Turns out the Mission and Service people (among many) who continuously have to remind us about how low our voluntary givings are are right!
In his Christian Century March 11, 2008, M.E.M.O. column, Martin E. Marty reports on CalTech professor Antonio Rangel's experiment that showed how price activates the brain's pleasure centre.
When the people in the study were not told the prices of the wines they were sampling, the cheapest wine was the preferred choice.
But when prices were included, the more expensive samples were preferred. The catch was that unknown to the participants, the most expensive wine was included twice: once at its actual price and again at a cheap price.
The experimenters used brain scanning equipment to record people's brain activity during the wine tasting and were able to observe that the pleasure centre of the brain was indeed more active when the more expensively labeled wines were being tasted.
Maybe there are more than just theological reasons why those of us who price the "cost of discipleship" at bargain basement prices are losing our market share? The brain is programmed to associate cost with satisfaction!
Turns out our founder had the right price point for success right from the beginning: Those who want to be my disciples must pick up their cross and follow me. It doesn't get more costly than that.
Hi Jennifer,
I agree with you about advanced capitalism.
What is intriguing is the physiology of the brain’s response to “price.” Previously, it was thought that such responses had been “hard wired” into the brain through the long evolutionary process. It is quite remarkable that how quickly “price” has become a trigger for these automatic, sub-conscious responses. Advertising has done a remarkable job of changing the brain!
The implication is that in spite of mere conscious awareness, all of us – regardless of our analysis – will have a gut level higher valuation of anything with a higher price.
If this is the case, then “high commitment” churches attract initially not because of their theology, etc. but simply because there is an hard-wired, built-in, pre-conscious, attraction to anything with a higher cost.
The United Church’s “soft sell” approach is guaranteed to only attract those who make conscious decisions – and those type of decisions lack the passion and commitment of pre-conscious ones. Which is not a bad thing. But it does raise questions about how to deepen a merely conscious decision to follow Jesus into a truly “lose my life to save it” commitment.
Posted by: David Ewart | March 18, 2008 at 02:01 PM
Hi David - I agree that discipleship (root word discipline) requires cost/sacrifice; but the wine comparison is probably affected by a market-consciousness that people in advanced capitalism have developed about the relative worth of different items based on cost. For instance, people might think that they are getting "better" education for their children if they send them to an expensive private school (though objectively that's not true) when what their children need is a "sacrifice" of more time being spent with them by their parents. Thank you for a good illustration for Holy Week.
Posted by: Jennifer Palin | March 18, 2008 at 01:59 PM