Ritual

Xavier Marquez reviews Randall Collins' book Interaction Ritual Chains.

A ritual, for Collins, is basically an amplifier of emotion. (I pause to note that an amplifier of emotion is not necessarily a generator of emotion, though it is not clear whether or not Collins sees any important distinction here). We are literally “pumped up” by a successful ritual – we experience a buzz, exhilaration, enthousiasmos, “collective effervescence.” A great lecture, a sports spectacle in a vast stadium, a great concert, a fire-and-brimstone sermon, the rituals of solidarity among small military units; these interactions motivate us, that is, they set us in motion, send us on our way to act beyond the immediate confines of the group situation (to read the book discussed in the lecture, follow the news of your sports team or music band and wear the team colors, proselytize for your sect, attack the enemy, and perhaps also to do the crappy jobs necessary to gather the material resources to do all of these things). Not every ritual is successful, of course (and not every ritual is equally successful for all participants, even when the ritual is generally successful – more on this point later); some ritual situations bore us, sending our attention wandering, and we end up feeling drained and depressed: think of a boring meeting at your workplace, or an awful lecture. These rituals are demotivating; as Collins puts it, they sap our “emotional energy.

Perhaps the most important bit is this one (emphasis mine):​

Though Collins does not say this, this view implies that ritual is prior to belief: belief “in” a cause, or a leader, or a god, or anything of the sort is primarily attachment to particular symbols of group membership that have been charged with value by powerful rituals, and should tend to decay in the absence of rituals “recharging” these symbols. (Collins suggests that a week is a good estimate of the half-life of the emotional charge of most symbols; hence the weekly services of churches or the weekly frequency of many intimate rituals, for example). Moreover, motivated reasoning should be ubiquitous, as indeed it seems to be; for the most part, we do not reason our way to most of our important beliefs, but acquire these through participation in communities with their interaction rituals (which may not look like obvious rituals; note that as long as we are participants in a successful interaction ritual, our focus is on the things the ritual is about, not on the ritual itself). Sociologists time and again find that many (most?) people join social movements before they acquire clear beliefs about issues; we then justify these beliefs ex post and defend them against perceived threats. And when a particular belief becomes entangled with an identity – when it becomes, in other words, a focus in some chain of successful interaction rituals, circulating as a marker of membership in some group– it then becomes more or less immune to rational argument. This is not to say that we cannot on occasion reason our way to various positions; but solid “belief” (in the sense that people most people have in mind when they say that they believe “in” something, ranging from Christianity to socialism) needs a lot of help from interaction ritual chains (understood as repeated, focused interactions that charge certain symbols with value). Belief without ritual and community is typically a fickle thing, discarded just as easily as acquired.

Just as Marquez's review caused me to want to purchase and read Collins' book​ immediately, I hope you'll want to go read Marquez's review after this short tease.

The personality of suicide bombers

The fact that suicide bombers are usually mild-mannered members of the middle class seems counterintuitive. After all, the middle class tend to be well-educated, well-behaved, good family membersnothing like the bloodthirsty tough guys or criminals we imagine when we think of terrorists. They bear little resemblance to English football hooligans or rabble-rousers. No other form of violence has a higher proportion of females than suicide bombers, even though females are usually more conformist than males.

Why is this so? I suggest it is because suicide bombing is the easiest form of violence for conventional middle-class people to carry out, if they decide to commit violence at all.

​From an article from 2008 by the great Randall Collins. Still relevant, exposing many myths about violent behavior which are still commonly accepted by many people, including many in the media.

Clandestine, confrontation-avoiding violence such as suicide bombing is a fourth pathway around confrontational tension. It succeeds only because the attacker is good at pretending that he or she is not threatening at all. People accustomed to the typical macho forms of violence are not good at this; gang members would make lousy suicide bombers. But mild-mannered middle-class people are ideal for it. Since they are not confrontational by nature, they do not have to control a blustering or threatening demeanor that would warn their victims. Self-directed introverts, they do not need to hear cheering as they stalk their prey. Middle-class culture is especially accommodative, adept at maintaining a smooth surface of conventionality. Whatever our private feelings, we learn not to express them on the job, in social situations, or in public. This is good training for carrying a bomb under ones clothing until the target is so close that massive damage is certain.

Playing games on yourself

AT a meeting last Tuesday, I told my colleagues that I would finish this column — which is about deadlines — by noon on Thursday. I spent part of Tuesday afternoon searching the word “deadlines” on Google, but didn’t make much progress. By late afternoon, I felt a tiny knot of fear in my stomach. What if I let my co-workers down? So I wrote something silly just to get started. This paragraph.

On the motivating power of deadlines, however artificial they might be.

People respond well to deadlines because meeting them provides a distinct feeling of having achieved something within a time frame.

Amazing how you can fool yourself, even though you know you're doing so.​ This might seem irrational, but many self-help books seem to posit a notion of multiple selves, often adhering to that popular dichotomy that places an angel on one shoulder, a devil on the other. Succeeding in life, then, becomes a game in which you outwit the devil, the bad self.

The psychological poverty trap

Shafir and Mullainathan tested the intelligence of sugarcane growers in India during two different periods: after selling the harvest, when they enjoy relative prosperity, and before the harvest, when times are tightest. The farmers had better IQ results during the season of plenty. Before the harvest they had problems making fateful decisions, because of stress. The study concluded that poverty generates a psychology of its own.

Most of us judge poor people, viewing them at worst as lazy, at best as suffering from deficient financial behavior. We've gotten used to thinking that being poor is their fault: If they were smarter or more industrious they surely would have overcome their poverty.

Shafir, however, claims that the real culprit isn't lack of ability but problems created by poverty. "These problems are distracting and cause mistakes," he told Markerweek in an interview.

"When you're poor you're surrounded by bad decisions of people around you," he says. "You're so concerned about the present that you can't begin thinking about the future, and that's the big irony: People with the greatest need to think about the future don't have the leisure or emotional capacity to do so. The very essence of poverty complicates decisions and makes immediate needs so urgent that you start making wrong choices. These mistakes aren't any different from anyone else's, but they occur more frequently due to the element of stress, and their implications are much greater."

More of this insight into the psychological impact of poverty, all interesting, from poverty expert Eldar Shafir.

Clearly, fundamental attribution error when it comes to the poor is dangerous, especially as it comes to crafting policy to combat it. I hope a better understanding of the psychological and decision-making impact of poverty will lead to greater empathy on the part of those more fortunate.

Studies like this also point to some of the potential advantages of behavioral economics over classical economics, built around the concept of rational actors. Put someone in a situation of comfort and wealth, and they'll tend to behave more rationally than someone in poverty who has a staggering array of challenges weighing on them.​

​Previously posted here, also related: the persistence of poverty.

The price game

When Ron Johnson took over as CEO of J. C. Penney, one of his most sweeping changes was to move away from the constant sales and coupons to a more straightforward pricing model. Not surprising considering he came from Apple where they hold one sale a year, on Black Friday, and not even a great one at that.​

But J. C. Penney is not Apple, and the price game each is playing is different.

Mr. Johnson explained a similar logic when he moved the chain toward simplified pricing. In January 2012, while introducing his new plan to investors, the press and vendors, Mr. Johnson said that in the previous year, the company held 590 sales events; almost three-quarters of the stuff it sold was marked down 50 percent or more.

But here’s the thing: customers weren’t actually paying less. The chain just kept raising the prices that customers saw on the racks, and then discounted those prices during promotions. Why keep playing a game that is expensive and troublesome for the seller and a mirage for the consumer?

J. C. Penney was not the first retailer to be astonished by the brilliance of this realization. In 2006, Macy’s had a similar idea after acquiring the coupon-happy May department stores. It decided to “retrain” those customers, as its chief financial officer put it at the time, by drastically cutting coupons. By 2007, it had abandoned that strategy. Its chief executive acknowledged that pulling back on coupons was Macy’s biggest mistake in its acquisition.

Even Walmart, which actually does pull off the trick of “everyday low prices” in its domestic stores, is finding it hard to convert consumers to a single-price model in countries like Brazil and China, where retailers give deep discounts on a few main products, then mark up the rest, said Mark Wiltamuth, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.

The problem, economists and marketing experts say, is that consumers are conditioned to wait for deals and sales, partly because they do not have a good sense of how much an item should be worth to them and need cues to figure that out.

Just having a generically fair or low price, as Penney did, said Alexander Chernev, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, assumes that consumers have some context for how much items should cost. But they don’t.

Price strategy has to be supported throughout the organization. For Apple to have one price for its items means they must enforce that price through all of its distribution partners, and it must also create advertising that reinforces the premium quality of the goods. And of course, the products must be good enough to justify a no discount policy.​

​One thing is for certain: once you go sale, it's tough to go back (once you go red, it's hard to go black?). Companies that consider a sale or discount strategy should do so carefully. Once customers expect a regular cadence of sales or discounts (e.g. Restoration Hardware's bi-annual bath sales, or Bed Bath and Beyond's ubiquitous 20% off coupons) they orient their entire behavior around that pattern and won't easily be persuaded to buy at full price ever again.