The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think (6 page)

But what if each one of us is really several different people?

If each of us actually has multiple people living in our heads, this has radical implications for the way we think about behavior.
Instead of having just one self, we are really a collection of selves—a group of
subselves
.
Like different personalities, each of your subselves has peculiar quirks and preferences.
And each comes out only when you are in a particular situation.
At any one time, only one subself is in charge, which is the current you at that moment.

If we are a multiplicity of subselves, this suggests that even though we feel like we are the same person all the time, we might actually change who we are depending on where we are, what we’re doing, and who else is around.
To see how this might work, let’s take a closer look at a study showing how the same person will respond very differently
to an advertisement, depending on which subself is currently in the driver’s seat.
After that, we’ll more formally introduce whichever one of your subselves is reading this book to the other people living inside your head.

PRIMED FOR PERSUASION

Before proceeding with our program, we’d like to take a moment for a brief word from our sponsor—the Nouvelle Breton Café.
The Nouvelle Breton provides a completely unique experience, as noted by a reviewer for the
Los Angeles Times:
“It is truly a one-of-a-kind place that has yet to be discovered by others.”
Gina Polizzi from
Pacific Food News
calls it “a unique place off the beaten path.”
If you’re looking for a great dining experience different from any other, look no further than the Nouvelle Breton Café.

Given that description, would you go out of your way to dine at the Nouvelle Breton Café?

What if you’d instead seen an ad emphasizing that this café was the most popular restaurant in the area, noting that over 1 million people have eaten there, and stating that “if you want to know why everyone gathers here for a great dining experience, come join them at the Nouvelle Breton Café.”

Here’s a more general question for your inner marketing consultant: Which of the two ads do you think would be more effective, the first (emphasizing that the restaurant is unique) or the second (emphasizing that the restaurant is popular)?
If you considered this question from a traditional market-segmentation perspective, you might guess that the answer would depend on the type of person seeing the ad.
One type of person—the conforming, yes-man sort—might be attracted to going where millions have gone before, eagerly following the masses.
But another type of person—the rebellious, independent sort—might be turned off by lemminglike conformity, preferring something unique and off the beaten path.
Different people are, well, different.
Some people have one set of preferences, while others have another.

But the idea of multiple subselves suggests something radically
different: that the same ad might be effective or ineffective depending on which person inside your head is currently viewing the ad.
This means that even for the same individual, an ad might be appealing to one subself and repulsive to another.

Working with our colleagues Noah Goldstein, Chad Mortensen, Bob Cialdini, and Jill Sundie, we initially tested this idea by asking people to view advertisements promoting products ranging from restaurants and museums to the city of Las Vegas.
Before anyone saw the ads, however, we first activated, or primed, one of two different subselves inside people’s heads.
The idea was to put people in a situation they might experience when watching television.
Ads on TV don’t just appear at random; they pop up during particular programs, perhaps an uplifting romantic comedy or a frightening police crime drama.
The type of program a person is watching might naturally bring out one of his or her different subselves.
Is it possible that the you watching a romantic comedy depicting flirtatious, sexy characters might be different from the you watching a thriller depicting violent killers in our midst?
If so, these two yous might have entirely different responses to the exact same marketing appeal.

To test this possibility, some people in the study viewed a clip from the hair-raising classic
The Shining
, in which Jack Nicholson plays a madman chasing his family members around an isolated and deserted hotel with an ax.
A few minutes into the clip, at an especially scary moment, we went to commercial, showing people several ads.
Some of the ads included a message informing viewers about the popularity and high demand for each product (for example, “visited by over a million people a year”).
Other times people saw the same ads, but the ads didn’t mention anything about popularity or high demand.

When people viewed the ads in between segments of a scary program, they found the products more attractive when the ad emphasized the product’s popularity.
Adding the message “visited by over a million people a year” to a museum ad, for example, boosted people’s desire to visit that museum.
People became especially receptive to messages about following the crowd after watching a frightening movie clip.
Like wildebeests in the presence of a leopard, people who are feeling threatened want to be part of a larger group.

In fact, the people who had been viewing the scary film weren’t simply drawn to follow the masses; they actively avoided products and experiences that would make them stand out from the crowd.
We know this because some of the ads in the study included a message emphasizing the uniqueness of the product (think “limited edition”).
After watching the scary movie, people rated unique products as less attractive.
Adding a message about standing out from the crowd to the museum ad actually led people to avoid the museum.
Despite its being the exact same museum as shown in the other versions of the ad, an art gallery presented as unique and different wasn’t the kind of place people wanted to visit while they were feeling defensive.
When people watched a scary movie, then, they were attracted to products that were common and popular and avoided those that were different and unique.

But people’s preferences changed drastically if they instead watched a romantic movie.
Before seeing the same commercials, a second group of people watched a clip from the romantic film
Before Sunrise
, which portrays an attractive man and woman (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) falling in love as they travel by train through the most picturesque cities in Europe.
This film clip brought out a very different subself, leading viewers to experience erotic and loving feelings.
Unlike people who saw the scary movie clip, the people in a romantic frame of mind were most affected by ads that emphasized a product’s uniqueness.
Now, when they saw the message about standing out from the crowd in the museum advertisement, they were especially drawn to it.
Like animals on the prowl for a mate, people primed for romance want to stick out from the crowd.
By contrast, including information about the popularity of the product repelled the romance-minded subjects.
Adding the message “visited by over a million people” made the museum seem blasé and commonplace, leading people with a romantic mind-set to avoid the destination.

Rather than showing that some people are inherently disposed to be conformists while others are inherently disposed to be unique, the study found that the same person will sometimes want to conform and at other times seek to be unique.
When the situation elicited a person’s romantic subself, he or she craved uniqueness and avoided
conformity.
But when the situation elicited a person’s vigilant subself, he or she now craved conformity and actively avoided opportunities to be unique.
From the perspective that you have a single unitary self—that you have only one personality—shifting between conformist and rebellious tendencies seems inconsistent and even hypocritical.
But from a multiple-subselves perspective, the behavior is logical and consistent since, in different situations, you follow the deeply rational preferences of your different subselves.

So given that there are multiple subselves living in your head, the next question is, how many?

HOW MANY SUBSELVES ARE THERE?

When people talk about evolutionary success, they often think only about survival and reproduction.
But it is a gross oversimplification to assume that this is the whole story.
Although surviving and reproducing are important challenges, humans had to surmount a number of distinct challenges to achieve evolutionary success.
At a base level, our ancestors, like other animals, needed nourishment and shelter.
But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges.
These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family.

The humans who became our ancestors were those who protected themselves from enemies and predators, avoided infection and disease, got along with the other people in their tribe, and gained the respect of their fellow tribe members.
They also successfully attracted a mate, established a partnership with that person (perhaps for the rest of their lives), and, if all went well, cared for their needy and relatively helpless offspring.
Those humans who succeeded in solving these critical challenges enhanced their fitness and became our ancestors.
Those who were less successful at solving these challenges failed to become anyone’s ancestors.

Each evolutionary challenge is unique.
The things a person does to successfully charm a date are different from the things one does to
avoid a predator or care for a baby.
Solving these different problems required our ancestors to make decisions in different—and sometimes completely incompatible—ways.
What is effective when you are taking care of a child, for example, is different than what is effective when you are negotiating a business deal with distant acquaintances.

The evolutionary result of our ancestors’ continually having to solve different problems is that the mind has different psychological systems for meeting each challenge.
Just as it is more efficient to have different brain systems for analyzing color, sound, and taste, it is more efficient to have different psychological systems for attracting a mate, evading physical harm, and managing each of the other challenges.

You can think of these different psychological systems as our subselves, where each is an executive vice president in charge of reaching a different evolutionary goal.
Depending on which evolutionary goal is currently on your mind, consciously or subconsciously, a different subself will guide your decisions.

To understand how the different subselves work, think of the brain as analogous to a computer.
Like a computer, your brain receives input and produces output.
Someone pressing a button or shouting a voice command generates input for a computer.
Your senses—what you see, hear, touch, smell, and feel—provide the input for your brain.
The critical part is what happens after the input arrives.
For computers, pressing a particular button on a keypad will lead to a different output, depending on which software program is currently running.
For example, pressing the button with the equal sign is going to produce a different result if you do it in Word versus in Excel.
Word will show you an “=“ character; Excel will presume that you’re beginning to type in a mathematical formula.

Computers have different software programs specialized to solve different challenges, such as the different tasks that arise at the office.
For instance, your computer solves the challenges of writing documents, creating numerical spreadsheets, and designing slideshow presentations with different software programs (such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).
Each software program is designed to solve a specific problem.
Just as computers have different software programs to solve challenges faced at the office, the brain has different programs—the
subselves—to solve the social challenges perennially faced by our ancestors.
At any given point, your brain is running a different subself program, depending on whether you’re consciously or subconsciously trying to make a friend, seduce a date, impress your boss, avoid an aggressive panhandler on a dark street, or teach your child how to read.

Just as a computer will process the same input differently depending on which software program is currently running, the brain will process the same input (a pat on the arm or an ad for a unique museum) differently depending on which subself is currently activated.
For example, researchers at the University of Groningen observed activity in men’s brains when the men believed they were being touched either by an attractive female research assistant or by a male.
Even though it was, in reality, always the same person doing the touching, different areas of the brain lit up when men thought a woman was touching them versus a man.

The notion that the brain has different programs for managing different evolutionary goals has vast implications for how people make decisions.
Not only will the subselves determine how people interpret the same information, but what a person likes, dislikes, and chooses will depend on which subself is currently running the show.

MEET THE SUBSELVES

Let’s meet each of our seven subselves.
It might be tempting to think of the subselves as seven crazy dwarfs living inside your head.
But instead, think of them as like a council of ancestral elders, with a different wise man or woman in charge of a specific evolutionary problem.
Each elder has hundreds of thousands of years of experience—the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors—with successfully solving their assigned problem.
So when you confront an important decision in the real world, your mind’s council wisely defers to the elder most evolutionarily adept at handling the situation.
To see how each subself might deal with a given situation, let’s consider how each subself thinks, what triggers it to take charge, and the nature of the specific evolutionary challenge it confronts.