Marketing and Mind Control

By Wray Herbert
Source: Newsweek

Imagine that I have $100 and I offer you $20 of it, no strings attached. You'd take it, right? Any fool would; it's a windfall. But imagine further that you know I must give away part of my $100 or lose it all. All of a sudden my motives aren't entirely altruistic, but I'm still offering you free money. Take it or leave it, but no negotiation allowed. How would you feel? What would you do?

If you were like a lot of people who have answered these questions in a psychological experiment over the years, you would now feel conflicted. Many of these people actually walked away from the deal, even though it would have meant a no-strings-attached twenty bucks in their pockets. Why? Because the arrangement is fundamentally unfair, and once you know this your basic sense of moral indignation clicks in. Your emotions and principles trump your pure rationality.

Psychologists have demonstrated this in the laboratory, time and time again. It's known as the Ultimatum Game, and its counterintuitive findings are part of a broad new understanding of how the human brain and mind work. As it turns out, we are not very reasonable creatures much of the time, nor are we very aware. Indeed, we are under constant sway of our emotions and intuitions, and most of the time we are not even aware of just how quirky and emotional our everyday decisions are.

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