Mere Association

Psychological Reasons for Mistakes

Man is, and always was, a block-head and dullard, much readier to feel and digest than to think and consider. — Thomas Carlyle

1. Mere Association

Inside the jewelry boutique, surrounded by enchanting music and gorgeous women, how could John resist buying Mary the $5,000 necklace?

We automatically feel pleasure or pain when we connect a stimulus—a thing, situation or individual—with an experience we've had in the past or with values or preferences we are born with. As we've learned, we move towards stimuli we associate with pleasure and away from those we associate with pain. We most easily associate to the events whose consequences we have experienced most often and the ones we easily remember. The more vivid or dramatic an event is, the easier we remember it.

Every time Mary served bacon for breakfast, she sang a special melody. After a while, if John heard her singing the melody, he expected bacon.

The Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov studied the digestive system of dogs when he observed that a stimulus unrelated to food made the dogs salivate. In one experiment he rang a bell just before giving food to the dog. He repeated this several times until the dog salivated at the sound of the bell alone. No sight or smell of food was present. The sound of the bell produced the same response as the food. The dog learned to associate the bell with food.

Experiments have shown that we can learn to fear a harmless stimulus if it is paired with an unpleasant one. If for example rats consistently receive mild electrical shock after hearing a tone, the rats learn to develop a fear of the tone alone. The source also describes an experiment on conditioned immune responses in mice, alongside food aversion. Mice got saccharin-flavored water (saccharin has incentive value due to its sweet taste) along with a nausea-producing drug. Would the mice show signs of nausea the next time they got saccharin water alone? Yes, but the mice also developed infections. It was known that the drug in addition to producing nausea, weakened the immune system, but why would saccharin alone have this effect? The mere pairing of the saccharin with the drug caused the mouse immune system to learn the association. In this account, saccharin became a cue for an immune response previously associated with the drug. The animal experiment does not establish that ordinary human associations produce the same effects.

John's supplier took him to the best steakhouse in town and picked up the check. The next time it was time to buy new supplies, John associated the supplier with pleasant feelings. People can influence us by associating a product, service, person, investment, or a situation with something we like. Many times we buy products, enter relationships, and invest our money merely because we associate them with positive things. No wonder advertisers or politicians connect what they want to sell with things we like and avoid associating themselves with negative events. Pair a sports car with something that produces a positive feeling—a beautiful and sexy model—and we automatically associate the car with pleasure.

John was afraid to deliver bad news to the CEO. Whether we like someone is influenced by the events with which an individual is associated. Bad news isn't welcome. We tend to dislike people who tell us what we don't want to hear even when they did not cause the problem—the familiar tendency to kill the messenger. This gives people an incentive to avoid giving bad news. To protect themselves, they tell the news in a way they believe we want to hear it. This tendency is called the Persian Messenger Syndrome and traces its origins back to ancient Greece. In Antigone, a messenger feared for his life since he knew the king would be unhappy with the news he brought.

Warren Buffett says on being informed of bad news: "We only give a couple of instructions to people when they go to work for us: One is to think like an owner. And the second is to tell us bad news immediately - because good news takes care of itself. We can take bad news, but we don't like it late."

Seeing the fish salad, John remembered the time when he'd eaten fish salad and gotten sick, and once more felt nauseous. We see similar situations where they don't exist because a situation resembles an earlier experience. We therefore believe that the future mirrors the past and that history will repeat itself.

Keep in mind

• Evaluate things, situations and people on their own merits.
• Individuals are neither good nor bad merely because we associate them with something positive or negative.
• Encourage people to tell you bad news immediately.
• Merely because you associate some stimulus with earlier pain or pleasure doesn't mean the stimulus will cause the same pain or pleasure today. Past experiences are often context dependent.
• Create a negative emotion if you want to end a certain behavior. If you want someone to stop smoking, one way could be to show them what they stand to lose. Terrifying pictures may cause them to associate smoking with death.