My cat Chas used to yowl non-stop in the car, especially when driving over bridges (kathunk, kathunk, kathunk), but when we drove from NC to Ohio this summer, he was much calmer. Maybe age mellowed him, or maybe he just recognized that he has no control over things and needs to be sanguine. I tried to follow Chas’ (picture of him napping below) philosophy when making sense of this season of chaos.
This summer, Chas, me, my family, my lab, and the Center all moved from UNC to Ohio State, where I now have a fancier title and a lab space with windows (my students rejoice). It’s been a lot of mayhem, but I still want to apologize for the long time since our last posting. To help make up for it, this post has three brief science-backed insights—which I often repeated to myself this summer to be less righteously indignant.
1. Some people are just Defectors (or Business is Business).
In February, we put our house on the market and seemed to get lucky. In the first week, the CEO of an engineering company made a reasonable offer. He was pleasant when we talked. My only hesitation was his plan to pull out a flowering cherry tree (planted with my own hands) for a parking spot for his teenaged son’s BMW.
At the very last moment—the day the due diligence period ended—the stock market briefly tanked and he canceled the contract. He did this after the deadline for backing out of the deal ended, so he was technically on the hook for owing us a bunch of money. Instead, he alleged—without basis—that we had violated the contract and he wanted us to give him money. He said he was going to come after us, even though we did nothing wrong. This put us in a tough spot—one that called for a lot of moral understanding.
When I, a social psychologist, think about right and wrong, I picture a continuum from heroism to villainy—from running inside a burning house to save kids (example) to a real-life Cruella de Vil (example) who makes coats from puppies.
But in life—especially in business dealings—there are many things that sit on the bubble of good and evil and are considered just “doing business.” Like canceling contracts at the last minute after everyone’s hopes were up, and after a nice personal chat about how much you liked their house. In the mind of the CEO, we were all playing a callous, heartless game of moving pieces (not human feelings). While it’s true that callous psychopaths are overrepresented among CEOs (Babiak et al., 2010)--and so he may be one—there’s a more charitable explanation for his behavior. His experience dealing with contracts and companies has allowed him to see house deals not as social connections between people with hopes and dreams, but simply as transactions. As my mom, a bankruptcy lawyer might say “business is business.”
Neglecting human hopes is not how I function and probably not how you function. But it’s a necessary lesson that there are more people than I realized who, in the language of game theory, are happy to “defect” rather than “cooperate.” Rather than work together to maximize our common good, some are prepared to act exploitatively.
Scholars argue that the whole reason we have institutions like the law is precisely so we can do deals with strangers (North, 1990). In small societies, we can rely on social pressure to induce cooperation, but strangers who lack moral sense feel no pressure to be kind. Law doesn’t mandate kindness that comes from the heart—but it can stop you from causing harm.
And so we consulted the law. A lawyer advised that the best defense is an ominously worded offense: we said we could sue for breach of contract but wouldn’t so long as he was “cool.” (The game theory equivalent of a nuclear arms race: we both know paying lawyers will mutually assure the destruction of all our savings for little outcome.) We still lost the big chunk of money he owed us, but kept some from the due diligence.
Once we’d come to terms with his sneakiness and moved on—and deeply cut the price of our house—we had to eat crow when he made a second offer. He was the only one, and our realtor strongly urged us to accept it because they wanted to be done with the sale. We swallowed our pride and accepted… with $0 as a deposit. Then he pulled out again. Totally predictable, but still makes you feel like a doormat for a Defector.
2. Prices are make-believe.
We eventually sold the house for much less than we expected. Our friends and family moaned when we told them how much we had to slash the price. But social science teaches us that prices are entirely a matter of social construction.
How much is a gold ingot worth? Gold might seem intrinsically valuable, but it’s just worth whatever other people want to pay for it. In a famine, a bar of gold might be worth nothing, because people would rather pay for food. Things are only worth what someone is willing to spend because money is, essentially, make-believe (Ingham, The Nature of Money; Harari, Sapiens, Ch. 8–10).
When my kids asked me, “what is money?” I’m struck by how hard the question is. It’s basically an empty placeholder we all agree can be exchanged for other things. Yuval Harari argues that money is just trust: we give real goods for paper or numbers on a phone screen because we trust that we can use those numbers to buy other things later. Losing faith in each other and in government isn’t just bad for “getting along”—it threatens the basis of economics itself.
It was painful to sell our NC house for less money than we expected. Also painful: buying our new house in Ohio for more money than we expected. Living by “buy high, sell low” is why I’m an academic, not a businessperson.
When we arrived in OH our new house was pretty trashed. Beneath the “cute Airbnb” staging—complete with a peaceful Highland cow photo—was a mess: broken doors, a dishwasher clogged with old food, heaps of chicken wire in the yard from an old coop, and a carpet of dog poop across all the grass. The person we bought the place from lived like a rabid raccoon.
While spending the last two months cleaning and fixing things, I’ve constantly wondered how someone can live like that. I try for moral understanding: she was a single mom with teenagers. That’s hard. I lived my early childhood mostly with my single mom, who was putting herself through school. We didn’t have much money. But even then, my mom didn’t let us live surrounded with grossness and broken things. Also, we’ve since learned that the previous owner was not scrimping to survive. She’s a VP at a big company and has since moved into a bigger, more expensive house. I was angry that we had encountered another Defector.
3. Moral understanding → Stress management.
When I describe the state of our new house—especially the carpet of dog poop—people agree that our house-seller is on the side of evil, and we’re on the side of goodness. They think it’s justified for us to be outraged. But the problem with outrage is that it tears you up inside. Research shows that prolonged anger (even when righteous) has mental and physical costs. Repressed anger is linked to increased risk for anxiety, depression, heart disease, and stomach ulcers. Chronically angry people also end up with decreased serotonin (the feel-good neurotransmitter) and increased cortisol (the stress hormone; Hendricks et al., 2013). Once you’re in the anger cycle, it’s hard to get out.
Sometimes moral outrage is necessary. Moral outrage motivates us to fight injustice, to donate to causes that we feel strongly about, and to rally people to uphold our values (Zhang et al., 2024). These are worthy things, whether we’re talking about politics or more everyday injustices in our lives. But the ability to turn outrage into useful action is often limited. There’s only so much we can impact the state of the nation with political donations or our behavior on social media. And there’s really nothing useful about me continuing to fume about a trashed house.
Sure, we can have revenge fantasies, and sometimes people successfully follow through on these (see r/pettyrevenge for satisfying stories of clever retribution, such as the person who replaced their pens with disappearing ink to stop their coworker from swiping them). But most of the time ruminating on the injustices that we face hurt us more than the people responsible. Perhaps said best in the Buddhist tradition, “Anger is like grasping a hot coal to strike another; you are the one who is burned.”
I’m not saying you need to give up your convictions. Trying to let go of my anger doesn’t mean that I think it’s okay for everyone to leave dog poop when they move out. Likewise, being willing to talk to people across the political divide doesn’t mean that you give up your view on abortion or immigration.
But trying to see the humanity in those we disagree with is generally good. It leads to better civic outcomes and also seems to calm us down I think we would all appreciate being a bit more sanguine.
After a chaotic summer, fall is here. The yard is clean. I’m trying to yowl less. I’m no longer daydreaming about suing the CEO from North Carolina, and most of the broken stuff in our new house is fixed.
Have I let go of my anger? Mostly. But the person we bought the house from lives just one mile away. I’m sure I’ll see her somewhere. I don’t know yet whether I’ll be kind, cutting, or just coldly silent. I try to practice what I preach and have moral understanding, but I’m human. If I see her, I’ll let you know how it goes.
That was quite a summer, Kurt. Thanks for sharing this - many thought-provoking issues you raise. I am going to continue to ponder. Good luck in your new home at new university!
Love this, Kurt!