Wagers, Motivation and Public Humiliation

When I worked at a small agency in Boston, I found myself hanging out in a bar with a friend and colleague, getting a bit tipsy as we talked shop and played Golden Tee. Everything was pretty casual until we decided it would be fun to bet over the result. Eventually, we hit upon a unique wager: the loser would have to go up to our boss during a meeting, inhale deeply, and exclaim, "Wow, Jack, you smell AMAZING!" Suddenly the game took on a manic intensity: the stakes had focused our inebriated brains.

I bring this up, first, to embarrass the person who lost the bet and then backed out of doing it, and second to note the power of a wager to raise the stakes in any activity. If someone asks me whether I could run a 5k, I'd shrug my shoulders because I really could care less. But if someone bets me $100 that I couldn't finish one, I'm going to hit the road and be out training tomorrow. It isn't that I really, really need that money, but that I really, really like to win.

It is that insight, that people's desire to win (or to see their friends humiliated) that is driving a new approach from everything from weight loss to fundraising. And we are very creative about the types of wagers that we make. One interesting way to set up the competitive dynamic is actually to bet on yourself, and make that bet public. That's essentially what Stickk.com is doing: they pioneered the idea of a commitment contract. Here's how it works: you set a goal, for example to lose twenty pounds or run a marathon., and you set up a contractual penalty if you fail to reach the goal. One common approach is to donate some money to a charity you dislike, like an avid meat-eater sending $100 to PETA. The donation is placed on hold, and only made if you fail to reach your goal. Then you set up a referee who validates that you accomplished the challenge, and you can invite friends and family to watch your progress. 

How successful is it? According to Ogilvy PR's site: "StickK.com is doing well in helping people achieve their goals. For people who use the website to set and achieve weight loss goals, for example, there is a reported 85%-90% achievement rate." If validated, that is a far higher rate than programs like Weight Watchers and even prescription weight loss aids. It proves that people don't like losing money, but also that they don't want to be seen as losers once they've made the public bet with themselves.

More recently, a site called moolta.com has taken this idea and applied it to fundraising. The mechanism is a little different than Stickk: here, users raise money by being willing to take on absurd challenges. As nocamels.com explains:

Would you take a shower in a public fountain? What if your friends would donate $50 if you did it? A just-hatched startup called Moolta wants you to challenge your friends to do wildly crazy things, record their antics and post them to their platform. What’s in it for the dare accepters? The dare is a fundraiser — in most cases for charity.

The interesting thing about this model is that the donors are essentially paying to "win" a bet, but the daredevil who does (and records!) the act is really winning by proving his commitment to a cause and his personal fearlessness in public. And when you think about our social media-driven world, people are trying hard to be seen as creative, fearless and unconventional all the time. Moolta has combined a clever way of raising money for charity with a novel opportunity to create viral content.

Clearly, wagers and humiliation are motivating in at least two ways: in the Stickk model, avoiding humiliation and loss is meant to drive desired behavior change. In Moolta's approach, people can bet on their friends' willingness to humiliate themselves for charity, and those friends are liberated to act ridiculously by the fact that they're doing it for a good cause. We love betting on and against each other so much that there is plenty of room for both to thrive.

Watching Our Nation Break in Two

NOTE: This is last in a series of four planned posts about how we make decisions as a society, and where our political leadership might be taking us. It is meant to be non-partisan, but my conservative-ness might slip through. In the first post,I discussed the difference between team thinking and crisis thinking, and how we seem to be demonstrating a team mentality while saying we are in a crisis. The second post considered the possibility that things aren't all that bad, but political marketing is making us feel the world is falling apart. The third post looked at whether we are waiting for a crisis we know must come, but is taking its sweet time to get here. This post will consider the possibility that our society is in fact splitting in two.

In 2004, the map you see to the left became a bit of a phenomenon. People fed up with the divisiveness of that presidential election (and particularly those bitter about being on the losing side) half-jokingly suggested breaking the country up into the blue "United States of Canada" and the red "Jesusland". This notion tapped into a deep feeling that we can no longer agree on the direction of the country, and it would be better if we divorced now and formed two ideologically coherent countries.

I haven't heard anyone advocating for the country to split lately, so it would be tempting to laugh off that map as a passing fancy. But the idea that the "other side" is not just wrong, but illegitimate, has if anything gathered steam since 2004. The Birther movement can be seen as a crude way to deny to Obama the legitimacy to even advance an argument. Equally crude, though nicely packaged, is this argument from Ron Rosenbaum that the Republican party is irredeemably and undeniably racist, and thus not a legitimate participant in our national debate. Lest you think I exaggerate:

In a way mainstream media outlets who promote a false equivalency between the two parties by failing to note at the very least the neo-racist supporters of the Republican Party are themselves complicit in the charade that the GOP is a morally legitimate entity. Not that racists don’t vote Democratic, and yes I know the GOP was, was, the party of Lincoln, but that was long ago in another country.

The distance between this statement and saying that anyone who votes for Mitt Romney is a racist is short indeed, and from there it is just a few more steps to an argument that any Republican elected, or any Republican law passed, does not have moral legitimacy.

If all of this is a little too high minded, take a look at your Facebook or Twitter feeds after the next debate. I'm pretty sure you'll see the liberals decrying Romney's desire to leave the poor and vulnerable unprotected to help out his rich cronies, and the conservatives attacking Obama's anti-American, socialist policies that are destroying the country's spirit and shredding the Constitution. 

So what? People disagree about politics, and they aren't always nice about it. At the end of the day, most of these arguments come and go, with no lasting impact on the unity of our nation. Our democracy has lasted almost 250 years by adjusting to the changing beliefs of its people: eventually we find common ground and move on.

There's one exception to this rule, and I think the example is instructive. As I wrote a year ago, in the years before the Civil War we had fewer and fewer common principles to help us reconcile our differences. Eventually, the differences of belief between the Union and the Confederacy were severe enough to provoke first succession, then war. The only way to reconcile these wildly divergent beliefs was for one side to crush the other, and force its beliefs upon the losers.

Is there a current schism anywhere near as severe as that in the time before the Civil War? I took a stab at capturing some of the differences between "Red Culture" (that associated with Jesusland) and "Blue Culture:

Obviously this is an over-simplification, but my point is that in ways big and small these cultures are wildly different, with very few areas of overlap. This does not feel like the description of two strains within one coherent society to me, but two antagonistic societies living side by side. It also feels like there is not much chance of one side convincing the other on any of these issues, as these views are based in deep beliefs and worldviews that are hard to challenge.

My sense is that Blue Culture is the more recent development of the two, one that has its roots in the trauma of the Great Depression and which fully took shape when the Baby Boomers challenged the moral consensus around religion, sexuality and gender roles that existed (somewhat uneasily) before the 1960s. That worldview has always defined itself in opposition to a more patriarchal, conservative America, which they felt left the disadvantaged to fall through the cracks. In the 1980's, conservatives began to push back, reasserting traditional values and worrying that the goals Blue Culture was advancing would sap American individuality and vitality. We now seemed to have reached something of a stalemate.

A few essays ago, I argued in essence that this stalemate was somewhat stable, that neither side would really move us that far from the common ground that we have somehow stumbled upon. But I think the sense of impending crisis, and the limits of deficit spending, will undermine this truce. Conservatives want to cut taxes to give individuals more control of their money. Liberals want to raise spending to extend social services to more people. For a long time, we could take turns from one administration to the next, but we can't paper over our differences this way anymore.

How will this end? I don't believe we have a second civil war in us. My guess is no Californian will want to take up arms to keep Georgia in the Union, or vice versa. And I also don't think we are going to suddenly resolve all of these problems, barring an external crisis that forces us to come together for survival's sake. I see two possibilities: one is that a financial crisis much bigger than the 2008 crash devastates the country, and our irreconcilable differences force a rapid and nasty divorce on us. The alternative (and the one I'm rooting for) is that we realize we're running in place and decide to stop, and we figure out a way to either split up amicably or devolve all but a few functions of the federal government to the state or regional level.

Sadly, I don't see America in its current form lasting my lifetime. That may be tragic, but it doesn't need to be. A country with a single citizenship, a single military, but two different systems of domestic governance, could be a good thing. It would ease most of the contentious debates we suffer through today, and would allow those who don't "fit in" on their side to migrate to the other territory. And it would acknowledge our shared heritage while not lying about how differently our two cultures view the world.

But since the odds of an amicable divorce seem so long, I'll end with a bit of a prayer: please, please let me be wrong.

David Brooks, the Tea Party, and Our Political Future

I am a David Brooks fan. I have pimped his new book, The Social Animal, like it was a 19 year-old crack addict from a broken home. At one point, I owned work and home copies of Bobos in Paradise. And I completely agree with his latest column on the sad state of our political parties and leadership heading into the next election:

Voters are certainly aware of the scope of the challenges before them. Their pessimism and anxiety does not just reflect the ebb and flow of the business cycle, but is deeper and more pervasive. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. Large majorities think the country is on the wrong track, and have for years. Large pluralities believe their children will have fewer opportunities than they do.

Voters are in the market for new movements and new combinations, yet the two parties have grown more rigid.

As a diagnosis of our current predicament, this is about as good as it gets. And I would endorse most of his proposed solutions, too:

This reinvigoration package would have four baskets. There would be an entitlement reform package designed to redistribute money from health care and the elderly toward innovation and the young. Unless we get health care inflation under control by replacing the perverse fee-for-service incentive structure, there will be no money for anything else.

There would be a targeted working-class basket: early childhood education, technical education, community colleges, an infrastructure bank, asset distribution to help people start businesses, a new wave industrial policy if need be — anything that might give the working class a leg up.

There would be a political corruption basket. The Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country. It’s time to drain the swamp by simplifying the tax code and streamlining the regulations businesses use to squash their smaller competitors.

There would also be a pro-business basket: lower corporate rates, a sane visa policy for skilled immigrants, a sane patent and permitting system, more money for research.

But this post isn't meant to be a standing ovation for Brooks. In fact, I have a large criticism: he indicts the two parties for not doing anything that will get America out of its mess. He seems ready to acknowledge (if only indirectly) that his past support of Obama has not panned out, and the Democrats don't have a plan to get us out of this mess. And yet, when a grass-roots movement arose that wanted to push to make big changes (many of which are compatible with Brooks' wish list, he thumbed his nose at it. Here's his reaction to the Tea Party in an older column:

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

You can get more details here, and it is pretty obvious that Brooks found something distasteful and lowbrow when he looked at the Tea Party.

And there have certainly been times when the Tea Party has lived up to the caricature painted of it in much of the media: the Truther movement, which is well-represented within the Tea Party, is just a silly waste of time, and men carrying visible firearms at political rallies sends a horrible message no matter what the law says, or their intent was.

But all political movements, especially those that bubble up from the bottom, are going to have loons. They will all be excessive in their thinking or their rhetoric from time to time. But you know what would help? If thinkers like David Brooks engaged with these movements to give them focused, more powerful thinking, instead of trying to strangle them while they're still in the cradle.

The Tea Party emerged out of a concern that government spending and the intrusions of the nanny state would sap the nation's vitality and destroy the American Dream. That doesn't sound all that different from the concerns Brooks outlines. Maybe if he can look past the rough edges, and get over his distaste at their lack of intellectualism, he'll find they have a lot in common.

Brand Clarity, Profit, and Facebook

Amazon was founded to sell us books, and eventually expanded into selling us other things we didn't want to search through a store to get. It makes a ton of money. Google was founded to make search easier and better, and eventually expanded into providing other tools that make content gathering easier and better. It makes a ton of money. The two most successful Internet firms may now do lots of things, but the vast majority of their profits come from finding new places to apply the same basic template that has made them successful. (And, as an aside, when Google tries to do things like set up a social network, it hasn't been nearly so successful.)

Facebook was founded to connect college students to each other. (When I was in college, the "Face Book" was a picture book of the people in your class that everyone looked through to figure out who they wanted to, well...let's say meet.) It eventually expanded to let anyone use the service and connect to other people. And they have made some pretty good money doing this. Although they do it by selling ads that have a remarkably poor click-through rate, which has started making people wonder if that type of promotion is really worthwhile or just chasing buzz.

But Facebook has a problem: it is the most hyped company in the world right now, and is valued at many, many times its earnings. It has to figure out a way to turn 'social' into 'revenue' without turning off its users. If the ads don't really work, how do they do this? Well, they could try to give marketers more information about their users. That information is very valuable. But if they do that, a lot of people (who don't want Procter and Gamble sending them a toothpaste coupon if their status says they have coffee breath) will leave the site.

Another option is to sell other services through the site. To this end, they have developed a virtual currency called a Facebook Credit (which reminds me a bit of a SchruteBuck), which can be used to buy upgrades on games like Mafia Wars and Farmville, and now can also be used to rent movies through the site.

Then there is the option of snatching bits of other companies' business models and aggregating them in Facebook. After all, Facebook has a huge built in user base. Their first target, Groupon, which gives daily discounts off of local services like restaurants if you buy in advance. Facebook plans to expand its existing Deals program to get in on the action.

Here's the thing: none of these initiatives (with the possible exception of buying a new Tommy Gun on Mafia Wars) has anything to do with staying connected to friends. And in some cases, it may actually get in the way of that core mission. If your Facebook page starts filling up with Deals based on what you and your friends are doing and discussing, are you going to be happy, annoyed, or creeped out?

But the bigger issue is that the Facebook brand isn't about shopping, or renting movies. It's about sharing a bit of your life with people you know, and staying in touch with them in return. Groupon was designed to sell me stuff, and so I don't mind when it does. With Facebook, I'll mind. Modern Internet users have gotten very good at compartmentalizing the brands that they use for different online tasks, and it may just be Facebook's fate that it is the place to waste time and joke with friends, not the place to spend money.

When We Look, and When We Turn Away

Abortion is one of those topics I don't much like writing about. While I have a lot of sympathy for women who find themselves pregnant and frightened, and I think it is a societal failure (and especially a failure of religious folks like myself) that they aren't given more support, I am absolutely opposed to it. And many people who share my position have written much more passionately and wisely about why it is wrong than I ever could, so I don't think my best argument would add to the debate.

However, the gruesome case of Kermit Gosnell and his revolting clinic has given me reason to think about abortion more than normal. Then I read this piece by Elizabeth Scalia, who goes by the pen name The Anchoress, highlighting the lack of media coverage given to the case. She sees in that lack of coverage a bias in the media, as she states here:

So, allow me to ask the impolitic question I have hinted at elsewhere: in choosing to look away, in choosing to under-report, in choosing to spin, minimize, excuse, and move-along when it comes to Kermit Gosnell—and to this whole subject of under-regulated abortion clinics, the debasement of women and the slaughter of living children—how are the press and those they protect by their silence any better than the Catholic bishops who, in decades past, looked away, under-reported, spun, minimized, excused, moved-along, and protected the repulsive predator-priests who have stolen innocence and roiled the community of faith?

Scalia wonders why the press has not tenaciously dug into this story, why there have not been investigations into other clinics. And while I agree with her, I think there is a pretty obvious reason, and even an understandable one. Simply put, the primary emotion evoked by the Gosnell case is not outrage, but horror.

Now, Scalia is outraged because she shares my conviction about abortion. But a lot of people have made an uneasy truce with the notion that abortion is a necessary fact of modern life, and so the reality of the thing, the notion that living things, identifiable as babies, are being dismembered is not something they ever want to face. Whereas you would search long and hard to find someone who would suggest a Catholic priest had any right or sanction to molest boys and girls. Thus, the predominant societal reaction is not to turn away in disgust, but to seek justice.

To put it another way, the Gosnell case creates what psychologists (and especially amateur psychologists like myself) call cognitive dissonance. Our instincts tell us that something horrible is happening, but our rational brains say that what is happening is not that bad, or a freak happening, or the price we pay for some greater good. I would compare it to the gruesome videos I've seen of horrible (there's that word again) slaughterhouse conditions. I react viscerally, and maybe even doubt my decision to buy beef from the store without knowing where it came from and how the animals were treated. But then I let it go, telling myself that these videos are the exception and that the meat I buy isn't adding to the problem.

T.S. Eliot said, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." I think this is the type of thing he had in mind. The simple fact is that something disgusting, immoral, and disturbing was happening at Dr. Gosnell's clinic, and his acts were just on the far side of legality. For those of us who support the legal right to abortion, and for those of us who don't but who shirk the hard work of changing laws and minds, we simply prefer not to bear that reality.