I'm t T and I'm Zakiah and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
Are you doing Black Friday shopping this year or what?
No, I'm doing Black Friday saving? Okay, in this economy, put those dollars back in your pocket. There's only two of them, but put them back. What about you?
You know, it's been a long time since I participated in Black Friday. I usually like to do like the pre Black Friday sales that they like, you know, game you on where it's like, oh you get a sneak peek to our Black Friday sales. Those things get me every time. But this year, this economy, you know, we got to think a little bit smarter.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
It sounded like think it's smarter, but also maybe dipping your toe in the waters based on what you're just saying, tricking myself, you know, doing a bunch of girl math to say, oh, yeah, I didn't spend any money this Black Friday, right, this is how it was supposed to be. I needed this stuff. But you know what our minds are tricking us all the time. And people may think there's no science to Black Friday shopping and the deals,
but there is now. I know a long time ago we knew that Amazon Prime Day was a bus and we gave up on that right. But for Black Friday, I still have questions. So let's jump into it.
What do we know?
I think we know that Black Friday is a very special holiday. Can I call it that?
I think so.
For a lot of folks, people are camping out. I don't know if they're still fist fighting, but I remember that they were fist fighting back in the day trying to get those flat screen TVs.
I think the flat screen TV. If there was an ornament for America, that's it because it runs on capitalism and consumerism. Put a flat screen TV on your.
Christmas treet this year.
I know that Black Friday has often been an economic indicator or an indicator for what the shopping season is going to be, what people are willing to spend, And even as we've seen perse Strings Titan that over time,
people still spend on this day. And we just had an episode where we talked about the economy, and so I'm wondering how you know, with this new influx of what doctor West was calling discouraged workers, so people who were you know, on the job market, but then you know, got tired of applying for jobs and so aren't applying anymore.
How that will impact Black Friday sales? Are those people saving or are they feeling like, oh, let me spend during a time where there's more discounts. I don't know how that psychology works.
I don't think I know the psychology of any of it, and I need help because I think I've seen a lot of the like Doorbusters and the lines you know, lining up in advance that's gone away, but there are digital substitutes for that, like where it says twenty three people have this in their car, and I'm like, I better hurry up and check out.
Is that a thing? Is that real? Is something wrong with me?
Every time there's something wrong with both of us.
I think we have to get into it because it feels like it's a little bit of economics and psychology tied together.
Mine all my money, money on my mind.
There you go.
For today's lab we're looking at Black Friday. And I know people sometimes think like, oh what I buy is my business and you know there's no science to it, but I don't think so we have to look at like free shipping and there's only three left, Like why.
Do those things hijack our brains?
And what's happening? Especially when I get an email that says I left something in my car? It works every time, it works every time. I'm like that poor little item I needed.
So we're here to get some answers about that.
My name is done. Really, I'm a professor of psychology and behavior economics at university, and I do research on human irusianality and just kind of to help us think about human irrationality. I think about what gets us to act in ways that we don't know and don't seem to be logical. Now, I don't mean that they are not logical, but they're not the standard logic.
How people behave around spending really varies with a personal person. I know me as a key, are not spending the same, We're not spending the same. I'm fast and furious with it. My friends, she's cold and calculated. But what types of questions are you answering in your work? Like what can we learn from your work?
I try to uncover what is the logic by which we work, and the logic is often interesting and curious and not consistent. So for example, you could say, why would we stand in line for forty five minutes to get a cone of Ben and Jerry's ice cream? That's what cost us to dollars. It doesn't make sense rationally, but when you think about the allure free and so on,
you can understand what it is. So there's a logic to what we do as human beings, just that the logic is not the we calculate, we trade off, and we do we do the writing. So that's that's the kind of thing that I try to uncover.
H So this is a study of the human mind and how it makes decisions.
My metaphor for the human mind is that it's a vintage Swiss army knife. Two parts Swiss army knife and vintage. Let's start with the Swiss army knife part. The Swiss army knife is kind of okay in lots of things, but it's not really excellent in anything. It's greatness come from the fact that there's lots of tools that can do lots of different things, and our mind is a little bit like that too, not particularly excellent in anything, quite okay in lots of things, and we can carry
it with us. It's a vintage Sweet Sarmon knife. And what I mean by that is that our set of tools in our mind to deal with the world evolved in a very different evolutionary period. We were roaming the savannah, we were dealing with hunting, we were dealing with lions. Money is a new invention. We were not evolutionary designed to deal with money. We don't have a detector in our brain to figure out money. We think about compound
interest and so on. So when we come to deal with money, we have these ancient tools that are were never that good.
I like the vintage Swiss army knife. Yes, metaphor, because we've talked about anxiety in today's world, like our brains are not caught up to a cell phone and to somebody texting you saying can we talk later? That feels like the snake, you know, it feels like the terror because we have these old systems. What are the consumer issues that you think are could be it root costs or brain but like what's affecting and hurting people the most right now?
So you know, money is an amazing invention. It allows society to move forward in all kinds of unbelievable ways. Right, if we didn't have money, how society looks like. Right, money is amazing. But money requires that we think about opportunity costs. Money requires that we think about now versus later. Spending now is unbelievably emotional. It really holds us and we feel like something. We are not good at delaying rewards, so we end up overspending now, sometimes even taking debt.
That brings us into the second problem, which is we're not really good at understanding compound interest. In all of the world, I would say the poverty trap is that low income individuals take a loan at a high interest rate and then it's very, very hard to escape. So those are kind of fundamental about money. They're not about shopping and so on, but they're fundamentally about money. The other thing I would say is that we have not yet figured out the way to make saving fun. Like
think about it. Shopping certainly fun, fun, Saving like it's this invisible activity, like when was the last time you went to your friends and you say tity, You wouldn't believe it. I saved two thousand dollars and I found a better insurance and I'm paying. It's not part of the conversation.
It never is. Yes, And you know what that makes me think about, based on what you were just saying, how it's like way more fun to spend now rather than think about spending later. It makes me think about the buy now, pay later apps and things like that. Yes, that is relatively new to our way of spending. There were things like layaway you would get the wouldn't get the product till you finished paying. But now you can get the product you've only paid a little bit, and
then you keep paying until you've paid it off. In simple terms, what's happening in our brains when we make a purchase and get to split that into future payments, and what mechanisms make the buy now, pay later feel easier than a credit card?
Ye? So, so what happened with the buy now, pay later is First of all, the terminology is very good, right. It doesn't tell you pay much more later. It doesn't say anything about the interest. It doesn't say buy things you don't really need and pay for them later. The world has a vast interest in something that is not consistent with our best interest. In mind, Every coffee shop wants to sell you another coffee. Every restaurant want to
sell you another dessert. Every supermarket want to send you another cook Now you can go to the supermarket with a plan what's called the shopping list. But the supermarket also has a plan.
It does, it does.
And their plan is not the same as your plan, and they control the environment. They decide what to put it hige level and what to put it the checkout. We live in the world in which people have plans to part us from our money. And then there's all kinds of tricks. So let's start with it, like the most basic trick. The most basic trick is called a sale.
Imagine that there's a shirt for fifty dollars versus another store the same shirt, and they say this used to be one hundred dollars and now it's on fifty percent off and it's fifty dollars. Now why, like, when you think about sale, a sale, something is it's fifty Why would you care what it used to cost at some part time in the history? Right? You shouldn't. You should say is this shirt worth this price to me? Yes?
Or no?
Why do we care that it used to be one thousand dollars and now it's fifty, but we do why would we do a deal? That's right? That's right. What happens is that we have a really hard time assessing value. If I show you a shirt, I say, how much is it worth? I don't really know, very hard to figure out. But if it used to be one hundred dollars and now it's fifty, it's probably a good deal. So it's kind of a lazy way to compute value
without thinking about how valuable is another show to you. Now, when you pay for something, you should care about what it is that you're getting, but we don't. Why it's very hard to estimate the value of what we're getting, so we estimate other things, like how much work has gone into that.
So as a freelancer doing different work, the better I get at moving through projects, I have people on standby that I can subcontract out to help.
I feel like when it took.
A long time and there was a lot of back and forth, but really I didn't know what I was doing.
At that point.
People were like, oh, you've worked so hard, and now they're like, you turn this around in twenty four hours. We charge you this, sir, but also you didn't have to wait consider this, you know.
And that's and that's because that's because the question is you think that people can assess the real value of your work, but they can't, so so they assess efforts. So there's this story wait.
For thinking they can do it, or then from that VNA.
Because because you know, if you if you go back to the vintage twist army knife, they are not equipped with a way to evaluate your work, so they're evaluating something else. There's a there's this story that Picasso is sitting on a bench and a woman come and says, Picasso, I'm a huge fan. Would you draw a picture of painting of me? And he takes his pen and does this thing, and in thirty seconds she has this thing and she looks at it. She said, you know what,
you have captured my essence. I don't know how you do it, Like there's only one line and you've captured my essence. He said, how much is it? And it says it's five hundred dollars. He says five hundred dollars for thirty seconds. No, no, it's five hundred dollars for thirty years and thirty seconds.
Yeah, my experience over time.
That's right. Now, we can say that, but the truth is it's really hard. Fairness and effort are very much, deeply embedded in us, and we use them as the strategy to evaluate things.
We said a lot about Black Friday and shopping and spending money, but I feel like not everything can be completely bad. There's always a little bit of good there, right, no absolute evil, Like, what's the silver lining.
On this h chaotic evil? Chaotic good?
Black Friday is very special. It's one day of the year. It's one day of the year. Now, imagine that you went on an expensive meal. Imagine that usually you go out and you spend one hundred dollars on dinner and you buy the second chip this morning on the menu. Imagine that on some Tuesday, at some point you decide to double your restaurant spending and double the wine. What
are the odds? So it was Tuesday, what's the odds that the following Tuesday you will not say to yourself, maybe I'm a two hundred dollars per dinner person, not one hundred dollars person. So the point I want to make is, then when we deviate from a regular strategy, an upscale on a regular Tuesday, there's no guarantee that we will not do it again and again and again on the next Tuesday.
This is what happened to me becoming friends with tt on Tuesday. She's just she's just led me to a life of extravagance instead of a.
One time they go. But imagine that you only met her and became extravagant with her one day a year. Now, it would not become a routine. So one of the things we showed is that when people increased the amount of spending and quality of their spending on a regular Tuesday, there's a big chance it would become a habit. When they do it on a very special day, Oh, I'm only doing it on my birthday or Valentine's Day or
Black Friday, then it remains constrained. So I think that actually, you know, we spend too much, we waste, we spend in lines too much. I mean, there's all kinds of things to talk about the negative side, but I think there's also some think protective on saying I'm responsible most of the year, and I'm going to pick a day in the year to be less responsible, and because it's this day, that everybody does on the same day and so on. It would protect me from being irresponsible throughout the year.
I feel like a lot of spending, Like Sophora is a store that sells makeup and hair stuff and they have Sephora Day where they say all their prices are going down, and all of these influencers that now I'm convinced they're being paid to do these videos, get on social media and say this is what you should should buy during the Sephora sale. This is my favorite foundation, this is my favorite mascara, this is my favorite shampoo, this is my favorite conditioner. I've listed everything for you.
These are the most amazing products and they're going to be on discount on Sophora Day. And you see so many of those videos you start to feel like, oh am, I going to miss out on the opportunity by the saying will it be sold out? And so it feels like with social media and influencer culture, it's making people have this fear of missing out and then spending money that they typically wouldn't spend.
So, just to be clear what we talked about the benefits of Black Friday, that it doesn't apply to Sepphori day.
That's right, you tell her.
And the reason and the reason is that the way that our mind works is that this is a day we go a little extra crazy spending, but it's only on that day. But if you do sphor a day, it's basically like you just spent on one day of the year, but there'll be other days in other places. And you basically are opening yourself up to say I'm a sucker for special days day.
Now, and they're doing the stories, are doing it often enough.
Every week is a special.
But let's talk about the thing you described. A UNI described a version of something that is going away, and that's called scarcity. You said, it's a day. The next day, I would feel bad about it. Right, it's basically how does it work, it says, And there's not a lot of it, there's just some of it. Whatever is available will go away. It will not be to the next day.
And scarcity gets us to think in a different way. Right, if you say, oh, this, this makeup would always be there at this price, you would say not interested, get it next time. But this makeup is going tomorrow. Now you start thinking, what if tomorrow I will decide I want it and it will be not available. I would feel terrible. I don't want to feel terrible, so let me buy it now so that I will not feel terrible. So scarcity is another really interesting trick. It's called counterfactual thinking.
You say, what if I will want it and it will not be there? I would say to myself, I was not careful. I didn't think why I didn't buy it, and therefore we buy it. I'll give you an example where this is really strong.
Oh that's what I want to hear about.
You go and buy a new electronics. Let's say it's a big screen TV, standard American thing to do on Black Prides, and the salesperson says, tity, this TV is not coming with an extended warranty. The warranty is just for a year. How would you feel if a year and three days from now, few of this a little part of the screen did not work so well and you did not buy the extended warranty? How would you feel?
And you think to yourself, I would feel very stupid. Yes, I would say, why on that Black Friday didn't I buy the extended warranty when the person offered it to me? So you say, you know what at the extended on. Many of those places make more money on the extended warranty that they make on the electronic themselves. Because the electronics we compare, we think about, and so on they extended warranty. It's kind of an emotional buy on top of something.
All this just makes me think about girl math, like I was talking about before, and so that is the mental gymnastics that I do that allows me to feel like spending my money isn't so bad. You know, Like if I'm returning something and then I get store credit and I get something else with that store credit, that's something else that I just bought is free.
Okay, that's a direct line.
That's not how that works.
One other interesting place where we do mistakes with money is what's called the pain of paying. So imagine that tonight you go to dinner. Imagine expensive dinner that's a two hundred dollars and you can either pay with cash or with credit card, which one would feel worse.
Cash Why, I don't know, I have no idea, but it does.
It turns out that the thing that is worse with cash is the timing of the payment and the consumption that when we pay with a credit card, we pay some time later. When we prepay, we buy like a gift certificate, we pay way in advance. If you go to a restaurant with the gift certificate, it feels great. It feels free. When when you pay later it doesn't feel as bad. Paying at the time of consumption feels very bad.
Now.
The pain of paying is about this idea that when we part with money, it's not just about opportunity costs and so on. There's some almost like a moral cost. And the more cost has to do with how do we feel at the moment of spending. So things like credit cards are protecting us from feeling bad. Apple pay, Google Pay. Even worse, we don't even understand what work what we're spending. So a good piece of advice for Black Friday is to say, make a plan of what
you want to buy. That's number one, right, Buying things is fine. Just make sure it's what you want, not what somebody else wants. And then and then the second thing is take the amount of money that you want to take out and spend that amount. Wow, right, make sure you don't go over it.
I like that.
That's that's very very important because the credit card is kind of numbing the pain of pain. Yes, And what you want to do is you want to feel the pain of pain. You want to say the pain of pain is basically getting anything. Do I really want this or not? You want that?
Thought?
So that's also an important element, like the payment method has an impact on how we feel about the payment.
There are always viral videos and then the recaps with strong opinions on going out to eat with a group and what happens when the bill arrives, because some folks don't want to split the bill evenly because they're on a budget, and they're like, I only had an appetizer and water and it if you going out with tit, she's having lobster the entree as the appetizer and a cocktail okay, and sometimes more than one.
If it's more than one, help us.
We're gonna have fun tonight.
But why do people get all cagy and weird and talking about they don't want to be friends?
And somebody ordered too mini apps?
Like what is it about meal time and the bill that makes us turn on each other?
You're not yourself when you're hungry or after you just ate it things.
When we do research, we try to isolate every element, and in real life many times there are multiple elements at the same time. So this story starts with escalating spending. Yes, you think you'll come to do appetizers, and restaurants are good at that, right, And if there's alcohol, inhibition goes down and you say, oh, yes, So restaurants are excellent in getting us not to think about rices and just
to think about food. And there's a social element of somebody's ordering, and when it's unclear who is paying for it, there's like shying away from responsibility. Right, it's like a mob behavior. Who is responsible? I don't really know who ordered all of this, And because you didn't say everybody, it's equals splitting or something that people are kind of.
It's like a mob behavior basically. So when it's the same group of friend going, I really like the approach of one person buying for everybody and alternating who is the person buying. If she would have said to people, send me the money your share, people would have because she paid, and we are kind of wired for reciprocity, it could be very hard to walk from her.
Is there anything that you feel like this is one piece that people need to know like even if it's not Black Friday, but just holiday vibes, Like we get in a holiday spirit and that goes longer than one day.
Like is there anything you want people to be thinking about?
So there are two other things I want people to think about as we get closer to the holidays. The first thing is that it is better to save for dis questionary spending than to borrow. So if you plan for the holiday season, try to save the money so you have it in advance and then spend it rather than spend it and then hope to pay it later. Now, the last thing I want to say is, you know, we talked about the pain of pain. One of the things that the pain of pain teaches us is also
something about what is a good gift? So the question of what is a good gift, there's lots of is to think about it, but one way that comes from the pain of pain is the good gift is a gift that somebody wants but feel guilty buying for themselves. So imagine you walk down the street and you see a hat and it's a beautiful hat, and you're not the head person. You never had the hat, but you're curious. You go in the store, you put it on your head.
It's beautiful, you like the color of the shape, but you look at the price tag and it's crazy expensive, and you said to yourself, I'm not the had person. I'm not going to buy this hat. And you get home and you find out that your significant other bought you that exact head from your joint checking account. How do you feel? Most people say I feel gratitude. I don't say to her, honey, you know I looked at this hat and decide not to buy it. Please return it to the store and put the money back into
a checking count. Example for something that people want but feel guilty about buying, and a good you know, like between friends, Like I don't need to give my friends money, like I wouldn't directly deposit money into the checking account. I want to do something for them that they would do themselves. So something that people feel guilty about.
Tit does this for me very nice.
I do it for all the people that I love. I'm like, I wouldn't need this for me, but here's five hundred dollars for a spot.
Ay when we did a study on gifts, and what we learned was that gift givers don't want to take risks, but the people who get the gifts often wish that people took more more risks. And I think, you know, if I give you a gift, I want you to think about me. I want that gift to be a mechanism for us to start caring more about each other. I'm not giving you a gift because you can't. You don't have enough money to buy a bottle of wine,
and I need to subsidize that. So real gifts, not gifts that you know, you eat a bar of chocolate and it goes away. Real gifts, it takes a risk. You buy somebody hat, you buy them a drum set, you get them a chair. It's risky, yeah, but the risk has payoff in terms of friendship.
I found this so interesting because it really made me rethink the way that I think about spending, Like maybe I should stop doing all this girl math and really just save my money. And have you know these special days where I'm spending rather than making every day a special day?
Yeah, you know, I think every time we have an episode that shows me how the brain betrays me. My brain doesn't know what to do with money, of course, you know, and we didn't even get into the like emotional ties with money as much as we could have. There's so much there. There's so much also historical things like what you learned from your family, what your friends do. It's expensive to be friends with t T y'all.
Don't lie. It's very expensive to be as the kid's friend. Listen, it is very expensive. You must like carry on, we're just peasing a poe.
I want to know you know, now that we know Black Friday isn't so bad. I want to hear from our listeners like, what are y'all getting? Are you getting anything? What's your take? Is there a special thing you've been saving up for all year? Have you seen a really good deal? Do you think good deals still exists?
And also send me the links in the DM because maybe I want that thing too.
I've learned nothing, nothing, y'all.
You see how hard it is to change your mind. You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs. Podcast TT is on X and Instagram, at d R Underscore T.
S h O, and you can find Zakiya at z said so.
Dope Labs is a production of Lamanada Media.
Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our producer is Issara Acevez. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed by James farber Lamanada Media's Vice President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart Podcast is Katrina Norbel.
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Original music composed and produced by Takayasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Watte.