#everyday behaviour

Your everyday behavior broadcasts exactly who you are, far louder than your words ever could. Stop making excuses for the weak patterns you keep repeating. Check yourself, face the heavy pursuit, and build a truly solid, unbreakable foundation.

The task: Press some buttons!

Let's say we invite you to the lab and let you rate how much you like certain snack food items. Doritos, Snickers, M&Ms... and the like. You like M&M's as much as Snickers, you don't really have a preference. But you do like snack foods in general, and you are starving because we just let you fast for four hours.

You do a little task, quite simple. We show you all kinds of snack food items and ask you to press a button whenever you see an item that is associated with a beep (training phase). Press it quickly, before the item disappears from the screen again. Do this for a couple of rounds.

Then, as you might guess, we let you choose between two snack food items at a time. When you came in, you liked them both to the same extent. Now, one of the items you see at once was always associated with a beep (e.g. you choose between those M&M’s and a Snickers bar, while Snickers was associated with a beep while M&M's weren't).

The outcome: Preferences changed!

Result? Suddenly you are not indifferent between the two items anymore, but you end up choosing Snickers way over chance rate (around .65, and the effect sometimes lasts for two months). Note that this was done without hitting you on the head every time you chose M&M's (i.e. without negative external reinforcement because it is likely that you would unlearn this behavior when being punished every time you engage in it), or without telling you about how great of a job you did every time you chose M&M’s (i.e. positive reinforcement).  You simply chose for later consumption (which item do you like more?)- and you are hungry, of course.

The question arising from these experiments is how values are placed on certain goods, and how our valuations can change through automatic, most likely unconscious mechanisms (only some participants were aware of some items always being associated with a beep during training). The mechanisms underlying this effect on later choice are not yet fully understood, but follow-up studies show that the effects are not only mechanistic reflexes nor are they related to mere-exposure effects (that is, you simply like an item more because you look at it more, you have been “exposed” to it longer- you might have experienced it when suddenly humming along to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” just because you've heard it too often).

As always, handle results with care. This is far from making you choose anything you don’t want in a supermarket or even trying to make you choose an apple over a Snickers bar in a supermarket. As long as you do not have any inherent goal, say to alleviate hunger or to eat healthily, it will be hard to influence choices in a systematic manner (and that's a good thing, of course!). But I’ve mentioned Snickers so often in this article, that you might go ahead and treat yourself to some… Snickers soon? Snickers. Snickers.

The science behind:

Schonberg, T., Bakkour, A., Hover, A. M., Mumford, J. A., Nagar, L., Perez, J., & Poldrack, R. A. (2014). Changing value through cued approach: an automatic mechanism of behavior change. Nature Neuroscience, 17(4), 625–630. doi:10.1038/nn.3673