Hoy No Circula—Today You’re Not Getting on the Road.
This was the name Mexico City gave its innovative “road-space rationing” program when it was instituted in 1989. The country’s capital, a sprawling metropolis, stood in the top ranks of the dirtiest cities in the world. A friend who lived there at this time once mentioned that every time she blew her nose, her handkerchief would end up black. The main source of the heavy pollution and dangerously bad air quality was, of course, the abundance of cars. The city’s traffic was notoriously dense, just as the great distances many had to traverse across the city for their commute to work were notoriously long. For the health of its millions of citizens, the city government created a program that would impose usage limitations on the car owners of the Distrito Federal. On certain days of the week they wouldn’t be allowed to get on the road, which would gradually cause the smog to clear.
The plan was fairly simple, and was based on the last digit of a car’s license plate number. One day a week, cars with the designated numbers were not allowed on the city’s roads. On that day, the plan theorized, you would have to use public transportation or carpool with someone else. With decreased vehicle emissions fouling the air in the bowl-like valley of the city each day, people would suffer fewer contamination-related illnesses and early deaths. The newly improved collective health of the capital would make up for the individual annoyance. Sounds good, right?
Wrong. The well-intentioned program didn’t take into account human nature, which tends to put one’s own needs before the overall good of the group. (This is a classic problem in political science, called the “commons dilemma,” and plays a role in our global climate change problem as well.) People usually manage to find loopholes or ways around personal inconvenience. And in Mexico City, many people did indeed find a creative way to circumvent the new restrictions on road use, one that sabotaged the whole purpose of the reformist policy.
Drivers simply bought another car and obtained a different-ending license-plate number (even or odd) than that of their original car.
This way, they could still drive into work every day—not only that, but the second car soon came to be used four days a week, not just one. So instead of reducing smog and road congestion, the new policy actually increased the number of cars, congestion, and smog. These second cars, of course, were by and large used cars, now pouring into Mexico City from the outlying regions to meet the demand—cars that were older and more polluting than the cars already in the city. Within six months after the new road use program began, the city’s gasoline consumption had risen substantially, and pollution and road congestion had increased.
It is hard to predict or shape the future, especially where human behavior is concerned, even (or especially) when it is important to try to do so. This is especially true of policies that impose restrictions on individual freedoms to benefit the common good, as in Mexico City, or give incentives or rewards for desired behavior. In one famous example, which led to something called the cobra effect, the government of India put a bounty of hundreds of dollars on each cobra killed and brought in to the appropriate official, in order to help rid the country of these dangerous and too-common predators. But this new policy actually increased, rather than decreased, the cobra population. In fact, it led to an explosion of the cobra population! Why? Because many people started actively breeding cobras in order to bring them in and get the reward.
I bred my own cobras, you might say, in the first psychology experiment I ever participated in, back when I was taking Psych 101 in college. Introductory psychology classes typically require students to participate in five or ten experiments. In this experiment I was to do the “pursuit rotor task,” an old-fashioned experimental task in which concentration and coordination are at a premium. You have to try to keep the metal rod in your hand in contact with a metal disc that is rapidly spinning on an old record turntable; doing so completes an electrical circuit that runs a timer that keeps track of how long you were able to keep the two in contact. The graduate student experimenter explained to me that I would do the task twice, and I would get paid up to ten dollars depending on how much better I did the second time than the first time. This was a lot of money to a college student in the 1970s. So he set the disc spinning and told me to begin, and went back into his control room. Naturally, I did really badly the first time around. For some reason, ahem, I just could not manage to keep the rod on the disc very long at all. The experimenter came in after the first part looking very concerned and asked whether I understood the task, what I was supposed to do. I said, yeah, but it was (ahem) so hard. He started the disc spinning the second time and went back to the control room. I was so much better the second time—almost perfect in fact. When he came back in the next time he looked very suspicious—and quite grudgingly counted out the nine dollars and change I had earned. Economists would say I behaved quite rationally. The incentives were such that to maximize my earnings I should do as poorly as possible the first time, and as well as I could the second time. But basic human motivations and the effect of rewards on behavior were apparently lost on the experimenter, who hadn’t factored in the consequences beyond his scientific intentions—just like the policy makers in Mexico and India.
Like policies that seek to recast behaviors, our own personal desires and goals for the future can change us while we are pursuing them, often in unintended ways—hence, unconsciously. Pursuing a given goal can cause us to do things that go against our important values and self-concepts, things we’d normally consider immoral or unethical or unhealthy. It can cause us to be more open to outside influences, even subliminal advertising, than we normally are. It can cause us to spend our money in ways we will later think were silly and wasteful, when we get the bill. It can cause us to like people we’d otherwise not like, and also to like our friends less than we usually do. All because those changes will help us get to the goal we are currently trying for. Our current goals change us—our minds, hearts, and values. And without our being aware that these changes have taken place. This is why we must be careful what we wish for.
Because our goals and motivations are for desired future states, their influence resides in the third time zone of the hidden mind. What and who and where we want to be in the future, near or long term, shapes what we think, feel, and do in the present. What we want and need to get, where and who we want and need to be, all strongly influence what we like and don’t like right now, at this moment. We become what we pursue and we start to see the world through goal-colored glasses. This is true whether the objective you’re after is one you are consciously aware of or not.
Wishes wield great power over us. It is as if our goals reconfigure us, making us temporarily a different person with different values doing different things than we usually do. Unfortunately, we often recognize this only after the fact, after the goal has been reached or is no longer being pursued, and at that point we wonder what we were thinking. Dan Wegner used to tell the story of going through the cafeteria line with good intentions to eat a nice, healthy salad for lunch, and then sitting down and being surprised to see a hot, steaming plate of fries in front of him. (“How did that get there?”) What he really wanted, and maybe usually got for lunch, won out because he wasn’t paying enough attention to carrying out his good intention to do otherwise. (Overcoming our unconscious desires and breaking our bad habits is not easy but it can be done, as we’ll see in Chapter 10.)
Our intentional goals, then, can have unintended consequences. But at least with a conscious desire, we have the chance to take off our goal lenses and think through the practical consequences of accomplishing it. But often, and for a variety of reasons, our motivations operate unconsciously, hidden in the background, influencing what we do before we know it. This is what the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza meant when he wrote that “men are usually ignorant of the causes of their desires—we are conscious of our actions and desires, but ignorant of the causes by which we are determined to desire anything.” We may think we know why we are doing what we are doing, but often there is a deeper underlying reason.
I experienced this firsthand about fifteen years ago, driving back to New York from a Thanksgiving weekend with my sister’s family in Tennessee. The trip was about nine hundred miles. I left at eight thirty in the morning and told everyone as I was getting in my car that I was going to make it back in twelve hours, as a kind of challenge, and all day I drove with this goal of making it back home by eight thirty at night. I did make it in time and was feeling quite pleased with myself as I walked out of the parking garage. But instead of heading to my nearby apartment building, I found myself heading for the nearest liquor store, which at the time by state law closed at nine o’clock on Saturday, and would not be open on Sunday. It was at this point that I remembered that I didn’t have anything to drink at home in my apartment. That night as I was having a glass of the wine I had just bought, it dawned on me why I had been so determined to get home by eight thirty. It had nothing to do with “the challenge” of driving nine hundred miles in twelve hours. It had everything to do with getting to the liquor store before it closed. When I realized the real reason I wanted to get back by eight thirty, the power of my need to have something to drink that weekend, I was somewhat shocked. It wasn’t easy, but that glass of wine was the last drink I ever had. I had learned that what is good for our goals may not be good for our souls.
Do you remember the scene in the first Lord of the Rings movie where kindly Uncle Bilbo’s face suddenly distorts into that of a ferocious beast, just because his nephew Frodo won’t let him hold the Ring of Power? Just as Bilbo’s need transformed him, goals can take us over and dramatically change our preferences and behavior. This is perhaps most clear in the case of strong addictions. In Chapter 5, we looked at a study of smokers trying to quit. Their unconscious attitudes toward smoking and cigarettes were negative, but when they had a strong need for a cigarette after not smoking for four hours, their unconscious attitudes toward smoking changed. Now, even though they very much wanted to quit, and knew all about the damage that smoking was doing to their bodies, that powerful need changed their unconscious feelings about smoking to positive. The strong goal changed their minds.
The decision researcher George Loewenstein, of Carnegie Mellon University, was the first to call our attention to how such powerful visceral needs can dramatically change our choices. Think of the alcoholic who in the morning swears (and believes it) that she will never touch the stuff again, and vows not to have anything to drink that evening. Yet when the clock rolls around and her body is expecting, nay, demanding the substance, her attitudes and behavior change drastically. At this point, she makes all sorts of rationalizations. “One more night won’t make any difference,” she says. “I’ll quit tomorrow.” But for too many addicts, that promise is never kept, and that tomorrow never comes.
We’ve already seen how another deep goal, the mating or reproduction motive, operates behind the scenes to guide behavior in its favor. Attractive female applicants, and to a lesser extent attractive male applicants, were considerably more likely to get called in for job interviews than less attractive applicants with the same qualifications. Attractive people activate the reward structures of our brains without our realizing or intending it. The mating motivation is unconsciously activated, regardless of the egalitarian, meritocratic values of the person who is doing the hiring.
Neuroscience research on the motivational circuits of the brain by Mathias Pessiglione and Chris Frith, of University College London, has confirmed that the perception of a reward activates the reward centers of the brain whether or not the person is consciously aware of the external reward. Participants squeezed harder on a handgrip task when a picture of a pound coin (the reward for doing well) was flashed subliminally before the task, compared to when a penny coin was subliminally flashed. Plus, the reward center of the brain, in the basal forebrain, was more active in the pound than in the penny coin condition.
Another study showed the unconscious operation of the mating motive. Male college students were primed, or not, with the goal to affiliate with women, through reading a short passage about a romantic encounter. Next they were given the choice of taking a short tutorial with another person, Jason or Jessica, on one of two topics, say geology and astronomy. Half the time Jason taught geology and Jessica taught astronomy, and half the time it was the other way around. But the actual topics they taught didn’t matter—if the mating motive was operating unconsciously, the participants wanted to work with the female tutor more than they wanted to work with the male tutor. And at the end of the study, they really believed their choice was because of the topic she taught (geology or astronomy), that they had a genuine interest in that subject they had not known they had.
The problem with not knowing the real reasons for what you do is that we are all very good at coming up with positive reasons for our behavior after the fact. Bob didn’t hire the woman because of her looks but (of course) because of her qualifications. Mary didn’t have three shots of whiskey because she is addicted to alcohol but because she just wanted to—deserved to—relax after a long, hard day at work. Aziz didn’t choose the tutorial topic because of the attractiveness of the tutor, but because he was genuinely interested in the topic. And I didn’t race home at breakneck speed to get to the liquor store before it closed, but rather for the fun challenge of seeing if I could get home in under twelve hours. These are essentially rationalizations and our conscious mind is very good at coming up with them. In the 1980s movie The Big Chill, Jeff Goldblum’s character says that rationalizations were more important to him than sex, because he’d often gone many months without sex, but he couldn’t go one morning without a good rationalization.
When the mating goal is operating it can cause us to rationalize doing things we’d normally avoid because of the health risks involved. Take tanning salons and diet pills, for instance. They can help us achieve a mating goal because they can help make us feel more attractive to others—slimmer, with a healthy, sun-kissed, if sometimes orangey, look. But they can be bad for our health and physical safety; tanning salons damage our skin and elevate the chances of skin cancer; and diet pills increase blood pressure, hurt our heart, worsen sleep, and can lead to addiction. The negatives clearly outweigh the positives, which is likely why most people don’t use diet pills or tanning beds.
Indeed, researchers at a large American state university found that a group of several hundred female undergraduates had generally negative opinions about using either one. They reported little if any interest in using a free tanning salon membership or in taking a diet pill known to cause heart problems later in life. But all that changed when their mating motive, their desire for a close romantic relationship, became active, after they had rated many photographs of highly desirable “local” men and women on a dating website. Now the female students’ opinions about using tanning salons and diet pills became more positive. They expressed greater willingness to engage in these risky behaviors, and indeed, rated these behaviors as less risky than did the control group. The active mating goal caused them to downplay the negative aspect of the tanning salons and diet pills to themselves because those negative aspects interfered with the active goal of becoming more attractive. That goal was now overriding the students’ usual beliefs and values, changing their minds so that they could more effectively pursue the objective of attracting a mate.
Attracting a mate, or preparing ourselves to do so, is something we often do during our leisure time, but during these free hours our mind seeks to satisfy other goals, too. Research by Shira Gabriel and her colleagues at the University of Buffalo has shown that much of our leisure time activity is devoted to meeting our deeper social needs to belong and to socialize, but mostly without our realizing it. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, from 2003 to 2014 most of adults’ leisure time was spent on solitary activities—watching TV and movies (56 percent), reading books (7 percent), and being on the Internet (9 percent). Only 13 percent, on average, was devoted to actual socializing—spending time with friends and coworkers (outside the office). How can this overwhelming preference for solitary activities be reconciled with the notion that we humans are a fundamentally social species?
It’s because, as their many studies show, the seemingly nonsocial, solitary activities are actually social in nature. Down deep we feel we are spending time with the people we see on TV, and so they satisfy the need for real social contact that drives us. And very often we are not aware of how our “sneaky social self,” as the researchers called it, meets its needs through these other, solitary activities. For example, when we are feeling lonely, we tend to watch more of our favorite shows, with characters we know better and are more familiar with, and indeed doing so causes us to feel less lonely. When we are not feeling lonely, on the other hand, we tend to just watch whatever happens to be on TV at the time.
Gabriel and her colleagues note that people often bemoan the fact that they watch too much TV, and when giving the reasons for why they do, they rarely give social reasons. Instead they say that they watch TV because they find the plot interesting, or they are bored. When challenged on this point, they are quite skeptical that the deeper reason is actually that these activities help fill important social needs. But they do. That’s in large part why watching TV is such a popular activity, and pets are an excellent “substitute” as well. When one of my childhood heroes, Walter Cronkite, passed away, his family was at his bedside, but his several cats, to whom he was very close, were also there on the bed with him, too. Research has shown that just the presence of a dog, not even your own dog, helps reduce a person’s distress after being socially excluded. Our best friends, indeed.
Hunger is another powerful unconscious motivator, like physical safety and reproduction, driving behavior in surprising ways. Most of us have learned, through our own experience, not to go grocery shopping when hungry. But some recent research has shown that being hungry makes you buy more of anything, not just food. Satisfying hunger is a deep evolutionary motivation that existed long before we had department stores and Targets and Best Buys, and it influences forms of consumption besides food. Alison Jing Xu and her colleagues studied shoppers coming out of a large mall in Minneapolis–St. Paul, and by checking their cash register receipts and also asking them to rate how hungry they currently were, found that hungry shoppers bought more non-food-related items such as clothes, cosmetics, and electronics. In another study, they found that hungry people also took more of free items such as binders and paper clips, showing that it was not that they wanted to spend more money, but that they just wanted to acquire things, a desire influenced by the underlying need for food.
So, not only is it a bad idea to go grocery shopping when you are hungry, but it’s a bad idea to go shopping for anything while hungry. If you are about to do any online shopping, you might want to head to the fridge first to grab a sandwich.
Our goals and needs also make us more sensitive to information we encounter that is relevant to our meeting those goals and needs. Sixty years ago, Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner introduced the concept of “perceptual readiness,” a theory that linked a person’s current motivational state and desires with increased sensitivity to goal-relevant people and objects in one’s environment. You unconsciously tune your attention to things that will help you satisfy your goals and needs. So in another study, Xu and her colleagues showed how hungry people become temporarily more sensitive to words related to hunger and to wanting, gaining, and acquiring, so much so that they are even able to see and identify those words when they were presented subliminally, for only 50 milliseconds, or one-twentieth of a second each. This was so fast that people who were not currently hungry could not identify those words. But the state of hunger changed the participant so that they were able to see things related to the goal that normally they could not see.
This greater sensitivity to goal-related information has implications for our degree of vulnerability to outside influences. We will be more influenced by ads, for example, when we already have the need or goal suggested by the ad. Recall the obese shoppers in the recipe-priming study from the previous chapter. Words related to healthy eating and dieting in a recipe flyer they saw when entering the store significantly decreased how much snack food they subsequently bought. But this recipe priming effect only worked for the obese or restrained eaters who had the dieting goal already—not for the other shoppers who did not have that goal.
Again, the message is that we should be careful what we wish for, because we will be more open to outside influence than we otherwise would be. Many of us are concerned about subliminal advertising, because we do not want to be manipulated by large corporations or governments to buy or do things we’d otherwise not want to. There is an urban myth from the 1950s about a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that purportedly flashed “Drink Coke” and other subliminal messages during a movie, which caused people to flock like thirsty zombies out to the concession stands. This never actually happened. It was a hoax perpetrated by a public relations firm that was presented as fact in a bestselling book of the time, The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard. Not only did the technology to present these messages during a movie not exist at the time, but the movie theater where it was said to have happened never existed, either! Nevertheless, the story did lead to many people becoming afraid of being manipulated in order to further a company’s interests rather than their own, and without their consent.
In the past twenty years, research has shown that subliminal advertising can in fact influence your choices and behavior, but only if you already have the goal. If you are thirsty, it can affect what you choose to drink. If you are hungry, it can affect what you choose to eat. What is important about these outside influences is not so much whether they are subliminal or not, but whether you realize they can affect you or not. They weren’t subliminal to the dieters in the grocery store, and the hungry shoppers at the department store could probably tell you they were hungry, yet in neither case were they aware that their dieting or eating goals influenced what and how much they bought.
External influences have more of an impact on you the more the goal matters to you. This basic principle was borne out in a recent review of hundreds of goal-priming studies, which found a reliable and robust goal-priming effect on behavior in general, but an even bigger effect when the goal was personally important to the participant. The stronger the need, and the more important the desire, the stronger the outside influence can be. This is very important when it comes to wishes for our career and our personal lives, since being motivated is good—but we should also know the secondary effects. Your current goal changes the information you are influenced by, and it also changes what you pay attention to and can later remember.
Take a couple who are in the front seat of a car driving on a highway. The driver is focused on the traffic, the other cars around her, the road signs, and also on her car’s own speed and maybe the air-conditioning. The passenger, sitting right next to her, is enjoying the fall foliage, reading the billboards, noticing the odd and funny license plates and bumper stickers. They will have very different memories of the trip when they reach their destination even though they were in the same place for several hours. This is because what we look at and pay attention to depends on its relevance to our current goal, which in this case is quite different for the driver and the passenger.
In 1978, Richard Anderson and J. W. Pichert performed a classic experiment on how we reconstruct memories of a situation in strikingly distinct ways depending on the goal we have in that situation. The experimenters had asked participants to watch a videotaped tour of a residential home. Everyone watched the same videotape. Some were told to watch the video as if they were a burglar who was planning on robbing the home; others were told to watch the video as if they were a potential home buyer. Afterward, the two groups had quite different memories of the video. The “home buyers” remembered how large the rooms were, the condition of the major appliances (such as the hot water heater and gas stove), and the number of bedrooms. The “burglars,” on the other hand, remembered if there were basement windows that were accessible, valuable but portable consumer products such as televisions and stereos, as well as other belongings that could be sold. And because our attention is limited at any given moment, the “home buyers” missed a lot of the details the “burglars” picked up on, and vice versa. The participants’ memories of the video were not an accurate copy of the tape (many people think memory works this way) but a version of it filtered and edited by the particular goal they had while watching.
Another risk of focusing on a goal for a long time is that your unconscious can continue to notice things and evaluate them when you no longer mean to be pursuing that goal at all. A great illustration and comical metaphor for this effect comes at the opening of the movie Modern Times, starring Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s famous Tramp has been working long and hard in a factory where his one job is to tighten large bolts on giant moving gears all day. Finally the quitting-time whistle blows and everyone puts down their tools and files toward the exit. Charlie is so crazed from countless hours spent tightening these bolts that he can’t quite control himself and leaves with his wrenches still in his hands. Uh-oh, out in the street is a buxom woman in a large coat with, you guessed it, very large buttons going down the front. To Charlie’s goal-crazed mind, these look just like those bolts in the factory, and he jumps at the woman, trying to tighten those buttons, and chases her down the street as she tries to get away.
Players of the game Tetris might know what I’m talking about. People who play Tetris for prolonged periods of time report that they start seeing the real world as though it were a larger version of the game itself. Jeffrey Goldsmith wrote about such an experience in a Wired magazine article in 1994. He stayed for a week in Tokyo with a friend who had a Game Boy: “Tetris enslaved my brain. At night, geometric shapes fell in the darkness as I lay on loaned tatami floor space. Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together.” When we devote so much time and attention to a pursuit, it begins to pattern our thoughts, mental images, and even dreams in entirely unintended ways. The Tetris player viewed the world in terms of the shapes it includes, and the mental operations of the game occurred unbidden, with the player unconsciously fitting things together, rotating them to make a good fit—everything processing through the filter of a game played so much it had become hyperaccessible in his mind. Dream researchers have even found that people who played Tetris all day, even amnesiacs with no memory of having played, reported having dreams of different shapes falling from the sky, rotating and fitting into the pattern of spaces below.
I had the same experience in my office in the late 1980s when I became addicted to playing Pac-Man, the monochromatic version available for the very primitive desktop PCs of the time. My fingers would fly over the left, right, up, and down arrow keys and I got very good at evading the ghosties and racking up huge totals of points. One day after spending too long playing the game when I should have been getting work done, I looked up and noticed it was time to go down the hallway for a lunchtime brown-bag talk. To my surprise, when I went out into the hallway I immediately looked left down that hall, and then straight ahead down that other hall, to make sure they were clear before heading down to the talk. Our floor of the NYU Psychology Building was a maze of corridors (visitors often got lost) and when I got to the next juncture, I again found myself stopping to peer around the corner to make sure the way was clear before proceeding. To my Pac-Man–crazed mind it was as if our office floor had become the game maze, causing me to react to other people in the hallways as if they were Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.
One of the most important mental operations your goals influence is the evaluation of things and people as good or bad, depending not on your personal values or long experience with them so much as on whether they help or hinder that goal. Your current goal can even unconsciously change who you consider your best friends to be. Most of us have diverse friendships; we don’t do the same kinds of things with all of our friends. We like to confide in some and talk about serious things, with others we like to do activities like hiking or playing golf, with others the focus is on our kids. In college, that intense formative period of our young adulthood in which we create friendships that often last for the rest of our lives, the main activities we engage in are studying, or hanging out and relaxing. With this in mind, researchers used the shifting contexts of college to examine how goals might recast our close friendships. Could we feel closer to certain friends instead of others depending on the goal—studying versus relaxing—we have at the time?
Gráinne Fitzsimons and her research team asked a group of college students who their best friends were and what kinds of activities they did with them. The participants completed a short language test with words (primes) related to achievement and high performance, or to relaxation and enjoyment. Next, they completed a task designed to prime the achievement goal or the “relax and have fun” goal, without their realizing it. Then came the crucial measure: all of the students were asked to rank their set of friends, the ones they’d listed at the start of the study, from best friend to least-close friend. If the achievement goal had been triggered, the student listed people they typically studied with as being their best friends, but if the fun-party goal had been primed, now the student listed their party pals as being their best friends. The goal reordered the students’ pecking order of best friends to reflect which ones were of more help in attaining it.
Not only does our current goal affect how we feel about our current friends, but it influences who we become friends with in the first place. Students at Northwestern University first had their goal for academic success, or for physical fitness, primed so that it was operating unconsciously in the background. If their academic achievement goal had been primed, the students wanted to be friends with people whom they could study with, but if their fitness goal had been primed instead, they wanted to be friends with others they could work out with. They were not aware of the influence of their active goals on their friendship choices.
This effect works both ways. Not only do your goals affect how you think about your friends and other close relationships, but merely thinking about a close personal relationship can influence how effectively or vigorously you pursue your goal. Thinking about your mom, for example, brings to mind (often unconsciously) the goals that you associate with her, such as making her proud of you. Fitzsimons and I brought in college student participants who had said on a questionnaire a few months earlier that they had the goal of making their mother proud of them, and we also brought in a second group of participants who had other goals regarding their mother, such as helping her or being good friends with her (but not making her proud). Next, we had some of them think about their mothers, but just in a very incidental way, such as writing down what she did on a typical Saturday, drawing a map of her neighborhood, listing her hobbies, and so on. In the control group, the participants just answered questions about themselves, none about their mothers.
Did thinking about their moms trigger the goal of making her proud—that is, achievement motivation? After the “mom” priming part of the experiment, all of the participants then worked on a short verbal task, taken from the board game Scrabble. We gave each of them the same seven wooden letter tiles, and their job was to come up with as many different words as they could in five minutes using just those letters. As we had predicted, the students who had the goal of making their mothers proud of them and who had just thought about their mom before the Scrabble task outperformed all of the other participants. Thinking about Mom was not enough if you did not associate her with the goal of high performance and achievement; also, wanting to make your mom proud of you was not enough if you had not just thought about her and so primed, or “woken up,” that goal. Merely thinking about an important person in your life therefore makes it more likely you will then immediately pursue the goal you typically associate with them. Importantly, this effect can occur even when the person is not there—she may not be physically present, but she is psychologically present. It doesn’t matter if she is actually thousands of miles away from you.
So our current goal influences what we like and dislike; it can cause us to like some people more than others depending on whether they are a help or a hindrance to our achieving a goal. Your current goal can even cause you to like someone you’d normally not like at all. For instance, that goal can change how you’d normally react to negative, rude behavior, and if that rudeness is good for your current goal, you can actually end up liking that rude person.
Take a scenario in which a personnel director is interviewing candidates for a job opening, a situation that our lab simulated by making a realistic videotape of a job interview. The camera was positioned behind the interviewer at his desk, so you only saw him from behind, but you could see the person being interviewed seated in front of the desk. Everyone who participated in the study saw the same tape, with one exception. The exception had nothing to do with the job interview itself. Rather, in this fairly busy office, with secretaries and others coming in and out during the interview, a coworker named Mike suddenly appeared in the doorway and reminded the job interviewer that it was noon and they had planned to go out to lunch that day. The key difference between the two tapes was how Mike acted. In one version, Mike was very polite and even deferential, apologizing for interrupting the interview and saying he would wait outside the door. In the other version, Mike was instead very rude, angrily pointing out that they had made plans to go out to lunch that day and it was time to go.
The participants had not been told to judge Mike at all, only to evaluate the job candidate on whom the camera was focused, in terms of how suitable he was for the job. Here is where the goals come in. One group of our participants was told that the job interview was to be a waiter at a nearby restaurant. We knew that most people think that waiters are supposed to be polite and deferential—with a “the customer is always right” kind of attitude. The other group of participants was told the interview was for a very different kind of job—that of a reporter at the New York Daily News, assigned to cover organized crime. The ideal qualities for the crime reporter were the exact opposite of those for the waiter—the crime reporter had to be tough, aggressive, and persistent—rude, if need be.
The job candidate was the same in both videotapes, and the questions asked by the interviewer during the videotape were generic and vague enough to apply to both positions, and regarded things such as employment history, motivation to do well, and so on. But after the participants watched the tape, we asked them—surprise!—not about the actual job candidate, but about Mike, who had interrupted. We asked how much they liked Mike and also to rate him on several personality traits, such as politeness and rudeness.
As you would expect, in a control condition where no job was mentioned, the participants liked polite nice Mike significantly more than rude nasty Mike. This tendency was even stronger in the waiter condition. People usually like polite and kind people more than rude and nasty people; no surprise there. But here is the kicker: in the crime reporter condition, participants actually liked rude Mike more than they liked polite Mike. This occurred even though they clearly recognized he was rude and aggressive. What changed here was that these traits, while normally not a good thing, were a good thing for the participants’ current goal of evaluating the job candidate for a crime reporter condition. While that goal was active and operating, they happened also to encounter Mike, and even though they had no conscious intentions or instructions to evaluate Mike at all, their active goal reacted positively to his rudeness. The active goal, consciously focused on someone else entirely, caused them to like a person whom, without that goal operating at the time, they would have clearly disliked instead.
The implications for real life are considerable. The personal traits and values we might value in people in one domain of our life, say at work, may well not be the ones we’d value in a romantic relationship. And vice versa. Imagine a personnel director who in her off hours is actively dating and looking for that special someone. If that goal becomes strong enough over time, as with Charlie Chaplin’s compulsion to tighten bolts, she might like and even hire people who are more suited for romantic relationships than for a position in the company. And she may not realize she is applying the wrong criteria, just like the Italian job employers who overwhelmingly favored attractive over unattractive applicants. Flip it around and one can see an investment banker or a police lieutenant liking and choosing to date people who are greedy and competitive, or efficient and emotionless. And would grade school teachers who value quiet, obedient, studious children then also prefer the same kind of person as a friend or date?
On April 21, 1980, a woman with short dark hair crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon wearing a yellow Adidas running shirt with her race number pinned to it. Rosie Ruiz had taken first place in the women’s category, beating 448 other runners. The crowd swirled nearby, and they had reason to be excited. Not only had an unassuming, twenty-six-year-old Cuban-born woman with very little previous marathon experience won one of the world’s most famous athletic competitions—but she had come in with the third-best women’s time in history, a stunning 2 hours, 31 minutes, and 56 seconds. She was an office assistant in everyday life, suddenly transformed into a running champion. It was the perfect Cinderella story.
Except that it wasn’t. Not even four hours after declaring her the winner, the race organizers began receiving reports that threw the veracity of Ruiz’s sensational performance into doubt. For one thing, the women who finished after her, world-class competitors who had been in the lead before the twentieth mile, had no memory of Ruiz overtaking them. In spite of the mounting suspicion, she stuck to her story, offering to take a lie detector test. The next day came the proverbial smoking gun: two Harvard students who had been watching the marathon had seen Ruiz pop out of the crowd and join other runners late in the race. Soon after, it also came out that when she had qualified to compete in Boston, in the New York City Marathon, she had done so only by riding the subway and using the same technique of slipping into the final stretch of the race. On April 29, eight days after her false victory, officials stripped Ruiz of her title.
Forms of cheating and deception, much less extreme than Rosie Ruiz’s, of course, are commonplace in sports, as in “flopping” in basketball to trick the referee into calling a personal foul on your opponent (who didn’t actually hit you very hard). We’ve all seen soccer players writhe on the ground in apparent agony, clutching their shins after a hard tackle, while viewers at home watch replays showing no contact even occurred. These spectacular and obvious sports examples highlight what researchers have shown to be a general human tendency: when the goal of achievement and high performance is active, people are more likely to bend the rules in ways they’d normally consider dishonest and immoral, if doing so helps them attain their performance goal.
Over my many years of teaching, I’ve found that very few students obediently put down their pens or pencils when I announce “time’s up” on a test. Sometimes after asking them several times to hand in their test, and waiting many minutes, I’ve had to finally pull the test out of their hands while they are still furiously writing! (One even called me rude for doing so.) Experimentally, along with my NYU colleagues Peter Gollwitzer and Annette Lee-Chai, my lab re-created this effect by first priming the achievement goal in our participants using the scrambled-sentence technique, with words such as achieve, strive, and succeed embedded in the test. Then we gave them a set of Scrabble letter tiles and three minutes in which to write down as many words using just those letters as they could. Then the experimenter said she had to leave the room to start another experiment, and if she did not get back in time she would announce “Stop” over the intercom when time was up, at which point they were to put down their pencils and stop working.
What our participants did not know was that we had a video camera hidden in the front of the room, and so could check later whether they had actually put their pens down when told to over the intercom, or whether they continued to write down words until the experimenter reappeared (after about five minutes). For those participants in which the achievement goal was operating, thanks to the prime, more than 50 percent of them “cheated” by continuing to write down words long after the Stop command; in the control condition only about 20 percent did so. If the active achievement goal can cause a person to bend the rules like this on a relatively unimportant task—with no prizes, no recognition, no possibility of anyone noticing; just a psychology experiment—it is easy to understand its power over our moral judgments and behavior when actual money or athletic victories are on the line.
Rosie Ruiz wanted to win the Boston Marathon so badly that she quite literally took shortcuts to do so. She cheated, in an outrageous and quite public manner. Her fervent desire to win the famous and prestigious race had convinced her that cheating to do so was somehow okay. Ruiz is an extreme example of a tendency we all have, to do things that help us achieve our strong goals that we would not do in the absence of that goal.
Our goals are such a powerful influence over us that they can override even our long-term values and beliefs. What if I told you that seminary students, wanting to spend their lifetimes as priests and ministers, and with strong personal values and self-concepts about helping others and behaving morally, would walk right by a sick person lying by the side of the road, just because their current goal was to get to their next class quickly because they were running late? But that is exactly what happened in the famous “Good Samaritan” study done at Princeton University in the 1970s.
In this experiment, conducted by John Darley and Daniel Batson, seminary students were asked to give a speech on either vocational careers for people studying to be members of the clergy, or the Good Samaritan parable in the Bible, in which one man helps a stranger who is in need after everyone else has passed him by. In order to give this speech, all participants had to walk from one building to another. Importantly, some participants were told that they were running late and had to hurry to reach the other building, while others were not. On the way to the other building, in a covered walkway, all of the students passed a shabbily dressed person slumped on the ground and in apparent distress. This person was actually part of the experimental team. The point of the study was to see who would help, and what situational and personality factors made a difference in helping.
It turned out that the only thing that predicted how likely a student was to stop and help was whether they were in a hurry or not. The type of speech they were to give, and how religious they were (as measured on a personality scale), made no difference. All that mattered was whether they had to get to the next classroom quickly. Stopping and helping someone would cost them time, and this was valued negatively by the “get there fast” goal. This objective was such a strong unconscious influence that it short-circuited their own moral beliefs, and even the very relevant moral principle that was currently on some of their minds—the Good Samaritan parable itself!
What’s important to appreciate here is that the seminary students didn’t somehow transform into bad people. Rather, their active goal directed their attention away from the person in need, made it less likely they’d feel that the person needed their help, devalued the notion of their stopping to help, and guided the seminary students’ behavior toward getting to the next class as quickly as possible. Based on their discussions with the participants after the study was over, Darley and Batson believed that the students who were in a hurry did not interpret the person as being in distress, needing help. The researchers concluded that “because they were hurrying” the seminary students were so focused on getting to the next class on time that they did not have their normal empathic reactions to seeing a person in distress. Stopping to help meant being late for class, and so the goal placed a negative value on helping a person in distress, changing the students’ minds from the positive value of helping someone in distress—which, ironically, is the entire point of the Good Samaritan parable they were in such a hurry to discuss in their next class.
One factor that has tremendous power to change our goals and thus transform our values and behavior is power itself. The power of power is legendary: as the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cases of power abuse and corruption among government officials are unfortunately all too commonplace; my home state of Illinois has almost a tradition now of sending politicians first to the Governor’s Mansion and then to prison, because of their abuse of power for personal gain.
Often the power abuser seems entirely oblivious to how his or her behavior must seem to the public, as if they are somehow unaware of it being a misuse of power at all. But for anyone else, it doesn’t pass the “smell test.” George H. W. Bush’s librarian of Congress sealed all materials related to the Iran-Contra arms scandal (in which Bush was involved as vice president) for fifty years, on Bush’s last day in office in 1993; a few weeks later, that same person was named the librarian of the Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M at the quite princely salary (especially at the time) of $400,000 a year. No connection between the two events, of course. And not that long ago, South Carolina’s governor had to resign because he flew down to South America to see his mistress, hardly bothering to hide the fact. Examples of this are surprisingly easy to find, and you just have to shake your head in wonderment that the corruption was so out in the open—as if the power abuser were blind to the unconscious influence of power, unlike everyone around them.
There are several theories as to why power has this corrupting effect, but the one I’d like to focus on here is that power has the natural effect of activating one’s own important, personal goals—the ones that are usually constrained or suppressed because of social disapproval or expected punishments for pursuing them. These are often selfish goals that are achieved at the expense of other people. Power gives you the ability to get what you want despite others’ objections or lack of consent. What our lab’s research has shown, in fact, is that giving a person power reveals what those deep wants actually are. And we can quote my home state’s all-time hero, Abraham Lincoln, on this point: “Anyone can do the right thing when they are made to,” he wrote. “If you really want to judge a man’s character, give him power.”
In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, more than a dozen women came forward to level accusations against Donald Trump for abusing his power and status to inappropriately touch or kiss them—for example, contestants reported that as owner of the Miss Universe and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants, he felt entitled to walk into their dressing rooms while many were naked or half-naked, and Trump had been caught on tape by Access Hollywood ten years earlier bragging about walking up to women he didn’t know and kissing and fondling them. Quite discouragingly, such heinous behavior by the powerful is not unusual, and even tolerated by some, although scientists have been studying it for a while.
Our lab became interested in the issue of sexual harassment in the 1990s after a Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, was accused of inappropriate advances by a former employee, Anita Hill. In the years since, our country has made gains in addressing this systemic problem, but there is clearly much progress still to be made. Sexual harassment is the sexual objectification of subordinates (or less powerful coworkers), the act of treating them as sex objects instead of with respect as a colleague or work teammate. There are several forms that sexual harassment can take, but one of the most egregious is the quid pro quo variety, as in, I’ll give you this in exchange for that. This can be explicit or implicit. To give a real-life example, in one case a male boss in Tennessee actually said to his female subordinate, in front of a roomful of employees, “Let’s go discuss your raise at the Holiday Inn.”
In 1993, Louise Fitzgerald, a law professor at the University of Illinois, examined the body of Supreme Court cases of quid pro quo sexual harassment, especially the testimony of the accused (usually male) harassers. She concluded from her study that fully 75 percent of the accused harassers did not know or realize they were doing anything wrong. Their usual story was that 1) they were genuinely attracted to the woman, and 2) they behaved toward her just like we all do toward someone we are attracted to: we smile at them, ask them out, court them, behave amorously toward them. In other words, they believed—apparently sincerely, according to Fitzgerald’s analysis—that they were genuinely attracted to the victim of their harassment solely because of her qualities (looks, demeanor, personality), and that it had nothing to do with their power over her.
Fitzgerald’s conclusions tipped us off that power might be having an unconscious influence over the harassers, in unconsciously activating their strong personal goal of having sexual relations with women, causing them to be attracted to women they have power over and to behave toward them in inappropriate ways. In its extreme or quid pro quo form, the powerful boss uses that power inappropriately to pursue the objective of having sex with women he has power over, in the form of hiring or firing them, and doling out raises and promotions.
At the time, the mid-1990s, other researchers had developed personality scales that distinguished between men who were likely to sexually harass and those who were not. What seemed to separate those with the tendency from those without it was the willingness to use leverage or power over a woman to get sexual favors from her. Another important determinant was what the person admitted he would do if it was guaranteed he would not get caught—that is, if nothing bad would happen to him. We and other researchers were astonished and dismayed by the large percentages of men who said they would probably commit rape and sexual assault under such circumstances.
In one study, we had men who scored high on these tendencies and those who scored low come into our NYU lab for a study purportedly on visual illusions. Before they worked on the illusions, we first primed them using the scrambled-sentence method with words related to power, such as boss, authority, status, and power. In the control condition no power words were presented. We expected that unconsciously activating the idea of power would then trigger the goal of sex in the high-sexual-harasser group, and that this would in turn cause them to become more attracted than otherwise to a female confederate also taking part in the visual illusion study. So after the two of them viewed and made ratings of several standard visual illusions, we took them into separate rooms and asked the male participants several innocuous questions about their experience in the experiment. One of those concerned the “other participant” and how pleasant and attractive she was. We could then see how the power-priming manipulation influenced how attracted the male participant had been to the female student who took part in the study with him.
First, the good news—the male participants who had scored low on sexual harassment and aggression tendencies found the woman to be equally attractive whether they were in the power priming or control priming group. For these men, power made absolutely no difference in how attracted they were to the woman. But it was a very different case for the men who were high in these harassment and aggression tendencies. For those in the control condition, without the idea of power being active, they actually found the woman to be unattractive—below the midpoint of the unattractive-to-attractive rating scale. It was only when the idea of power was active in their minds that they considered the woman to be attractive, as attractive as the nonharasser men had rated her to be. In other words, when the idea of power was triggered in their minds, exerting an unconscious influence on their feelings, the woman became more attractive to them. So what this study suggests for real-life power situations, quite alarmingly, is that sexual harassers are attracted to women because of the power they have over them.
Because these effects of power were shown to operate unconsciously, without our participants’ awareness, it is easier to see how real-life bosses, such as those in the sexual harassment case studies reviewed by Louise Fitzgerald, could sincerely report they did not know they were doing anything wrong or unethical. To them they were behaving as they believed all of us do when we are attracted to someone. But what they missed was the effect of their own power over the person whom they found attractive. It is for this reason—that power itself can be an aphrodisiac, in the words of Henry Kissinger—that many universities and businesses have made it a matter of policy to forbid dating and romantic relationships between students and professors, bosses and subordinates, or anyone holding potential power over the other person’s outcomes. The high-profile case of Yale philosophy professor Thomas Pogge, accused of quid pro quo sexual harassment of many of his students, highlights the continuing need for enforcement of such a policy. While Pogge’s behavior, occurring as it did over many years, was especially egregious, the goal of such blanket policies is to prevent even the unintentional influences of power on attraction, which our studies as well as the actual legal cases show often occurs. For while the power holder may (consciously) believe that it is all innocent and aboveboard, the relatively powerless person may well feel uncomfortable and worry about real consequences for their career if they do not return the interest.
Still, there is a “good news” or “half-full” summary of our study, in that power did not corrupt everybody. For our participants who did not have the personal goal of sex connected with the idea of having power, there was no unconscious effect of power over their attraction to the woman. My Yale colleague Margaret Clark was the first to show that not everyone has selfish, exploitative goals regarding other people; there are also those of us who are more communally oriented toward their fellow humans and actually put the other person’s interests above those of their own. Think parents, in this regard. Parents—good ones, at least—typically put the interests of their children above their own, even though the parents have the power in the household and not so much their children. How would such communally oriented people react to having power over others? We decided to examine this in our lab with . . . a desk.
At NYU, my colleagues Serena Chen and Annette Lee-Chai and I reasoned that people with communal orientations or goals toward other people would react to power differently than the rest of us. We used a personality scale that Margaret Clark had developed that distinguished those people, and selected a communal and a control group of participants for our studies. In the first experiment, we had participants come into my actual professor’s office for the study, saying that all of the usual lab rooms were busy at the time. They were casually asked to sit in one of the two chairs in the office: either in my big, leather chair (which I still have, and am sitting in right now, in my office at home) behind my desk, or in the student’s small, wooden chair in front of the desk. We did this to prime the idea of power in a naturalistic way. For the students in the study, sitting behind my desk was the power position, sitting in front of it the low-power position.
Then we gave the participants some questionnaires that measured how concerned they were with what others thought of them, and also fairly explicitly measured racism. If you weren’t that concerned about what others thought of you—a hallmark of having power, because others can’t do harm to you—then you would have lower scores on the “caring what others thought” scale and higher scores on the racism measure. Indeed, that is what we found in the control condition: Participants were less concerned about what others thought when they sat in the powerful professor’s chair than when they sat in the relatively lower-power student chair in front of the desk. But the opposite effect happened for the students who had communal goals toward other people, who generally put others’ interests above their own. For them, sitting in the “power chair” caused them to care more than usual about what others thought, and they became less racist when in the power chair, not more.
In a further study, power-primed participants, given the choice, took the easy tasks in the experiment for themselves and left the harder ones for the other person to do. Unless, again, they were communally oriented individuals. When those participants were primed with power-related words, they subsequently took more of the harder tasks and left the easy ones for the other person to do. When the idea of having power was active in their minds, they became more concerned about the other person, and less about themselves. The unconscious effect of power on our participants depended on their own important goals, and unconsciously activating the idea of power revealed clear differences in their selfishness and their degree of concern for other people. In other words, it revealed their character.
Lincoln was more right than he knew.
* * *
What we wish for, our desired futures in the short term as well as the long, has considerable and mainly hidden effects on our minds and behavior. More than we may realize, our current goal is in control, and often overrides our core beliefs and personal values, making us de facto a different person while that goal is operating. This is why we have to be careful what we wish for, because these wishes and desires can take over our minds in ways we are not aware of. We are delegating control to that goal, and while we may not be aware of or even approve of what that goal is up to, we are nonetheless personally responsible for it.
We need to be especially careful when it comes to our own important and possibly selfish goals that, if satisfied, would come at the expense of others. This is why it is so important to cultivate a genuine care and concern for others, because those tendencies will reveal themselves to others, even unconsciously on our part, when we get the chance to act on them, as in our power studies. Above all, never wish for bad outcomes for yourself or anyone else, as you might do when you’re angry at them, because to your mind a goal is a goal, and that spiteful wish might come back to bite you. On the other hand, wishing for positive things, such as setting an important goal for yourself, can help make your dreams come true—because while you’re dreaming, your unconscious never sleeps.