FOR THE MOST part in this chapter, I’ve discussed instances where prices change from something to nothing. Of course, some things that are generally free or are considered a common resource can be relocated into the realm of market forces. For instance, carbon emissions trading is an area where we ought to consider the intersection between social and market norms.* “Cap and Trade” is a program of economic incentives designed to encourage industries and companies to pollute less; the less they pollute, the fewer pollution allowances they have to buy. Moreover, if companies don’t use all their allowances, they can profit from their cleanliness by selling their extra allowances to companies that pollute more. It’s virtue that pays!
However, in light of the experiments described in this chapter (as well as those in Chapter 4), we might want to consider the dark side of putting a price on pollution. If a company can be charged for spewing poisons into the environment, it might well decide, after a cost-benefit analysis, that it can go ahead and pollute a lot more. Once pollution is a market and companies pay for their right to pollute, morality and concern for the environment are nonissues. On the other hand, if pollution is something that cannot be purchased or traded, it would more naturally fall into the domain of social norms.
To be sure, if we want to place pollution under the control of social norms, we can’t stand back and hope that people will start caring. We need to make pollution into an easily measurable and observable quantity and get people to pay attention to it and understand its importance. We could, for example, publically post the pollutant amounts of different countries, states, and companies together with their environmental impact. We could include this information on companies’ financial statements to their shareholders or maybe force companies to post it on their products, much as we do for nutritional information on packaged food.
I’m not saying that Cap and Trade is necessarily a bad idea, but I do think that when public policy or environmental issues are at stake, our task is to figure out which of the two—social or market norms—will produce the most desirable outcome. In particular, policy makers should be careful not to add market norms that could undermine the social ones.
NOW THAT WE’VE learned how social norms get people to care less about their own selfish goals and pay more attention to the welfare of others, you might expect me to propose a brilliant idea for injecting more social norms and civility into the Filene’s Basement “Running of the Brides.” I wish I had a solution for getting these women to behave in a more considerate or at least less violent way. But the haunting memories of watching the live event suggest to me that getting a future bride to concentrate on an abstract idea like “other people” as opposed to the concrete reality of a discounted wedding gown might be nearly impossible. (For weeks afterward, I would look into the faces of my female friends and wonder whether they, too, were capable of trampling each other in an abject act of retail lust.)
And why, you might ask, am I so easily giving up on this social science challenge? Because I suspect that for social norms to operate, people cannot be at their most emotionally piqued state. When you’re focused, mind and body, on one highly emotional objective—grabbing that wedding dress—it’s hard to factor in others’ well-being. As we will see in the next chapter, when emotions run high, social norms inevitably get trampled like so many Vera Wang veils.
CHAPTER 6
The Influence of Arousal
Why Hot Is Much Hotter Than We Realize
Ask most twentysomething male college students whether they would ever attempt unprotected sex and they will quickly recite chapter and verse about the risk of dreaded diseases and pregnancy. Ask them in any dispassionate circumstances—while they are doing homework or listening to a lecture—whether they’d enjoy being spanked, or enjoy sex in a threesome with another man, and they’ll wince. No way, they’d tell you. Furthermore, they’d narrow their eyes at you and think, What kind of sicko are you anyhow, asking these questions in the first place?
In 2001, while I was visiting Berkeley for the year, my friend, academic hero, and longtime collaborator George Loewenstein and I invited a few bright students to help us understand the degree to which rational, intelligent people can predict how their attitudes will change when they are in an impassioned state. In order to make this study realistic, we needed to measure the participants’ responses while they were smack in the midst of such an emotional state. We could have made our participants feel angry or hungry, frustrated or annoyed. But we preferred to have them experience a pleasurable emotion.
We chose to study decision making under sexual arousal—not because we had kinky predilections ourselves, but because understanding the impact of arousal on behavior might help society grapple with some of its most difficult problems, such as teen pregnancy and the spread of HIV-AIDS. There are sexual motivations everywhere we look, and yet we understand very little about how these influence our decision making.
Moreover, since we wanted to understand whether participants would be able to predict how they would behave in a particular emotional state, the emotion needed to be one that was already quite familiar to them. That made our decision easy. If there’s anything predictable and familiar about twentysomething male college students, it’s the regularity with which they experience sexual arousal.
ROY, AN AFFABLE, studious biology major at Berkeley, is in a sweat—and not over finals. Propped up in the single bed of his darkened dorm room, he’s masturbating rapidly with his right hand. With his left, he’s using a one-handed keyboard to manipulate a Saran-wrapped laptop computer. As he idles through pictures of buxom naked women lolling around in various erotic poses, his heart pounds ever more loudly in his chest.
As he becomes increasingly excited, Roy adjusts the “arousal meter” on the computer screen upward. As he reaches the bright red “high” zone, a question pops up on the screen:
Could you enjoy sex with someone you hated?
Roy moves his left hand to a scale that ranges from “no” to “yes” and taps his answer. The next question appears: “Would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?”
Again, Roy selects his answer, and a new question pops up. “Would you always use a condom?”
BERKELEY ITSELF IS a dichotomous place. It was a site of antiestablishment riots in the 1960s, and people in the Bay Area snarkily refer to the famously left-of-center city as the “People’s Republic of Berkeley.” But the large campus itself draws a surprisingly conformist population of top-level students. In a survey of incoming freshmen in 2004, only 51.2 percent of the respondents thought of themselves as liberal. More than one-third (36 percent) deemed their views middle-of-the-road, and 12 percent claimed to be conservatives. To my surprise, when I arrived at Berkeley, I found that the students were in general not very wild, rebellious, or likely to take risks.
The ads we posted around Sproul Plaza read as follows: “Wanted: Male research participants, heterosexual, 18 years-plus, for a study on decision making and arousal.” The ad noted that the experimental sessions would demand about an hour of the participants’ time, that the participants would be paid $10 per session, and that the experiments could involve sexually arousing material. Those interested in applying could respond to Mike, the research assistant, by e-mail.
For this study, we decided to seek out only men. In terms of sex, their wiring is a lot simpler than that of women (as we concluded after much discussion among ourselves and our assistants, both male and female). A copy of Playboy and a darkened room were about all we’d need for a high degree of success.
Another concern was getting the project approved at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (where I had my primary appointment). This was an ordeal in itself. Before allowing the research to begin, Dean Richard Schmalensee assigned a committee, consisting mostly of women, to examine the project. This committee had several concerns. What if a participant uncovered repressed memories of sexual