When I was taking hypnosis classes our instructor taught us a seduction technique. It was more of a joke than a functional method, designed to make a point about how the brain works.
It goes like this…
After you get your date back to your place, and you haven’t closed the deal to have her spend the night, you ask this question: “Would you like your scrambled eggs with bacon?”
The idea is to get your date thinking about a decision that would come AFTER the decision to stay the night. It’s a standard sales technique, also known as getting your buyer to think past the sale. You want the prospect to imagine where he would ride that motorcycle, not whether he should buy it in the first place.
It’s not the sort of method that can move the unmovable, but if someone is on the fence, it’s light wind in the right direction. The seduction method I described is more of a joke because it would be laughably obvious. But you’ll remember the method from that example, and that’s the idea.
I was thinking about this method in a larger context of choice. We know from workplace studies that the biggest factor in employee satisfaction is the degree of control workers have over their jobs, assuming other factors such as the pay and the hours are somewhere in the normal range. People like choice more than they like the thing they choose.
For example, suppose a genie gave you these two choices:
1. You can eat at the finest restaurants in the world for free, twice a week. The only catch is that the genie picks the day, when you are not already booked, and he picks the specific restaurant.
Or…
2. You can eat at “good” restaurants, again for free, twice a week. But this time you can schedule it whenever you want, up to two places per week, and pick whatever “good” restaurant you want.
Your first impulse might be to pick the finest restaurants in the world. But I suspect you would eventually start to resent the genie’s control over your life. You would become jaded to the fine dining experience, but you would never get used to the genie having so much control over your options.
I believe if you took the “good” restaurant option, and had full control of the when and where, you would fully enjoy it. If you wanted fine dining, you could pay for it yourself, and it would feel special.
I know you’ll look for the loopholes in my genie example, and you certainly have that choice. Go nuts.
The larger point is that recently I realized how many things make sense when viewed through this filter of choice-equals-happiness. For example, a study on happiness showed that mothers were unhappy spending time with their own kids, despite it being the most rewarding thing they could do. With kids around, your choices are limited. Kids control a mother’s life.
It’s like the genie with the restaurant dilemma. There’s no question a mother would choose to spend most of her time with her kids. That’s like choosing the fine dining option. For a parent, kids are the highest source of happiness they can imagine. But once that path is taken, the mother loses her ability to control her own life. By choosing the highest source of happiness – time with kids – she gives up the only thing that can make her happy at any given moment, which is control over her own choices.
When you make your own choices, you manipulate cognitive dissonance in your favor. No matter what you choose, it seems like a better option than it really is because you chose it. I believe, without benefit of seeing any specific science, that a box of mixed Sees chocolate tastes better because of the choices. I believe the secret of a restaurant such as the Cheescake Factory is in their almost laughably long menu.
Here’s a relationship tip for you to try. I have no idea if it will work. It simply follows from the choice-is-happiness theory. The next time your mate or co-worker is butting heads with you over a decision, recast the situation as their choice.
For example, let’s say you favor Option A, and someone else wants Option B for reasons that seem to you irrational. You are at an impasse. Change the question to this:
“Okay, do you want Option A with this risk, or do you want Option B with this other risk? It’s your call.”
When you put things in the form of a choice, sometimes it gives people the only thing they wanted in the first place.
[Update: My examples all involved two choices. More than that, and as several commenters point out, you get decision paralysis. Also, as some of you pointed out, it’s more about a sense of control than choice. I could have written this post better. For people who say they hate making decisions, they don’t hate having the OPTION of making decisions. Sometimes it’s entirely rational to CHOOSE to let someone else decide for you. — Scott]