Evolutionary Marketing

There are many popular views about the human mind that, roughly, treat it as a rather general-purpose kind of tool: one that’s not particularly suited to this task or that, but more as a Jack of all trades and master of none. In fact, many such perspectives view the mind as (baffling) being wrong about the world almost all the time. If one views the mind this way, one can be lead into making some predictions about how it ought to behave. As one for instance, some people might predict that our minds will, essentially, mistake one kind of arousal for another. A common example of this thinking involves experiments in which people are placed in a fear-arousal condition in the hopes that they will subsequently report more romantic or sexual attraction to certain partners they meet at that time. The explanation for this finding often hinges on some notion of people “misplacing” their arousal – since both kinds of arousal involve some degree of overlapping physiological responses – or reinterpreting a negative arousal as a positive one (e.g., “I dislike being afraid, so I must actually be turned on instead”). I happen to think that such explanations can’t even possibly be close to true, largely because the response to arousal generated by fear and sexual interest should motivate categorically different kinds of behavior.

Here’s one instance where an arousal mistake like that can be costly

Bit by bit, this view of the human mind is being eroded (though progress can be slow), as it does not fit the empirical evidence or possess any solid theoretical groundings. As a great example of this forward progress, consider the experiments demonstrating that learning mechanisms appear to be eloquently tailored to specific kinds of adaptive problems, since learning to, say, avoid poisonous foods requires much different cognitive rules, inputs, and outputs, than learning to avoid predator attacks. Learning, in other words, represents a series of rather domain-specific tasks which a general-purpose mechanism could not navigate successfully. As psychological hypotheses begin to get tailored more closely to considerations of recurrent adaptive problems, new previously-unappreciated, features of our minds come into stark relief.

So let’s return to the matter of arousal and think about how arousal might impact our day-to-day behavior, specifically with respect to persuasion; a matter of interest to anyone in the fields of marketing or advertising. If your goal is to sell something to someone else – to persuade them to buy what you’re offering – the message you use to try and sell it is going to be crucial. You might, for example, try to appeal to someone’s desire to stand out from the crowd in order to get them interested in your product (e.g., “Think different“); alternatively, you might try to appeal to the popularity of a product to get them to buy (e.g., “The world’s most popular computer”). Importantly, you can’t try to send both of these messages at once (“Be different by doing that thing everyone else is doing”), so which message should you use, and in what contexts should you use it?

A paper by Griskevicius et al (2009) sought to provide an answer to that very question by considering the adaptive functions of particular arousal states. Previous accounts examining how arousal affected information processing were on the general side of things: the general arousal-based accounts would predict that arousal – irrespective of the source – should yield shallower processing of information, causing people to rely more on mental heuristics, like scarcity or popularity, when assessing a product; affect valance-based accounts took this idea one step further, suggesting that positive emotions, like happiness, should yield shallower processing, whereas negative emotions, like fear, should yield deeper processing. However, the authors proposed a new way of thinking about arousal – based on evolutionary theory that suggests those previous theories are too vague to help us truly understand how arousal shapes behavior. Instead, one needs to consider what adaptive functions particular arousal states serve in order to understand when one type of message will be persuasive in that context.

Don’t worry; if this gets too complicated, you can just fall back on using sex

To demonstrate this point, Griskevicius et al (2009) examined two arousal-inducing contexts: the aforementioned fear and romantic desire. If the general arousal-based accounts are correct, both the scarcity and popularity appeals should become more persuasive as people become aroused by romance or fear; by contrast, if the affect valance-accounts are correct, the positively-valanced romantic feelings should make all sorts of heuristics more persuasive, whereas the negatively-valanced fear arousal should make both less persuasive. The evolutionary account instead focuses on the functional aspects of fear and romance: fear activates self-defense-relevant behavior, one form of which would be to seek safety in numbers; a common animal defense tactic. If one were motivated to seek safety in numbers, a popularity appeal might be particularly persuasive (since that’s where a lot of other people are), whereas a scarcity appeal would not be; in fact, sending the message that a product would help make one stand out from the crowd when they’re afraid could actually be counterproductive. By contrast, if one is in a romantic state of mind, positively differentiating oneself from your competition can be useful for attracting and subsequently retaining attention. Accordingly, romance-based arousal might have the reverse effect, making popularity heuristics less persuasive while making scarcity appeals more so.

To test these ideas, Griskevicius et al (2009) induced romantic desire or fear in about 300 participants by having them read stories or watch movie clips related to each domain. Following the arousal-inducing, participants were then asked to briefly examine an advertisement for a museum or restaurant which contained a message that appealed to popularity (e.g., “visited by over 1,000,000 people each year”), scarcity (“stand out from the crowd”), or neither message, and then report on how appealing the location was and whether or not they would be likely to go there (on a 9-point scale across a few questions).

As predicted, the fear condition led to popularity messages to be more persuasive (M = 6.5) than the control advertisements (M = 5.9). However, fear had the opposite effect for the scarcity messages (M = 5.0), making them less appealing than the control ads. That pattern of results was flipped for the romantic desire condition: scarcity appeals (M = 6.5) were more persuasive than controls (M = 5.8), whereas the popularity appeals were less persuasive than either (M = 5.0). Without getting too bogged down in the details on their second experiment, the authors also reported that these effects were even more specific than that: in particular, appeals to scarcity and popularity only had their effects when discussing behavioral aspects (stand out from the crowd/everyone’s doing it); when discussing attitudes (everyone’s talking about it) or opportunities (limited time offer) popularity and scarcity did not differ in their effectiveness, regardless of the type of arousal being experienced.

One condition did pose interpretive problems, though…

Thinking about the adaptive problems and selection pressures that shaped our psychology is critical for constructing hypotheses and generating theoretically plausible explanations for understanding its features. Expecting some kind of general arousal, emotional valance, or other such factors to explain much about the human (or nonhuman) mind is unlikely to pan out well; indeed, it hasn’t been working out for the field for many decades now. I don’t suspect such general explanations will disappear in the near future, despite their lack of explanatory power, though; they have saturated much of the field in psychology and many psychologists lack the necessary theoretical background to fully appreciate why such explanations are implausible to begin with. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful that someday the future of psychology might not include reams of thinking about misplaced arousal and general information processing mechanisms that are, apparently, quite bad at solving important adaptive problems.

References: Griskevicius, V., Goldstein, N., Mortensen, C., Sundie, J., Cialdini, R., & Kenrick, D. (2009). Fear and loving in Las Vegas: Evolution, emotion, and persuasion. Journal of Marketing Research, 46, 384-395.

A Curious Case Of Welfare Considerations In Morality

There was a stage in my life, several years back, where I was a bit of a chronic internet debater. As anyone who has engaged in such debates – online or off, for that matter – can attest to, progress can be quite slow if any is observed at all. Owing to the snail’s pace of such disputes, I found myself investing more time in them than I probably should have. In order to free up my time while still allowing me to express my thoughts, I created my own site (this one) where I could write about topics that interested me, express my view points, and then be done with them, freeing me from the quagmire of debate. Happily, this is a tactic that has not only proven to be effective, but I like to think that it has produced some positive externalities for my readers in the form of several years worth of posts that, I am told, some people enjoy. Occasionally, however, I do still wander back into a debate here and there, since I find them fun and engaging. Sharing ideas and trading intellectual blows is nice recreation.

 My other hobbies follow a similar theme

In the wake of the recent shooting in Charleston, the debate I found myself engaged in concerned the arguments for the moral and legal removal guns from polite society, and I wanted to write a bit about it here, serving both the purposes of cleansing it from my mind and, hopefully, making an interesting point about our moral psychology in the process. The discussion itself centered around a clip from one of my favorite comedians, Jim Jefferies, who happens to not be a fan of guns himself. While I recommend watching the full clip and associated stand-up because Jim is a funny man, for those not interested in investing the time and itching to get to the moral controversy, here’s the gist of Jim’s views about guns:

“There’s one argument and one argument alone for having a gun, and this is the argument: Fuck off; I like guns”

While Jim notes that there’s nothing wrong with saying, “I like something; don’t take it away from me”, the rest of the routine goes through various discussions of how other arguments for the owning of guns are, in Jim’s word’s, bullshit (including owning guns for self-defense or the overthrow of an oppressive government. For a different comedic perspective, see Bill Burr).

Laying my cards on the table, I happen to be one of those people who enjoys shooting recreationally (just target practice; I don’t get fancy with it and I have no interest in hunting). That said, I’m not writing today to argue with any of Jim’s points; in fact, I’m quite sympathetic to many of the concerns and comments he makes: on the whole, I feel the expected value of guns, in general, to be a net cost for society. I further feel that if guns were voluntarily abandoned by the population, there would probably be many aggregate welfare benefits, including reduced rates of suicide, homicide, and accidental injury (owing to the possibility that many such conflicts are heat of the moment issues, and lacking the momentary ability to employ deadly force might mean it’s never used at all later). I’m even going to grant his point I quoted above: the best justification for owning a gun is recreational in nature. I don’t ask that you agree or disagree with all this; just that you follow the logical form of what’s to come.

Taking all of that together, the argument for enacting some kind of legal ban of guns – or at the very least the moral condemnation of the ability to own them – goes something like this: because the only real benefit to having a gun is that you get to have some fun with it, and because the expected costs to all those guns being around tend to be quite high, we ought to do away with the guns. The welfare balance just shifts away from having lots of deadly weapons around. Jim even notes that while most gun owners will never use their weapons intentionally or accidentally to inflict costs on others or themselves, the law nevertheless needs to cater to the 1% or so of people who would do such things. So, this thing – X – generates welfare costs for others which far outstrip its welfare benefits, and therefore should be removed. The important point of this argument, then, would seem to focus on these welfare concerns.

Coincidentally, owning a gun may make people put a greater emphasis on your concerns

The interesting portion of this debate is that the logical form of the argument can be applied to many other topics, yet it will not carry the same moral weight; a point I tried to make over the course of the discussion with a very limited degree of success. Ideas die one person at a time, the saying goes, and this debate did not carry on to the point of anyone losing their life.

In the case, we can try and apply the above logic to the very legal, condoned, and often celebrated topic of alcohol. On the whole, I would expect that the availability of alcohol is a net cost for society: drunk driving deaths in the US yield about 10,000 bodies (a comparable number to homicides committed with a firearm), which directly inflict costs on non-drinkers. While it’s more difficult to put numbers on other costs, there are a few non-trivial matters to consider, such as the number of suicides, assaults, and non-traffic accidents encouraged by the use of alcohol, the number of unintended pregnancies and STIs spread through more casual and risky drunk sex, as well as the number of alcohol-related illnesses and liver damage. Broken homes, abused and neglected children, spirals of poverty, infidelity, and missed work could also factor into these calculations somewhere. Both of these products – guns and booze – tend to inflict costs on individuals other than the actor when they’re available, and these costs appear to be substantial,

So, in the face of all those costs, what’s the argument in favor of alcohol being approved of, legally or moally? Well, the best and most common argument seems to be, as Jim might say, “Fuck off; I like drinking”. Now, of course, there are some notable differences between drinking and owning guns, mainly being that people don’t often drink to inflict costs on others while many people do use guns to intentionally do harm. While the point is well taken, it’s worth bearing in mind that the arguments against guns are not the same arguments against murder. The argument as it pertains to guns seemed to be, as I noted above, that regular people should not be allowed to own guns because some small portion of the population that does have one around will do something reprehensible or stupid with it, and that these concerns trump the ability of the responsible owners to do what they enjoy. Well, presumably, we could say the same thing about booze: even if most people who drink don’t drive while drunk, and even if not all drunk drivers end up killing someone, our morals and laws need to cater to that percentage of people that do.

(As an aside, I spent the past few years at New Mexico State University. One day, while standing outside a classroom in the hall, I noticed a poster about drunk driving. The intended purpose of the flyer seemed to be to inform students that most people don’t drive drunk; in fact, about 75% students reported not driving under the influence, if I recall correctly. That does mean, of course, that about 1 in 4 students did at some point, which is a worrying figure; perhaps enough to make a solid argument for welfare concerns)

There is also the matter of enforcement: making alcohol illegal didn’t work out well in the past; making guns illegal could arguably be more successful on a logistical level. While such a point is worth thinking about, it is also a bit of a red herring from the heart of the issue: that is, most people are not opposed to the banning of alcohol because it’s difficult in practice, but otherwise supportive of the measure on principle; instead, people seem as if they would oppose the idea even if it could be implemented efficiently. People’s moral judgments can be quite independent of enforcement capacity. Computationally, it seems like the judgments concerning whether something is worth condemning in the first place ought to proceed judgments about whether it could be done feasibly, simply because the latter estimation is useless without the former. Spending time thinking about what one could punish effectively without any interest in following through would be like thinking about all the things one could chew and swallow when they’re hungry, even if they wouldn’t want to eat them.

Plenty of fiber…and there’s lots of it….

There are two points to bear in mind from this discussion to try and tie it back to understanding our own moral psychology and making a productive point. The first is that there is some degree of variance in moral judgments that is not being determined by welfare concerns. Just because something ends up resulting in harm to others, people are not necessarily going to be willing to condemn it. We might (not) accept a line of reasoning for condemning a particular act because we have some vested interest in (encouraging) preventing it while categorically (accepting) rejecting that same line in other cases where our strategic interests run in the opposite direction; interests which we might not even be consciously aware of in many cases. This much, I suspect, will come as no surprise to anyone, especially because other people in debates are known for being so clearly biased to you, the dispassionate observer. Strategic interests lead us to preference our own concerns.

The other point worth considering, though, is that people raise or deny these welfare concerns in the interests of being persuasive to others. The welfare of other people appears to have some impact on our moral judgments; if welfare concerns were not used as inputs, it would seem rather strange that so many arguments about morality often lean so heavily and explicitly upon them. I don’t argue that you should accept my moral argument because it’s Sunday, as that fact seems to have little bearing to my moral mechanisms. While this too might seem obvious to people (“of course other people’s suffering matters to me!”), understanding why the welfare of others matters to our moral judgments is a much trickier explanatory issue than understanding why our own welfare matters to us. Both of these are matters that any complete theory of morality needs to deal with.

The Morality Of Guilt

Today, I wanted to discuss the topic of guilt; specifically, what the emotion is, whether we should consider it to be a moral emotion, and whether it generates moral behavioral outputs. The first part of that discussion will be somewhat easier to handle than the latter. In the most common sense, guilt appears to an emotion aroused by the perception of wrong-doing which has harmed someone else on the part of the individual experiencing guilt. The negative feelings that accompany guilt often lead to the guilty party desiring to make amends to the injured one so as to compensate the damage done and repair the relationship between the two (e.g., “I’m sorry that totaled your car by driving it into your house; I feel like a total heel. Let me buy you dinner to make up for it”). Because the emotion appears to be aroused by the perceptions of a moral transgression – that is, someone feels they have done something wrong, or impermissible –  it seems like guilt could rightly be considered a moral emotion; specifically, an emotion related to moral conscience (a self regulating mechanism), rather than moral condemnation (an other regulating mechanism).

Nothing beats packing for a nice, relaxing guilt trip

The understanding that guilt is a moral emotion, then, allows us to inform our opinion about what kind of thing morality is by examining how guilt works in greater, proximate detail. In other words, we can infer what adaptive value our moral sense might have had through studying the form of the emotional guilt mechanisms: what inputs they use and what outputs they produce. This brings us to some rather interesting work I recently dug out of my backlog of papers to read, by de Hooge et al (2011), that focused on figuring out what kinds of effects guilt tends to have on people’s behavior when you take guilt out of a dyadic (two-person) relationship and drop it into larger groups of people. The authors were interested, in part, on deciding whether or not guilt could be classified as a morally good emotion. While they acknowledge guilt is a moral emotion, they question whether it produces morally good outcomes in certain types of situations.

This leads naturally to the following question: what is a morally good outcome? The answer to that question is going to depend on what type of function one thinks morality has. In this case, de Hooge et al (2011) write as if our moral sense is an altruism device – one that functions to deliver benefits to others at a cost to one’s self. Accordingly, a morally good outcome is going to be one that results in benefits flowing to others at a cost to the actor. Framed in terms of guilt, we might expect that individuals experiencing guilt will behave more altruistically than individuals who are not; the guilty’s regard for the welfare of others will be regulated upwards, with a corresponding down-regulation placed on their own welfare. The authors note that much of the previous research on guilt has uncovered evidence consistent with that pattern: guilty parties tend to forgo benefits to themselves or suffer costs in order to deliver benefits to the party they have wronged. This makes guilt look rather altruistic.

Such research, however, was typically conducted in a two-party context: the guilty party and their victim. This presents something of an interpretative issue, inasmuch as the guilty party only has that one option available to them: if, say, I want to make you better off, I need to suffer a cost myself. While that might make the behavior look altruistic in nature, in the social world that we reside within, that is usually not the only option available; I could, for instance, also make you better off not at an expense to myself, but rather at the expense of someone else; an outcome most people wouldn’t exactly call altruism, and one de Hooge et al (2011) wouldn’t consider morally good either. To the extent a guilty party is interested in making their victim better off in both case, both outcomes would look the same in a two-party case; to the extent the guilty party is interested in behaving altruistically towards the victimized party, though, things would look different in a three-party context.

As they usually do…

de Hooge et al (2011) report on the results of three pilot studies and four experiments examining how guilt affects behavior in these three-party contexts in terms of welfare-relevant choices. While I don’t have time to discuss all of what they did, I wanted to highlight one of their experiments in more detail while noting that each of them generated data consistent with the same general pattern. The experiment I will discuss is their third one. In that experiment, 44 participants were assigned to either a guilt or a control condition. In both conditions, the participants were asked to complete a two-part joint effort task with another person to earn payment rewards. Colored letters (red or green) would pop up on each player’s screens and the participant and their partner had to click a button quickly in order to complete the task: the participant would push the button if the letter was green, whereas their partner would have to push if the letter was red. In the first part of the task, the performance of both the participant and their partner would be earning rewards for the participant; in the second part, the pair would be earning rewards for the partner instead. Each reward was worth 8 units of what I’ll call welfare points.

The participants were informed that while they would receive the bonus from the first round, their partner would not receive a bonus from the second. In the control condition, the partner did not earn the bonus because of their own poor performance; in the guilt condition, the partner did not earn the bonus because of the participant’s poor performance. In the next phase of this experiment, the participants were presented with three pay offs: their own, their partner’s, and an unrelated individual from the experiment who had also earned the bonus. The participants were told that one of the three would be randomly assigned the chance to redistribute the earnings though, of course, the participants always received that assignment. This allowed participants to give a benefit to their partner, but to do so at either a cost to themselves or at a cost to someone else.

Out of the 8 welfare units the participants had earned, they opted to give an average of 2.2 of them to their partner in the guilt condition, but only 1 unit in the control condition, so guilt did seem to make the participants somewhat more altruistic. Interestingly, however, guilt made participants even more willing to take from the outside party: guilty parties took an average of 4.2 units from the third party for their partner, relative to the 2.5 units they took in the control condition. In short, the participants appeared to be interested in repairing the relationship between themselves and their partners, but were more interested in doing so via taking from someone else, rather than giving up their own resources. Participants also viewed the welfare of the third party as being relatively unimportant as compared to the welfare of the partner they had ostensibly failed.

“To make up for hurting Mike, I think it’s only fair that Karen here suffers”

This returns us to the matter of what kind of thing morality is. de Hooge et al (2011) appear to view morality as an altruism device and view guilt as a moral emotion, yet, strangely, guilt did not appear to make people substantially more altruistic; instead, it seems to make them partial. Given that guilt was not making people behave more altruistically, we might want to reconsider the adaptive function of morality. What if, rather than acting as an altruism device, morality functions as an association management mechanism? If our moral sense functions to build and manage partial relationships, benefiting someone you’ve harmed at the expense of other targets of investment might make more sense. This is because there are good reasons to suspect that friendships represent partial allies maintained in the service of being able to win potential future disputes (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2009). These partial alliances are rank-ordered, however: I have a best friend, close friends, and more distant ones. In order to signal that I rank you highly as a friend, then, I need to demonstrate that I value you more than other people. Showing that I value you highly relative to myself – as would be the case with acts of altruism – would not necessarily tell you much about your value as my friend, relative to other friends. By contrast, behaving in ways that signal I value you more than others at least temporarily – as appeared to be the case in current experiments – could serve to repair a damaged alliance. Morality as an altruism device doesn’t fit the current pattern of data; an alliance management device does, though.

References: DeScioli, P. & Kurzban, R. (2009). The alliance hypothesis for human friendship. PLoS ONE 4(6): e5802. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005802

de Hooge, I. Nelissen R., Breugelmans, S., & Zeelenberg, M. (2011). What is moral about guilt? Acting “prosocially” at the disadvantage of others. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 100, 462-473.

 

Privilege And The Nature Of Inequality

Recently, there’s been a new comic floating around my social news feeds claiming that it will forever change the way I think about something. It’s not like there’s ever isn’t such article on my feeds, really, but I decided it would provide me with the opportunity to examine some research I’ve wanted to write about for some time. In the case of this mind-blowing comic, the concept of privilege is explained through a short story. The concept itself is not a hard one to understand: privilege here refers to cases in which an individual goes through their life with certain advantages they did not earn. The comic in question looks at an economic privilege: two children are born, but one has parents with lots of money and social connections. As expected, the one with the privilege ends up doing fairly well for himself, as many burdens of life have been removed, while the one without ends up working a series of low-paying jobs, eventually in service to the privileged one. The privileged individual declares that nothing has ever been handed to him in life as he is literally being handed some food on a silver platter by the underprivileged individual, apparently oblivious to what his parent’s wealth and connections have brought him.

Stupid, rich baby…

In the interests of laying my cards on the table at the outset, I would count myself among those born into privilege. While my family is not rich or well-connected the way people typically think about those things, there haven’t been any necessities of life I have wanted for; I have even had access to many additional luxuries that others have not. Having those burdens removed is something I am quite grateful for, and it has allowed me to invest my time in ways other people could not. I have the hard-work and responsibility of my parents to thank for these advantages. These are not advantages I earned, but they are certainly not advantages which just fell from the sky; if my parents had made different choices, things likely would have worked out differently for me. I want to acknowledge my advantages without downplaying their efforts at all.

That last part raises a rather interesting question that pertains to the privilege debate, however. In the aforementioned comic, the implication seems to be – unless I’m misunderstanding it – that things likely would have turned out equally well for both children if they had been given access to the same advantages in their life. Some of the differences that each child starts with seems to be the results of their parent’s work, while other parts of that difference are the result of happenstance. The comic appears to suggest the differences in that case were just due to chance: both sets of parents love their children, but one set seems to have better jobs. Luck of the draw, I suppose. However, is that the case for life more generally; you know, the thing about which the comic intends to make a point?

For instance, if one set of parents happen to be more short-term oriented – interested in taking rewards now rather than foregoing them for possibly larger rewards in the future, i.e., not really savers – we could expect that their children will, to some extent, inherit those short-term psychological tendencies; they will also inherit a more meager amount of cash. Similarly, the child of the parents who are more long-term focused should inherit their proclivities as well, in addition to the benefits those psychologies eventually accrued.

Provided that happened to be the case, what would become of these two children if they both started life in the same position? Should we expect that they both end up at similar places? Putting the questions another way, let’s imagine that, all the sudden, the wealth of this world was evenly distributed among the population; no one had more or less than anyone else. In this imaginary world, how long would that state of relative equality last? I can’t say for certain, but my expectation is that it wouldn’t last very long at all. While the money might be equally distributed in the population, the psychological predispositions for spending, saving, earning, investing, and so on are unlikely to be. Over time, inequalities will again begin to assert themselves as those psychological differences – be they slight or large – accumulate from decision after decision.

Clearly, this isn an experiment that couldn’t be run in real life – people are quite attached to their money – but there are naturally occurring versions of it in everyday life. If you want to find a context in which people might randomly come into possession of a sum of money, look no further than the lottery. Winning the lottery, both whether one wins at all and how much money you get, are as close to randomly determined as we’re going to get. If the differences between the families in the mind-blowing comic are due to chance factors, we would predict that people who win more money in the lottery should, subsequently, be doing better in life, relative to those who won smaller amounts. By contrast, if chance factors are relatively unimportant, than the amount won should be less important: whether they win large or small amounts, they might spend it (or waste it) at similar rates.

Nothing quite like a dose of privilege to turn your life around

This was precisely what was examined by Hankins et al (2010): the authors sought to assess the relationship between the amount of money won in a lottery and the probability of the winner filing for bankruptcy within a five year period of their win. Rather than removing inequalities and seeing how things shake out, then, this research took the opposite approach: examining a process that generated inequalities and seeing how long it took for them to dissipate.

The primary sample for this research were the Fantasy 5 winners in Florida from April 1993 to November, 2002 who had won $600 or more: approximately 35,000 of them after certain screening measures had been implemented. These lottery winners were grouped into those who won between $10,000 and $50,000, and those who won between $50,000 and $150,000 (subsequent analyses would examine those who won $10,000 or less as well, leading to small, medium, and large winner groups).

Of those 35,000 winners, about 2,000 were linked to a bankruptcy filing within five years of their win, meaning that a little more than 1% of winners were filing each year on average; a rate comparable to the broader Florida population. The first step was to examine whether the large winners were doing comparable amounts of bankruptcy filing prior to their win, relative to the low winners which, thankfully, they were. In pretty much all respects, those who won a lot of money did not differ from those who won less before their win (including race, gender, marital status, educational attainment, and nine other demographic variables). That’s what one would expect from the lottery, after all.

Turning to what happened after their win, within the first two years, those who won larger sums of money were less likely to file for bankruptcy than smaller winners; however, in years 3 through 5 that pattern reversed itself, with larger winners becoming more likely to file. The end result of this shifting pattern was that, in five years time, large winners were equally likely to have filed for bankruptcy, relative to smaller winners. As Hankins et al (2010) put it, large cash payments did not prevent bankruptcy; they only postponed it. This result was consistently obtained after attempting a number of different analyses, suggesting that the finding is fairly robust. In fact, when the winners eventually did file for bankruptcy, the big winners didn’t have much more to show for it than small winners: those who won between $25,000 and $150,000 only had about $8,000 more in assets than those who had won less than $1,500, and the two groups had comparable debts.

Not much of an ROI on making it rain these days, it seems

At least when it came to one of the most severe forms of financial distress, large sums of cash did not appear to stop people from falling back into poverty in the long term, suggesting that there’s more going on in the world than just poor luck and unearned privilege. Whatever this money was being spent on, it did not appear to be sound investments. Maybe people were making more of their luck than they realized.

It should be noted that this natural experiment does pose certain confounds, perhaps the most important of which is that not everyone plays the lottery. In fact, given that the lottery itself is quite a bad investment, we are likely looking at a non-random sample of people who choose to play it in the first place; people who already aren’t prone to making wise, long-term decisions. Perhaps these results would look different if everyone played the lottery but, as it stands, thinking about these results in the context of the initial comic about privilege, I would have to say that my mind remains un-blown. Unsurprisingly, deep truths about social life can be difficult to sum up in a short comic.

References: Hankins, S., Hoekstra, M., & Skiba, P. (2010). The ticket to easy street? The financial consequences of winning the lottery. Vanderbilt Law and Economics Research Paper, 10-12.