WHAT IS THE POINT OF GETTING ANNOYED?
Emotions as a Mechanism for Creating Commitments
IN THE AUTUMN OF 2008, AFTER PRESENTING A LECTURE AT STANFORD University, I took some time off in the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean north of San Francisco. As I peered out at the ocean at twilight, the exquisite natural vista I saw filled me with a deep sense of longing. A small wedding was taking place facing the sea at the foot of the cliff on which I stood. The happy couple stood near the water’s edge facing a young clergyman and a small knot of guests dressed in their finest outfits. My thoughts began to wander from the blue waters of the ocean and the red streaks of the sunset-filled sky to my wife and child, whom I had not seen in a fortnight. The sense of longing within me was accompanied by an odd combination of joy at having been privileged to have a warm and loving family, mixed with self-directed anger at the fact that I was so far from home.
Striving to amplify these feelings, I held tightly to the railing along the edge of the cliff while leaning forward to get a better glimpse of the bay and the emotion-filled wedding taking place below. Suddenly I felt the thin railing, the only object that was preventing me from plunging directly into the abyss below, shaking. Within a fraction of a second my sentimental feelings were replaced by a powerful sense of dread that quickly propelled me away from the railing. In all likelihood that sense of dread saved my life, but it is also likely that the sense of longing that preceded it was responsible for a choice I made later: to travel less often for the sake of improving my marriage.
Emotions are a mechanism assisting us in decision making. They were formed, shaped, and developed during our evolution in order to amplify our chances of survival. If I had not felt a sense of dread when the railing I was leaning on began to shake, I would probably have continued to bend forward as it broke apart, flinging me toward my death at the bottom of the cliff. Or, if I’d fallen and somehow survived, but couldn’t generate a feeling of regret, I might not have internalized the lesson learned by leaning too hard on a fragile railing. Similarly, without the capability of feeling anger toward others, we would become easy prey for exploitation and our capacity to compete over scarce resources would be weakened.
Humanity has been blessed to have, in addition to an emotional mechanism, another important mechanism assisting us in decision making—the ability to conduct rational analysis. From one point of view, it might appear that the sense of dread that I felt as the railing over the cliff began to shake was superfluous for my survival. Had I carefully calculated the extent to which the railing could bear my weight, the height of the cliff, and the full implication of my falling from the top of the cliff, I would never have leaned on the railing to begin with. But, under the circumstances, the quick reactions of my emotional mechanism were a thousand times more efficient than the slow deliberations of my rational mechanism. Rationality alone would likely have been much too slow to save my life.
In contrast to emotions such as fear, sadness, and regret, which can be defined as autonomous emotions, emotions such as anger, envy, hatred, and empathy are social emotions. They are interactive by definition. We feel anger or empathy toward others but we regret actions or situations in which we were involved. We can certainly fear others (although fear is usually induced by what another person can do to us and not by that person himself), but we do not need anyone else to feel fear. Diseases, dangers, failures, and disasters induce tremendous fear on their own.
The distinction between autonomous emotions and social emotions is especially important for understanding the concept of “rational emotions.” Autonomous emotions influence our own decisions, while social emotions influence both our decisions and the decisions of others. This brings us to the most important element in the framework of emotions: their ability to create commitments, in ourselves and others. Commitment itself is one of the most important concepts in the social sciences. It is used extensively in attempts to understand economic behavior, especially with regard to bargaining theory and international relations. The Nobel Prize in economics for 2005 was awarded to Thomas Schelling mainly for his studies of commitment.
The concept of commitment is rooted in the understanding that in a conflict between two individuals, an individual who can credibly persuade his opponent that he is willing to insist on a particular outcome—even at the cost of self-harm—gains an advantage. More concretely, a seller who can credibly persuade a buyer that he has no intention of reducing the asking price of an item—even if doing so will sink the deal—is more likely to get his way. This holds true even if the buyer believes that sinking the deal will be more harmful to the seller than compromising on a lower price. In international disputes, a party to the dispute that can persuade the other party that it is willing to stick to its demands even at the price of military conflict has an advantage even, and perhaps especially, if no such armed conflict ensues.
The key rule in commitment is that the party undertaking a commitment must be truly willing to suffer the necessary sacrifice. Declarations alone cannot suffice. True commitment is difficult to counterfeit. If it were easy to fake, threats would be more commonplace and no one would ever take them seriously. The fierce power that movements and nations that are fueled by religious fanaticism—such as Al Qaeda and Iran—can project is due to their ability to create credible commitments. The willingness to sacrifice welfare and even human lives for the sake of a religious idea is a potent force that gives these movements and nations significant bargaining leverage.
The barbarian Germanic tribes who crossed the Rhine River to attack the Roman Empire were able to persuade their enemies of their commitment by literally burning bridges behind them. This had the effect of proclaiming that retreat was not an option for them. For those of us who can’t demonstrate commitment by setting fire to a bridge, emotions are an invaluable tool for attaining bargaining leverage in a wide range of daily conflicts. Expressing anger, for instance, shows our willingness to respond sharply to injuries or slights, even at the cost of harming ourselves, such as by starting a fistfight. If we were purely rational, we would be unable to deter our opponents so easily.
An example may illustrate the usefulness of rational emotions. Imagine yourself at an airport on the way home following a family holiday abroad. Half an hour prior to the scheduled boarding time you are informed that the flight has been canceled. You have no choice but to go to a hotel and return to the airport the following day. Now further imagine two alternative scenarios. In the first scenario you see the other airline passengers around you quietly accepting the situation and preparing to leave the terminal in an orderly manner. The boarding gate is closed and the apologetic airline offers you free transportation to the hotel of your choice. In such a scenario you are unlikely to express anger. Disappointment and frustration are more apt to be your emotions.
Now imagine a different scenario: a short time after you are informed that your flight has been canceled, you run into an acquaintance who was scheduled to fly on the same flight. She tells you that as soon as the cancellation announcement was made she went straight to the airline’s representatives, made it clear to them that she had no intention of accepting the flight cancellation quietly, and demanded that an immediate solution be found enabling her to get home that same day. The result, your friend says proudly, was that the airline contacted another airline straightaway and booked her a flight home leaving in another hour.
I expect that under the second scenario your emotional state would be very different from what it would be under the first scenario. The adrenalin in your blood would rapidly rise and by the time you arrived at the airline representatives’ desk to demand the same solution as your friend, you would be displaying signs of noticeable anger. In fact, you would not only be displaying signs of anger, you genuinely would be angry. The conscious or subconscious awareness that anger would be useful for attaining your goal would create anger within you.
The anger in the second scenario enables you to make credible threats. If in the course of speaking with airline representatives you mention an intention to sue the airline if an immediate solution is not found, your emotional state is likely to amplify the credibility of your threat. After all, a person acting solely on the basis of rational calculations would be unlikely to invest the time and money required to file such a minor lawsuit. In the first scenario, in contrast, anger would be of little help and is therefore less likely to arise.
The process creating anger in the second scenario is an astonishing interaction between the cognitive part of the brain and the limbic system that is responsible for emotional control. This process takes place in the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which emerged quite late in the evolutionary development of the brain and is virtually nonexistent in other animals.
But positive emotions can show commitment, too. Love or admiration enables us to express to others our willingness to stand by their side and assist them even at a heavy price—and thus to influence their behavior toward us. Emotions need to be credible, at least at some minimal level, if they are to serve us in creating credible commitments. There are people who are able to “play-act” their emotions quite credibly, but this ability is statistically rare in the general population. If we all had perfect abilities to fake our emotions, there would never be any reason to relate seriously to the emotional responses of others and no evolutionary advantage to authentic emotional responses. Talented stage and film actors play characters in emotional situations mainly by eliciting true emotional responses from within themselves. They often do so by recalling appropriate emotional situations from their personal memories. In a sense, they are not acting but are reliving past situations. We will have more to say on credibility in later chapters.
Not every emotional reaction we have has a rational basis. In fact, most emotional reactions probably do not have a rational basis. In many cases our emotions could potentially harm us, and the ability to harness our emotions strategically, without even knowing we are doing so, is a wonderful human trait. Most of the time, using rational emotions does not require any sophistication. Indeed, children can sometimes do it more effectively than adults. A child who falls at the playground and lightly scrapes himself is more likely to cry if his mother is within eyesight. If his mother is not in the area, he is more likely to pick himself up and continue playing. He might even hold back on crying until he sees his mother. Even completely spontaneous emotions are decisively influenced by circumstances. A particular situation—for instance the audible ticking of a clock—may be exciting under some conditions (the end of a school day) but annoying under other conditions (in a doctor’s waiting room). We can feel empathy or sympathy toward a given person under certain circumstances and yet feel contempt or anger toward that same person under different circumstances.
Using rational emotions and commitment as tactics is especially common in bargaining and negotiating. Emotions such as anger and insult, but also empathy, can all be identified in common negotiating situations. They influence the relative bargaining powers of the negotiators. When a labor union leader publicly states that the latest offer made by management is an embarrassment, he or she does so to improve the union’s bargaining position. Such statements, however, are usually only lip service; the statement itself creates the desired sense of insult in the minds of both the labor union leadership and the rank and file workers. This has the effect of making any retreat from the commitment to turn down the offer very costly for the labor union, thus giving management an incentive to make a better offer.
People are varied in their bargaining skills. Sometimes differences in bargaining skills stem from gaps in people’s abilities to create and control rational emotions or to identify them in others. There are scores of books on practical negotiating skills taught at leading business schools that call for almost entirely ignoring emotions during negotiations. I have serious reservations regarding this point of view.
In an interesting experiment, Maya Tamir of the psychology department at Hebrew University of Jerusalem induced emotional states in subjects through musical passages that they listened to.1 Some of the musical passages had a calming effect, while others were stimulating or even irritating.
Tamir divided the subjects into two groups. One group participated individually in the task of bargaining over the division of a sum of money, and the other group participated in a collective task that required cooperation. Prior to conducting these tasks the subjects chose a musical passage to listen to. Tamir found that in the group assigned to bargain over money, the percentage of subjects who chose irritating music was significantly higher than the comparable percentage in the other group. In addition, those in the bargaining group who chose to listen to irritating musical passages achieved significantly better outcomes relative to those who chose to listen to calming music, and they walked away with much higher sums of money.
There are advantages for a negotiator who makes moderate use of emotional responses in the midst of negotiations, but the ability to control and regulate those emotions is also very important. Many negotiations break down despite the fact that a mutually beneficial agreement is available to both parties—even when both parties know that such an agreement is within reach. This usually happens when one party (or both) is stuck in a commitment (created by emotion) that is unacceptable to the other party. The chronic crises in peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians are a good example of this phenomenon. Emotions take over the negotiations instead of serving them, and expressions of anger and suspicion become overly convincing, defeating every attempt at arriving at an agreeable compromise.
We have so far concentrated on commitment to others. Interestingly, we use a similar mechanism to make commitments to ourselves. We often undertake actions in the present because of their effects on how we will behave in the future. A salient example of this is the purchase of a gym membership. The high cost associated with gym membership creates self-commitment to make use of its workout facilities. Another example relates to the obsessive way many of us check our incoming e-mail with such frequency that our mental concentration at work suffers. A popular computer application enables users to cut themselves off from e-mail access for a predetermined period of time. Once a user commits to an e-mail cutoff period, there is no going back; no action by the user can restore e-mail access until the full time period has run the clock. This would seem at first glance to be highly irrational: we are restricting our own freedom of action, willingly eliminating choices that we would otherwise have. But in the above examples we prefer to restrict ourselves instead of giving ourselves greater freedom, because there is a fundamental mismatch between our long-term and immediate desires (the latter often referred to as “temptations”). Our long-term desire is to attain top physical shape by visiting the gym as often as possible, but our immediate desire is often to seek the nearest good restaurant instead of working out in the gym. Self-commitment enables us to increase the cost of succumbing to immediate desire gratification before we find ourselves directly face to face with our temptations.
We often make use of self-commitment without even noticing it. If we have resolved to maintain a strict diet for the sake of reducing weight, we may studiously avoid even entering a restaurant offering an all-you-can-eat buffet, restricting ourselves to restaurants that only permit ordering à la carte. If eliminating a smoking habit is what we are striving to achieve, we will publicly announce this to our friends and acquaintances, thus attaching a painful price to slipping back into smoking: the embarrassment of public knowledge of our failure of resolve.
The phenomenon of self-commitment has a prominent place in both theoretical and empirical economic research. It forms the basis of our understanding of financial savings. Virtually every decision involving financial savings includes an aspect of self-commitment, because there we are consistently tempted to prefer consuming today rather than putting off consumption to a distant future date.
As a result, anger and shame play essential roles in financial responsibility, and even world affairs. It is possible that the recent debt crisis that brought down the economies of many countries around the world stemmed from a general lack of self-commitment, by individuals and by governments. If only these folks had been less calculating and more emotional, the story might have played out better.