Silver Clouds Dark Linings
by Rob Meyer 1 |
2
The more fun something is, the less good it is for you. It is a simple statement with profound implications, if it rings true to you. And chances are it does. One way or another most of us have had the idea ingrained into our psyches since childhood.
The problem: It isn’t true.
Or at least it isn’t as true as we have been conditioned to believe, says Raj Raghunathan, assistant professor of marketing at the McCombs School of Business. Raghunathan has been testing his “more fun equals less good” thesis and analyzing its implications for the purchasing decisions we make—big or small—from buying a car to picking up a bag of chips.
For Raghunathan, as with many marketing researchers, empirical studies are at the heart of his work. He and his co-authors have completed a series of tests that demonstrate the pervasive influence of the “more fun equals less good” intuition on the everyday decisions we make.
“People believe things can be serious, important or useful,” Raghunathan says. “Or they can be fun, enjoyable or hedonically pleasing. But they can’t be both.”
Putting it to the Test
In one test, Raghunathan invited friends to a party and asked them to try some mango lassi, a milkshake-type drink from Raghunathan’s native country of India. Half the guests were told the drink was “relatively unhealthy” and the other half were told it was “relatively healthy.” Later, after the guests had sampled the lassi, they were asked to evaluate the drink’s taste. The result: Those who rated the beverage higher in taste were the ones who thought they were drinking something relatively unhealthy.
“We seem to carry around a self-flagellating whip,” says Raghunathan, whose ongoing research in this area of consumer behavior recently earned him a $442,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. “If we are having fun, we must be doing something that is bad for us.”
The intuition holds true not only in our attitudes toward food but throughout a wide range of consumer products, Raghunathan has found.
In another study, subjects were shown a picture of one
of two cameras that looked exactly alike except one was
a bright blue color and the other was a dull gray. He
then asked the participants to judge the quality of the
image purportedly taken by the camera, which in reality
was the same picture. The group that thought the picture
had been taken by the blue camera—the “more fun”
camera—judged the image to be poorer in quality than the
group that thought the image was taken using the gray,
“boring” camera.
For Raghunathan, this test—albeit a very simple one—goes a long way toward proving his thesis that people subscribe to the “more fun equals less good” intuition. “There are no real alternative explanations for the pattern of results we obtained in this study with the cameras,” he says.
A similar experiment involved pictures of two cars, one a Kia Spectra and the other a BMW Mini Cooper. Raghunathan and his co-author asked study participants to rate the cars on “safety,” “value” and “practicality.” The results showed people assumed that the stylish and colorful Mini Cooper was inferior to the Kia on all three functional features. But in reality, the Mini Cooper is rated higher than the Kia in terms of safety, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which conducts crash tests.
“These studies suggest that consumers will infer the functional level of a product even when information only about its hedonic qualities is provided,” Raghunathan says.
Why We Believe “More Fun Equals Less Good”
So how did this belief—that things that are more fun must be less good—get stuck in our heads? Raghunathan offers two possible explanations.
The first is the way most parents react to basic behavior when raising their children. Raghunathan describes three common scenarios to illustrate his point.
“Let’s say a mother tries to get her young child to abstain from engaging in an activity the child finds enjoyable, like eating candy or jumping up and down on the couch,” he says. “The mother is likely to portray these activities as being ‘bad’ for the child. She might say, ‘If you eat too much candy, your teeth will rot,’ or ‘Stop jumping on the couch! You are going to hurt yourself.’”
The problem: It isn’t true.
Or at least it isn’t as true as we have been conditioned to believe, says Raj Raghunathan, assistant professor of marketing at the McCombs School of Business. Raghunathan has been testing his “more fun equals less good” thesis and analyzing its implications for the purchasing decisions we make—big or small—from buying a car to picking up a bag of chips.
For Raghunathan, as with many marketing researchers, empirical studies are at the heart of his work. He and his co-authors have completed a series of tests that demonstrate the pervasive influence of the “more fun equals less good” intuition on the everyday decisions we make.
“People believe things can be serious, important or useful,” Raghunathan says. “Or they can be fun, enjoyable or hedonically pleasing. But they can’t be both.”
Putting it to the Test
In one test, Raghunathan invited friends to a party and asked them to try some mango lassi, a milkshake-type drink from Raghunathan’s native country of India. Half the guests were told the drink was “relatively unhealthy” and the other half were told it was “relatively healthy.” Later, after the guests had sampled the lassi, they were asked to evaluate the drink’s taste. The result: Those who rated the beverage higher in taste were the ones who thought they were drinking something relatively unhealthy.
“We seem to carry around a self-flagellating whip,” says Raghunathan, whose ongoing research in this area of consumer behavior recently earned him a $442,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. “If we are having fun, we must be doing something that is bad for us.”
The intuition holds true not only in our attitudes toward food but throughout a wide range of consumer products, Raghunathan has found.
In another study, subjects were shown a picture of one
of two cameras that looked exactly alike except one was
a bright blue color and the other was a dull gray. He
then asked the participants to judge the quality of the
image purportedly taken by the camera, which in reality
was the same picture. The group that thought the picture
had been taken by the blue camera—the “more fun”
camera—judged the image to be poorer in quality than the
group that thought the image was taken using the gray,
“boring” camera.For Raghunathan, this test—albeit a very simple one—goes a long way toward proving his thesis that people subscribe to the “more fun equals less good” intuition. “There are no real alternative explanations for the pattern of results we obtained in this study with the cameras,” he says.
A similar experiment involved pictures of two cars, one a Kia Spectra and the other a BMW Mini Cooper. Raghunathan and his co-author asked study participants to rate the cars on “safety,” “value” and “practicality.” The results showed people assumed that the stylish and colorful Mini Cooper was inferior to the Kia on all three functional features. But in reality, the Mini Cooper is rated higher than the Kia in terms of safety, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which conducts crash tests.
“These studies suggest that consumers will infer the functional level of a product even when information only about its hedonic qualities is provided,” Raghunathan says.
Why We Believe “More Fun Equals Less Good”
So how did this belief—that things that are more fun must be less good—get stuck in our heads? Raghunathan offers two possible explanations.
The first is the way most parents react to basic behavior when raising their children. Raghunathan describes three common scenarios to illustrate his point.
“Let’s say a mother tries to get her young child to abstain from engaging in an activity the child finds enjoyable, like eating candy or jumping up and down on the couch,” he says. “The mother is likely to portray these activities as being ‘bad’ for the child. She might say, ‘If you eat too much candy, your teeth will rot,’ or ‘Stop jumping on the couch! You are going to hurt yourself.’”
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