I hadn’t heard of this before, but in a very interesting article on his blog Predictably Irrational (after the excellent book of the same name) behavioral economist and theorist about rationality Dan Ariely describes what he calls the endowment effect:
[T]he endowment effect [is] the theory that once we own something, its value increases in our eyes. […]
But ownership isn’t the only way to endow an object or service with meaning. You can also create value by investing time and effort into something (hence why we cherish those scraggly scarves we knit ourselves) or by knowing that someone else has (gifts fall under this category).
And then there’s the power of stories: spend a fantastic weekend somewhere, and no matter what you bring back – whether it’s an upper-case souvenir or a shell off the beach – you’ll value it immensely, simply because of its associations.
I’ve got to think that this effect is something in which argumentation theorists and researchers should have an interest, as it seems to fit handily into accounts of all sorts of biases and blind spots that hobble the abilities of persons to think critically about their own positions or standpoints as well as those of others. Of particular interest is that research like Ariely’s might help to explain why a conclusion often seems more compelling to many people when the speaker relates her particular path to arriving at it in the form of a narrative rather than by giving an argument for it.
You can read the full story, which includes the account of Ariely’s recent experiment on the endowment effect here.
RAIL 
As I see it, argumentation theory would deal with these sorts of things much the same way it deals with others: functionalizing the “story” as arguments and analyzing it thus. As long as he expresses it, the implicit function of the story would be that of an argument and from this point on, the argumentation theorist will be on his (old, own) domain and not in that of cognitive biases. I’m not sure everyone understands the same thing about “biases”, but if “bounded rationality” is the general understanding, I am appealing to it now. So arg. theorists would externalize self-deliberation and re-read implicatures as “argument-directed”, construe stories as arguments in context, and hence would have little to say as to “why” the decision took that path. The “why” part (again, as I see it) falls under the umbrella of other sciences.
Thanks for blogroll entry. I will compile myself one soon and return the favour!
It’s a good blog you have there–certainly one with a kinship of interests to this one. I hope people check it out.
Certainly stories are arguments in context, but they are also strategies of persuasion for establishing identification with/in the audience. Thus I would read Ariely’s sense of “endowment” as investing an object – or even a claim – with motivation and thus meaning, in K. Burke’s sense of motives.
Whether that endowment skews the validity of the argument itself, however, would depend on how strictly we read validity. As a rhetorician, I’d suggest that certain arguments would not be considered valid without this process of endowment – and thus identification. A person’s willingness to even listen to an argument may depend such endowments.
I’m not sure if that’s a complete answer to “Why” people reach a decision – but that’s perhaps where cognitive science can also contribute to this topic.
I would agree that stories and narratives can be strategies of persuasion, but I’m still thinking through whether or not they should be taken as arguments. I’m not convinced, as the title of one recent book has it, that “everything is (or can be) an argument”. For one thing, ‘argument’ seems to me to mark off a practice which can be used for persuasion but need not be. For another, I want to leave room for there to be a rich variety of forms of reason-giving, investigation and persuasion apart from argument. I think the temptation to collapse all of these things is one that in a lot of instances trades on an equivocation in “why” questions, such as “Why do you think that X?” There are at least three things (and I suspect many more) a speaker could mean when she asks a question like this, depending on where the stress is put in the question:
1) How is that you have come to think that X?
2) What reasons do you have for thinking that X is the case?
3) What reasons are there for anyone to think that X?
Narratives are perfectly good answers to reading 1) of the question, but in answering one I would not be offering reasons in defense of my holding that X (i.e. an argument) so much as I would be giving an explanatory account of the process by which I came to hold the belief that X. This account might contain arguments, but they will figure only as elements of the story. Suppose someone were to say in such a context a sentence like this one: “When I heard Christian say that choices were neither true nor false because they were not propositional, it dawned on me that he had it upon something very important about deliberation.”. Here there’s something roughly analogous to the use/mention distinction happening. The speaker *mentions* the argument in the course of his story of how he came to hold X, but he does not *use* it in an attempt to show that X.
The 2)-type “why” question seems to require not a narrative account of how the respondent came to hold that X, but something more akin to logical account. It asks the respondent to show the questioner those arguments that she takes to be sufficient to establish X. It’s like saying “show me your favorite arguments for X, the arguments that *you* take to really get X off the ground”. In such accounts I think it would be natural for a 2)-type answer to be mixed with or to blend by glissement into a more narrative 1)-type answer. The difference is that the arguments in this case will actually be *used* in the course of giving a rational defense of one’s belief that X, and not just mentioned in the course of the story of one’s journey to belief in X.
The 3)-type “why” is altogether different, since what it asks of the respondent is an account of the reasons why anyone should think that X. This question is roughly equivalent to asking “What are the arguments in favor of X”. No personal reference is asked for here (even though it will be present to some or other degree). The respondent instead is challenged to give as objective as possible an account of the arguments for X.
Very (VERY) roughly, I think of 1)-type accounts as intending to give a subjective account, 2)-type accounts as contributions to an intersubjective account, and 3)-types as intending to give as an objective account as is possible in the circumstances. To be clear I think all three kinds of account are perfectly reasonable, useful and “valid” (in a general sense, not in the strictly logical sense) in different occasions, which is why I want to resist collapsing all of them into a single category of ‘argument’ understood as coextensive with ‘methods of persuasion’. I just think we lose some valuable analytical tools and perspectives that way.
Your other point–that the kind of investment revealed by the endowment effect is sometimes necessary before a person will even enter into discourse is, I think, spot on. Coming to have a position at all seems intrinsically to involve some sort of narrative self-perception of the journey to holding it. It seems to me that even if one comes at first to hold a view in a purely logical–even in a deductive–manner, the role that position plays in one’s own internal narratives is a big part of why one *continues* to hold the position over time. The position just gets woven into the fabric of the other things that one thinks and the way one relates to one’s experiences.
That said, I suppose the lingering worry I have is that because we tend to form such strong attachments to narratives, sometimes this tendency can be used against us to get us to choose against our own best interests. This I think is the overlap between the observations of the endowment effect in behavioral economics and thinking about narratives as tools of persuasion in rhetoric and argumentation theory. While the LAST thing I want to do is ban narrative from public discourse, I do think that Ariely’s results give us good reason to think that narrative (like any form of persuasion, including argument when argument is used persuasively) has to be treated with great care. Otherwise we wind up with Joe the plumber instead of information that would help us really evaluate policy proposals, right?
[…] 16, 2010 by Steve A while ago I posted a short entry here entitled Nice Argument. I’ll Believe You When You Have a Story. That post linked to a post about the endowment effect on Dan Ariely’s blog in behavioral […]