One of the problems that these programs were called to study, was how to improve fruit consumption on a given school cafetaria. An analysis of the cafetaria display showed that the fruits were placed on a metal bin next to a bin of packaged snacks. So when students reached the point where the fruits were placed they had to make a choice between a more healthy but less appealing food, and the colorful and calorie rich and ego boosting snacks. No wonder fruits lost most of the battles.

The solution: remove the snacks to other location (one that’s not so easy on the eye) and place the fruits on colorful bowls, improving its presentation. Simple and inexpensive. With the introduction of this new display fruit consumption on the school cafetaria improved 104%.

While this kind of nudges won’t solve any major issue, even regarding childhood obesity, they may become powerful weapons that can help people make better choices and improve the quality of their lives.

It all started in 1931 with a campaign developed by the artist Haddon Sundblom published in the Ladie’s Home Journal that pictured Santa holding a glass of Coke hailing it for the refreshing pause it brings. From 1931 to 1964, Sundblom created a new advertising piece for Coca-Cola according to Christmas imagery the brand developped, as Phil Mooney, Coca-Cola’s VP for Heritage Communications, explained to CNN’s Eatocracy. The goal? Improve Coke’s sales in Winter time:

In 1931, Coca-Cola was trying to convince consumers that Coke could be consumed in the winter months as well as the summer months. Coke decided to be associated with the holidays by advertising Coke for the holidays. So the character of Santa was chosen because he has to go around the world in one evening and he is definitely going to get thirsty. So the campaign shows Santa pausing during the evening to enjoy a Coke.

By repeating the same theme year after year, the brand managed to create a strong association between Christmas and itself becoming a part of the collective memory for the occasion and ensuring that its always present when one think of Christmas.

True as this all may be, the notion that it was Coke that created the red and white version of Santa Claus is a myth. A myth that the company is happy to ride and foster, as it helps to associate the brand with the season. Whil Coke can state that Sundblom developed  his version of Santa Claus from the poem ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’, written in 1922 by Clement Clark Moore, the fact is that red and white Santa’s with fluffy beards have been around form at least 1866 in ilustrations by the artist Thomas Nast, and have been used by other companies like Oldsmobile, Waterman’s pens, Murad cigarettes or Michelin.

While the creation of the red and white Santa can’t be atributed to Coca-Cola, the proliferation and globality of the imagery are due to the brand’s advertising efforts.

And this was how Coca-Cola ‘stole’ Christmas for its marketing efforts and created one of the most powerfull branding associations of the World.

You can read Phil Mooney interview with Eatocracy here.

You can see some pre-Coke red and white Santas here (page is in portuguese).

If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person – you already feel fortunate.

While there isn’t – so far as I know – any study that tried to unlock an “optimistic gene”, a recent research as uncovered interesting insights about the brain mechanisms behind optimistic behavior as quoted on the BPS Research Digest:

Now Tali Sharot (author of the forthcoming book The Optimism Bias) and her colleagues have investigated the brain mechanisms underlying this rosy outlook. Sharot had participants estimate their likelihood of experiencing 80 adverse life events from developing Alzheimer’s to being robbed. After they gave each estimate, the participants were given the correct average probability for a person in their socio-economic circumstances. In a subsequent testing session, participants had a second chance to forecast their risk of experiencing the same 80 misfortunes. Throughout this process, Sharot scanned the activity of the participants’ brains.

One key finding is that the participants showed a bias in the way that they updated their estimates, being much more likely to revise an original estimate that was overly pessimistic than to revise an original estimate that was unduly optimistic (79 per cent of participants showed this pattern). The researchers checked and this difference wasn’t to do with the positive feedback being remembered better, but purely to do with it being taken account of more than negative feedback.

There were some intriguing neural insights. Discovering that an initial estimate was unduly pessimistic was associated with increased activity across the frontal lobes, in left inferior frontal gyrus, left and right medial frontal cortex/superior frontal gyrus, and also in the right cerebellum – and this increased activity correlated with the participants’ subsequent updating of their estimate in the second round of predictions. By contrast, discovering that they’d been overly optimistic was associated with reduced activity in the inferior frontal gyrus extending into precentral gyrus and insula, and again this activity change was related to the likelihood that the participants would revise their estimate in the second round of predictions.

As the researchers point, a possible evolutionary explanation for this is linked to the necessity of early humans to have an enhanced exploratory behavior, which may have been essential to finding new food resources or better habitats. However, without a realistic assessment of probabilities, an unrestrained optimistic view of the world can lead to dire consequences; for the optimists, but also for all those whose lives are influenced by them.

You can read the BPS Research Digest here.

This, however, is no more than an illusion; everyday we are influenced by what others think and do, looking for clues on how to behave in ambiguous situations or changing our behavior in order it to be tuned to how others behave. That much was proved in the 1950′s by social psychologist Solomon Asch in the attempt to study conformity.

The conformity studies designed by Asch were cleverly simple: experimental subjects were show a card with a line drawn on it, then they were shown another card with three lines being their task to identify which of those three lines was similar to the line shown on the first card. A simple, unambiguous task that shouldn’t create many errors. However, there was a simple experimental manipulation: the subjects had to perform their task in the company of 6 other fellows given their comparison estimates one at the time. What wasn’t known to the subjects was that these fellows wera actually confederates that were instructed to give blatantly wrong answers on some trials and cause the illusion of consensus leaving the real subject as the outsider.

What Asch was trying to measure with this was the amount of subjects that would conform with the confederate’s wrong answers. The results were clear: 75% of the subjects conformed at least once, while 5% conformed with the group on every trial!

What this study as shown is that, although we like to think we aren’t influenced by others behavior, when we are unsure about what to do, how to behave or when what we believe is the right choice clashes with a consensus from everyone around us we tend to conform, to change the way we think and behave in order to be more in line with the rest.

You can see this happening all the time in marketing with people buying the same brands the their friends bought, not because they’re the best but because we want to fit in, to be part of the group, to conform with the “norms”. Peer pressure is one of the most powerful weapons of marketers.

If you’re in doubt of the power of peer pressure just check this video of a “Candid Camera” episode that clearly shows conformity works:

This exhausting process to obtain a black cab license is known as The Knowledge, and it usually takes 2 to 4 years for an applicant to obtain it through a serie of tests are points are won. But taking and aquiring The Knowledge not only gets you a license, it changes your brain. Or more correctly, it changes a part of your brain known to be related with spacial memory:

In 2000, Maguire showed that one particular part of the brain – the  hippocampus – is much larger in London cab drivers than in other people. This seahorse-shaped area lies in the core of the brain, and animal studies had linked it to memory and spatial awareness. Species that store a lot of food tend to have a bigger hippocampus than those without the need to remember any burial sites.

Maguire showed that the same applies to humans. Not only did cab drivers have an unusually large hippocampus, but the size of the area matched the length of their driving careers.

Furthermore, the studies that have been conducted over the years on this subject as shown that it’s the aquisition of The Knowledge and its practice that changes the hippocampus size and not the fact that one has an abnormally (compared to mean) large hippocampus that allows the aquisition.

This is further proof of brain’s plasticity through learning even after adulthood and can have an important role in the study on how can we deal with diseases such as Alzheimer.

You can read more about these studies here.

We are not as rational as we think we are. We usually make the same mistakes over and over without even realizing that we are mistaken or the origin of those errors. Behavioral economics, that is getting a lot of attention lately, owes much of its core assumptions to the work of Kahneman and Tversky.

One of the most interesting and important biases uncovered by their work is the Optimistic bias that makes people assume a more probable brighter future for themselves and their endevors, over-estimating the probability of positive outcomes and under-estimating the likelihood of negative outcomes. In a recent article for Bloomberg, Kahneman calls it “the most significant bias”:

Because optimistic bias is both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic.

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person — you already feel fortunate.

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders — not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge.

A survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: The people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.

This excerpt is part of 4 articles that Kahneman wrote for Bloomberg that are a highly recommended reading. We can read the four part article on “Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think” over the following links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Part 4.

For more of Kahneman thoughts and experiments, you shoul read is recently published book Thinking Fast & Slow that already has been considered one of the most important books of the year.

A recent paper covering six experiments led by Joshua Ackerman (MIT), Christopher Nocera (Harvard Uni.) and John Bargh (Yale Uni.), shows that it’s not only flooring that can have an effect on our perceptions on other objects: what we touch, hold or sit on can shape our thoughts and decisions. What’s more, not only our perceptions of objects are affected: judgments over a person suitability for a job and the way we approach a negotiation are also affected by our tactile sensations. The article abstract:

Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways.

According to the authors, this effect happens because our physical experiences shape our understanding of abstract concepts. We are, from an early age, trained to attribute more importance to weighty objects and to perceive rough objects as stronger. Our physical contact with objects creates an anchor point in our perception that leads subsequent perceptive evaluation of other social objects. So if you’re trying to sell a car and are open to negotiation, you would do well to provide comfortable chairs to your prospective customers in order to decrease their rigidity in negotiations.

You can access the abstract of the study here.

But how reliable are our memories? Does memory work like a video recorder capturing the event so that we later can replay it as it happened? Or is memory more error prone and easy to manipulate? If you ask these questions to people you’ll see that the majority tends to place high reliability in memories and disregard the idea that memories can be tampered with easily. If you ask people who do study memory, like psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, you’ll get a different and slightly disturbing answer.

It turns out that memories aren’t as reliable as people think and can, with some effort (not nearly as much as you may think) and by expert hands, be modified so that you can forget key details, alter others and even remember events that never took place. For instance, in one of the many experiments Loftus did through her career, subjects vividly remembered going to Disney World and shake hands with Bugs Bunny, a Warner Bros. character.

Slate has a magnificent 8 part report on memories – including a massive experiment – and the work of Elizabeth Loftus that is worth reading. Here’s an excerpt from the first part:

Slate can’t erase all records the way Orwell’s ministry did [in the book 1984]. But with digital technology, we can doctor photographs more effectively than ever. And that’s what we did in last week’s experiment. We altered four images from recent political history, took a fifth out of context, and mixed them with three unadulterated scenes. We wanted to test the power of photographic editing to warp people’s memories.

We aren’t the first to try Orwell’s idea on real people. Elizabeth Loftus, an experimental psychologist, has been tampering with memories in her laboratory for nearly 40 years. Photo doctoring is just one of many techniques she has tested. In an experiment published three years ago, she and two colleagues demonstrated that altered images of political protests in Italy and China influenced Italian students’ descriptions of those incidents. We wanted to see whether similar tampering could work in the United States.

You can read the rest of the first part, and the following 7 parts, here.

It just so happen that it’s a theory of the sort that John Horgan discusses in a guest post at the Scientific American website. Horgan starts by referring to the theory of sex as a side effect of theory of mind. He then goes on to explain the theory proposed by Andrew Newberg that religious experiences have some overlap with sexual arouseness in terms of neural activity:

Another intriguing theory of religion—or, more specifically, religious or mystical experiences—has been proposed by the radiologist Andrew Newberg. Using single-photon emission computed tomography, a variant of the better-known positron emission tomography, or PET, Newberg has scanned the brains of praying Catholic nuns and meditating Buddhist monks, and he has found some overlap between their neural activity and that of sexually aroused subjects (scanned by other researchers). The correlation makes sense, according to Newberg. Just as sex involves a rhythmic activity, so do religious practices such as chanting, dancing and repetition of a mantra. Like orgasms, religious experiences produce sensations of bliss, self-transcendence and unity; that may be why some mystics describe their raptures with romantic or even sexual language.

Horgan states in the end that just because religion can be seen as a side effect of either sex or the theory of mind, that doesn’t mean that it has no value or purpose. Which I quite agree, although it reads more like a political statement than a scientific one. You can read the post here.