Research at SOM

The Psychology of Pill Popping

Be happier. Concentrate better. Worry less. If you could take a pill that would help make you a better you, would you?

Not if it would alter a trait that defines who you are, according to Joseph Simmons, an assistant professor of marketing.

Simmons’s research focuses on judgment and decision-making, a subfield of psychology, marketing, and economics. His latest work is one of the first efforts to understand the psychology underlying consumer demand for drugs that can enhance social, emotional, and cognitive traits. In a study to be published this fall in the Journal of Consumer Research, Simmons and coauthors Jason Riis of NYU and Geoffrey Goodwin of Princeton found that young, healthy people are reluctant to take drugs to alter traits that they consider fundamental to their self-identity.

“The more fundamental the trait, the less people want to artificially enhance it,” explains Simmons.

Simmons and his coauthors looked at 19 traits that could plausibly be enhanced by taking a pill. These ranged from cognitive-performance and motor skills such as concentration, memory, math ability, and speed of reflexes to social and emotional traits such as social comfort, self-esteem, empathy, and mood. Study participants rated social and emotional traits as the most self-defining and as the ones that they would be most reluctant to enhance by taking a drug. For example, 54% of people would take a pill to improve their ability to speak a foreign language, but only 19% would do so to improve their self-esteem.

The reluctance to enhance self-defining traits did not arise because participants valued those traits less. In fact, participants acknowledged valuing such traits more than the less self-defining traits. “It’s interesting that social and emotional traits seem to be more desirable on the one hand, but people are less willing to enhance them on the other. Everyone would like to have greater self-esteem, but they don’t want to take a pill to improve it.”

Advertising slogans can make people more willing to alter fundamental traits by easing the threat to their self-identity. People expressed greater willingness to take a hypothetical social-comfort drug when a tagline framed it as enabling one’s true self — “Become who you are” — than when it was framed as enhancing one’s true self — “Become more than who you are.” Simmons noticed this tactic at work — intentionally or not — in the advertising for the anti-anxiety pill Paxil.

“Paxil’s slogan ‘Get back to feeling like you’ is brilliant in light of what we found,” says Simmons. “You can argue that it’s good in the sense that it might encourage people with anxiety disorders who need the drug to take it. But some policymakers might have concerns with such an effective slogan because it could convince healthy people to take the drug purely for self-improvement purposes. That might be good for Paxil, but from a societal standpoint it’s much more controversial.”

Simmons and his coauthors are expanding their research and have just completed a study that explores the effects of perceptions of decline on the willingness to take enhancement drugs. They asked older people if they have gotten better, stayed the same, or declined on each of the 19 traits, and then assessed people’s willingness to enhance themselves. The first analysis of the data indicates that people who know they have declined on fundamental traits are more willing to take drugs to enhance them.

“If you ask someone who is 65 years old who their true self is, they’ll probably say it’s their self at age 18 or 25,” says Simmons. “If you think that you’ve gone from who you truly are to something worse, you may be willing to take a drug to help you to once again become who you think you truly are.”

The research also raises a more existential question: Who are we? That’s of interest to Simmons, too.

“There are many people who take psychoactive drugs and say ‘Now I am who I really am.’ That’s very bizarre — who were you before? And would you never have been who you actually are if these drug technologies had never been developed?”

“We’re trying to take this research in a lot of directions,” he adds. “We’re among the first to look at this area of inquiry. There’s a lot to do.”

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