate-acquisition subself has also taken a vow of chastity.
King exemplified the tension between these two subselves.
When a powerful, high-status man is away from home and in the presence of adoring female admirers, not only is his inner good spouse likely to be off duty, but his inner swinging single is primed to jump into the driver’s seat.
And when the swinging single starts pursuing its agenda, it doesn’t much care what the good spouse would do if it were in charge.

This is not to say that subselves provide an excuse or a justification for immoral behavior.
But they can explain why humans often behave like hypocrites: we have only one body, but our brains are inherently divided.
The actions of our mate-acquisition subself often create dire consequences for our other subselves later, as when the new sexual partner feels jilted and calls a press conference.
But as we saw in the study about reversing loss aversion, a man’s mate-acquisition subself is not especially qualified to judge potential losses when there are immediate gains on the horizon.

N
OW THAT
we’ve properly introduced our subselves, we’ll look more closely at how they do business.
We must warn you, though: if you’ve ever taken a business class, the next chapter might inspire you to throw away your textbook.
To see why, we’ll first make a stop at Disneyland.

3

Home Economics Versus Wall Street Economics

O
N
O
CTOBER
16, 1923, Walt Disney and Roy O.
Disney started a small business called the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio.
Walt was the cartoonist; Roy handled the finances.
Working on a shoestring budget out of their Uncle Robert’s garage, the Disney boys operated on the edge of bankruptcy for over a decade, often borrowing money from their parents and other relatives.

From the outset Walt dreamed big, sparing no expense to make the first talking animated film, then raising the bar even higher with the first cartoon in Technicolor.
In 1937, they staked everything on creating the first feature-length animated film.
Although immensely risky, the venture was a great success.
Over seventy-five years later, we’ll guess you still know the film—it was called
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
.
The brothers followed this triumph with a string of other now-classic films, including
Pinocchio, Dumbo, Fantasia
, and
Bambi
.

Running a business together for many years, the brothers Disney had some bitter disagreements, many stemming from Walt’s big-dreaming perfectionism and complete lack of attention to money.
For
Snow White
, Walt hired a giant team of animators, investing an excruciating three years and $1.5 million into the film (an unheard-of sum back in the Depression-ridden 1930s).
Even after the film was finished,
Walt wanted to spend another $300,000 in last-minute touch-ups—a move Roy forcefully blocked.
Nevertheless, the two men stuck together through a lifetime of ups and downs, eventually expanding beyond the movie business, opening Disneyland in 1955 and Disney World in 1971, leaving behind a company that became the largest media conglomerate in the world.

Fast-forward to 1984, when Michael Eisner arrived to take his new job as Disney’s chief executive.
Although Walt and Roy had been gone for over a decade, the company still had the feel of a family business.
Roy E.
Disney, Roy O.’s son, was head of animation and vice chairman of the board of directors.
Despite the company’s having grown to the size of a major corporation, Disney employees faced none of the massive between-production layoffs common in the film industry.
Working at Disney was more like being part of a family than a corporation.
Employees even took off an afternoon every week to play softball together.

Forward again to 2003.
After two decades of Eisner’s leadership, the once warm and friendly family business that had given birth to Mickey Mouse, Sleepy, Sneezy, and Dopey had become a battlefield, devastated by legal and managerial feuds.
Although Roy E.
Disney had himself brought in Eisner, he openly criticized many of Eisner’s decisions.
Eisner retaliated by hatching a plot to remove Roy from the board of directors.
The messy feud was covered widely in the media, leaving some dark smudges on the company’s cherished warm and fuzzy family-oriented image, as well as its financial bottom line.
Eisner was eventually demoted and then quit on bad terms.

Given the billions of dollars at stake, why couldn’t Eisner and Roy E., who had once been friends, just follow the lead of the company’s famous founders and try harder to get along?

Unless you’re a hermit, most of your crowning achievements and painful failures involve other people.
Sometimes people’s efforts mesh beautifully, and result in something extraordinary, like
Snow White
.
But negotiating the social world presents a minefield of potential conflicts, from nickel-and-dime flare-ups on the playground to billion-dollar explosions in the corporate boardroom.
Why are some people successful negotiators, while others can’t seem to get on the same page with their colleagues?

If we take a closer look at the rational economic rulebook for negotiation, we make a surprising discovery: rather than trying to maximize profits and minimize losses rationally, the most successful teams and CEOs operate by a very different set of rules—the ones used by our different subselves.
This is useful to know because you will want to bring the right subself when you’re heading to the bargaining table.

PLAYING GAMES

Brutus and Caesar, Jung and Freud, and Lennon and McCartney all had famously productive partnerships, followed by infamously nasty splits.
Even the closest of relationships are occasionally staging grounds for marital spats, sibling rivalries, and parent-child conflicts.
Life is a series of fragile negotiations.
Does a wife clean the kitchen uncomplainingly or initiate a possible argument over the distribution of domestic labor?
Does a man pick up the restaurant tab for the fifth time in a row or ask his dating partner whether she is familiar with the concept of turn taking?
Does a parent yield to a toddler’s screaming demands for a sugary treat at the market or say no and risk the possibility that the situation will escalate into an embarrassing full-blown public tantrum?

Rational economists, the mathematically oriented business analysts, study these kinds of negotiations using a set of ideas called
game theory
.
Game theory applies cold hard mathematical logic to otherwise messy decisions.
For example, should you accept an initial salary offer from Acme Corporation or drive a harder bargain and take the chance that the Acme execs will offer the slot to someone else?
By applying clean numerical values to the different outcomes, economists turn confusing dilemmas into precise mathematical problems.
And we humans really like logical precision—so much so that eight different game theorists have been awarded Nobel Prizes.