How to motivate yourself to change your behavior | Tali Sharot

We all have some

behavior

that we would like to

change

about ourselves and certainly we all want to help someone else

change

their

behavior

in a positive way, so maybe it's

your

child,

your

spouse, your colleague, so I want to share with you some new research. I think it reveals something really important about what makes people change their behavior, but before we do that, let's focus on a strategy that I think you probably use a lot, so let's say you're trying to avoid snacking, what do you tell

yourself

right? ? most people in a monologue will say watch out you'll get fat and if this were your kid you'd probably tell him that smoking kills and by the way he's in big trouble so what we're trying to do here is try. scare ourselves and others into changing their behavior, and not just us, warnings and threats are very common in political health campaigns, it's because we all share this deep-seated belief that if you threaten people, they will induces fear, this will make them act and that seems like a really reasonable assumption except for the fact that science shows that warnings have a very limited impact on behavior, so graphic images on cigarette packages, for example They don't discourage smokers from smoking and one study found that after looking at those pictures, quitting smoking actually became a lower priority for smokers, so I'm not saying that warnings and threats never work, but what What I'm saying is that, on average, they seem to have a very limited impact, so the question is why do we resist the warnings well? about animals, when you induce fear in an animal, the most common response you will see is freeze or run away, fight not so much and therefore humans are the same, so something scares us, we tend to shut down and try to eliminate negative feelings to be able to use rationalization, so, for example, you could tell

yourself

that my grandfather smoked, he lived to be 90, so I have very good genes and nothing to worry about in this process can make you feel more resilient than before, that's why the warnings sometimes have this.

Boomerang effect and other times we just put our head in the stock market, for example, you know when people stick their head out of the ground to look at their accounts, not to make a transaction, just to log in and verify their account, then, what What we are seeing here in black is the S P 500 for two years and in gray there are several times that people logged into their account just to verify and this is data from carlston and sepi, it is the control of all the obvious content, So what do we see? So when the market is high people log in all the time because positive information makes you feel good so you look for it and when the market is low people avoid logging in because negative information makes us feel bad so We try to avoid it completely and this is all true as long as bad information can be reasonably avoided, so what you don't see here is what happened a few months later, in the financial collapse of 2008, when the market fell dramatically and was so when people started frantically logging in, but it was already a little late, so you can think about it this way, it's not just about finances, in many different parts of our life, we have warning signs and bad behaviors now and they could potentially lead to all these bad outcomes later on, but not necessarily because there are different routes from your present to your future, well, it can go this way, it can go that way and as time goes on you gather more and more information. about where the wind is blowing and at any point you can intervene and you could potentially change the outcome, but that takes energy and you could tell yourself what's the point of worrying about something that might happen.

It may not happen until we get to this point where you take action, but sometimes it's a little late, so we wanted to know. In my lab, what kind of information is leaked to people? So we conducted an experiment in which we asked about 100 people to estimate the probability of 80 different negative events that could happen to them in the future. For example, I could ask you what the probability is that you will suffer hearing loss in the future and let's say you think it's about 50 percent, then I give you the opinion of two different experts, so the expert tells you that you know, For someone like you, I think it's only forty percent, so they give you a Rosier. vision of your future expert B says you know for someone like you I actually think it's around 60 it's worse then they give you a bleaker vision of your future what you should do right you shouldn't change your beliefs right wrong what we found is that the People tend to change their beliefs toward the more desirable opinion, in other words, people listen to positive information.

Now this study was done on college students, so you could say, well, college students are delusional, right? We all know it and surely as we get older we grow. wiser, so we said, okay, let's test if this really generalizes, it generalizes to your child, it generalizes to your parents, it generalizes to your spouse, so we test people from 10 years old to 80 years old. and the answer was Yes, in all these age groups, people take the information they want to hear as someone telling you that you are more attractive than you thought than the information they don't want to hear and the ability to learn from the good news remained quite stable. throughout life, but the ability to learn from bad news changes as we age, so what we found was that children and adolescents were the worst at learning from bad news and the ability improved each time. more and more as people got older, but then around the age of 40 around middle age it started to deteriorate again, what this means is that the most vulnerable populations, children and adolescents on the one hand, and the elderly, on the other, they are the least likely to learn accurately from the warnings, but what you can see here is that it doesn't matter how old you are, you can be 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60 years old.

Everyone is given information they want to hear more than information they don't, so we end up with a view like this of ourselves, laughter, and our The mistake of teachers, mentors, and employers is that, instead of working with This positive image that people maintain with so much effort, we try to put a clear mirror in front of them, we tell them that they know that the image is going to get worse, worse and worse. It doesn't work It doesn't work because the brain will frantically try to distort the image using Photoshop and fancy lenses until the images are happy, but what will happen if we follow the way our brain works and don't work against it? washing your hands for example, so we all know that washing your hands is the main way to prevent the spread of disease and this is really important in hospitals, so in a hospital here in the United States a camera was installed to See how often the medical staff does it.

In fact, they disinfect their hands before and after entering a patient's room. Now the medical staff knew that a camera was installed. However, only one in ten washed their hands before and after entering a patient's room, but then an intervention and electronic dashboards were introduced that informed medical staff. how well they were doing every time you washed your hands the numbers popped up on the screen showing you your rate for your current shift and the weekly staff rate and what happened boom compliance rose to 90 percent , which is absolutely amazing and the research staff were also amazed and made sure to replicate it in another division of the hospital again with the same results, so why does this intervention work so well?

It works well because instead of using warnings about bad things that can happen in the future like illness it uses three principles that we know really drive your mind and your behavior, let me explain, so the first is social incentives in the hospital study, medical staff can see what other people are doing well, they can see the rate of change the pace of the week we are social people we really care what other people do we want to do the same and we want to do it better this is a picture of a study that we carried out led by doctoral student Micah Adelson and what it shows you is a signal in the emotional center of your brain when you listen to the opinion of others and what we discovered was that this signal can predict the probability that you will conform at a later time the likelihood that you will change your behavior So the British government is using this principle to get people to pay taxes on time.

In an old letter they sent to people who forgot to pay taxes on time, they just emphasized how important it was to pay taxes and that didn't help then. They added a sentence and that sentence says that 9 out of 10 people in Britain pay their taxes on time and that sentence improved compliance within that group by 15 percent and is striving to provide the British government with 5.6 billion pounds, thus highlighting what other people are doing. Doing is a really strong incentive, the other principle is immediate rewards, so every time the staff washed their hands they could see the numbers go up on the board and that made them feel good and knowing that beforehand made them do something that they wouldn't do otherwise. what we want to do now, this works because we value the immediate rewards, the rewards we can get now, more than the rewards we can get in the future, and people tend to think that's because we don't care about the future, but that's completely wrong.

I mean, we all worry about our future, right, we want to be happy, we want to be healthy in the future, we want to be successful, but the future is very far away. I mean, maybe you'll be bad now and you'll be okay in the future and maybe. They will all be dead together, so here and now they would prefer to drink that tangible drink, that tangible T-Bone instead of something that is uncertain in the future, if you think about it, it is not completely irrational, right? They are choosing something certain now. something that is not certain in the future, but what will happen if you reward people now for doing actions that are good for them in the future?

Studies show that giving people immediate rewards makes them more likely to quit smoking, more likely to start exercising, and this effect. lasts at least six months because not smoking is associated with a reward and exercising is associated with a reward and becomes a habit becomes a lifestyle so that we can reward ourselves and others now for behaving in ways that be good for us in the future and that is one way to close the time gap and the third principle is to monitor progress so that the electronic dashboard focuses the attention of medical staff on improving their performance.

This is an image from a study we conducted that shows brain activity that suggests efficient coding. of positive information about the future and what we found was that the brain does a very good job of this but it doesn't do a good job of processing negative information about the future so what does this mean? It means that if you're trying to get people's attention, you might want to highlight progress, not decline; For example, if you grab that kid with a cigarette, you might want to tell him that you know that if you quit smoking you'll get better at sports.

Highlight progress not decline Now before I summarize let me share this little anecdote with you so a few weeks ago I came home and found this bill in my refrigerator and I was very surprised because there are never bills in my refrigerator so I I was wondering why my my husband decided to put that in our refrigerator and looking at the bill I could see that what he was trying to do with this bill is make me more efficient with my electricity usage and how he's doing that. social incentives, immediate rewards and progress monitoring. I show them, here are the social incentives, so in gray is the energy use in the average NSG use of the people in my neighborhood and in blue is my energy use and in green is a more efficient neighbor and my reaction To this was my immediate reaction was I'm a little bit better than average, but still my husband was exactly the same, exactly the same reaction and I want to get to the green bar and then a smiley face appeared which was my immediate reward and it said to me: I'm fine and I wanted to put this on my refrigerator and I also have this smiling face.

I can see the opportunity there to get two smiling faces, so there is an opportunity to progress and it shows me my progress throughout the year. My energy usage changes throughout the year and the last thing this bill gave me was a feeling ofcontrol, so it gave me the feeling that I was in control of my electricity usage and that's a really important thing if you're trying. getting people to change their behavior because the brain is constantly trying to find ways to control its environment, is one of the principles of what the brain is actually doing, so giving people a sense of control is a really motivator. important.

And what am I doing? I'm not saying we don't need to communicate risks and I'm not saying there is a one-size-fits-all solution, but I am saying that if we want to

motivate

change we may want to rethink how we do it because we fear the fear of losing our health. Money induces inaction while the luxury of a profit induces action and therefore to change behavior in ourselves and others we may want to try these positive strategies instead of worries that actually take advantage the human tendency to seek progress thanks