by Paul Dolan
Companies are constantly nudging and priming you into buying their goods and services. You only have to catch a whiff of some freshly baked bread in your local supermarket to be enticed toward the pastry section, whether you were planning on buying baked goods or not. Defaults are used in pensions, where moving to an opt-out pension plan increases contributions, and for organ donations, where moving to an opt-out donor registry increases the number of donor organs.4 Commitments have been used in health policy by offering quitting contracts to smokers and in taxation to reduce fraud, where placing signatures at the beginning rather than the end of tax forms reduces cheating.5 And in terms of social norms, building upon some innovative work undertaken by Opower in the United States, Rob Metcalfe and I have been working with UK energy suppliers to give feedback to consumers about their own energy consumption relative to the consumption of their neighbors. The latest results show that social norms reduce consumption by around 6 percent.6
By using priming, defaults, commitments, and norms in your own life, you can become a whole lot happier without actually having to think very hard at all about becoming happier. You will be happier by design. You can then save your attentional energy for those occasions where you really do want to pay attention to a decision or to what you are doing.
Priming
Would you be happier if your house were clean or your children tidied up after themselves? Something as simple as using an air freshener makes it far more likely that you and they will clean up. People who ate a biscuit after sitting in a cubicle with citrus air freshener pumped in made three times as many hand movements to clean crumbs off the table compared to those who were not exposed to this cleanest-smelling of all scents.7 And medical students who went to examine a patient complaining of heart palpitations were much more likely to comply with hand hygiene regulations when the smell of citrus was in the air.8
You might also think about how you use light to design your happiness landscape. Light is responsible for setting our circadian rhythm, the twenty-four-hour sleep-wake cycle marked by changes in body temperature and levels of hormones like cortisol (related to stress) and melatonin (related to sleepiness).9 Blue light, the sort emitted by electronics and energy-efficient lightbulbs, has a particularly powerful effect on our circadian rhythms and enhances alertness by suppressing the release of melatonin.10 I know it might sound obvious, but by increasing your exposure to light in the morning and throughout the day, especially blue light, you’ll optimize your alertness. By reducing your exposure at night, you prepare yourself for sleep. So charge your electronics outside of the bedroom and set up plenty of lights where you work. Laura Kudrna has a portable sunlamp that she carries with her when she needs to spend time analyzing data in dark university computer labs during the day.
One further environmental trigger you might consider is the natural environment. Nature (even through a window) grabs and retains your attention in positive ways because it’s constantly changing, even in subtle ways, which prevents adaptation. It’s been shown that prison inmates who had a view from their cell made fewer visits to the prison’s health care facilities than those who did not have a view, and surgical patients randomly selected to have a view of nature from their hospital room recovered more quickly than those who had a view of a brick wall.11 The resulting advice here seems simple: get out more. If you can’t get out (and in fact even if you can), buy some plants or install a fish tank, both of which help to reduce stress.12
When it comes to priming yourself to lose weight, there is much out there that we can learn from. We’re primed to fill our plates, irrespective of the plate’s actual size.13 The bigger the plate, the more you will have ate. So if you do want to lose weight, you could buy smaller plates. This conscious decision to choose smaller plates then drives the unconscious behavior of filling the plate. In an experiment where people were given a variety of larger containers to eat out of, they ate about a third more than those who ate out of smaller containers.14 As further evidence that size matters, imagine being invited to a Super Bowl party and being offered some snacks before the game. If you were offered a four-liter bowl you would eat more than if you were offered a two-liter bowl—about 140 calories more on average.15
In all of this, be alert to possible spillover effects (discussed in chapter 3). With the hopes of encouraging patrons to eat more healthily, a group of six hundred US restaurant patrons were given a menu with healthy sandwiches on the front and unhealthy ones on the back (by the way, this is the same group from earlier that underestimated their calorie consumption). The patrons were 35 percent more likely to choose a healthy sandwich than those without the new menu. So far, so good. But because many of them picked potato chips instead of fruit as a side dish to accompany their healthy sandwiches, they completely offset the calorie-saving effects of the healthier choice. Overall, the new menu had no effect at all on total calorie consumption. Choosing healthy meals when there is no opportunity for discretionary side orders would be one way to overcome this permitting spillover effect.
Recall also that thinking you’ve just had a great workout can give you the moral license to eat more than if you hadn’t exercised in the first place. Other healthy behaviors can have some of the same spillover effects as exercising. A lovely study shows how one group of students, who thought they had just taken a multivitamin pill, exhibited multiple forms of personal licensing in comparison to another group who were told that the pill was, in fact, a placebo. In particular, those who thought they had taken the vitamin pill expressed a greater preference for a buffet over an organic meal.16 There is nothing wrong with a little moral licensing here and there, but, if it really will get in the way of being happier, design your environment to limit its extent. Join a gym without a fast-food restaurant on your route home from it.
You might now be wondering if designing your environment to change your unconscious behavior will work when you are consciously aware of how you are designing it. If you deliberately use a smaller bowl in order to eat less, won’t you just serve yourself a second helping and ultimately eat the same amount anyway, because you know why you bought the smaller bowl? Thankfully, research suggests otherwise, supporting the efficacy of priming effects. There is even evidence for a “meta-placebo” or “open-label placebo” effect in medicine, where placebos (usually pills with no active ingredient) work even when people know they are taking a placebo.
In one study, eighty participants with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) were randomly divided into two groups. The first group received a container presented as “placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes.” The second received no pill or medical treatment at all and simply interacted with the medical practitioners, who behaved in the same way as did the providers who interacted with the group receiving the placebo pills. Three weeks later, the researchers found that the first group had fewer symptoms of IBS than the second group.17
So, all in all, the current evidence suggests that being happier by design does not require design by deception.
Defaults
If your home page is Facebook, it’s inevitable that you will spend more time networking and less time working. Most of us “go with the flow.” In general, humans are pretty lazy and are usually content to do whatever is the preset option. Defaults are passive commitments and you rarely notice them. So to become happier you need to make small adjustments to your life so that going with the flow is consistent with being happier. It is very efficient to use a little of your attentional resources now to set defaults for scenarios that might otherwise require a lot of your attentional resources in the future.
So if you’re used to checking your Facebook first thing in the morning, try changing your default for a few days to another home page, such as the news, and see what effect it has on how you feel. Shifting a few minutes of your
time from one activity to another could spill over to your happiness in an extended way throughout the day.
If you decide you want to spend less or start saving more, there are online budgeting applications that will send alerts through your phone when you go over budget or have a low bank balance. You can also select a default banking password that reminds you of what you have decided will make you happier about your finances and how you manage them. People primed with negative feelings, like “sorrow,” “grief,” and “heartbreak,” are willing to pay less for a box of chocolates than those who aren’t primed with anything, so shopaholics could consider these as log-ins to their most tempting sites.18 Or perhaps you’d like to e-mail less. Try a password that says something like “dontcheckmeagain.”
Setting a default to be with people whose company you enjoy is likely to increase the pleasure and purpose you experience, as well as improve some of the decisions you make. You may have withdrawn attention from your house but having an old friend around provides a fresh perspective on your dining room. If a friend lives far away, you could set up a default for an agreed time to talk each week or so. You then have to opt out of talking at that time if you cannot make it. This is the strategy that Mig and I have adopted—we talk on Skype at 9:00 a.m. UK time (10:00 a.m. in Ibiza) on Thursdays. The engagement has served to cement our friendship still further, and it makes us both happy (especially him, of course). Another way to default to being with others is to set up meetings on a particular work project or exercise program. Not only are you more likely to spend time on the activity if you have to actively “opt out” of your commitment, you will also work harder once you are there if you have someone encouraging you. The next section builds on this idea.
Commitments
Making them
Tell a friend you will stop smoking, and you are more likely to do so. We like to be consistent with our public promises. We are more likely to enroll in a curbside recycling program if we have to make a written commitment to do so than if we learn about the program in another way, such as on a flyer or by telephone.19 And those who tweet about their attempts to lose weight are more likely to do so than those who just listen to a podcast about weight loss. At the end of six months of tweeting, every ten posts to Twitter were associated with 0.5 percent loss in weight, which is about one pound for an average-weight male in the United States.20
What would you like to make a commitment to do or to stop? A key challenge here is to commit to things that are actually going to make you happier if you do them—but that also won’t make you overly miserable if you fail to do as you promised. If you set goals where you have some degree of control over the outcome, such as your physical health and feeling connected to others, you will experience more positive emotions than if you set a goal where you have less control over the outcome, such as being rich and famous.21 This does not mean that goals that aren’t entirely in your control are mistaken desires: if you can accept failure, you are better able to bounce back if you fall short of your ambitions.
Whatever form the commitment takes, start with small changes and don’t put yourself under too much pressure. Bite-size commitments are more effective than mouthfuls. Recall also that you want future behaviors to be consistent with past ones so each next step can build on the last. You are more likely to complete a degree if you commit to going to class tomorrow, as opposed to saying “I am going to complete my college education.” Commit to reading Macbeth to see if you like Shakespeare; don’t commit to reading Shakespeare’s entire collected works before deciding whether you have a taste for his style. You are more likely to run a marathon if you first commit to going out for a run a couple of times a week and building up from there, as opposed to saying “I’m going to run a marathon.” I have put on a considerable amount of muscle by committing to put on a pound a week for six weeks at various times over the past decade.
Making bite-size goals becomes easier with practice. It can be helpful to state what the overall goal is, break it down into more manageable chunks, and then ask yourself what you can do right now to work toward it. The basic insight, as noted earlier but which cannot be said often enough, is that you are more likely to do something if it is easy to do. So make each step on the path to the overall goal a simple one. Try it out for yourself in the box below, where I have used making new friends as an example.
Overall goal
“Bite-size” goal
“Right now” goal
Make new friends
Attend social events at which I can meet new people
Call a connected friend
Wherever you are “on a journey”—or working through a goal that has some discernible start and finish points—the evidence suggests that you can make reaching the destination more likely by the “law of small numbers”: in plain English, “20 percent gone” is a good motivator, as is “20 percent to go” when you get there (rather than their inverses, “80 percent to go” and “80 percent gone”). Korean students who had to complete words based on the first few consonants in each word (this is evidently much harder to do in Korean than English) returned to the task more quickly after taking a break when their progress was presented this way.22 The law of small numbers makes your commitment to progress more salient. You now have about 30 percent of this book to go—sounds good, eh?
Economists are fond of saying that people respond to incentives, and you will recall that it is one of the nine elements of mindspace. How many times have you bought something just because it was half price? Most, but certainly not all, of the time you are more likely to do something if paid, and less likely if fined or taxed. We know from psychology that losses loom larger than gains in our minds—losing anything, but especially money, really grinds on us. Taking this into account, we can think about how to frame our commitments. In one aptly named study, “Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is,” researchers offered smokers who wanted to quit a savings account where they had to deposit money for a six-month period. Once the period was up, participants took a urine test to see whether they had managed to stay off the cigarettes. If they came up clear they got their money back; if not, it went to charity. Participants offered the savings account were more likely to quit smoking than those who weren’t approached at all. Even more impressive is the fact that when they went back to test the smokers twelve months later, the majority of those who quit were still not smoking.23
We can also be quite selfish and, whatever our proclivity to behave that way, we’re likely to feel guilty about it from time to time. One way to overcome this guilt is to precommit to spending some money on yourself. This is consistent with the happiness-enhancing principle “pay now, spend later,” rather than the other way around, as with credit cards.24 Precommitting to indulgence is seen as one of the reasons why many of us prefer all-inclusive holidays.25 So you could allocate some fraction of your income to the “me money” account and spend it each month on yourself, guiltlessly. Life is all about balance, and occasionally it’s good for us to think about only ourselves.
Breaking them
You should also consider when to give up on a commitment—when you might be better off breaking a commitment or cutting your losses. Consider a relatively trivial example. You are in the cinema watching a boring film that you can’t imagine will improve. Would you get up and walk out before the end? You ought to if you expect to be made happier by the alternative use of your time. The time and money you have already spent in the cinema is a sunk cost—it’s gone and you can’t get it back. So it should not be relevant to what you decide to do next. But it feels like it is relevant, doesn’t it? You made the effort to go to the cinema, you bought the ticket, and you’ve sat through some of the film already. All of this feels more like an investment than a sunk cost. And so
you want to see your investment pay off—or at least stick around in the hope that it might. This explains why people stay in failing relationships and dull jobs for longer than they ought to.
Your reluctance to see the past as sunk can make you less happy in the long run. You are much more likely to say “I wish I had got out earlier” than “I wish I had stuck around longer.” On a night out, I have learned to go home as soon as the thought of going home enters my head but I admit that it took me many more years than it should have done to realize this. Hopefully being more aware of it now might help you to wise up sooner than I did.
Commitments matter, then, but so, too, does the ability to recognize when to give up on them. Time is a scarce resource and you should not waste it on remaining miserable. This is yet another difficult challenge as there is no cast-iron way of ever knowing whether you were right to hold or fold. But I suggest that once you start seriously considering folding, you should probably move quite quickly from considering to doing. I say this as someone who has walked out of the cinema and not regretted doing so. But it is also based on our ability to adapt; to make sense of things that happen; and to regret those that have not.
If you are spending more and more time seriously thinking about quitting something, don’t spend too much longer committing to it. Much as you might not like to accept it, sometimes it is better to hold your hands up and admit that you made a mistake. Most of the time in relationships, it seems, we translate negative feelings about a partner into active attempts to repair our beliefs about him or her that may otherwise be challenged by those feelings.26 Put simply, we work to maintain and stabilize our mistaken beliefs about our partner. This is often conducive to happiness but sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is better to move on. And if you decide to leave a relationship, expect to feel low for a while. This is a natural and entirely healthy process. Keep this in mind, and you may be slightly less inclined to jump into an even worse “rebound” relationship. But you should certainly get out and socialize. Those who do socialize adapt better to the change and are less likely to go back to the previous partner simply because they feel lonely.
