The hot and cold empathy gap
Are you making decisions with your id or your ego?
Are you blowing hot or cold this festive season? Are you making decisions with your id or your ego? It’s important for brands to understand what the behavioural economist George Lowenstein has called the ‘hot cold empathy gap’. Especially health or wellness brands such as Drinkaware and the NPA (National Pharmacy Association) two of our clients who we’ve worked with in this fascinating area.
We all have two decision making states. Cold - super ego, rational. Hot - id, irrational, emotional. As the authors of ‘Nudge – Improving Decisions about health, wealth and happiness’ by Richard H Thaler & Cass R Sunstein', point out
“For most of us… self control issues arise because we underestimate the effect of arousal. When in a cold state, we do not appreciate how much our desires and our behaviour will be altered when we are ‘under the influence’ of arousal. As a result, our behaviour reflects a certain naivete about the effects that context can have on choice.”
We first explored this with the NPA, utilising the research of Daniel Ariely and his book ‘Predictably Irrational’ regarding the area of sexual arousal and the effect it has on our decision making processes. Ariely and colleagues asked male students a number of probing questions, such as: “Could you enjoy sex with someone you hated?” / “Would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?” / “Would you always use a condom?” and other choice queries.
There were then further sets of questions that went even further and asked about the likelihood of engaging in immoral behaviours such as date rape. The male participants were then asked to arouse themselves to a high level, but not to ejaculate. They then took the questionnaire again.
“Across the 19 questions about sexual preferences, when all the participants were aroused they predicted that their desire to engage in a variety of somewhat odd sexual activities would be nearly twice as high (72% higher) they had predicted when they were cold.”
“In the five questions about their propensity to engage in immoral activities, when they were aroused they predicted their propensity to be more than twice as high as (136% higher than) they had predicted in the cold state.”
“Similarly, in the set of questions about using condoms, and despite the warnings that had been hammered into them over the years about the importance of condoms, they were 25% more likely in the aroused state than in the cold state to predict that they would forgo condoms. In all these cases they failed to predict the influence of arousal on their sexual preferences, morality and approach to safe sex.”
The challenge for sexual health marketing is therefore that when you talk to the audience they are likely to be in a ‘cold’ state – but you want to influence them when they have got the hots for someone. Daniel Ariely says “We can teach them how to say no before any temptation takes hold, and before a situation becomes impossible to resist” but this relies on the superego making decisions before the powerful id takes over, and this seemed to be unrealistic given the levels of promiscuity and the highly sexualised culture of the UK. However he goes on “alternatively, we can get them prepared to deal with the consequences of saying yes in the heat of passion (by carrying a condom for example)” which seems to be a far more realistic ambition.
The implication for our work with the NPA was that the client took the brave step forward of actually acknowledging that young people will have lots of sex. That it was pointless to ask them to “just say no’ because they won’t. When they’re hot, they’re not bothered.
For Drinkaware, the very current issue is that in December a lot of people, under the influence of alcohol, make a lot of 'hot' decisions. These will to be have more, health damaging drinks, to take drugs, or make a sexual pass at someone. First of all though, drinking. When consumers are in a hot state they are of little interest to our client Drinkaware, as their influence will be reduced.
After every 'hot' night out however, comes the 'cold' light of day. Where our rational self reasserts itself. Where we want to be good, well behaved and healthy. So does this mean that they will immediately download the mydrinkaware app, or pledge to 'never drink again?' Not in December. For though you might crawl back to your bed with your hangover, there'll be another great drinks party or dinner coming up, and there's no way you're going to miss it!
Behavioural economics tells us that procrastination is caused by this 'hot' temptation (for the next party) overcoming 'cold' intentions. So we give in to drinking again because we tell ourselves that we'll be good tomorrow, or the day after that.
Research studies show however that the best way to defeat procrastination is not to set yourself harsh rigid deadlines, nor to have no deadline at all. Rather it is to put in place a 'middle way' which is self imposed deadlines. So could we exploit the high incidence of 'cold' state hangovers in December by offering people the opportunity to start being 'drinkaware' in January? We acknowledge that December is party time, and we shouldn’t try and set people harsh deadlines or conditions, because we know that they will simply become 'hot' and fall into drinking again. We also acknowledge our propensity to procrastinate, and tackle that through what appears to be a realistic, manageable goal - start in January. So look out for Drinkaware activity in December, and if you’re in a cold, rational hungover state, sign up to MyDrinkaware and start your resolutions for 2012 a little bit earlier than planned!