Switch - Chip Heath [51]
The researchers were curious about what would happen if the maids were told, to their surprise, that they were exercise superstars. One group of maids got the good news: They received a document describing the benefits of exercise, and they were told that their daily work was sufficient to get those benefits. Exercise doesn’t have to be hard or painful, they were informed—and it certainly doesn’t have to be in a gym. It simply requires you to move your muscles in a way that burns calories. The maids in this group were given estimates of the amount of calories they burned doing various activities: 40 calories for changing linens for 15 minutes, 100 calories for a half hour of vacuuming, and so on. Meanwhile, maids in another group received the same information about the benefits of exercise, but they weren’t told that their own work was a good form of exercise (nor did they get the calorie-burning stats).
Four weeks later, the researchers checked in again with the maids and found something incredible. The maids who’d been told that they were good exercisers had lost an average of 1.8 pounds. That’s almost a half pound a week, which is a pretty substantial rate of loss. The other maids hadn’t lost any weight.
Crum and Langer investigated possible explanations. The weight loss wasn’t simply a statistical fluctuation. There were too many maids for a fluke explanation of that kind, and furthermore, the maids who lost weight had a corresponding drop in body fat. Nor had the maids caught the “exercise bug”—they weren’t exercising any more outside of work than they had before.
The researchers also ruled out a bunch of other possibilities: The maids weren’t working any more hours. They hadn’t changed their consumption of alcohol, caffeine, or tobacco. Their dietary habits hadn’t changed in any meaningful way—they weren’t eating more vegetables or consuming fewer sugary foods. But still they were losing weight.
What was making them slim down?
2.
A local car wash ran a promotion featuring loyalty cards. Every time customers bought a car wash, they got a stamp on their cards, and when they filled up their cards with eight stamps, they got a free wash.
Another set of customers at the same car wash got a slightly different loyalty card. They needed to collect ten stamps (rather than eight) to get a free car wash—but they were given a “head start.” When they received their cards, two stamps had already been added.
The “goal” was the same for both sets of customers: Buy eight additional car washes, get a reward. But the psychology was different: In one case, you’re 20 percent of the way toward a goal, and in the other case, you’re starting from scratch. A few months later, only 19 percent of the eight-stamp customers had earned a free wash, versus 34 percent of the head-start group. (And the head-start group earned the free wash faster.)
People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one. That’s why the conventional wisdom in development circles is that you don’t publicly announce a fundraising campaign for a charity until you’ve already got 50 percent of the money in the bag. (After all, who wants to give the first $100 to a $1 million fund-raising campaign?)
One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they’re already closer to the finish line than they might have thought.
3.
The researchers Crum and Langer chalked up the maids’ weight loss to a placebo effect. In other words, they concluded that awareness of the exercise value of their activities triggered the weight loss, independent of any physical changes in the maids’ behavior.
The placebo effect is one of the most reliable phenomena in modern medicine, so at first glance, this explanation seems reasonable. We’ve all got friends who swear by the healing powers of questionable remedies—stinkweed supplements or goat horn extract. Maybe the maids got a similar mental boost from their new knowledge.
But notice what