COHERENT ARBITRARINESS50

We know that people will go to great lengths to avoid evidence that would force them to revise their opinions on what they consider to be their core value system (including their opinion about other races or immigrants), because it is so related to their views of themselves.

In one of the most famous experiments in the field of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler chose college students randomly to receive a mug or a pen. Immediately following the gifts, they offered to buy them back from the newly endowed mug and pen owners. At the same time, they also offered those who did not get a mug or a pen the opportunity to buy what they did not get. Strikingly, the price at which the newly endowed sellers were willing to part with their mugs or pens was often two to three times greater than what those who did not have the pen or mug wanted to pay for them.⁵¹ Since who ended up with a mug or a pen was entirely random, there was absolutely no reason why the arbitrary act of being chosen to get one of them would create such a divergence in valuations. The difference in the bids must have been because those who ended up with a mug started liking their mug more, while those who got a pen did the same with the pen, suggesting there is relatively little intrinsic or deep about how people value things like mugs and pens.

An even more dramatic form of arbitrariness was revealed by another experiment. Students were asked to bid on trackballs, wine bottles, and books. Before bidding, they were asked to write down the last two digits of their social security number with a dollar sign in front of it and imagine it was a possible price for the product they had. They obviously knew their social security number had nothing to do with the price of a wine bottle, but nevertheless they were influenced by the “price” they had written down. Students with social security numbers ending in the number eighty or larger bid between 200 percent and 350 percent more for the same good than those whose social security numbers ended in a number less than twenty. In most other ways, they still behaved according to the standard model: for example, they were less willing to buy as the price went up and were most likely to buy cheaper items. But they seemed to have no idea how much these products were worth to them in absolute terms.⁵²

But of course mugs and pens are not immigrants and Muslims. Are we really seriously implying this arbitrariness applies to preferences on these much more serious issues as well? We are indeed.