Imagine you’re standing in the middle of a rope bridge. Not unlike the one at the end of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Rickety, rotten planks. A yawning chasm beneath you. Massive crocs churning up the water. You grip the threadbare rope handrails. Grit your teeth and focus on getting across. Eventually – shaking and dripping with sweat – you reach the other side. There to meet you is a well-groomed individual with a clipboard. They want to know how you found the experience. They make a lot of eye contact. How do you feel?
In studies, it seems likely that you’ll find this individual significantly more attractive than you would have if you’d met with no scary rope bridge involved. Why?
Wait, you’re only attractive because I’m anxious?
Stress has a profound effect on our decision making. That’s because it’s the same combination of neurotransmitters (dopamine, cortisol, noradrenaline) that generate all arousal states. Then it’s up to our rational brain – the prefrontal cortex – to interpret how this makes us feel. That’s where context comes in.
You’ve stepped off the rope bridge, your brain still flooded with fear-inspired neurotransmitters that kept you hyper focused in getting to the other side. Quite without you realising it, your prefrontal cortex acknowledges the well-groomed, smiling, charming person. And the chemicals swishing around your brain. And decides, ‘Wow, this person is making me feel funny. This person is attractive.’
And you’re probably wrong about that.
As Sandra Bullock’s character Annie tells Keanu Reeves in Speed, “Relationships that start under intense circumstances never last.” She’s right (and not just because Keanu was replaced by Jason Patrick for Speed 2). If you meet someone when you’re in a state of arousal, your PFC is going to try and rationalise the emotions you’re feeling in context. You might end up pursuing the wrong romantic partner for this reason.
Our brains are not always great at interpreting their own signals
Arousal is the state of physiological and psychological readiness to respond to stimuli. This mechanism is very old, almost all living things that respond to the environment have some correlates of the neurotransmitters involved (even plants and mycelium). What makes us human is our ability to interpret the stimuli via the PFC. Which makes us feel very clever but is prone to all kinds of mishaps.
Take cortisol, which plays a significant role in decision-making processes.
Cortisol is produced as part of the body’s stress response and helps to mobilise energy reserves, increase blood sugar levels, and suppress the immune system. After all, you don’t need to worry about catching a cold when you’re running from a lion.
In addition to these physical effects, cortisol also affects the brain’s decision-making processes. Research has shown that high levels of cortisol can impair cognitive function, particularly the areas of memory and attention. When cortisol levels are high, we may have difficulty focusing on important information and processing it effectively. This can lead to poor decision-making and a greater likelihood of making mistakes.
You’ve read this far, keep going
Fundamentally, cortisol is great at making us focus on the problem at hand. But it can obscure the bigger picture. I feel it plays a role in sunk cost fallacy. What’s that? More skewed decision making when the ‘rational’ brain can’t see the bigger picture.
Imagine you have put 100,000 into a business and it’s a total disaster. You realise you’re going to have to put another 100,000 in or you’ll go under. A lot of data suggests that you do just that. And you probably lose another 100,000 in the process. If we were truly rational, and able to see the bigger picture, we’d ask ourselves ‘if I knew before what I know now about this business, would I have put the initial 100,000 in?’ And if the answer to that is ‘no’ we should cut our losses and let the business fold.
I’d argue that it’s cortisol focusing our thinking on the problem at hand (how do I rescue my business?) that blinds us to the fact that there are other options. Salespeople use this technique deliberately, that’s why they try to keep you on the phone. The idea is that you’re more likely to purchase once you’ve sunk (or invested) a significant amount of time in the conversation. Incidentally, if you’re ever weighing the pros and cons of your relationship, the only positive you can find is ‘but we’ve been together X years…’ Well, I think you see where that’s going.
You can likely see how this might affect people using our apps too. “Oh my god,” the user thinks. “I’ve lost a couple of hundred… I’d better try and win it back!”
Bye bye big picture
That’s the focusing effect of cortisol, it makes us fixate on the problem at hand. For this reason, many people advocate forced cool downs for app users. This is a gamification technique detailed by Yu Kai Chou in his book Actionable Gamification. Essentially it involves locking the user out from playing for a set period of time.
But bearing in mind what we know about cortisol, this is probably not going to be a very good fix (even if the user, in a calmer, more rational state, has requested the forced cooldown for instances where they have lost a certain amount of money). Essentially it’s just passing the user’s problem onto one of our competitors, rather than taking care of them in a moment where they may not be seeing the bigger picture, or making rational decisions. It might even make them more focused on winning the money back on one of our competitors’ apps.
Can understanding stress help us to do better?
If we could integrate running or walking apps, such as Strava, into our apps, we could allow users to retain control of the forced cooldown by allowing them to unlock the cooldown after completing a run or a walk. When we run or walk, especially in nature, we pump plenty of fresh oxygenated blood to our brains. It’s a way to bring the stress levels down, while allowing the user to still feel in control. Because when we‘re really stressed it can be difficult to relinquish control (again, even if we asked for the cooldown to apply). Maybe our users will think better of immediately returning to their game after a forced break like this.
For users who can’t walk or run, we could allow them to connect mindfulness or meditation apps (as long as they had some interactive component) to achieve the same.
The fact is, anxiety and stress don’t just make us feel bad. They affect our ability to make rational decisions. Again, this is probably how Jason Patrick ended up replacing Keanu Reeves in Speed 2.
What do you think? Have you ever been affected by sunk cost fallacy? Have you noticed that you make worse decisions when you’re stressed? Let me know. And look out for each other.
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