Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention by Ben Parr

Author:Ben Parr
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-03-02T14:00:00+00:00

Balancing Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Rewards

When McDonald’s first introduced healthier items to its menu—Caesar salad, fruit and yogurt parfait, grilled chicken sandwich wrap—it was hailed as an important step toward reducing the consumption of empty calories and the fast-growing problem of childhood obesity. But despite consumer outcry about the traditional menu (thanks to the documentary Super Size Me) and demand for the healthier menu, sales of its salads and healthy items have remained flat. Why?25

Certainly, one reason is that people don’t go to McDonald’s to get a salad—they go to get a Big Mac and fries. But Dr. Gavan Fitzsimons, a marketing and psychology professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, found another interesting reason why healthy items at the fast food giant didn’t sell. Fitzsimons and his collaborators recruited 104 students, measured their level of self-control, and asked them to look over a menu of food options, each of which was the same price. One group had a menu with French fries, chicken nuggets, and a baked potato. The other group had an extra menu item: a salad.26

Students in the first group chose the fries (rated by the students two weeks prior as the least healthy option) about 50 percent of the time if they had low self-control and 10 percent of the time if they had high levels of self-control. The second group—the one with the salad on the menu—was a different story, though. Individuals with high levels of self-control actually chose the fries more often than their counterparts. When given a menu with a healthy option, students with high levels of self-control chose the fries nearly 50 percent of the time. Adding a healthy option to the menu actually increased the likelihood that the students would choose to eat the French fries. Not only that but Fitzsimons and his colleagues also found that the amount of time and attention the students with high self-control gave toward the fries increased significantly when the researchers added a salad to the menu.

Healthy menu options can actually backfire. Add a salad to a menu and you’ll pay attention to the least healthy option more. The reason, Fitzsimons and company concluded, is something he calls “vicarious goal fulfillment.” Oftentimes, we have to make a choice between an intrinsic reward and an extrinsic one. We derive pleasure from the salty taste of fries (this is tangible, so it’s an extrinsic reward), but we also seek to lose weight and feel good about ourselves when we wear our swimsuits at the beach (the positive and intangible feelings of accomplishment and self-satisfaction are intrinsic rewards).

In the case of the McDonald’s experiment, our wanting for each reward—extrinsic pleasure from tasty food and intrinsic pleasure from healthy eating—are mutually exclusive: very few people can lose weight on a diet of French fries and Big Macs. But the brain can be tricked into thinking it can have its cake and eat it too. When a healthy option appears on a menu filled with junk food, our brain feels a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.