Of course, the Example Rule also plays a role in the public’s fear of nuclear power, given the ease with which we latch onto images of the Chernobyl disaster the moment nuclear power is mentioned. But popular fears long predate those images, suggesting there is another unconscious mechanism at work. This illustrates an important limitation in our understanding of how intuitive judgment works, incidentally. By carefully designing experiments, psychologists are able to identify mechanisms like the Example Rule and the Good-Bad Rule, and we can look at circumstances in the real world and surmise that this or that mechanism is involved. But what we can’t do—at least not yet—is tease out precisely which mechanisms are doing what. We can say only that people’s intuitions about nuclear power may be generated by either the Example Rule or the Good-Bad Rule, or both.
We’re not used to thinking of our feelings as the sources of our conscious decisions, but research leaves no doubt. Studies of insurance, for example, have revealed that people are willing to pay more to insure a car they feel is attractive than one that is not, even when the monetary value is the same. A 1993 study even found that people were willing to pay more for airline travel insurance covering “terrorist acts” than for deaths from “all possible causes.” Logically, that makes no sense, but “terrorist acts” is a vivid phrase dripping with bad feelings, while “all possible causes” is bland and empty. It leaves Gut cold.
Amos Tversky and psychologist Eric Johnson also showed that the influence of bad feelings can extend beyond the thing generating the feelings. They asked Stanford University students to read one of three versions of a story about a tragic death—the cause being either leukemia, fire, or murder—that contained no information about how common such tragedies are. They then gave the students a list of risks—including the risk in the story and twelve others—and asked them to estimate how often they kill. As we might expect, those who read a tragic story about a death caused by leukemia rated leukemia’s lethality higher than a control group of students who didn’t read the story. The same with fire and murder. More surprisingly, reading the stories led to increased estimates for all the risks, not just the one portrayed. The fire story caused an overall increase in perceived risk of 14 percent. The leukemia story raised estimates by 73 percent. The murder story led the pack, raising risk estimates by 144 percent. A “good news” story had precisely the opposite effect—it drove down perceived risks across the board.
So far, I’ve mentioned things—murder, terrorism, cancer—that deliver an unmistakable emotional wallop. But scientists have shown that Gut’s emotional reactions can be much subtler than that. Robert Zajonc, along with psychologists Piotr Winkielman and Norbert Schwarz, conducted a series of experiments in which Chinese ideographs flashed briefly on a screen. Immediately after seeing an ideograph, the test subjects, students at the University of Michigan, were asked to rate the image from one to six, with six being very liked and one not liked at all. (Anyone familiar with the Chinese, Korean, or Japanese languages was excluded from the study, so the images held no literal meaning for those who saw them.)
What the students weren’t told is that just before the ideograph appeared, another image was flashed. In some cases, it was a smiling face. In others, it was a frowning face or a meaningless polygon. These images appeared for the smallest fraction of a second, such a brief moment that they did not register on the conscious mind and no student reported seeing them. But even this tiny exposure to a good or bad image had a profound effect on the students’ judgment. Across the board, ideographs preceded by a smiling face were liked more than those that weren’t positively primed. The frowning face had the same effect in the opposite direction.
Clearly, emotion had a powerful influence and yet not one student reported feeling any emotion. Zajonc and other scientists believe that can happen because the brain system that slaps emotional labels on things— nuclear power: bad!—is buried within the unconscious mind. So your brain can feel something is good or bad even though you never consciously feel good or bad. (When the students were asked what they based their judgments on, incidentally, they cited the ideograph’s aesthetics, or they said that it reminded them of something, or they simply insisted that they “just liked it.” The conscious mind hates to admit it simply doesn’t know.)
After putting students through the routine outlined above, Zajonc and his colleagues then repeated the test. This time, however, the images of faces were switched around. If an ideograph had been preceded by a smiling face in the first round, it got a frowning face, and vice versa. The results were startling. Unlike the first round, the flashed images had little effect. People stuck to their earlier judgments. An ideograph judged likeable in the first round because—unknown to the person doing the judging—it was preceded by a smiling face was judged likeable in the second round even though it was preceded by a frowning face. So emotional labels stick even if we don’t know they exist.
In earlier experiments—since corroborated by a massive amount of research—Zajonc also revealed that positive feeling for something can be created simply by repeated exposure to it, while positive feelings can be strengthened with more exposure. Now known as the “mere exposure effect, ” this phenomenon is neatly summed up in the phrase “familiarity breeds liking.” Corporations have long understood this, even if only intuitively. The point of much advertising is simply to expose people to a corporation’s name and logo in order to increase familiarity, and, as a result, positive feelings toward them.
The mere exposure effect has considerable implications for how we feel about risks. Consider chewing tobacco. Most people today have never seen anyone chew a wad, but someone who lives in an environment where it’s common is likely to have a positive feeling for it buried within his brain. That feeling colors his thoughts about chewing tobacco—including his thoughts about how dangerous it is. Gut senses chewing tobacco is Good. Good things don’t cause cancer. How likely is chewing tobacco to give you cancer? Not very, Gut concludes. Note that the process here is similar to that of habituation, but it doesn’t require the level of exposure necessary for habituation to occur. Note also that this is not the warm glow someone may feel at the sight of a tin of tobacco because it brings back memories of a beloved grandfather who was always chewing the stuff. As the name says, the mere exposure effect requires nothing more than mere exposure to generate at least a little positive feeling. Beloved grandfathers are not necessary.
Much of the research about affect is conducted in laboratories, but when psychologists Mark Frank and Thomas Gilovich found evidence in lab experiments that people have strongly negative unconscious reactions to black uniforms, they dug up corroboration in the real world. All five black-clad teams in the National Football League, Frank and Gilovich found, received more than the league-average number of penalty yards in every season but one between 1970 and 1986. In the National Hockey League, all three teams that wore black through the same period got more than the average number of penalty minutes in every season. The really intriguing thing is that these teams were penalized just as heavily when they wore their alternate uniforms—white with black trim—which is just what you would expect from the research on emotion and judgment. The black uniform slaps a negative emotional label on the team and that label sticks even when the team isn’t wearing black. Gilovich and Frank even found a near-perfect field trial of their theory in the 1979-80 season of the Pittsburgh Penguins. For the first forty-four games of the season, the team wore blue uniforms. During that time, they averaged eight penalty minutes a game. But for the last thirty-five games of the season, the team wore a new black uniform. The coach and players were the same as in the first half of the season, and yet the Penguins’ penalty time rose 50 percent to twelve minutes a game.