Sensation_The New Science of Physical Intelligence

by Thalma Lobel

  The results were consistent with those of the first study. When the participants did not wash their hands, previous luck influenced their risk taking: those who were lucky in the previous round took a greater risk in the next round and bet higher than did those who had been unlucky. For those who had cleaned their hands, however, previous luck was not an influence.

  These studies demonstrate that in the short term, the act of washing or cleaning can have a discernible impact on our subsequent behaviors and decisions. It is as if physical cleaning can remove the psychological traces of events in the very recent past so that those events have no influence on our behavior. While major life occurrences are not easily erased, small daily experiences may be perceived as more malleable, and we may be able to control their influence on our future by physical cleaning.

  Our day-to-day experiences influence our decisions, reactions, experiences, and emotions in a continuous feedback loop. For example, positive feedback in one event can easily influence performance in the next event, even if the two are unrelated. We all have “bad days” and “good days,” days we receive good feedback and days we receive bad feedback, days we succeed and days we fail; and our subsequent behaviors and decisions are affected by these experiences. We may perceive the same situation and the same behavior differently, and may come to different decisions based on previous experiences. Almost all of us, for example, have at some point encountered an ill-disposed waiter or an unfriendly cashier. This unpleasant experience, fresh in our minds, can sour the next encounter we have with an innocent coworker, friend, or child. Yet if we think back to the first encounter, could our perception of the service provider’s behavior have been influenced by a previous event in our own life or day? Was the waiter or cashier really that grouchy?

  While most people can never truly wipe the slate clean, so to speak, the aforementioned studies have found that physically cleaning can in fact minimize the effect of prior experience on subsequent behavior, almost as if the cleaning did wash away some trace of the past. Perhaps with something as simple as washing your face, for example, you can wash away the past and soak in the present.

  A simple tactic like washing can be extraordinarily valuable in your daily life. When you find yourself overwhelmed with emotional and cognitive stimuli, struggling to juggle work, family, friends, and leisure time, washing your hands might be the perfect way to let go. It may also help you to adjust to the abrupt transitions you make between stress at work and life at home so you do not take your work home with you. Taking a shower often improves our feeling of well-being, and we now have proof that something more is going on than physical cleaning of dirt. Cleaning has the power to eliminate traces of the past; it can refresh and rejuvenate our bodies as well as our focus and concentration on the present moment. These deliberate acts can help us to turn the proverbial page, draw clearer boundaries between the multiple circumstances and activities we juggle, and be truly present in the moment and dedicated to the task at hand.

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  I Yaniv Golan and Shani Busnach.

  II Shimon Malov.

  Sweet Smell of Success: Taste and Smell

  It Tastes Like Honey

  A. A. Milne’s universally beloved character Winnie-the-Pooh has delighted generations of children in dozens of languages. Many of Pooh’s adventures begin in search of honey, and many of his troubles are the result of his single-minded pursuit of it. Real bears are not quite as steadfastly focused on sweets but are fierce animals that eat meat, among other things. Nevertheless, Milne may have chosen honey as Pooh’s obsession to emphasize how sweet-natured his character really is. A friendly bear, Pooh loves company and enjoys helping his friends.

  Honey, one of the sweetest foods, is often used to symbolize good and desirable things. During the dinner to celebrate the Jewish New Year, a common tradition is to eat slices of apple dipped in honey as well as honey cake. The sweetness of the honey represents our hope for a felicitous year.

  Honey has also been used in certain Orthodox Jewish communities to celebrate the first time a child is brought to school to study the Bible. As part of a ceremony, the rabbi places honey on a slate on which biblical verses are written, and the child licks the honey from the letters. The child also receives a piece of honey cake, with sacred words written on it. It was believed that by licking the sweet honey and eating honey cake, the young child would come to associate Bible studies with sweetness, and studying the Bible would be a pleasurable and satisfying experience.

  The association between sweet taste and congenial and pleasant characteristics is beautifully demonstrated in the 2000 film Chocolat, starring Juliette Binoche and based on the novel by Joanne Harris. Binoche plays a young woman, Vianne, who travels to a small, conservative French village and opens a chocolaterie, much to the displeasure of the severe parish priest who leads the community. Vianne’s charming personality and sweet, friendly disposition—as well as her chocolates—soon win over many of the townspeople. People who enter her chocolaterie only to have a cup of hot chocolate or to pick up some of her confections quickly develop a warm personal connection with Vianne. She and her daughter bring sweetness to the lives of the townspeople with both their candy and their personal charm.

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  It is not surprising that we associate sweet taste with good and lovable things. For most of us, sweet tastes are pleasurable. Few are the children who don’t love candies and chocolate, and their parents’ job is to control the amount they consume. My three-year-old granddaughter, Natalie, would do anything for candy, the best tangible reward she can imagine. Most parents know too well the unpleasant experience of passing a candy store and having to deny their children’s request to buy up half the store.

  Most adults also enjoy sweet foods, although many of us would love to be able to control ourselves and eat less of them, being all too aware of the risks that excess sweets pose to our health and figures. Still, we crave sweetness and even demand alternative sweeteners to try to get around the negative effects of eating too much sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.

  This association between sweetness and congeniality is clearly expressed in metaphors and endearments such a sweet person, sweetie pie, a sweet message, sweetheart, and a sweet thing to do, which describe nice people or deeds, congeniality, kindness, and thoughtfulness. To sweet-talk is to say flattering things, and sweetness is ultimately what we want to hear. In the Psalms, David describes God’s word: “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (119:103).

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  Does the knowledge that a person is fond of sweet things influence what we think of that person? More specifically, do we judge a person who enjoys sweet things as being sweeter? To probe this question, a group of researchers conducted several experiments.1 In one experiment they presented photos of strangers to ninety students. Each photo was displayed for only a short time with a statement next to it indicating what foods the person in it was fond of. The food item could be bitter (e.g., grapefruit), sour (e.g., lemon), spicy (e.g., peppers), salty (e.g., pretzels), or sweet (e.g., candy). The participants were asked to rate the person in the photo on three attributes: agreeableness, extroversion, and neuroticism. Participants rated those who liked sweet foods as more agreeable than those who fancied other foods. There were no differences in the ratings of extroversion or neuroticism; the ratings differed only on agreeableness. Those who said they liked sweet things were perceived to be sweeter people.

  The study’s findings suggest that when we interact with someone who eats sweet things, we are likely to perceive that person as being nicer, more genial. On occasions such as first dates or business meetings, a person who orders cake or makes a remark about his or her sweet tooth might be perceived as nicer. This judgment of others, based on their predilection for sweets, might affect our own behaviors. For instance, when we believe a person is agreeable, we might be primed to be more cooperative and to compromise. We may judge as better a bid or offer from a
person we perceive to be pleasant and agreeable than one from someone we’re not predisposed to like.

  A more interesting question, to my mind, is whether ingesting sweet tastes actually affects our behavior. Is it possible that the mere taste of a sweet candy is enough to trigger more prosocial behavior? In order to examine this, the researchers divided fifty-five students into three groups, telling two of the groups they would be tasting a particular food and then asked to comment on it. One group, the sweet-taste group, tasted milk chocolate. The second group, the nonsweet group, tasted an unsweetened cracker containing no sugar at all; and the third group, the no-taste group, was given nothing to taste.

  When the experiment was ostensibly over, the participants were told that another professor was looking for volunteers to participate in a separate study but that this professor could not give any compensation in monetary payment or credit hours. Each participant could choose how many minutes, ranging from zero to thirty, he or she would like to volunteer. Those who had tasted the milk chocolate volunteered for a greater number of minutes than did those who tasted a nonsweet food or those who tasted nothing. Just tasting sweet milk chocolate made members of the sweet taste group more willing to help someone else. In other words, tasting something sweet made them sweeter, at least in the short term.

  I should add that the researchers also checked participants’ moods by asking them to complete a questionnaire regarding their positive and negative emotions. They found that the influence of the sweet taste on prosocial and helpful behavior was not due to positive moods such as the happiness that might result when one eats something sweet. They found that when we eat sweet food, we may behave in a nicer, more prosocial manner and be more willing to help others if necessary.

  This information may be quite useful. When arguing with someone, or when you want someone to be nice to you, offer that person a sweet drink, a chocolate bar, or a piece of cake—you may improve the person’s behavior and cause him or her to become more willing to help and avoid conflict. These findings should not be taken to mean that eating sweets will make a huge change in a person’s behavior. They do suggest, however, that there is a correlation between eating sweet food and behaving in a nicer manner.

  Sweetness is not the only taste we use metaphorically. Other tastes that describe various behaviors, situations, and personalities include these: the party ended on a sour note, he stayed to the bitter end, he is a bitter man, those spicy girls. To date, research has focused mainly on the sweet taste, but in my lab we are currently conducting a series of studies on bitter and spicy tastes and various behaviors and judgments related to them. For example, does a bitter taste influence the extent to which individuals tend to complain and be unsatisfied? I hope I will have interesting results to report in the near future.

  One Big Mac, Please. No Pickles. No Patience.

  Food affects us in ways other than just taste. Apparently, simply being exposed to the logos of some food chains has the power to influence our behavior. The food industry spends a lot of money on advertising as well as in studying the influence of brand logos and advertisements on consumer behavior. These studies tend to focus on consumers’ buying practices and investigate factors that influence consumers’ judgments of products, as well as their shopping intentions and purchasing decisions. However, recent studies have shown that exposure to brand logos affects behaviors that are unrelated to shopping intentions and purchasing. Logos of certain brands actually prompt behaviors that are associated with the brand name or the brand’s characteristics. Let’s look at one such study from the food industry.

  What word or phrase comes to your mind when you think of McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King, or Taco Bell? Most people think of fast or fast food, and associate that with food prepared quickly, served quickly, and eaten quickly. Numerous studies have investigated the connection between eating fast food, obesity, and health problems, and public health campaigns have attempted to raise awareness of the negative consequences of fast food and warn against eating too much of it. The study I’m interested in, however, focuses not on how fast food influences our bodies but rather on how it affects our minds. Fast food symbolizes time saved and instant gratification. Is it possible that mere exposure to fast-food logos can influence how fast and impatient we are in domains unrelated to eating?

  A group of researchers conducted three experiments to examine this question.2 In the first experiment, they subliminally exposed half the students in the study to six logo images of fast-food chains, such as McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC. These students were asked to focus on the center of a computer screen while the logos were presented for twelve milliseconds, so short a time that no one could consciously recognize what appeared on the screen. Indeed, the only things all students reported seeing were meaningless color blocks. The second group, the control group, was exposed to blank squares for the same length of time.

  In order to test whether subliminal exposure to fast-food logos would activate a faster mode of behavior, participants were asked to read a paragraph of 320 words describing the city of Toronto. The students did not know that the time it took them to read the paragraph was recorded. The results clearly showed that those who were exposed to the fast-food logos read the paragraphs faster than did those who were exposed merely to blank squares.

  To further investigate the influence of logos, researchers conducted a second experiment. This time they did not present participants with fast-food logos but instead asked one group to recall a time that they went to eat at a fast-food restaurant and the other group to recall a time when they went to a grocery store. Then researchers asked the students to participate in a marketing study (supposedly unrelated to the previous study) and complete a survey in which they were to rate the desirability of several products. There were four pairs of products, each pair pitting a timesaving product against a conventional product: a four-slice toaster versus a single-slice toaster, a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner versus regular shampoo, a high-efficiency detergent versus regular detergent, and a three-in-one skin care product versus a regular skin care product.

  The researchers believed that the more impatient people were, the more they would appreciate timesaving products, and indeed, results showed that the memory of a visit to a fast-food restaurant activated the desire for more speed. Those who recalled eating a fast-food meal rated the timesaving products as more desirable than did those who recalled entering a grocery store. Just thinking about fast food made the participants more impatient and led them to want timessaving products.

  In a third experiment, the researchers measured the decision to save money. Saving delays gratification. Delayed gratification means putting off the acquisition of something in the present in order to obtain something even better in the future. Parents have to teach this concept to their children, who usually find it difficult not to receive what they want when they want it. Researchers wanted to examine whether simply exposing participants to fast-food cues would influence their saving behavior, representing their ability to delay gratification.

  To that end, the researchers presented fifty-eight students with four logos and asked them to rate the logos’ aesthetic qualities. For half of the participants, two of the logos were for fast-food chains, McDonald’s and KFC; for the other half, two of the logos were of diners that were inexpensive, but not specifically for fast food. The students were asked to choose between two amounts of money, a smaller sum they could have that day or a bigger one in a week’s time. Those who were exposed to the fast-food logos were more willing to accept a smaller sum of money right away. The fast-food-related images influenced their economic decisions. Unless you really need the money immediately, the wiser economic decision would be to wait to receive a bigger sum. The results revealed a relationship between exposure to fast-food logos and poor economic decision making. Just as some of us prefer buying lunch at a fast-food place in order to satisfy our hunger quickly rather than waiting in a restaurant where the food would be b
etter, participants preferred receiving their money immediately rather than waiting for a larger sum later.

  These findings suggest that fast food holds much larger sway over us than previously understood. Being exposed to fast-food logos, consciously or unconsciously, or even recalling a visit to McDonald’s, might be enough to influence our behavior in activities unrelated to eating. These results are somewhat frightening. Think of all the times you are exposed to fast-food-chain logos while walking or driving. Is it possible that seeing these logos makes you more impatient and, as a result, causes you to jaywalk, honk more frequently in a traffic jam, or become more impatient with the passengers in your car? Fast food affects how quickly we will try to get things done; this has its merits and advantages in some situations, but being impatient or desiring immediate gratification can spoil your enjoyment of other situations, such as strolling through an art exhibition, reading a book, or just taking in a beautiful view.

  Put Yourself on the Scent

  Smell has an influence on our emotions, behavior, and judgments. Among the most well-known influences of odors is their effect on consumer behavior. Realtors recommend that when you want to sell a house, you bake bread or cookies (vanilla is particularly evocative) in order to favorably influence potential buyers. Several studies have shown that when a pleasant smell is present, people spend more time and more money in stores, and they give more positive evaluations of products. In a study conducted in a big, prestigious clothing store, researchers diffused a pleasant scent for one week and compared the behavior of customers during that week with customer behavior during another week, when no scent was diffused.3 In the presence of a pleasant scent, shoppers evaluated the store and its products more positively and expressed a greater intention to revisit the store.