Page 220 - The Social Animal

202 The Social Animal

The Importance of Irrevocability

One of the important characteristics of the examples presented above
is the relative irrevocability of the decision.This needs some explain-
ing: Occasionally, we make tentative decisions. For example, if you
had indicated you might buy an expensive house near San Francisco,
but the decision was not finalized, chances are you would not expend
any effort trying to convince yourself of the wisdom of the decision.
Once you had put your money down, however, and you knew you
couldn’t easily get it back, you would probably start minimizing the
importance of the dampness in the basement, the cracks in the foun-
dation, or the fact that the house happened to be built on the San
Andreas fault. Similarly, once a European Jew had decided not to
pass and had allowed himself to be identified as a Jew, the decision
was irrevocable; he could not easily pretend to be a Gentile. By the
same token, once Pentagon officials intensified the bombing of
North Vietnam, they could not undo it. And once a homeowner had
signed the petition, a commitment to safe driving was established.
Some direct evidence for the importance of irrevocability comes
from a clever study of the cognitive gyrations of gamblers at a race
track. The race track is an ideal place to scrutinize irrevocability be-
cause once you’ve placed your bet, you can’t go back and tell the nice
man behind the window you’ve changed your mind. Robert Knox
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and James Inkster simply intercepted people who were on their way
to place $2 bets. They had already decided on their horses and were
about to place their bets when the investigators asked them how cer-
tain they were that their horses would win. Because they were on
their way to the $2 window, their decisions were not irrevocable.The
investigators collared other bettors just as they were leaving the $2
window, after having placed their bets, and asked them how certain
they were that their horses would win.Typically, people who had just
placed their bets gave their horses a much better chance of winning
than did those who were about to place their bets. But, of course,
nothing had changed except the finality of the decision.
Moving from the racetrack to the Harvard campus, Daniel
Gilbert tested the irrevocability hypothesis in the context of a pho-
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tography class. In this study, participants were recruited through an
advertisement for students interested in learning photography while
taking part in a psychology experiment. Students were informed that