George Loewenstein

[laughs]

George Loewenstein is a behavioral economist, and he wrote this paper in the '80s about anticipatory utility.

The novel idea was that we don't only wanna think about your utility from what you're consuming at the moment but also the anticipation of consuming something in the future can provide utility today.

It's like the future version of savoring.

So stick with me.

Researcher George Lowenstein has studied what happens when we make predictions and decisions across different emotional states.

So this is so fascinating to me.

When we're in what researchers call a hot state, so we can identify that with being angry or afraid or high stress, in pain or craving something, we tend to underestimate how much that temporary state is influencing what we want and what we're likely to do.

Which actually brings up something I wanted to run by you.

What's that? There's this concept in psychology called the information gap theory of curiosity, coined by George Lowenstein back in the early 90s.

Oh,

yes.

about a pillow.

George Lowenstein, 1994 Information Gap Theory The core insight is that curiosity isn't a pleasant state of wonder.

It's the discomfort of knowing you don't know something.

It's a cognitive itch.

And there is research on it.

So Maurice Schweitzer, for example, does research on apologies and Shereen Chandra and George Lowenstein do research on apologies.

And, you know, apologies are incredibly powerful, sort of.

Surprisingly powerful in that when you say, you know, I'm sorry, I did that wrong.

There's a behavioral science idea that helps explain part of this.

George Loewenstein calls it a hot-cold empathy gap.

Basically, when we're in one state, we're surprisingly bad at predicting how much another state will change what we want.

There was this study with smokers where people weren't craving a cigarette, and they underestimated how valuable that cigarette would feel later when they actually were craving one.

So there's an amazing set of studies, you know, both in the financial world and the medical world.

Um, George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon did the, the, the first ones, which show that- If you make people feel too guilty or too scared or, or, uh, too worried, often what they do is behave like the, the metaphorical ostrich, and they, they stick their, their head in the sand.

So what I love about that as an argument is reframing the same problem from one which is guilt-inducing or, um, sorrow-inducing to something that gives an element of, of, of positivity, yet still leaving a very clear role for the, the donor to get involved.

It's, I think it's a, a brilliant insight.

Why is that?

It comes down to the neurochemistry of curiosity Specifically, the information gap theory, which was proposed by a behavioral economist named George Loewenstein in the 1990s.

Okay, let's unpack this theory.

What did Loewenstein say?