Thinking Space

Well a lot has been written about change and resistance to learn new things, the cognitive load it brings.

However in their research Heath Brothers brought a new perspective that what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

In an experiment researchers gave different size buckets of free popcorns to moviegoers, they wanted to understand if someone with larger bucket will eat more popcorns than someone with smaller supply. Even though popcorns were not fresh and mostly people couldn’t finish their quota but they found the people with larger bucket size ate more.

No other theory explained this behaviour. These people weren’t eating for pleasure (popcorns were so stale). They weren’t eating to finish them (Buckets were too to finish). The equation came was

Bigger container  = More eating

If you try to conclude that people who ate more were Gluttons and needed to be motivated for healthier eating behaviours then you have a difficult task at hand but if you turn the problem into handing out smaller buckets to eat at the first instance then you will have much success.

“So what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.”