This is my fourth blog about the book Sway – don’t worry, it’s gonna be my last entry too! Haha… I just couldn’t miss writing about this last batch of interesting stories and study.In the French version of the show “Who wants to be a Millionaire”, there was once a contestant named Henri. For those who are unfamiliar with the contest mechanics, the host starts with easy, then progresses to difficult questions. When a contestant doesn’t know the answer, he can use 3 lifelines: call a friend, narrow down the choices and poll the audience.
When the host asked Henri the first couple of questions, he was able to answer them correctly. Still in the easy round, the host asked -
What revolves around the earth? (a) moon, (b) sun, (c) Mars, (d) Venus
Henri was stumped. He didn’t know the answer. So he decided to use the “ask the audience” lifeline. And here were the results - 0% answered Venus. 2% answered Mars. Now, the strange part - 42% voted moon (which is the right answer) and 56% voted the sun!
One would think that there must be something wrong with what the French were taught in school but the underlying reason is based on a deep-rooted belief in fairness and the great lengths one will go to defend it. Did Henri deserve 1 million euros? The audience deliberately chose the wrong answer because it didn’t seem fair to them to make Henri win when he couldn’t even answer such an easy question. In fact, when Henri followed the audience’s wrong answer, there was muffled laughter from the audience! Cringe.
To better understand the perspective on fairness, let’s take a look at this study conducted in Berlin. Researchers placed random pair of strangers in separate rooms. The pair would be given a USD10 which can be split between them but the catch is, the participants couldn’t talk to each other or enter into any negotiation. Instead, one person was randomly picked to decide how to split the money.
This splitter can decide how to split any way he wanted. If the receiving partner accepted, both of them will get their shares. If he rejected the offer, both of them will leave empty-handed.
As you guessed (like most of us would probably do), most splitters decided to divide the money equally and all the receiving partners accepted the offer. But among the splitters who gave themselves more than half of the share, majority of the receiving partners got angry and ended up walking away from the money. Walking away both empty-handed gave them a feeling that justice has been served. Crazy, right? But guess what? Even when the money went up from US10 to USD100, same results.
Thus, going back to Henri, for the audience to help him win in the contest was like to allow the uneven splitter walk away with a disproportionate amount of money. And if you think what happened to Henri is the worst thing that can happen to a Who wants to be a Millionaire contestant, the Russian version is another story. The audience would always give the wrong answer to mislead both smart and less smart contestants alike! The reason is traceable to Russian roots. Most are poor peasants, only a few are rich, and if someone becomes rich quickly, it probably meant he got into some illegal business. They resent this, and the fact that some become richer than everyone else.
Refusing to help a TV contestant win is unthinkable in our culture. If Henri was a contestant in the Philippines, he would have everyone's sympathy and all the more everyone would want him to win! Viewers would even pray for him and when he does win, everyone would share his triumph. But then again, what’s fair in one country isn’t clearly fair in some.
Anyway, going back to the splitting study, my favorite is when the experiment was brought to a remote place in the Peruvian Amazon to a tribe called Machiguenga. The amount of money was adjusted to make it worth more than 2 days of work. Unlike in most countries (US, Japan, Israel, Indonesia, etc.) were most splits offered by the splitter were equal, most splits among the Machiguenga tribesmen were lopsided – 85/15 in favor of the splitter! But here’s the more interesting part. You’d think that the receiving parties would reject the unfair split, but nope, they accepted it!
When Machiguenga splitters were asked why they decided to split it the way they did, they said that they didn’t see why they should give up half of their winnings to someone who was just lucky to get anything. The receiving parties, on the other hand, said that they would always accept money regardless of the amount. Rather than viewing themselves as being treated unfairly, they viewed the offer as a generous gift.
In life, I think the Machiguenga mentality is how we should receive whatever comes our way, especially for things which we don’t have control over, whether monetary or not. After all, something positive is always better than nothing. And when we take this perspective, fairness never becomes an issue because everything becomes a bonus. :)