Page 238 - The Power to Change Anything

Change the Environment 227

strated this by constructing a magic soup bowl. The bowl could
be refilled from the bottom without diners catching on to the
trick. While people eating from a normal bowl ate on average
9 ounces and then reported being full, those with the bottom-
less bowls ate 15 ounces. Some ate more than a quart before
reporting they’d had enough. Imagine, the two groups were
equally satisfied, and yet one group ate 73 percent more than
the other because diners were unconsciously waiting for their
bowls to look more empty to cue them that they were full.
Wansink suggests that people make over 200 eating deci-
sions every day without realizing it. This mindless eating adds
hundreds of calories to our diets without adding at all to our sat-
isfaction. If half of what Wansink suggests is true, we can pro-
foundly influence our own eating behavior by simply finding
ways to become more mindful of these “mindless” choices.
A mere glance at family, company, and community circum-
stances would reveal the same phenomenon. Much of what we
do, for better or for worse, is influenced by dozens of silent envi-
ronmental forces that drive our decisions and actions in ways
that we rarely notice. So, to make the best use of your last
source of influence, take your laserlike attention off people and
take a closer look at their physical world. Step up to your per-
sistent problem, identify vital behaviors, and then search for
subtle features from the environment that are silently driving
you and others to misbehave.

MAKE THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

Once you’ve identified environmental elements that are subtly
driving your or others’ behavior, it’s time to take steps to make
them more obvious. That is, you should make the invisible vis-
ible. Provide actual cues in the environment to remind people
of the behaviors you’re trying to influence. For example, con-
sider another Wansink experiment in which he gave cans of
stacked potato chips to various subjects. Control subjects were