by Sian Beilock
Interestingly, the ubiquitous nature of the QWERTY keyboard helps explain a peculiar phenomenon: our everyday vernacular and the particular words that we like best in our language seem to be linked to how easy it is to type them. Because we tend to like what is easy to do, we prefer words typed on the QWERTY keyboard with our right hand. It’s called the QWERTY effect and has been found in the English, Dutch, and Spanish languages, all of which use a similar QWERTY design. Most interesting is that the QWERTY effect is strongest for words that came into usage after the keyboard did. It’s as if these neologisms are shaped by keyboard use.19 This is one reason why LOL (“laugh out loud,” typed exclusively with the right hand) and YUCKY (almost all with the right hand) are likely to stick around and why people naming new products might be wise to consider names that are typed with the right hand. A sandwich from Jimmy John’s, anyone?
The QWERTY effect also seems to explain some recent trends in baby naming. By searching U.S. census data, researchers have found that the keyboard may be influencing what people are naming their babies. Names with more letters from the right side of the keyboard have increased dramatically in popularity since the dawn of the home computer and the widespread use of the QWERTY keyboard, and new names coined since the 1990s (think Lileigh) tend to have more letters from the right side than those coined before keyboard use was so ubiquitous.20
Our body affects our mind in unusual ways. Even when we are not performing a particular action, it seems that our mind is looking to our body for clues about how we should feel and even what we should like. Given that we spend so much time at our computers, the QWERTY keyboard is having a big impact on how we use language and even what language we prefer. In short, we like things that our body does easily.
Take the following two columns of letter pairs:
Column 1
Column 2
FV
CJ
VF
GK
BF
TK
FG
CM
FB
EJ
VR
VK
GF
BK
TF
FK
JY
JC
MJ
KB
JH
KR
HJ
KV
YJ
JD
MH
MC
UJ
KT
UH
HC
Which column of letters do you like better? There is nothing special about the letter pairs; they are fairly uncommon in the English language, and they don’t rhyme. They also don’t form any common acronyms or initials. So, on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to prefer one letter column over the other. But my research group and I have found that people do have a preference, at least if they are skilled touch typists on the QWERTY keyboard. Skilled typists overwhelmingly prefer the letter pairs in Column 2. Why? Just as words typed with the right hand are easier to type than those typed with the left hand, the letter pairs in Column 2 are easier to type than those in Column 1 because each letter uses a different finger and hand. As anyone who types quickly knows, typing two letters in close succession with the same finger, like the letter pairs in Column 1, is difficult because you can’t start typing the second letter until you have finished typing the first. It’s more fluid to type a series of letters using different fingers and hands because you can hit the keys almost simultaneously. My colleagues and I have found that just seeing letters on a computer screen revs up the motor cortex of skilled typists. We mentally simulate typing the letters and this simulation provides us with information about how easy or hard typing them is going to be. Since we tend to like what is easier to do, we prefer the letter pairs in Column 2—even though we don’t usually know why.21
Our body controls our mind, but sometimes our body doesn’t let our consciousness in on the fact that it’s doing so. This subtle form of mind control isn’t limited to the QWERTY keyboard. When people dial a number on their phone, for instance, the letters corresponding to the numbers they are dialing automatically seep into mind. Dialing 5683 subtly brings up the idea of LOVE, and dialing 75463 makes SLIME more likely to pop into mind. Businesses that create meaningful phone numbers are on to something. When people perform actions, the outcomes of their actions are activated mentally—even if they are not aware of it. Because the same keypad on a phone is often used for both dialing numbers and typing messages, dialing a number simultaneously brings to mind both numbers and letters.
People actually prefer dialing numbers that imply positive words (37326, DREAM) over numbers that imply negative words (75463, SLIME). People also prefer companies whose phone number corresponds to words related to their business. People prefer a dating agency with a phone number that corresponds to the word love and a mortician whose number spells the word corpse to companies whose numbers are not related to the product they are peddling.22 This is true even though we are not necessarily conscious of the numbers’ association with particular words.
The body drives the mind in subtle ways. If simply dialing a phone number can put thoughts in our head, how else does our body exert subtle mind control?
Grocery Store Choices
David Rosenbaum’s discovery came to him during a meal at a restaurant. He was watching the waiters tend to the tables around him when he was struck by how they handled the water glasses of the patrons they were serving. Most of us wouldn’t give the actions of our waiters a second thought, but Rosenbaum isn’t most people; he runs the Laboratory for Cognition and Action at Pennsylvania State University, where he studies how people plan and control their body movements.
The water glasses on the tables were all set upside down. Rosenbaum noticed that when the waiters picked up a glass to fill it, they didn’t do so in a random way. Rather they flipped their wrists and grabbed the glass with their thumbs facing downward. This initially awkward hand position had a real advantage. It allowed the waiters to easily hold the glass when they turned it over, poured the water in, and set it down. In other words, how the waiters grabbed the glass wasn’t a function of its shape but was based on what they intended to do with the glass.
Intrigued by the waiters’ behavior, Rosenbaum went back to his lab to run an experiment. He wanted to know whether or not we all grab objects in a way to most easily use them. Sure enough, this is exactly what he found. People pick up lightbulbs differently than they pick up tennis balls, because they usually do very different things with them. We pick up a bottle differently when we are planning to drink out of it than when we intend to throw it across the room. The way a waiter grasps a water glass depends on whether he is planning to fill it with water or put it in a tray to be cleared. Grasping the upside-down glass with your thumb turned downward means that it will take only one easy flip of the wrist to be able to fill it with water—what Rosenbaum calls the “end-state comfort effect.”23
It turns out that monkeys also grab objects with their function in mind. When cotton-top tamarins—small monkeys that live in South America and are used in benign lab experiments—want to get a tasty marshmallow that is wedged into a champagne glass, they grab that glass differently depending on whether the glass is positioned upside down or upright. When the glass is upright, the monkeys grab it by its stem, with their thumb pointing up. But when the glass is inverted, the monkeys grab the stem with their thumb facing down, just like the waiters Rosenbaum observed.24 That way, the monkeys will need only one flip of the wrist to get the sweet treat out.
How people and monkeys grab objects also influences how much they will come to like the object they grab. In a study my Human Performance Lab recently conducted we seated undergraduate volunteers at a small table where we had placed two different kitchen utensils: a wooden mixing spoon and a rubber spatula. We were particularly careful about how we placed the objects. Sometimes both objects were positioned so that the handle was closest t
o the volunteer and they were easy to pick up by the handle. Sometimes the part used to mix or flip was facing the volunteer, who had to reach around and contort her wrist in an uncomfortable way in order to grab it by the handle. Keep in mind that we didn’t ask the volunteers to actually use the objects for cooking or mixing. Their only task was quite simple: to pick up the utensil they liked better.
Similar to what Rosenbaum observed with the waiters, the volunteers tended to pick up the objects by the handle, as if they were going to use it. But more interesting is that people tended to prefer the object that was easier to grasp, the object whose handle was facing them.25 This is an example of physical fluency—the fact that objects that are easier to handle tend to be preferred. We automatically bring to mind how we would hold an object, and this ease of interaction tells us whether we will like it. That’s why the right-handed majority tends to find objects on the right side of a space to be more pleasant than those on the left (presumably because they more fluently interact with objects on their right). When something is easier to manipulate, we like it more.
This means that subtle changes in the placement or packaging of products can have big effects on people’s desire to buy them. It is well known that the way products are organized in store aisles and whether they are at the entrance or the exit to the store can have a striking impact on what people buy. But less attention is focused on how our fluent interactions with a product might change, say, according to how easy it is to carry. Certainly companies like Proctor & Gamble, which makes everything from hair care products to Tide, and beverage companies like Coca-Cola have tuned in to the idea that our body’s actions can influence our mind. How easy it is to grasp a product influences consumer choice. Just think about the evolution of product packaging. Most liquid detergents now come in bottles with handles. This is also true for large bottles of milk and Tropicana orange juice. Several years ago the two-liter Coke bottle got a curvier look that facilitates picking up and pouring; coincidentally, sales rose over those of its closest rival, Pepsi.26 This is no accident. Packaging that affords easier carrying might subtly push people to purchase larger quantities of a product.
In the wake of Coke’s sleek new bottle, PepsiCo decided to hire a chief design officer, Mauro Porcini, who was 3M’s first chief design officer. PepsiCo plans to invest $600 million in advertising to grow the market share of its leading brands, such as Pepsi, Gatorade, and Doritos.27 Certainly some of that money is going to go into thinking about the ease and fluidity with which people handle the products. When something is easier to pick up, all else being equal, we like it more.
The first time this really dawned on me I was standing in the aisle of our nearby Target lugging my one-month-old daughter in her portable car seat. It had taken me almost a month to get up the courage to venture to Target on my own with my newborn. What if she started screaming, spit up, or both? There I was, standing with the baby in one hand, trying to decide which diapers to purchase. I automatically reached for a small package of twenty-four diapers with my free hand, easily balancing my newborn and the nappies. Somewhere in the back of my mind, however, I realized that I probably needed a bigger package of diapers, unless I wanted to test my luck with another solo store run in a few days. But I had a bad feeling about the larger package. It wasn’t the price (the bigger pack was clearly more economical than the smaller pack) nor the look (the packaging was identical), but something pushed me away from the super size. Only after I started doing research on how our body influences our preferences did I realize that it was probably the simple fact that I would have a hard time carrying my newborn and the bigger diaper pack that swayed my choice to buy less. Our motor system unconsciously cues us in to the possible outcomes of our actions—even before we have completed them. Our body has a surprising influence over what we buy.
Even the type of basket we use in the grocery store can affect our purchasing habits. Picture yourself in a grocery store. You have two choices: to grab a basket or to push a cart. How many times have you opted for the basket, sure you are going to pick up only a few things, but by the end of what was supposed to be a quick run into the grocery store, you find yourself dragging a heavy basket through the checkout line? One reason you may end up with so many items you hadn’t initially intended to purchase is that you tend to flex your arm when you carry a basket.
Flexing your arm and moving it toward you is something that routinely happens when you are trying to obtain an object. A lifetime of associations between flexion and gratification means that, when you flex your arm, you are more likely to want to satisfy your urges, to give in to your desires. Bringing your arm close to your body sends a subtle signal to your brain that it is okay to go for what is pleasurable. Extending your arm away from you signals the opposite. When you are in a flexed, “approach” frame of mind, you like easy gratification: you act and think in the short term rather than the long term. This frame of mind influences your shopping behavior. Whether you carry a basket on your arm (and flex your arm) or push a cart (and extend your arm) influences which products you buy.
In a recent series of studies in the Netherlands,28 a group of researchers examined whether basket users were more likely to purchase vice products, like a candy bar or other junk food, than those who pushed carts. They inconspicuously tracked customers, selected at random, in a hypermarket (the Dutch version of a supermarket) from the time they entered the store until they left. The researchers recorded the customers’ paths through the store, what they bought, and whether they were using a basket or a shopping cart.
Of course, people enter stores for different reasons and go to different parts of the store to buy the products that most interest them. And being in one part of the store could encourage more frivolous spending than being in another; think about the temptations in the snack aisle. So in order to further constrain their observations, the researchers compared the shopping behavior of people who had a basket and those who had a cart only for purchases around the cash register, where chocolate bars, candy, and gum lurk—those products that can be immediately consumed for instant gratification.
Not surprisingly, the researchers found that people who used baskets spent less time in the store, spent less money, and also purchased fewer items than people who used carts (about eleven items for basket users, compared to thirty-two for cart shoppers). However, while just under 5 percent of people with shopping carts purchased vice products, 40 percent of the basket shoppers did. Customers flexing their arms while holding a shopping basket seemed to gravitate toward products that offered immediate pleasure.
Admittedly, there could be many reasons why basket holders showed different shopping patterns than cart pushers. Perhaps people who went in with a cart were focused on the long term, stocking up for the future, and were wary of vice products that offered satisfaction in the short term. To control for these and other possible differences between shoppers, the researchers conducted a second, more controlled study. They invited volunteers to shop in a supermarket they had created. The volunteers received a shopping list with a dozen different types of products to buy—for example, meat, veggies, snacks—and were asked to choose one product from each category during their laboratory shopping trip. To do this, they were given either a basket to hold or a shopping cart to push.
In this simple study, the researchers again found that people who held a basket were more likely to pick vice products over more virtuous ones; for instance, people with the basket chose Twix and Mars Bars over apples and oranges for their snack pick. Indeed the odds of choosing the vice over the virtue were three times larger in the basket condition. How we hold our body can change what we buy, and preferences for immediate gratification increase when our arms are flexed than when they are extended.
Our body is far from a passive machine, carrying the outputs and orders our brain sends about how to act. As the researchers involved in the supermarket study suggest, “People’s bodies hack their brains.” How we move and even contor
t our body has an impact on our thoughts, the decisions we make, and even our preferences for particular products. Here are just a few other examples that come from the supermarket study:
Slot machines are designed to elicit instant gratification. Pulling levers may lead to more gambling than pushing them away or even pressing a button. The lever is also on the right side of the slot machine, which, for the mostly right-handed population, is associated with good things and also might increase the amount of money a person is willing to gamble.
Pulling open, rather than pushing, a door to enter a store might lead to purchases of vice products that provide immediate satisfaction, something that owners of ice-cream shops and liquor stores may want to keep in mind. Pulling open the door, much like flexing our arm while carrying the shopping basket, involves bringing our arm toward us, which can put us in an “easy gratification” state of mind.
Our body and the actions we perform influence our thinking and reasoning in powerful and highly predictable ways. We can learn how to notice these influences in order to fully understand how our mind works and appreciate its relationship with our body.
