Obesity is spreading like a disease. If a person becomes obese, the likelihood that his friend would also become obese increased by 57 percent. If a person’s sibling became obese, the chance of another sibling becoming obese increased by 40%. If a person’s spouse became obese, the likelihood he would become obese increased 37%. Part of this is based on things like portion size: people base the amount of food they eat on the amount others around them eat. It’s hard to just eat a granola bar when everyone around you is eating Double-Doubles. But, there are also deeper, more mysterious psychological forces driving our eating habits.
Consider the following: your friend Lucy, who is about 25 pounds overweight, e-mails you pictures from her recent vacation. After you look at Lucy’s picture, the office secretary comes by with a plate of cookies. Will exposure to someone overweight influence how many cookies you eat?
Over 26% of people surveyed said they would eat less than if they hadn’t seen the pictures, while nearly 32% said they wouldn’t eat any after seeing the pictures. The rest of the people surveyed said the pictures wouldn’t affect their cookie eating desires or willpower. No one said that the photos would cause them to eat more.
It turns out, those people who saw a picture of fat Lucy ate substantially more than those who didn’t. Why?
Goal Contagion
We’ve all been in that situation: two people talking about someone, when all of the sudden one person shifts the conversation dramatically, and the other person doesn’t miss a beat, knowing that someone just walked up behind him. This sort of thing happens in a million different ways, where one person’s goal shifts and his accomplice’s shifts right in line. One of my favorite examples:
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Most people can tell what someone else wants by tone of voice, or turn of phrase, or even body language. But, the ability to understand other people goes far beyond these basic social cues. Primates, including humans, actually encode animated behavior and self-propelled motion of objects in terms of goals. When we see someone pushing a shopping cart, we don’t simply observe the action of someone pushing a shopping cart. We perceive that person’s behavior as goal-directed and then identify the goals behind that behavior. We don’t even have to consciously think about it: we describe the action as “That guy must need more toilet paper,” not simply “That guy is pushing a basket on wheels.”
Research has also indicated that situational cues can automatically put goals in place and guide goal-directed behavior without a person’s awareness of them. The perception of goal-implying behaviors may activate representations of goals outside of conscious awareness, which lead to actual goal directed behavior. Basically, when we watch someone do something, the human brain automatically perceives the goal behind that action and then adopts and pursues the same goal. This is what’s known as goal contagion.
This seems wild, but from an evolutionary standpoint it makes sense: if we see someone gathering wood or building a hut, we understand the goal is fire or protection. By automatically adopting that goal ourselves, it makes it easier for people to work together, which makes survival more likely.
Stereotypes
Humans seem to be so goal-oriented that we don’t just perceive goals from actions. We also perceive them from stereotypes (bundles of characteristics including traits, attitudes, behavioral tendencies, and goals that are associated with members of a social category). When we are exposed to a stereotyped person, or even just a photo of a stereotyped person, our brains perceive the goals associated with that stereotype, and, additionally, motivation or commitment to these goals. For negative (non-deterministic) stereotypes, “it is likely that the stereotype includes high commitment to pursue stereotype-conducive behaviors and low commitment to a countervailing goal that would limit those behaviors.” In other words, because a person fits a negative stereotype, others are likely to infer that she has low commitment to a goal that would prevent her from fitting that stereotype.
Fat Lucy
When we combine the effect of goal contagion with the knowledge that stereotypes confer goals of their own, it becomes more clear why people eat more cookies after seeing a picture of fat Lucy. “Because having high commitment to a goal to be healthy could limit actions that lead to being overweight, consumers infer that overweight people have low commitment to the health goal.” When goal contagion kicks in, people who see the picture of fat Lucy adopt that same low commitment to health and eat more cookies.
Solutions
The authors of the stereotype studies propose two solutions to limit the negative effects of goal contagion:
- Increase access to an alternative goal. i.e. if you’re trying to eat less at work, hang up that bikini in your office to remind you of your positive goal.
- Link the behavior to the stigma. i.e. keep a picture of fat Lucy stuffing her face with food to remind you that the reason she’s fat is because she eats too much.
I would also suggest one more: merely being cognizant that this phenomena exists, actively thinking about it, might be enough for you to stop it from working.
Also keep in mind that this phenomenon of goal contagion applies throughout our lives. For example, college students’ scores on general knowledge tests increased after exposure to a picture of a professor but decreased after exposure to a picture of a supermodel. Foster the environment that promotes positive goals and discourages negative goals.
Sources:
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