The Irrational Bundle. Dan Ariely

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СКАЧАТЬ at Starbucks instead of getting cheaper coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts or even free coffee at the office. But you don’t think about these trade-offs anymore. You’ve already made this decision many times in the past, so you now assume that this is the way you want to spend your money. You’ve herded yourself—lining up behind your initial experience at Starbucks—and now you’re part of the crowd.

      HOWEVER, THERE IS something odd in this story. If anchoring is based on our initial decisions, how did Starbucks manage to become an initial decision in the first place? In other words, if we were previously anchored to the prices at Dunkin’ Donuts, how did we move our anchor to Starbucks? This is where it gets really interesting.

      When Howard Shultz created Starbucks, he was as intuitive a businessman as Salvador Assael. He worked diligently to separate Starbucks from other coffee shops, not through price but through ambience. Accordingly, he designed Starbucks from the very beginning to feel like a continental coffeehouse.

      The early shops were fragrant with the smell of roasted beans (and better-quality roasted beans than those at Dunkin’ Donuts). They sold fancy French coffee presses. The showcases presented alluring snacks—almond croissants, biscotti, raspberry custard pastries, and others. Whereas Dunkin’ Donuts had small, medium, and large coffees, Starbucks offered Short, Tall, Grande, and Venti, as well as drinks with high-pedigree names like Caffè Americano, Caffè Misto, Macchiato, and Frappuccino. Starbucks did everything in its power, in other words, to make the experience feel different—so different that we would not use the prices at Dunkin’ Donuts as an anchor, but instead would be open to the new anchor that Starbucks was preparing for us. And that, to a great extent, is how Starbucks succeeded.

      GEORGE, DRAZEN, AND I were so excited with the experiments on coherent arbitrariness that we decided to push the idea one step farther. This time, we had a different twist to explore.

      Do you remember the famous episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the one in which Tom turned the whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence into an exercise in manipulating his friends? As I’m sure you recall, Tom applied the paint with gusto, pretending to enjoy the job. “Do you call this work?” Tom told his friends. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Armed with this new “information,” his friends discovered the joys of whitewashing a fence. Before long, Tom’s friends were not only paying him for the privilege, but deriving real pleasure from the task—a win-win outcome if there ever was one.

      From our perspective, Tom transformed a negative experience to a positive one—he transformed a situation in which compensation was required to one in which people (Tom’s friends) would pay to get in on the fun. Could we do the same? We thought we’d give it a try.

      One day, to the surprise of my students, I opened the day’s lecture on managerial psychology with a poetry selection, a few lines of “Whoever you are holding me now in hand” from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

      Whoever you are holding me now in hand,

      Without one thing all will be useless,

      I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,

      I am not what you supposed, but far different.

      Who is he that would become my follower?

      Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

      The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,

      You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,

      Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,

      The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon’d,

      Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,

      Put me down and depart on your way.

      After closing the book, I told the students that I would be conducting three readings from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that Friday evening: one short, one medium, and one long. Owing to limited space, I told them, I had decided to hold an auction to determine who could attend. I passed out sheets of paper so that they could bid for a space; but before they did so, I had a question to ask them.

      I asked half the students to write down whether, hypothetically, they would be willing to pay me $10 for a 10-minute poetry recitation. I asked the other half to write down whether, hypothetically, they would be willing to listen to me recite poetry for ten minutes if I paid them $10.

      This, of course, served as the anchor. Now I asked the students to bid for a spot at my poetry reading. Do you think the initial anchor influenced the ensuing bids?

      Before I tell you, consider two things. First, my skills at reading poetry are not of the first order. So asking someone to pay me for 10 minutes of it could be considered a stretch. Second, even though I asked half of the students if they would pay me for the privilege of attending the recitation, they didn’t have to bid that way. They could have turned the tables completely and demanded that I pay them.

      And now to the results (drumroll, please). Those who answered the hypothetical question about paying me were indeed willing to pay me for the privilege. They offered, on average, to pay me about a dollar for the short poetry reading, about two dollars for the medium poetry reading, and a bit more than three dollars for the long poetry reading. (Maybe I could make a living outside academe after all.)

      But, what about those who were anchored to the thought of being paid (rather than paying me)? As you might expect, they demanded payment: on average, they wanted $1.30 to listen to the short poetry reading, $2.70 to listen to the medium poetry reading, and $4.80 to endure the long poetry reading.

      Much like Tom Sawyer, then, I was able to take an ambiguous experience (and if you could hear me recite poetry, you would understand just how ambiguous this experience is) and arbitrarily make it into a pleasurable or painful experience. Neither group of students knew whether my poetry reading was of the quality that is worth paying for or of the quality that is worth listening to only if one is being financially compensated for the experience (they did not know if it is pleasurable or painful). But once the first impression had been formed (that they would pay me or that I would pay them), the die was cast and the anchor set. Moreover, once the first decision had been made, other decisions followed in what seemed to be a logical and coherent manner. The students did not know whether listening to me recite poetry was a good or bad experience, but whatever their first decision was, they used it as input for their subsequent decisions and provided a coherent pattern of responses across the three poetry readings.

      Of course, Mark Twain came to the same conclusions: “If Tom had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” Mark Twain further observed: “There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign.”*

      WHERE DO THESE thoughts lead us? For one, they illustrate the many choices we make, from the trivial to the profound, in which anchoring plays a role. We decide whether or not to purchase Big Macs, smoke, run red lights, take vacations in Patagonia, listen to Tchaikovsky, slave away at doctoral dissertations, marry, have children, live in the suburbs, vote Republican, СКАЧАТЬ