What He Sees
Lefty Ruggiero had a mortal terror of air conditioners. Pistone recalls that in summer, in New York and in Tampa, they sat in stuffy cars and rooms: Pistone would switch the air conditioning on, Lefty would switch it straight off, and it very nearly came to blows. Pistone would be pouring with sweat while Lefty sat there dry and always said the same thing: just roll the window down. They shared rooms, and Lefty, who forever had a cold, was capable of turning the heating on in the middle of summer because, as he put it, the place felt damp.
Once in Florida they were put up in a spacious suite at the Deauville hotel. Pistone and his partner sat by the pool for a while and went upstairs. Lefty was storming around the suite, where it was fresh and cool. According to Pistone, Lefty accused him of doing it on purpose: why had he turned the air conditioner on, and now it couldn’t be turned off? Pistone objected that he hadn’t even been in the room since the morning. Then, said Lefty, he must have sneaked in and cranked it up so that Lefty would freeze off everything he had. The remote was nowhere to be found. Lefty complained that he had been lying there for two hours and his backside was covered in icicles. And to top it off came the sentence: don’t come near me this evening, you can eat on your own.
While Lefty raged, Pistone’s partner got down on all fours, fished the remote out from under the sofa and switched the air conditioner off.
The Human Thermostat
I laughed when I read that, because Lefty, without knowing it, had acted out a device they write about in psychology textbooks. A man is like a thermostat. Inside him there is a set point—what the world ought to be like: so many degrees, so much respect, so much money. He is constantly comparing what he sees with the set point. If they differ, he acts until he has put the picture back where it belongs. When they match, he calms down.
From this follows something important that almost everyone gets backwards. People don’t control their actions; they control what they perceive. Lefty didn’t care who had turned on the air conditioner or where the remote was. What he cared about was getting his degrees back in the room. To do it he did what he knew how to do: shouted, accused, threatened to leave you without supper. The remote under the sofa didn’t interest him, because he wasn’t looking for a remote. He was looking for a way to stop being cold.
When you’re dealing with someone who is behaving strangely, ask yourself: what picture is he trying to put back in place? A client who makes a scene over a trifle is often not making it over the trifle, but because something in his world has drifted from its set point: nobody recognised him, he was kept waiting, he was talked down to. Find that set point and the scene is over. Argue about the trifle and he’ll keep shouting until you’re the one who’s frozen.
You Can’t Argue with a Set Point
People have different set points, and that’s the main difference between them. For Lefty, comfort was twenty-five degrees Celsius and the windows shut; for Pistone, twenty degrees and the air conditioning on. Neither of them was wrong. Each was simply defending his own set point.
One more thing. People change things exactly as much as they need to for the picture to match the set point again, and no more. It’s the law of saving effort, and it applies to everyone. A worker whose set point is “nobody’s telling me off” will work right up to the line beyond which people start telling him off. If you want him to work better, don’t change his effort, change his set point: what “a job well done” means to him.
Tommaso Buscetta—the same one who later talked—once spent three years in the same cell as a mafioso who had killed a close friend of his. In those three years, Dickie writes, they didn’t exchange a single insult, and they even celebrated Christmas together. Buscetta knew that Cosa Nostra had already sentenced his cellmate. Whether the cellmate knew it himself, nobody can tell. He was killed shortly after he got out. Why should Buscetta waste his strength on a quarrel? As he saw it, the matter was already settled; the picture matched the set point. People don’t fight over what they consider settled. A rather grim example of saving effort, but a very precise one.
Shave the Moustache
There is a way to change how people behave without persuading them: change the surroundings they live in. Behaviour flows along a channel, like water. Change the channel and the water will flow differently, no sermons needed.
When Lefty took Donnie under his wing, he set about, in Pistone’s words, making a man out of him. And he started not with morals but with looks. The first order was to shave off the moustache and get a haircut: wiseguys don’t wear moustaches, that’s for old Sicilians. Dress with style; when going out, a sports jacket and slacks. In the presence of a captain or the boss of a family, keep quiet and stand to one side unless you’ve been invited into the conversation. Introduce people by the formula: “This is Donnie, a friend of mine” means he’s all right but not made; “a friend of ours” means made, and you can talk family business in front of him. Never say anything openly on the phone. Report on all your business, don’t leave town without permission, split the takings.
Lefty never read a book about behaviour, but he built the channel so well that within a month the newcomer moved, talked and kept quiet like one of them. A razor, a jacket, two formulas of introduction and the rule of keeping quiet in front of your elders did more than a hundred talks about honour ever would have.
It’s the same in the office. If you want people to work more carefully, give them a comfortable workplace with everything to hand. If you want meetings to be shorter, take the chairs out of the meeting room. If you want a newcomer to learn the ropes, give him simple rules for the first week and a person who answers for him. People change not because they’re convinced, but because of the surroundings they get used to.
When Two Thermostats Fight
A conflict is when two set points pull in different directions. Sometimes in two people, sometimes in one.
Remember the scene in the diner when Mirra promised, in front of everyone, to carve Pistone up. Pistone said nothing, but inside him two set points collided. One: a man who isn’t made doesn’t snap back at a made man—those are the rules. The other: if you put up with humiliation in public, they’ll take you for a pushover, and that’s the end of respect. Fighting was out: win, and sooner or later Mirra would finish you off; lose, and you’d throw away all your respect. Putting up with it was out too.
Pistone found a way out that’s worth remembering. The next day he tracked Mirra down at his diner on Madison Street and asked him to take a walk. No witnesses, one on one, so that Mirra could save face. And what he said, as Pistone remembers it, went something like this: Tony, I understand you’re a wiseguy and I’m not, not yet; you’re entitled to respect; but enough of humiliating me in front of people. Mirra was quiet for a moment and then told him all right, forget it, he was an okay guy.
Look at what Pistone did. He didn’t choose between the two set points. He found a setting in which both could be satisfied: out on the street, with no audience, Mirra didn’t need to defend his face before the tribe, and Pistone got his respect. Many conflicts can’t be settled in the room where they started. Change the room.
When Something Breaks
One last thing. Sometimes no amount of effort can hold a set point. The world stubbornly refuses to match what it ought to be. Then a man begins, slowly and painfully, to rebuild the set point itself. It’s long and it hurts, and it almost always happens later than it should.
Salvatore Cancemi was the head of a district and a member of the Commission that approved the murder of judges Falcone and Borsellino. One day he heard Riina holding forth about turncoats: they were the problem, and so they had to be killed along with their relatives down to the twentieth generation, starting with children of six. Dickie writes that on that day something in Cancemi cracked. But it was only the following summer that he made himself walk through the gates of a carabinieri barracks. And afterwards he handed over his entire fortune to the state, about thirty-three million pounds by his own estimate.
The year between “cracked” and the barracks gates—that’s how long the rebuilding takes in a man who has lived his whole life by one set point. Don’t expect people to change their picture of the world in a single meeting. And don’t expect it of yourself either. But if you feel that the world stubbornly refuses to match what’s inside you, don’t waste a year. Ask yourself whether it’s time to change not the world, but the set point.