By Katherine Salant, www.washingtonpost.com, Saturday, May 23, 2009
When I first started writing about new homes 16 years ago, I found some of the features in them nonsensical.
Every house, even the smallest ones, had a formal living and dining area that most households would rarely use. When I asked the sales agents and their builder bosses about this, their response was always the same.
It’s a resale concern.
The demise of these rarely used formal spaces has been predicted many times, but I still see them in new houses. Are people really driven to spend such huge amounts for rooms they might use four times a year, just because they’re concerned about resale?
Actually, maybe not. The driving force behind buyers’ irrational choices is not practical concerns such as resale, one author argues. It’s emotions.
Our buying decisions on any house are entirely emotionally based, according to Jonah Lehrer, author of “How We Decide” (Houghton Mifflin) and a former neuroscience researcher. In the first two or three minutes you are in a model home, your sensory organs are feeding data into the emotional centers of your brain. As you glance at the living room, these emotional centers rapidly register the details: red sofa (you love red), chair like grandpa’s, rug like the one your ex-wife took, view out back of dead grass, walls blue (you hate that shade). Then, on the spot, the emotional networks vote up or down. The deal starts or ends with the firing of a few billion neurons.
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If our nearly instantaneous visceral response is positive, our dopamine receptors go into overdrive, Lehrer said. They make us want that house, and they make us want it immediately. That’s why an experienced real estate agent watches buyers with such intensity in those first few moments, ready to pull out a sales contract in a nanosecond, Lehrer said in an interview.
Once your emotions have voiced their opinions, a different set of neurons in the frontal cortex, which control your brain’s “executive function,” start to kick in. They generate seemingly logical reasons why a particular house is the one, Lehrer said. As you continue to think about this purchase, your list of good reasons gets longer: It has all the formal living and dining space that we need for resale! We’ll have a place to put great aunt Julia’s living room set, which we just inherited! We can have romantic dinners for two by the fireplace in the family room!
Simultaneously, our dopamine receptors keep up the drumbeat: Hey you, model home sales agent, this is a beautiful house! Make this mortgage work!
Unfortunately, our immediate emotional responses have a major downside, Lehrer said. Our dopamine receptors tell us how we feel and what we want in the moment, but they don’t signal anything about the potential consequences of satisfying our desires.
After you have moved into your new house, the negatives you avoided when you bought it begin to emerge, Lehrer said. You realize that living in that location adds two hours to your daily commute, leaving you too exhausted to enjoy all that space or have that romantic dinner. When you start getting sky-high utility bills, you realize that choosing the seductive kitchen over the insulation upgrade wasn’t so smart.
House size is another home-buying irrationality. Beyond a certain point, more square footage will not increase the owners’ utility or their enjoyment, but buyers always seem to want the biggest house they can afford. Although neuroscience has not yet explained the irresistible pull of bigness, Lehrer said we’re clearly wired to be status seekers and to want things that make us look better in the eyes of others. At a distance of 500 feet, nothing telegraphs success better than a big house.
Lehrer said researchers in psychology and economics call these ego massagers “positional goods.” Ownership confers a certain status, but functionally speaking, there’s little difference between the pricey version and the less costly one. The positional good most often cited in academic literature is watches, Lehrer said. A Rolex and a Timex both show the time, but the Rolex, which costs 100 times as much, says, “I’m the guy who can afford a Rolex,” Lehrer said.
People who buy big houses and Rolex watches soon discover another downside of dopamine-induced desire. The excitement is short-lived. Once these pesky receptors make us feel satisfied, they push us to seek happiness in something else.
Is there any way for home buyers to escape this dopamine trap?
The insistent urge to seek pleasure in new things and our “gut reaction” that insists on immediate gratification will always be with us, Lehrer said. But he said you can make this powerful combination work in your favor if you can detach yourself long enough to determine the nature of an overwhelming attraction — “Is it lust or love? Substance or the superficial?”
If the object of your desire is a new house, ask yourself whether you love the kitchen because the appliances and food preparation area are arranged to make fixing meals easier or because the sleek, stainless steel appliances, bright red European-styled cabinets and luminous granite counters look sexy.
Lehrer ended our interview with an observation that many home buyers forget. The house that will make you happiest is not the biggest, the most option-laden or the one with the bucolic views. It’s the one where you can celebrate life’s events — holiday gatherings, birthday parties, bedtime stories, conquering an impossible soufflé recipe and finally harvesting the tomatoes you nurtured for months in your back yard. All these things can happen in any house, he said, even in one that doesn’t have a living room.
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