THINKER'S ALMANAC - November 26

How does the maternal instinct of a female turkey help us understand the unconscious behavior of humans?

Subject: Heuristics - Mother Turkeys

Event: George Washington signs Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1789

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.  The word comes from the same root as eureka. Daniel Kahneman

On this day in 1789, Thanksgiving was celebrated for the first time under the new U.S. Constitution based on a proclamation signed by President George Washington.  However, it took over 150 years for Thanksgiving to be recognized as an official Federal holiday.  On December 26, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a Congressional resolution establishing the fourth Thursday in November as the Federal Thanksgiving Day holiday (1).

                                            Image by Dominique Benoist from Pixabay

Turkey day is an appropriate day to explore some interesting insights about turkeys that might help us better understand human behavior.

In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert B. Cialdini begins not with psychology but with ethology, the study of animals in their natural habitats.  Specifically, Cialdini talks about the behavior of mother turkeys.  It appears that there is one key factor that triggers a female turkey’s maternal instincts.  It’s not the smell, feeling, or appearance of the turkey chick; it’s the sound of the chick -- the “cheep-cheep” sound of the baby turkey.  This factor is so strong that even if experimenters present the mother turkey with a stuffed animal that is a predator -- such as a polecat -- the mother turkey will accept it and care for it as long as the stuffed polecat has a recorder inside that is playing the cheep-cheep sound.

All this turkey talk is really Cialdini’s way of giving us insight, not so much about turkey behavior, but about human behavior.  Just as the cheep-cheep sound triggers an automatic, fixed pattern of behavior in the mother turkey, humans also have a range of triggers that result in automatic compliance responses.  As an expert in the field of influence and persuasion, Cialdini is fascinated by these triggers and how they can be employed by marketers and salespeople to nudge customers toward spending more money or toward being more compliant (2).

Another name for a trigger is a “heuristic,” a mental shortcut that humans employ to make thinking faster and easier.  Heuristics are hardwired into us, allowing us to think without really consciously thinking.  Instead, like the mother turkey’s response to the cheep-cheep sound, heuristics are instinctive responses, where we sacrifice nuanced, reasoned responses, for quick, automatic responses.  

In their book Useful Delusions, Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler provide an excellent example of how humans subconsciously use heuristics to make judgments.  In a study, subjects were asked to taste wine and judge its quality.  Multiple wine bottles were arranged before the subjects, each bottle included a price; the prices ranged from five dollars to ninety dollars per bottle.  What the subjects did not know, however, was that the wine in the ninety-dollar bottle was the same as the wine in the ten-dollar bottle.

As you might have already guessed, the subjects judged the wine in the ninety-dollar bottle as far superior to the wine in the ten-dollar bottle, despite the fact that both wines were exactly the same.  The explanation for this is what we might call the “cost heuristic,”  most people live by a general rule of thumb that says that things that cost more are of superior quality to things that cost less (3).  Just as the cheep-cheep triggered the turkey’s maternal instinct, cost can trigger our quality/value instinct.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is a heuristic, and how can it be explained through the material behavior of a female turkey and the way people evaluate wine?

Challenge - Rules of Thumb:  Do some research on other heuristics.  Identify a specific one that you find interesting.  Identify its name and how it works to trigger unconscious thinking.

Sources:

1-History.com.  “Thanksgiving 2021 - Traditions.” 16 Apr. 2021.

2-Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, New and Expanded.  New York:  Harper Business, 2021: 2-3.

3- Vedantam, Shankar and Bill Mesler. Useful Delusions. New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, 2021: 51.