People eat chocolate bars in pieces, waiting and savoring. They space their cigarettes through the day, their gossip sessions, their calls to friends. They like their sports with timeouts, and practice their religion with fasts and periods of self-denial, like Lent.
So why is it that commercial interruptions always ruin TV programs?
Maybe they don’t. In two new studies, researchers who study consumer behavior argue that interrupting an experience, whether dreary or pleasant, can make it significantly more intense.
“The punch line is that commercials make TV programs more enjoyable to watch. Even bad commercials,” said Leif Nelson, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the new research. “When I tell people this, they just kind of stare at me, in disbelief. The findings are simultaneously implausible and empirically coherent.”
Over the years, psychological research has found that people are not always so clear on what makes them happy. When reporting on their own well-being, they exhibit a kind of equilibrium: After a loss (divorce, say) or a gain (a promotion), they typically return in time to about the same happiness level as before. Humans habituate quickly, to hardship and prosperity, to war and peace.
Yet even modest pleasures — a cup of coffee in the morning, an afternoon walk, a Scotch before bed — seem to follow a law of diminishing returns. “Alcohol is like love,” says a roué in Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye.” “The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine.”
To Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of the book “The How of Happiness,” this raises a provocative question: “If you adapt so quickly to pleasurable activities, and the pleasure decreases, how do you sustain a level of happiness or ever move up on the scale?”
One way people do this, research suggests, is to favor novel experiences over material goodies. The smell of a new car may go to a person’s head for months. But the memory of a mind-bending trek through the Australian outback — or the Amsterdam museums — seems to provide longer-lasting psychological sustenance, some researchers argue. In some studies, couples report greater satisfaction in their relationship after trying new things together.
The new consumer research analyzed similar dynamics at a moment-to-moment level. In one experiment, Dr. Nelson, along with Tom Meyvis and Jeff Galak of New York University, had 87 undergraduates watch an episode of the sitcom “Taxi.” Half watched it as it was originally broadcast, with commercials for the Jewelry Factory Store and the law office of Michael Brownstein, among other ads. The other half watched the show straight through, without commercials.
After the show was over, the students rated how much they enjoyed it, using an 11-point scale and comparing it with the sitcom “Happy Days,” which they were all familiar with.. Those who saw “Taxi” without commercials preferred “Happy Days”, but those who saw the original show, Jewelry Factory Store and all, preferred “Taxi” by a significant margin.
In similar experiments, using other video clips and a variety of interruptions, the results were the same: people rated their experiences as more enjoyable with commercials , no matter their content, or other disruptions.. The effect wasn’t limited to watching TV; interrupting a massage also heightened people’s enjoyment, one experiment found.
The opposite was true for irritating experiences, like listening to vacuum cleaner noise: a break only made it seem worse, they found.
“The reason this happens, we argue, is that we tend to adapt to a variety of experiences, as they’re happening,” Dr. Nelson said. “Listening to a song, watching a TV program, having a massage: these all start out very enjoyable, and within a few minutes we get used to it. Interruptions break that up.”
In one of their papers, the authors even propose that commercial television evolved culturally to maximize enjoyment. The millions of Americans who record their favorite shows on TV may scoff; but they, too, often stop the shows to get a drink, make a call or talk. This kind of controlled interruption may represent a kind of ideal, Dr. Nelson said.
Gal Zauberman, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said the findings were solid, and added: “To me, the most interesting part is that almost everyone says, ‘I just wish I never had to watch a commercial.’
“It’s all a part of this phenomenon that we have found in other work,” he continued, “that people are not fully aware of what makes them happy, especially when there’s a temporal component, when one experience affects another in time.”
Interruption hardly improves all pleasurable activities. Dr. Nelson and his colleagues have found that people often do not habituate to shows or stories that are particularly demanding — with unexpected plot twists — and that interruptions can snap the thread, souring the experience. When artists, tradesmen, musicians and others lose themselves in their work, the selfless pleasure some psychologists call flow, the lunchtime whistle can be a hazard.
But life’s more common pleasures may have more in common with spending a morning in the hotel hot tub. Pretty wonderful; all the more so if you can slip out and dip in the pool every few minutes.
Source - The New York Times
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