How to Motivate Yourself to Change Your Behavior by Tali Sharot

Today, the Positive Psychology Class discussed behavior change. We watch two TED Videos about this topic. I'll post another Video in the next post. So the speaker's name is Tali Sharot. She is a Behavioral Neuroscientist. In the video, she talks about "how to motivate yourself to change your behavior." I want to take notes of what she said about this topic in this post.

When we talk about “what gets people to change their behavior?” Some people may use this one strategy. The one strategy that most people probably use a lot. For example, when we are trying to stop ourselves from snacking. We would say to ourselves, “Beware. I’ll be fat”. Or when parents try to avoid their kids to avoid smoking they’ll say, “smoking kills.” But they found that that words doesn’t affected their kids.

We’re trying to scare ourselves and others into changing their behavior. Even warnings and threats are really common in health campaign, in policy. It’s because we all share this deep-rooted belief that if you threaten people, the fear is induced, it will get them to act. But, sciences show that warnings have very limited impact on behavior. For example, graphic images on cigarette packets do not deter smokers from smoking, and one study found that, after looking at those images, quitting actually became a lower priority for smokers. The speaker not saying that warnings and threats never work, but in average they seem to have a very limited impact.

And then why are we resistant to warnings?

If we think about animals, when we induce fear in an animal, the most common response we will see is freezing or fleeing, fighting not as much. And so humans are the same. If something scares us, we tend to shut down and we try to eliminate the negative feelings. So we must use rationalizations.

What type of information does leak into people? So, the speaker and her teams conducted an experiment where they asked approximately 100 people to estimate the likelihood of 80 different negative events that might happen to them in the future. The result shows that people tend to change their beliefs towards a more desirable opinion. People listen to the positive information. People take in information they want to hear -like someone telling you you're more attractive than you thought- than information that they don't want to hear.

The ability to learn from good news remained quite stable throughout the life span. But the ability to learn from bad news that changes as you age. We can see the graphic, it shows that kids and teenagers were the worse at learning from bad news. And the ability became better and better as people aged. But then, around the age of 40, around midlife, it started to deteriorating again.

So, what this means is that the most vulnerable populations such as kids, teenagers, and elderly people they’re the least likely to accurately learn from warnings. But, no matter what age we are, everyone takes in information they want to hear more than information that they don’t.

We should doing something to change behavior with positive image that people so effortfully maintain instead of put a clear mirror in front of ourselves. We tell ourselves “you know, the image is just going to get worse and worse and worse”. It doesn’t work because the brain will frantically try to distort the image, using photoshop and fancy lenses until it gets the image it’s happy with.

There was a study that conducted led by PhD student Micah Edelson. There is a signal in the emotional center of our brain when we hear about the opinion of others. This signal can predict how likely we are to conform at a later time, how likely we are to change our behavior.

Three principles that drive our behavior and mind:

1.  Social Incentives : We are motivated through positive actions of others. Social incentives concern a broad range of interpersonal rewards and motivations that encourage people to behave in a socially valued and approved manner. (Dorfman & Grossmann., 2020).

2. Immediate Reward : reward our good behavior so it will make us feel good. Studies show that giving people immediate rewards make them more likely to quit smoking, more likely to start exercising, and this effect lasts for at least six months. It is because not smoking becomes associated with a reward, and exercising becomes associated with a reward, and it becomes a habit, it becomes a lifestyle. So we can reward ourselves and others now for behaving in ways that are good for us in the future.  

3. Progress Monitoring : we are motivated by seeing progress. Brain activity suggestive of efficient coding of positive information about the future. And also the brain does a really good job at this. But, it doesn’t do such a good job at processing negative information about the future. That means, if we are trying to get people’s attention we might want to highlight the progress, not the decline.

For example, if we take that kid with the cigarette, we might want to tell them “you know, if you stop smoking you’ll become better at sports”. We highlight the the progress, not the decline. Brain is constantly trying to seek ways to control its environment. It’s one of the principles of what the brain is actually doing. So, giving people a sense of control is a really important motivator.

The last, Tali Sharot as speaker not saying that we don’t need to communicate risk, she is not saying that there’s one-solution-fits-all, but she is saying that if we want to motivate change, we might to rethink how we do it, because the fear of losing our health, the fear of losing money, induces inaction while the thrill of a gain induces action. And so, to change behavior in ourselves and in others, we may want to try these positive strategies rather than threats, which really capitalize on the human tendency to seek progress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp0O2vi8DX4

Dorfman, A., Grossmann, I. (2020). Social Incentives. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1834