Page 237 - The Power to Change Anything

226 INFLUENCER

forces from the physical world, the better prepared we’ll be to
deal with them. Equally important, the more we note how we
fall prey to simple, silent things that surround us, the more
likely it is that we’ll extend our vigilance to other domains of
our life.
To understand this concept more fully, let’s start by sam-
pling just one domain: our personal life. More specifically, our
eating habits. How might understanding the power that things
hold over us help here? What might we do to warn our friend
Henry, who continues to struggle with his weight loss problem?
To answer this, consider the work of the clever and mischie-
vous social scientist Brian Wansink, who manipulates things to
see how a small change in physical features affects a large
change in human behavior. For instance, he once invited a
crowd of people who had just finished lunch to watch a movie.
As subjects filed into the theater, Wansink’s assistants handed
them either a small, medium, or bigger-than-your-head bucket
of very stale popcorn. The treat was so stale that it squeaked
when eaten. One moviegoer described it as akin to eating
Styrofoam packing peanuts.
Despite the fact that the popcorn tasted terrible and that
the crowd was still full from lunch, when Wansink’s crew gath-
ered up the variously sized buckets at the end of the movie, it
turned out almost everybody had mindlessly gobbled the chewy
material. Even more interesting, the size of the container, not
the size of the person or his or her appetite, predicted how
much of the food had been consumed. Patrons with big buck-
ets ate 53 percent more than those given the smaller portions.
The distraction of the movie, the size of the bucket, and the
sound of others eating around them all subtly influenced peo-
ple to eat something they would otherwise have rejected.
Wansink has even more to teach Henry. For example, it
turns out—contrary to what you and I might believe—that we
don’t tend to eat until we’re full. We eat until small things from
our environment make us think we’re full. Wansink demon-