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 is just spin.
The raise vs. inflation thing is still a mistake of math. The question of the units you use to describe your salary wouldn’t make any difference to it.
But what you’re describing is different. I’ll choose absolute minutes of exercise left, or percentage of time left, on the basis of which seems easier to conquer. I’m trying to maintain my own motivation.
We tell ourselves stories about the world in order to understand the world, and it matters the terms we use in those stories.
So we’re essentially “spinning” the facts to get the reaction – from ourselves – that we find preferable. Kind of a self-relations strategy.
The salary vs miles to go observation is really the key. In the “miles to go” scenario, you’re measuring a subjective quantity that is essentially only monitored by you. However even if you calculate your salary in Laos Kip, your purchasing power is still fixed at what ever it was. So when you take your Laos Kip salary to the car dealer, grocery store, etc… its obvious what will happen.
The crux is that you can’t fool your self when there are external measures for you to reference against. If it was all subjective (and only up to you for measurement), you might as well do it in astronomical units. I only have .000000053AU’s to go. I’ll be done in no time.
It’s harder to think when I’m exercising, and I use my diminishing ability to do simple math (if I keep going at this pace, I’ll finish in this time, for example) to measure how tired I am. It’s possible in your example that, while 5 miles “sounds better” than 8km, it might also let you zone out longer before doing any more checks and let your mind relax while your body gets more tired. As far as your friend wanting to make her run sound longer, that’s just marketing.
The Jack Benny radio program had a terrific bit – a genuine classic – when Dennis Day, the singer, asked for a raise. Jack explained to Dennis the program was only on for a half hour a week and that Dennis only sang for about 2 minutes on each program. This meant that he was making a huge sum . . . if figured as Jack said.
Problem with the Boss example is that people treat wages differently. You come to expect $X weekly, and you budget your life accordingly. If prices rise due to inflation, you cut back here or there. When the boss cuts your salary, it says something very different about your performance, the health of the company, etc. When your boss raises your salary, that is always a positive event even if the raise hasn’t kept up with inflation. So the example isn’t very good.
Manufacturers of soft drinks have been playing this game for years. First they gave us the “Full Half-Quart size”, which sounds like a lot more than “Pint Size”. Then they stopped selling quarts altogether, giving us liters instead. So why haven’t the Exxons of the world figured this out, and gone to the Euro approach of selling us liters of gas to soothe our nerves?
I do exactly the same thing when I calculate how much I will earn from doing overtime. I always calculate the gross amount I will earn. The few times I have stopped to deduct the tax, I found it so depressing that I almost didn’t want to do the overtime. So, yeah, I do my overtime work happily thanks to nominal illusion.
“Each of us can fool ourselves some of the time, but why can’t we fool ourselves all the time?”
I wish that were the case, but what about people who live their entire lives truly believing that, say, prayer works? There is plenty of empirical evidence that it doesn’t, and yet… And that is a big issue, not small potatoes.