Both prepping and relationships work better when both people are true partners, on the same page with regard to goals. Most couples don’t start out there, though. It’s common for one partner to be ‘more into it’ than the other. The reluctant spouse.
From there, if you don’t get your partner’s buy-in, there are only three outcomes: Giving up the prepping yourself, leaving the friction in the relationship, or hiding things from your partner. Lousy, lousy, and lousy.
I would never encourage misleading or manipulating your partner. You live with them Every day, what’s more important than that? I don’t see a thing wrong, though, with using what’s known about how people make decisions to keep some of the weird quirks of our brains *out of the way* when you’re trying to get your partner to buy in to being prepared. In this podcast, Salty and I talk over four aspects of behavioral psychology and how to make them work for rather than against you:
Future Discounting
If you offer people $100 now or $105 in a week, both guaranteed, most will take the $100 now (despite that impressive annualized rate of return). We don’t value rewards to our future selves nearly as much as we value rewards to our present selves. That’s called future discounting.
The ‘instant refund’ places make their living off of our future discounting. They take a hefty ‘service fee’ from the refund, but pay it immediately.
It’s a problem to preppers because we’ve got to invest effort and money now to use in the future…maybe use in the future. Your reluctant spouse has no doubt noticed this, so it makes sense that said spouse might prefer to spend the time and treasure on your current selves. Sometimes it’s worth it to do the harder thing, though, so what can be done?
Apparently, one of the reasons we value Now more than Later is that we can clearly visualize the value of the treasure right now. Our brains admit that our future selves might want or need specific things, but that’s a theoretical thing rather than a vivid reality. T
o overcome future discounting then: Make the needs and wants of Future You concrete. It’s not just “if the power goes out, it’d be great to have a backup heat source”. It’s more like “When the next big ice storm hits and the power goes out, we won’t be heading to some Red Cross shelter to sleep on cots among a couple of hundred snoring refugees; we’ll just walk right over here and turn on the ventless heater, set some water right next to it to heat for hot chocolate, and have a Board Game War with the kids.”
Uneven risk weighting
Humans are weird. People will choose an expensive medical treatment that lowers their risk for a disease from 10% to 0%, but not one that lowers their risk from 90% to 50%. Sooo….they’ll pay up for a 10% drop in risk, but not for a 40% drop. Why? We tend to seriously overweight the importance of minor changes in percentages, if the change occurs at one of the far ends of the scale. A 1% change between 0 and 1% or between 99 and 100% mean a lot more to us than between 45 and 46%.
Why is is a problem for a prepper trying to convince a spouse? Because we are, by nature, dealing with a lot of potential scenarios that are moderately likely. I could spin a dozen stories of likely scenarios that may cause us to be stuck in the house for several days, but they’re not almost certain to occur, nor can good preparation make it 100% sure we wouldn’t suffer from the experience.
Most prepper scenarios are smack in the middle of the region where improvements are likely to be underappreciated. And they should be, by the way. If you’re focussing all our attention on “EMP destroys all technology” or “The Yellowstone Caldera has a massive explosion”, you’re taking the sucker end of a bet.
What then can we do to help the people we’re talking with value the reduction of a ‘somewhat likely’ risk? Reframe it. Remember the people from the start of this section that wouldn’t pay up for a drop in risk from 90% to 50%? Those same people decided they would pay up for a treatment that showed 4 out of 10 people doing better. That’s the exact same information, just phrased in concrete, small numbers instead of intermediate percentages. It also focuses on the ‘win’ of the situation. Which brings us to:
Loss Aversion
Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: You bought something expecting to resell it later. When the time came that you wanted to unload the thing (anything from a stock to a bass boat), you couldn’t get as much as you wanted for it. You ended up keeping it even as its value dropped further, because you didn’t want to take the loss.
Now look around at the internet community. Most of the rest of us are raising our hands here too. People hate admitting losses; hate losses a lot more than they like an equivalent amount of gain. How’s that fit in to prepping?
For one thing, people can be put off by thinking about what they’ll have lost if they invest in these preps and they never need them. There are other ways to think about the same situations though. One can focus (in a concrete way, remember) on all the pluses of having the preps when needed. Another approach is to concentrate on the gains you get right now when you prep. Peace of mind is a significant gain. Having material items (such as food stores) that you can use eventually whether a crisis comes or not is also a concrete gain that often arises from prepping. It’s all about the framing, and if you’re having a discussion with someone who’s reluctant, you’re helping frame the ideas for them.
Anchoring
Salty’s setting up as a professional photographer, and to do that properly he needs a $800 lens of a particular size. He has two choices on how to present that to Spice: “I could get the $200 version, but it’s not very good. I really need the $800 one.” or “I could get the $200 version, which isn’t very good; or the $800 one, which is darned good, or the $1500 version which everyone agrees is the best things since sliced bread.”
Spice, like most of you would, feels better about the $800 lens if it’s presented in the second format. The presence of the $1500 Lens of Unobtainium in the discussion helps anchor her sense of how much is reasonable to pay for a good camera lens. Marketers know this; they very often list high-end products that almost no one buys to provide a higher anchor — it makes people far more willing to pay for the ‘intermediate’ level.
I would not recommend making up extra-expensive ways to prep to try to manipulate your spouse; it’s not how I roll. However, if there are options you might be tempted to leave off the table because you know your spouse won’t go for them, but you yourself find them a reasonable option, you might consider having them be part of the discussion. While you may well be right that your spouse won’t buy it (or them), it may provide an anchor that puts other options in a more favorable light.
Almost no one will buy that $89 sparkling wine…but notice how it made all those $30 bottles look a lot more reasonable?
* With appreciation of Scott Huettel and his book of the Great Courses series: Behavioral Economics: When Psychology and Economics Collide
The Reluctant Spouse, Part III: When the Reluctance Isn’t About Reason
The Reluctant Spouse, Part II: Four Ways to Counter Objections
The Reluctant Spouse, Part I: Three Approaches to Bridge the Gap
Podcast: Preppers, Play This Podcast To Your Reluctant Spouse
