In Chris Anderson’s article Free!, he aptly christens America the “land of the free” (Anderson, 2008). But this name isn’t based on our personal freedoms -- rather it refers to the economy of ‘free’ that has now fully emerged in the US. We now live in a world where the price of a good or service isn’t defined by its actual cost, but by our psychology (Anderson, 2008). This concept was extremely intriguing to me, so I decided to use this blog post to investigate more into the ‘psychology of free’.
When reading these articles I was overwhelmed by the number of situations I could recall when I chose/accepted something just because it was free. Most of the time it wasn’t even something that I wanted -- honestly, when am I ever going to use a plastic draw-string backpack sporting a giant Geico logo? The answer is absolutely never. So why did I it take it in the first place?
The answer, according to Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, is that I took or accepted the free item because it wasn’t scary. Ariely says that the “real allure of free is tied to fear” -- fear that we will risk something and lose (Ariely, 2008). We choose free things when we assign them a higher value because they do not come with the same risk tied to spending money on something that we might decide we don’t like/want/need later.
But is choosing the free thing really risk free? Apparently not. Just because “there is no visible possibility of loss when we choose a free item” doesn’t mean that we aren’t paying for it in either a physical or metaphorical way (Ariely, 2008). According to Ariely, the impact that ‘free’ has on us can lead us to make decisions that are not in our best interest. When I first read this I was reluctant to accept it -- if I’m not paying for it, how is it costing me anything? Well let me tell you. I went to a free high school choir show once, and that’s two hours of my life that I’ll never get back. I borrowed a pair of shoes from a friend and paid for them with some serious blisters. I took the free mascara sample instead of buying the brand I like and ended up with a middle part in my eyelashes. Those are costs and that makes the free stuff not free.
There are definitely more serious situations when supposedly free things end up costing us. When we take the interstate rather than the tollway we risk missing our interview. When we download a movie for free rather than buying it we risk computer viruses (and jail time?). What do we risk when we consume free news? Do we risk anything?
My answer is yes. We all know, or say that we know, that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. But have we trained ourselves to live that out? Just because it is free doesn’t mean it is better -- and it’s probably costing us in ways that we don’t even realize. Free news is great because it’s free. But it can be not so great if the free news that we assign value to is inaccurate, biased, or irrelevant. What’s the cost of missing out on something you needed to know? What’s the cost of not even knowing that you are missing out?
Sources:
Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational. New York: HarperCollins.
Anderson, C. (2008). Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. Wired. http://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/
Schiller, C. (2015). The Psychology of Free: Why this One Magic Word is Your Most Powerful Secret Weapon. https://www.blinkist.com/page19/the-psychology-of-free-why-this-one-magic-word-is-your-most-powerful-secret-weapon
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