Learn about how your brain can trick you into changing your mind; how to set goals you can achieve to make your life better; and what to do if you’re on a diet and you start to slip up. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: "Choice Blindness" Can Fool You Into Changing Your Mind — https://curiosity.im/2SsBZkH Is It Harder to Maintain a Good Habit or Attain a New Goal? — https://curiosity.im/2EewQcl If Your Diet Fails, Don't Give Up — https://curiosity.im/2SvpUvo If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about how your brain can trick you into changing your mind; how to set goals you can achieve to make your life better; and what to do if you’re on a diet and you start to slip up.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/choice-blindness-maintaining-habits-and-achieving-goals-and-dont-give-up-if-your-diet-fails
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three brand new stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about how your brain can trick you into changing your mind, how to set goals you can achieve to make your life better, and what to do if you're on a diet and you start to slip up.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily. It's surprisingly easy to convince people that they made a different decision than the one they made in reality. This is a thing called choice blindness. And there's some recent research out of the Choice Blindness Lab at Lund University that might blow your mind.
It's like, let's say you're at a restaurant and you can't decide if you want smoked salmon or prime rib. You talk to the waiter and you order the smoked salmon. Then 15 minutes later, he brings you the prime rib. And you think to yourself, wow, this is great. You're so happy to get that prime rib you ordered. Obviously, this is pretty messed up since you ordered the salmon, not the prime rib.
But this kind of mind game is a lot more possible than you might think. In a recent study, participants were shown two different faces and asked to pick the most attractive one. Then, researchers showed them their choices. But sometimes, they performed a sleight of hand card trick and they switched out the choices the participants had actually made for the choice they had rejected.
Now, you might think that would be an easy thing to notice. But participants commented on the switch less than a third of the time. As the study progressed, the rejected choice impacted later choices. Participants were shown some of the same faces again and asked to compare with other choices. Those who had experienced a card trick actually chose the face that had been swapped out more often than not.
The results suggest people were convinced the face they had rejected was more attractive after all. Now, judging a beauty contest is one thing, but surely, this phenomenon can't be replicated with deeply held political or moral beliefs, right? Well, in a similar study from 2012, researchers asked random people in a park to fill out a survey and rank how strongly they agreed or disagreed with certain moral claims.
Moments later, the researchers asked them to review, discuss, and justify their position. Once again, researchers swapped out participants' original statements for their opposites. And even in this situation, more than 2/3 of participants failed to notice the switch. They were asked additional questions to make sure they fully understood the new claim they were putting forward and that didn't matter.
The people who were subjected to a card trick were capable of justifying their response despite the fact that moments earlier, they had professed something completely different. So go easy on yourself. Your beliefs are not as ironclad as you think they are.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's talk New Year's resolutions. Do you go for easy resolutions or shoot for more challenging goals? In a recent study, psychologists came up with some ideas for what types of resolutions you can and should set.
CODY GOUGH: What kind of resolutions did you set?
ASHLEY HAMER: One of them is I want to budget my money. I think that's a pretty standard one that people do. I don't keep a budget and I feel like that's the thing I needed to do.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, yeah. That can be good.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. What about you?
CODY GOUGH: I don't usually set resolutions because I'm indecisive and I never can pick one, I guess. A 365-day commitment is just so much.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Right. Well, the hope is that it's more than 365 days.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I know.
ASHLEY HAMER: So for this study, researchers presented 300 people with five hypothetical goals. They were put into three categories-- academic GPA, personal savings, and tennis wins. One goal was maintaining the status quo. As in something maintain a 3.5 GPA. Other types of goals focused on either a small, medium, large, or very large improvement on the status quo.
Participants were broken into groups and each group ranked how hard they thought a category was. Some results were obvious. Like, small improvements were easier than medium improvements and medium improvements were easier than large improvements. But the participants said that those goals where they'd maintain the status quo were harder than the goals that involved making small improvements. That's because the small goals felt more manageable.
See, if you feel like there's no improvement with the goals you set, then all the factors outside your control slip into the foreground. You start to think about stuff like can I keep saving at the same pace as last year? What if the economy tanks? What if I have a family emergency? This is an effect the researchers call negativity bias.
Now, in a different experiment, participants told researchers it would be easier to maintain the status quo than it would be to make small improvements. But in this experiment, the participants also said that if they had to pick a goal for themselves, they'd make small improvements rather than maintain the status quo.
They said that they thought small goals were harder but they also had better rewards. In reality, maintaining the status quo is technically easy but psychologically difficult. It takes effort but has no clear payoff. So it's hard to get motivated. Researchers saw this as a quirk in human psychology. So when you're aiming for goals this year, set resolutions ambitiously. You might not make big achievements right away, but small improvements are better than letting those goals become stagnant.
CODY GOUGH: Let's face it. Diets can be hard. Maybe you were on a diet during the holidays in which case you really know how hard it can be to stick to it. Now, let's say you dropped your diet. Should you pick it back up or is it a lost cause? A new study has a reason to keep trying. Great news if you drank as much eggnog as I did in December.
ASHLEY HAMER: You're big eggnog guy?
CODY GOUGH: I'm a big eggnog and brandy guy.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, interesting.
CODY GOUGH: And whipped cream and nutmeg.
ASHLEY HAMER: That sounds amazing.
CODY GOUGH: My eggnog and brandy recipe is pretty legendary.
[LAUGHTER]
ASHLEY HAMER: It's awesome.
CODY GOUGH: Well, it's awesome. It's also quite caloric. Yeah. Not the healthiest, but once a year--
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: You know. So for this study, 60 middle-aged women were put on a diet plan for about 15 weeks while researchers monitored risk factors for diabetes and heart disease. The diet plan worked in three phases. In phase 1, participants stuck to what the study called a healthy eating plan. In phase 2, participants would go back to their previous eating patterns. And phase 3, they went back on the healthy diet.
The women tried two different diets. Half were assigned to the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, which focused on decreasing salt intake and eating whole foods. The other group was given a Mediterranean diet. And that focused on boosting healthy fats. After each phase was complete, participants checked back with the researchers who measured blood pressure, cholesterol, and other risk factors for heart disease and diabetes.
Risks increased and then dropped like a roller coaster as diets fluctuated. Higher risks were when the women had no diet restrictions. It only took a couple of weeks of dieting for the risk factors to decrease. They dropped the same amount during phase 1 and 3 of dieting. The study's Lead Researcher, Wayne Campbell, summed up the results by saying, quote, "The best option is to keep the healthy pattern going, but if you slip up, try again." Unquote.
Now, you might want to avoid extremes. When you lose 20 pounds on three or more occasions, researchers call that weight cycling, which you may have heard Oprah referred to as yo-yo dieting. Research indicates that weight cycling does seem to stress the cardiovascular system and it may put you at higher risk for heart disease.
But according to the researchers, the long term impact of diet and weight fluctuations still require a bit further study. Still, existing research suggests that dieting is not just an all or nothing thing. If you slip up, keep trying. You can do this. Get back on that horse right into the sunset.
ASHLEY HAMER: Read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow with the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer, stay curious.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.