That way, we’re basically tricking our future selves into spending less money. 2 This is silly, but at least it makes some kind of sense: If we’re going to mess with expectations, we should manipulate the numbers so we tend to be less satisfied.
#OREGON TRAIL 2 FOOD POISIONING MOVIE#
So, with music, a lot of my friends do the opposite of this movie theatre trick–they inflate their expectations so they’re artificially disappointed when they hear a new album. Of course, they just did that to themselves. I ended up enjoying it a lot (and still listen to it regularly), whereas they ended up all disappointed and annoyed. Turns out it was right about 8 utils (maybe slightly less, but it was really close). I think some of my friends expected it to somehow magically be 10 utils. I expected “Volume 2” to be about 8 utils.
I’d say “Volume 1” was like 8 utils to me. They’re still She & Him and their first album was awesome. Many of my friends said they didn’t like it, and it was just more of the same from She & Him. This happened with She & Him’s “Volume 2”. I’ve heard friends totally pan a new album just because it didn’t live up to their expectations, which were far higher than they should’ve been. If anything we tend to inflate our expectations, especially when it comes to music. So why do we trick ourselves into going to see bad movies in the theatre at 10 times the cost of the Redbox DVD? What’s really strange is we don’t do this with other stuff. But you’ll trick yourself out of $10 and you’ll waste time that you could’ve spent doing something cheaper and better. If I go in without expectations, I can’t be disappointed!” Well, kind of. Ridiculous, right? How’s that any different than saying, “The trick to movies is that I just lower my expectations as much as possible. It’s going to be terrible! I can’t wait!” I’m tricking myself into paying $5 for the privilege of being food-poisoned by my friend. But what if I said, “You know what? I’m going back! I’ve learned that I just have to lower my expectations so I can really enjoy the food poisoning! I’m going to just assume it will kill me this time, or at least that it’ll ruin my digestive system for the next few days. A couple weeks later, the same friend makes the same offer again. Half of us are disappointed and the other half end up battling the dysentery. We all decide to give it one more shot–maybe he just had a bad night, right?–and we head back over there with our five bucks. A few weeks later, the same friend makes the same offer. Half of us are disappointed and the other half are left with Oregon Trail flashbacks. We eat the meal and it’s really freaking terrible. It’ll be delicious!” So we all go over there and bring five bucks. I’ll cook something for all of us to eat. He says, “Hey everyone! Come over to my place and bring $5. It’s as though we have a friend who likes to cook. So if we inflate the utility from a 4 to a 5, what we’re really doing is inflating the whole scale.
We can’t artificially inflate the number of utils to, say, 5 because what happens to those other movies that really were a 5? 1 This also reduces the perceived value of a 10 because we’re watering all of our other movie experiences down. It has to be because we have to put every other movie we’ve ever seen on the same scale. But the problem is that the movie itself is still only 4 utils. That way, when we go to the movie and it’s 4 utils, we exceeded expectations! We practically created three utils out of thin air! Um, ok.
Let’s say we go see the same bad movie we’ve talked about already, but we have “no expectations”, meaning we essentially expect the movie to be about 1 util of entertainment. What we’re doing when we go see movies with deflated expectations is trying to trick ourselves into accepting the lower utility of the movie and ignoring the greater cost.
PREVIOUSLY, in Part 2: How we all use UHD to decide what to buy, and how we sometimes ignore UHD altogether. Illustration by Sean Nyffeler of Popcorn Noises fame