Читать книгу The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home - Дэн Ариели, Dan Ariely, Dan Ariely - Страница 21

When I was sixteen, I joined the Israeli Civil Guard. I learned to shoot a World War II–era Russian carbine rifle, set up roadblocks, and perform other useful tasks in case the adult men were at war and we youth were left to protect the home front. As it turned out, the main benefit of learning how to shoot was that from time to time it excused me from school. In those years in Israel, every time a high school class went on a trip, a student who knew how to use a rifle was asked to join it as a guard. Since this duty also meant substituting a few days of classes with hiking and enjoying the countryside, I was always willing to volunteer, even if I had to give up an exam for the call of duty.^*

On one of these trips I met a girl, and by the end of the trip I had a crush on her. Unfortunately, she was one class behind me in school and our schedules did not coincide, making it difficult for me to see her and learn whether she felt the same about me. So I did what any moderately resourceful teenager would do: I discovered an extracurricular interest of hers and made it mine as well.

About a mile from our town lived a guy we called “Birdman” who had endured a miserable and lonely childhood in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. Hiding from the Nazis in the forest, he found much comfort in the animals and birds around him. After he eventually made it to Israel, he decided to try to make the childhood of the kids around him much better than his, so he collected birds from all over the globe and invited children to come and experience the wonders of the avian world. The girl I liked used to volunteer in the Birdman’s aviary, and so I joined her in cleaning cages, feeding the birds, telling visitors stories about them, and—most amazingly—watching the birds hatch, grow, and interact with one another and the visitors. After a few months, it became clear that the girl and I had no future but the birds and I did, so I continued to volunteer for a while.

Some years later, after my main hospitalization period, I decided to get a parrot. I selected a relatively large, highly intelligent Mealy Amazon parrot and named her Jean Paul. (For some reason, I decided that female parrots should have French male names.) She was a handsome bird; her feathers were mostly green with some light blue, yellow, and red at the tips of her wings, and we had lots of fun together. Jean Paul loved talking and flirting with nearly everyone who happened by her cage. She would come near me to be petted any time I passed her cage, bowing her head very low and exposing the back of her neck, and I would try to produce baby talk as I ruffled the feathers on her neck. Whenever I took a shower, she would perch in the bathroom and twitch happily when I splashed water drops at her.

Jean Paul was intensely social. Left alone in her cage for too long, she would pluck at her own feathers, something she did when she was bored. As I discovered, parrots have a particularly acute need to engage in mental activity, so I invested in several toys specifically designed to preclude parrot boredom. One such puzzle, called SeekaTreat, was a stack of multicolored wooden tiers of decreasing size that form a kind of pyramid. Made of wood, the tiers were connected through the center with a cord. Within each tier, there were half-inch-deep “treat wells” designed to hold tasty parrot treats. To get at the food, Jean Paul had to lift each tier and uncover the treat, which was not very easy to do. Over the years, the SeekaTreat and other toys like it kept Jean Paul happy, curious, and interested in her environment.

THOUGH I DIDN’T know it at the time, there was an important concept behind the SeekaTreat. “Contrafreeloading,” a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food.

To better understand the joy of working for food, let’s go back to the 1960s when Jensen first took adult male albino rats and tested their appetite for labor. Imagine that you are a rat participating in Jensen’s study. You and your little rodent friends start out living an average life in an average cluster of cages, and every day, for ten days, a nice man in a white lab coat gives you 10 grams of finely ground Purina lab crackers precisely at noon (you don’t know it’s noon, but you eventually pick up on the general time). After a few days of this pattern, you learn to expect food at noon every day, and your rat tummy begins rumbling right before the nice man shows up—exactly the state Jensen wants you in.

Once your body is conditioned to eating crackers at noon, things suddenly change. Instead of feeding you at the time of your maximal hunger, you have to wait another hour, and at one o’clock, the man picks you up and puts you in a well-lit “Skinner box.” You are ravenous. Named after its original designer, the influential psychologist B. F. Skinner, this box is a regular cage (similar to the one you are used to), but it has two features that are new to you. The first is an automated food dispenser that releases food pellets every thirty seconds. Yum! The second is a bar that for some reason is covered with a tin shield.

At first, the bar isn’t very interesting, but the food dispenser is, and that is where you spend your time. The food dispenser releases food pellets every so often for twenty-five minutes, until you have eaten fifty food pellets. At that point you are taken back to your cage and given the rest of your food for the day.

The next day, your lunch hour passes by again without food, and at 1:00 P.M. you are placed back into the Skinner box. You’re ravenous but unhappy because this time the food dispenser doesn’t release any pellets. What to do? You wander around the cage, and, passing the bar, you realize that the tin shield is missing. You accidentally press the bar, and immediately a pellet of food is released. Wonderful! You press the bar again. Oh joy!—another pellet comes out. You press again and again, eating happily, but then the light goes off, and at the same time, the bar stops releasing food pellets. You soon learn that when the light is off, no matter how much you press the bar, you don’t get any food.

Just then the man in the lab coat opens the top of the cage and places a tin cup in a corner of the cage. (You don’t know it, but the cup is full of pellets.) You don’t pay attention to the cup; you just want the bar to start producing food again. You press and press, but nothing happens. As long as the light is off, pressing the bar does you no good. You wander around the cage, cursing under your rat breath, and go over to the tin cup. “Oh my!” you say to yourself. “It’s full of pellets! Free food!” You begin chomping away, and then suddenly the light comes on again. Now you realize that you have two possible food sources. You can keep on eating the free food from the tin cup, or you can go back to the bar and press it for food pellets. If you were this rat, what would you do?

Assuming you were like all but one of the two hundred rats in Jensen’s study, you would decide not to feast entirely from the tin cup. Sooner or later, you would return to the bar and press it for food. And if you were like 44 percent of the rats, you would press the bar quite often—enough to feed you more than half your pellets. What’s more, once you started pressing the bar, you would not return so easily to the cup with the abundant free food.

Jensen discovered (and many subsequent experiments confirmed) that many animals—including fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees—tend to prefer a longer, more indirect route to food than a shorter, more direct one.^* That is, as long as fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don’t have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat.

This brings us back to Jean Paul. If she were an economically rational bird and interested only in expending as little effort as possible to get her food, she would simply have eaten from the tray in her cage and ignored the SeekaTreat. Instead, she played with her SeekaTreat (and other toys) for hours because it provided her with a more meaningful way to earn her food and spend her time. She was not merely existing but mastering something and, in a sense, “earning” her living.^•

THE GENERAL IDEA of contrafreeloading contradicts the simple economic view that organisms will always choose to maximize their reward while minimizing their effort. According to this standard economic view, spending anything, including energy, is considered a cost, and it makes no sense that an organism would voluntarily do so. Why work when they can get the same food—maybe even more food—for free?

When I described contrafreeloading to one of my rational economist friends (yes, I still have some of these), he immediately explained to me how Jensen’s results do not, in fact, contradict standard economic reasoning. He patiently told me why this research was irrelevant to questions of economics. “You see,” he said, as one would to a child, “economic theory is about the behavior of people, not rats or parrots. Rats have very small brains and almost nonexistent neocortices,^* so it is no wonder that these animals don’t realize that they can get food for free. They are just confused.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “I am sure that if you were to repeat Jensen’s experiment with normal people, you would not find this contrafreeloading effect. And I am a hundred percent positive that if you had used economists as your participants, you would not see anyone working unnecessarily!”

He had a valid point. And though I felt that it is possible to generalize about the way we relate to work from those animal studies, it was also clear to me that some experiments on adult human contrafreeloading were in the cards. (It was also clear that I should not do the experiment on economists.)

What do you think? Do humans, in general, exhibit contrafreeloading, or are they more rational? What about you?