IF YOU EAT THIS COOKIE, THE TERRORISTS WIN
Last night, I made the mistake of watching the evening news. The opening story was about a failed
terrorist bomb plot in the United States, followed by reports of a missile attack overseas and the
arrest of a young man for murdering his ex-girlfriend. Just before going to break, the anchor promised
to tell me about “the surprising thing you eat every day that might give you cancer.” Then the show cut
to a car commercial.
It used to puzzle me: Why do companies advertise during such depressing programming? Do they
really want viewers to associate their products with the horror stories that fill the nightly news? And
who is going to be in the mood for a department store sale after hearing about a brutal murder or the
threat of a terrorist attack? It turns out I might be, and you might be, too,
thanks to a psychological
phenomenon called
terror management
.
According to terror-management theory, human beings are—naturally—terrified when we think
about our own deaths. It’s the one threat we can try to avoid but will never escape. Whenever we are
reminded of our mortality (say, every twenty-nine seconds on the nightly news), it triggers a panic
response in the brain. We aren’t always aware of it—the anxiety may be just below the surface,
creating a free-floating sense of discomfort, without our knowing why. Even when it’s outside our
conscious awareness, this terror creates an immediate need to do something to counter our feelings of
powerlessness. We will reach
for our security blankets, whatever makes us feel safe, powerful, or
comforted. (Barack Obama got in a lot of trouble for pointing this out in 2008, when he told a San
Francisco crowd that in uncertain times, people “cling to guns or religion.”) Politics aside,
terror-
management theory can teach us a lot about our own willpower failures. We don’t just cling to guns
and God when we’re scared; many of us also cling to credit cards, cupcakes, and cigarettes. Studies
show that being reminded of our mortality makes us more susceptible to all sorts of temptations, as
we look for hope and security in the things that promise reward and relief.
For example, a study of grocery shoppers found that when people are asked to think about their
own death, they make longer shopping lists, are willing to spend more on comfort food, and eat more
chocolate and cookies. (I can see the retail strategy now: Supermarkets invite local funeral homes to
hand out brochures by the shopping carts.) Another study found that reports of death on the news make
viewers respond more positively to advertisements for status products, like luxury cars and Rolex
watches. It’s not that we think a Rolex will protect us from a missile attack—it’s that these goods
bolster our self-image and make us feel powerful. For many people, buying
things is an immediate
way to feel more optimistic and in control. This is surely one reason Americans were so receptive to
President George W. Bush’s request, “Mrs. Bush and I want to encourage Americans to go out
shopping,” following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
It doesn’t take planes flying into buildings to press our inner panic buttons. In fact, it doesn’t even
take real deaths to set us spending—television dramas and movies can have the same effect. In one
study, watching a death scene in the 1979 tearjerker film
The Champ
made people willing to pay
three times as much for something they didn’t need (and would later regret). Importantly, the
participants in this study were oblivious to the fact that watching the film had influenced what they
were willing to pay. When given the opportunity to
buy an insulated water bottle, they just thought
they wanted the water bottle. (In contrast, people who had watched a National Geographic special
about the Great Barrier Reef were completely unimpressed by the bottle and held on to their money.)
This, no doubt, is how we end up with half the purchases that clutter our homes and pad our credit
card bills. We’re feeling a little down, we come across an opportunity to purchase something, and a
little voice—OK, a few dopamine neurons—in our head tell us, “Buy this—it’s everything you never
knew you wanted!”
Terror management strategies may take our minds off our inevitable demise, but when we turn to
temptation for comfort, we may inadvertently be quickening our race to the grave. Case in point:
Warnings on cigarette packages can
increase
a smoker’s urge to light up. A 2009
study found that
death warnings trigger stress and fear in smokers—exactly what public health officials hope for.
Unfortunately, this anxiety then triggers smokers’ default stress-relief strategy: smoking. Oops. It isn’t
logical, but it makes sense based on what we know about how stress influences the brain. Stress
triggers cravings and makes dopamine neurons even more excited by any temptation in sight. It
doesn’t help that the smoker is—of course—staring at a pack of cigarettes as he reads the warning. So
even as a smoker’s brain encodes the words “WARNING: Cigarettes cause cancer” and grapples
with awareness of his own mortality, another part of his brain starts screaming, “Don’t worry,
smoking a cigarette will make you feel better!”
There is a global trend of adding increasingly graphic and disturbing photos of tumors and dead
bodies to cigarette warnings. This may or may not be a good idea. According to terror-management
theory, the more horrifying the images, the more they will prompt smokers to relieve their anxiety by
smoking. However, these images may be quite effective at preventing people from taking up the habit,
or strengthening a smoker’s intention to quit. The verdict is still out on whether these new warnings
will
reduce smoking, but we should keep an eye on the possibility that they will have unintended
consequences.
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