Harnessing The Rider (Reason) and The Elephant (Emotions) to Drive Changes

The Covid crisis has ushered both voluntary and involuntary changes into our lives: relationships mediated by technology, the blurring of work and domestic tasks inside living spaces, a compressed, never-ending togetherness with roommates or family members, the cessation of travel. Given that Nature seems to have compelled behavioral changes that most human beings would have otherwise resisted, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit a book on how we can drive and sustain changes in normal times.

For instance, for those who want to usher weight losses across the family, the authors of Switch propose a seemingly simple solution. They suggest that if you want a group of people to eat less, you don’t have to change their thinking or behavior. Just grant them smaller portions. In other words, change the environment (which is relatively easier) rather than try to change people (which is more difficult).

This lesson is derived from Brian Wansink, the author of Mindless Eating, who used to run the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. Wansink conducted a study among a set of moviegoers, who were divided into two groups. One group was given a free medium-sized tub of intentionally unappetizing popcorn for free; the second group received the same, stale popcorn, also for free, but in a much larger tub. At the end of the study, the movie goers who had been given the larger tub, ended up eating more, regardless of how hungry they were to begin with. The conclusion of the study was: larger portions induce more eating.

While, in general, it is thought that people resist change, we also encounter situations where change is welcomed. It’s probably the reason we choose to get married, have babies, change jobs, move houses or travel. After all, as the Heaths observe, babies are not always a source of pleasure. Parents have to contend with night shifts, soggy diapers, the stress of ongoing care. And yet we seem to welcome certain changes but fear others. And struggle with making other shifts like exercising or learning a new skill.

In Switch, authors spell out what drives change at the individual, organizational and social level. One easy change, like in the popcorn study, is to change the situation. But this is not sufficient. There is a bigger battle to be fought, between the heart and the mind.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, the University of Virginia psychologist, Jonathan Haidt constructs an analogy to picturize the battle. Your emotions are like an Elephant, and the rational mind, is like a tiny Rider. Since the Elephant is so outsized, the Rider, despite his or her best efforts, is often unable to subdue the beast. But as the authors point out, the Elephant can be befriended when you need to make certain critical changes.

Essentially, Switch offers a three-part framework to inspire change:

1. Direct the Rider: Offer clarity on the exact change you need to make, in order to head in the desired direction.

2. Motivate the Elephant: Engage people’s emotions, since self-control and willpower are insufficient.

3. Shape the Path: Change the environment to usher the change.

Learn From the Bright Spots

The model, however, can be used only when you already know what you need to do. How do you find fixes in more knotty situations? In 1990, Jerry Sternin, contended with what seemed like an intractable problem. He had only six months in Vietnam, in which to make a visible change in the child malnutrition situation. He also had limited funds and no knowledge of Vietnamese. He knew he could not address larger contributors to child malnutrition like poverty and poor sanitation systems, with a constrained budget and in such a short time.

Instead, he traveled into villages, and spoke with groups of mothers. He asked them to identify kids who were thriving nutritionally despite being saddled with the same circumstances as others. Exceptions that could not be replicated were not considered. Eventually, the mothers identified a few kids who seemed to be growing up more healthy than those in other homes. They found that these kids were fed differently from the majority:

a. They were given four meals a day rather than two meals.

b. They were being hand-fed by their parents, rather than being encouraged to eat on their own.

c. Some low-cost nutritional ingredients like shrimps, crabs and green sweet potatoes were added to their meals.

When these specific changes were adopted by other families, studies found that nutritional outcomes changed across villages. The tips, disseminated by word-of-mouth, changed the outcome for many families across Vietnam.

Just like Sternin identified the bright spots – the kids who were healthy despite their poverty -an alcoholic can dwell on the times he or she had managed to stay sober. Then by mining the bright spots, he or she might be able to come up with specific directions for the Rider. And the Elephant is also engaged, since dwelling on the times or instances when things actually seemed to work generates hope and optimism.

Similarly, if you are rolling out a program among a few managers, and only two agree to implement it, two are half-hearted and one is skeptical, go back and study the two that did  it. Perhaps those managers can influence the behavior of others – by coaching and training them, and offering specific pointers on how the program can be finetuned?

If your child brings home a report card with an A, B, C and F, are you more likely to focus on the “F” or on the “A”? What if you shifted your focus to the “A” and tried to build on the child’s strengths rather than trying to fix the weaknesses?

Reduce the Choices and Script the Moves

If the Rider is given too many choices, he/she is more likely to become paralyzed. For instance, a grocery that set up 6 sample jams on a trial table sold 10 times more jams than a grocery that set up 24 sample jams. Too much choice makes the final decision more cognitively exhausting and hence unlikely to occur. As Barry Schwartz puts it in his book, The Tyranny of Choice, there are many times when “Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”

Besides, too much choice, the Rider is also paralyzed by ambiguity. When you don’t know what path to take next, you are unlikely to take any action at all. Hence you are likely to stick to the familiar and resist change. But when you “script the moves”, you dive into the details, which makes the Switch more likely.

In an intervention conducted among parents who were child abusers, the social workers asked the parents to participate in a lab experiment, where they were to spend five minutes with their children, inside a lab setting, and obey the child’s commands. The whole interaction was to be “child-directed” and the parents were coached, by a trained expert, who watched the interaction remotely, to respond appropriately.

For instance, if the child was drawing, the parent would also start drawing. If the child used a green crayon, the parent was instructed to follow suit. If the child said, “give me your green crayon,” the parent was to comply and shift to pink. If the child said “pink is ugly,” the parent was to agree and switch to red. Parents who participated in this intervention were much less likely to abuse their children in later years, compared with a control group that was simply given anger management therapy.

Direct Them Towards an Exciting Destination

To motivate the Elephant, you also need a destination that has been crafted to evoke excitement. So one particular Teach for America teacher told her class of first graders, that by the end of the year, she wanted them to be scholars like third graders. By calling them scholars, she had them reframe themselves into students who were serious and invested in learning. She also made their goal cool, because all the first-graders thought the older third-graders were hip and aspirational. She had started with a set of kids who had large differences in skills – some were already reading at a good level, others struggled with basics. But still she managed to effect a remarkable improvement across all.

Make the Change Feel Easier

A study on hotel maids divided the maids into two groups. The first group, who was taught about the benefits of exercise, was also told that the work they were doing – bending, scrubbing, pushing – already counted as exercise. They were even alerted to the calories they shed while performing various tasks.

The second group was only given a talk on the benefits of exercise. They were not asked to reflect on the work they were already doing. Four weeks later, the first group was found to have lost more weight than the second group. None had made dietary changes or increased the time spent at gyms. What could have accounted for this? The researchers attributed this to a placebo effect. But Chip and Dan Heath argue that it’s not a placebo effect, but an actual change in behavior that might have triggered the difference. Since the first group was told that they were already exercising, they might have started “working out” more consciously and with greater zest, inside the rooms. Instead of making one trip to the cart, to dump the dirty linens, they might have made several trips.

In other words, the Elephant is easier to motivate, when you “shrink the change.” As the Heaths write, “The Elephant has no trouble conquering [the] micro milestones, and as it does, something else happens. With each step, the Elephant feels less scared and less reluctant, because things are working.”

To sustain changes that are slow and painstaking, you might want to reward tiny steps. Amy Sutherland, a writer, studied the methods of animal trainers. If an animal trainer wants to get a monkey to skateboard, they need to reinforce or reward each micro step that will eventually lead to the larger achievement. At first you give the monkey a piece of mango for merely allowing you to insert a skateboard into the cage; then you, reward it for touching the skateboard. Then for sitting on it. Then for resting a foot on it. And so on and on, till the monkey, who has fed on several mangos by then, is ready to move around on the skateboard. Animal trainers never use punishments, only positive reinforcements. Sutherland wrote a hilarious New York Times article (2006) on how she trains her husband, using the same method.

Like Sutherland, who never gave up on her spouse, a good leader never thinks of people being inherently bad, or of children being innately unruly. Good leaders reflect on how they can draw out the best in their team members or in the children they are managing/teaching. For those who run short of ideas, reading Switch will help you foster and retain a positive outlook towards changes in yourself and others.

References:

Heath, Chip and Heath, Dan, Switch: How To Change Things When Change is Hard, Broadway Books, New York, 2010