Page 99 - The Power to Change Anything

88 INFLUENCER

Brian Wansink, a consumer behavior psychologist, shows
how classical conditioning influences something as basic as
food preferences. He surveyed World War II veterans who had
served in the South Pacific. He discovered that about a third
of them loved Chinese food, while another third hated it. What
made the difference? They had all eaten Chinese food during
the war—it was all they had to eat. The third who had experi-
enced heavy combat during the periods where they ate
Chinese food hated it. The third who had been away from the
front lines loved it. The soldiers had been classically condi-
tioned to love or hate Chinese food, and these preferences
remained 50 years later. In short, the preference was both
learned and durable.
While Pavlov’s experiments linked bells to something pos-
itive (food), other researchers used cues to signal something less
desirable—say an electric shock. To no one’s surprise, it turns
out that fear and pain create even more dramatic changes in
preferences. Remember the book A Clockwork Orange? Alex,
a particularly nasty hoodlum, is given “aversive therapy.” Prison
doctors play images of violence choreographed to Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony while giving Alex drugs that make him
severely nauseous. The aversive therapy worked so well that
Alex could no longer defend himself—or enjoy Beethoven.
But, alas, this is all more of a curiosity than a helpful tool.
Although negative associations can indeed cause profound
change in preferences, you won’t find effective influencers using
aversive or other aggressively manipulative methods. Shock col-
lars all around, right? Wrong. They avoid painful techniques
because they are ethical, principled, and nice people.
So, if we shouldn’t poke people with sharp sticks as a way
of propelling them away from their inappropriate behavior,
what’s left? Actually, there are two very powerful and ethical
ways of helping humans change their reaction to a previously
neutral or noxious behavior: creating new experiences and
creating new motives.