The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others by Tali Sharot

Author:Tali Sharot [Sharot, Tali]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.2. People’s desire to know their own worth is related to market performance. The black line represents the S&P 500, and the gray line represents the number of times people logged on to their accounts to check on their stocks. When the market goes up, people are more likely to take a peek at the value of their holdings than when it goes down.11

After statistically accounting for many different factors and possible explanations, the team reached a conclusion: people’s decision to gather information about the value of their stocks is governed by their desire to feel good. If the market is heading up, people assume that their own stocks will follow suit, and so they log on to take in a large sniff of the good news. When the market is dropping, they choose to shove their craniums in the ground. People know that there is a chance that they may be losing money, and confirming this will make them feel rotten. If they remain ignorant, they can hold on to some hope that their portfolio is, in fact, weathering the storm. So all else being equal, people tend to ignore negative information, which can make them feel bad, and seek positive news, which can make them feel good.

That, however, is true as long as the bad news can reasonably be ignored. What the graph does not show is what happened when the market finally collapsed, in the fall of 2008. During the financial collapse, people started logging in frantically. When things are very clearly going wrong, keeping a sliver of hope is virtually impossible, and so we set out to assess the damage as soon as we can and rebuild.

This principle does not just apply to finance. While most people at risk of Huntington’s disease avoid genetic testing, many of those who decide to take the test are individuals who are already experiencing symptoms. In essence, they are simply confirming what they already know to be true with near certainty. Although the disease cannot be cured, the knowledge can help them make decisions regarding how to live their remaining years. Individuals who know they have a short life span “fast-forward” their lives; they may get married, they may get pregnant, they may retire early.12 In other words, people select to avoid potentially unwelcome information unless they are almost certain of the devastating news. At that point, the cost of making wrong decisions outweighs the benefit of not knowing how bad things really are.

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