Who’s Cuing You?
Once again, my blog-writing module has been activated by an article in the New York Times, this one called, “Warning: Habits May Be Good for You,” by Charles Duhigg. The main focus is on the way that a benevolent woman, Val Curtis, enlisted the habit manipulation know-how of American businesses to change the hand-washing behavior of people in Africa so that fewer children would die of diarrhea. They developed an advertising campaign that worked by cuing the built-in disgust response to peoples’ use of the toilet, and offering soap as a way of alleviating that disgust. The campaign has been very successful, in contrast to earlier habit-changing efforts that failed to appreciate the way human brains work.
The article is worth reading just for the many examples of how companies have used their knowledge to manipulate consumer behavior–you might be surprised at how your own habits have been altered for the benefit of someone’s bottom line. But a little thinking about the information presented reveals much broader implications for understanding how we function in everyday life.
I have written and talked about how different modules (neural networks,) are activated as we move from one environment to another–from the bathroom, to the kitchen, to work, for example–but this article alerted me to the fact that as different facets of any given situation catch our attention, each one may cue a different module. The sight of the couch may cue chip-eating behavior, as the author mentions, and as our gaze wanders around any room, we may find our thoughts and desires shifting in response to each item or person.
I have suggested elsewhere how these cued responses can be put to use; that if the dieting module wants to gain ascendency over the gluttony module, it should subscribe to health newsletters and magazines when gluttony is quiescent, and leave them on the table to re-activate itself when gluttony would ordinarily be in control. I had not considered, until reading today’s article, that it could be equally productive to work from the opposite direction and look for cues in the environment that activate the gluttony module. Just the understanding that the desire for chips is cued by the couch, and that that cue may have been implanted by the commercial of a chip-making company, might be enough to begin defusing that cue.
I have also mentioned how some unnoticed cue may lead us into an “emotion cascade,” a la Minsky, so that we find ourselves caught up in sadness, or loneliness, etc., and how I have tried to become alert to the beginnings of such cascades before they build up strength. The very understanding that emotion cascades begin in the same way that all behavioral sequences do–in the brain’s reacting to some cue in the environment–may give us enough perspective to see them as arbitrary sequences rather than taking them for “the way things really are.”
Getting back to how the disgust module was used to instill hand-washing behavior, we might take occasion to ask how our own disgust module acquired the set of cues that activate it. Whatever we find repulsive, that response was bequeathed to us by some aspect of our history, and examination may reveal that we have been manipulated by forces we may have the option of repudiating, once we become aware of them.
What is true of repulsion is true of attraction: many such responses are acquired–that car, that fashion, etc. Those that are not acquired from our experience are the result of something as programmed as pheromones–arbitrary from a genetic rather than from an environmental point of view.
There are at least two important conclusions to be drawn: nothing is inherently sacred or holy, and everything is dependent on what has come before. Our desire to change, to improve ourselves, is not something we can take credit for. That, too, is part of our inheritance.
The very understanding of how we have come to be what we are, itself becomes a part of what we are, and helps to determine what we will become.
Becoming What It Will Become
