When Betsey got home from her morning run earlier this week, she beamed and told me she had covered eight kilometers. And this Sunday, after running the first two hours of my long weekend run, I gritted my teeth and told myself, “only five miles to go.”
The strange thing about these observations is that I’m an Aussie, and so typically talk in kilometers, while Betsey grew up in the United States, speaking in miles.
Why did we reverse roles? It turns out we were in very different situations. When I asked Betsey about her comment she said that, ” … measuring my run in kilometers makes it sound like I ran farther.” And this seems like something we may want to do once we are done jogging. In turn, I was still running when I described the last eight kilometers as five miles, and I did this because I was trying to convince my body that it didn’t have that much further to go.
Economists have long thought about nominal illusion — the tendency for certain magnitudes to sound different when described in different units. For instance, a boss offering a two percent pay raise in a year in which inflation is six percent faces fewer protests than when cutting your wage by three percent in a year with one percent inflation. Yet the two situations are equivalent: your boss cut your real wage by four percent.
I had always thought about nominal illusion as simply being a mistake, or a math error. But what I learned when thinking about the jogging example is that sometimes we purposely manipulate the units with which we describe the world to make ourselves feel better.
But the economist in me finds it surprising that nominal illusion works. When I told myself that I had five miles left to run, I actually looked at my fancy G.P.S. watch, which told me that I had eight kilometers left to run, and then did the math to convert this to five miles. So I both knew that I had eight kilometers left, but fooled myself that it was “only” five miles.
Can we systematically fool ourselves in this manner? And if so, why can’t I use nominal illusion to make myself feel really terrific? For instance, if I convert my salary to the Laos Kip, then it sounds like I’m super-rich. But somehow my ability to harness nominal illusion around these bigger issues fails me. Each of us can fool ourselves some of the time, but why can’t we fool ourselves all the time? And why can we sustain comforting nominal illusions in some domains, but not others?
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This sounds similar to how I “fool” myself by setting my alarm clock ahead 10 or 15 minutes. Even though I’m fully aware that it’s set ahead, it still seems to help!
Is this the same thing as setting your alarm clock for 5:30 and then hitting the snooze button three times every morning, rather than just setting it for 6am? Maybe it is giving you a nominal illusion of more time?
I do this when I’m writing papers for class. I write everything in single-spaced font. That way, I only have, say, 5 pages to write instead of 10. Then, when I hit my 5 pages, I just double space my work and it “magically” doubles in length.
I feel as though we can only fool ourselves regularly in areas we’re not particularly skilled. For example, you are capable of converting kilometers to miles, so I doubt you’d benefit from fooling yourself as often as I would, since I do not know the conversion off the top of my head.
I do understand sales, though, so they do not affect me as easily. 30% off can sound like a great incentive, but when I know how much I am still being charged, it is still ineffective in swaying me unless it’s a reasonable price regardless of the sale.
I’ve often wondered the same thing about stock splits. People seem to get excited about them (and the share price tends to bump when a split is announced), but you’ve essentially just exchanged a $10 bill for 2 $5 bills.
Warren Buffet obviously doesn’t subscribe to this thinking. (BRK-A is currently trading at about $130,000 per share.)
I suppose this is pretty close to the, “Only $3 folks–buy two for $6!” sort of marketing. But only it’s self-marketing.
Or is it that nefarious “1984″ speech that, but only we speak it to ourselves.
In any case, it is neuro-linguistic in nature, it seems, since it involved speaking to ourselves (or is that schizophrenia?).
Hmmm…I wonder if this can work on a national scale? If so, instead of paying $3.30 per gallon of gas, we might state it thusly:
“TODAY ONLY!!!! A whopping 3.79 liters of gasoline for only $3.20!!!”
Or how about this one from your scale:
“Looking good, sexy! You weight only 181.44 kilograms–great job!”
“Yet the two situations are equivalent: your boss cut your real wage by four percent”
Um, no. Inflation isn’t your boss’s doing. The government cut your real wage. You might have said that the end result is the same, without laying it on the boss.
However valid your point about the nominal illusion may be, this example falls short.
http://www.pastaqueen.com/halfofme/archives/2006/02/kilos_vs_pounds.html
Same argument, but using weight. For example, I weigh 240 lbs. but only 109 kg’s. I’d prefer to describe my weight in kg’s, BUT if I lose weight, I’d rather use lbs. to describe the loss because 2 lbs. isn’t quite 1 kg. It sounds better to say 2 units lost rather than 1.