Sneak Attack Behavior Change
Designing artifacts that change people’s behavior “for the better” is very difficult. Changing unwanted health, savings, safety or customer-related behaviors are among the hardest things we must do. Cognitive designers are always on the look out for new tactics and approaches to help clients avoid failure and achieve success with behavior change programs.
Check out Melinda Fulmer’s article in the LA Times on Parent Seeks Ways to Make Kids Eat Vegetables. The tactic is to grind them up and sneak them into other foods so kids get them without thinking about it. Kids get what they need and parents don’t need to do battle with them.
There are even books of recipes (The Sneaky Chef) and special lines of food (Bobokids line from Bobobaby) you can buy to take a “sneak attack” approach to behavior change. The approach seems to work and raises some interesting questions for cognitive designers:
- Is this the best approach to take to the problem? The article discusses ways it can backfire.
- Are there other paternalistic (for the user’s own good) applications of the sneak attack technique?
June 25th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Is this really behavior change? The kid’s don’t know they are eating vegetables, so they are not making the choice to eat them. They are not changing – they’re just eating something tasty without giving the mom push-back, which they would do with anything that they think tastes good.
I have a lot to learn on this topic, but it seems to me, that this is not really the childrens’ behavior that is changing, it is simply the mothers’ tactics, as stated.
Wouldn’t behavioral change come in if the mom said that the kid had to try something once before he/she refused it entirely. Then, if the kid actually liked the vegetable, and chose to eat it, then the behavior would change towards that particular vegetable, well as the possibilities for liking other foods…. By trying them and thereby having a more informed behavior..
June 26th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Maybe another example is when a computer application or program is changed/updated… the end user is forced to use the application differently, but the change makes the application more intuitive, so that you actually have to think less about using it. Something like the information aggregators (lexisnexis, Dow Jones Factiva, etc.)… when they improve their products, researchers perhaps don’t need to use Boolean logic to search. Rather, they can use natural language, because the programmers have incorporated fuzzy logic and additional logarithms behind the product.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:58 am
I read a very similar article in a magazine called Wondertimes (unfortunately the article is not web accessible). What I believe this article is getting at is that it’s fine to put healthy ingredients in your children’s food, but the behavior you need to help them learn is good food choices. And that takes time, time your child’s growing body doesn’t always have if the only thing they will eat is pasta. As they learn these great eating habits we all aspire to (some of us adults still need to work on eating our vegetables), we can help them in their most important developing years.
I know that before I became a parent I said “no french fries” or “my child will not eat pasta all the time”, but it’s different from theory to reality. The choice I have is to never go to a fast food restaurant, but if I find a french fry (one made from a sweet potato) will get my son to eat and it will be healthy, you will do that as a parent. That is the point that Lapine in the article is making. If I give them something they think is a treat (still on an occasional basis), and it gets them those last veggie servings for the day, I don’t have to feel guilt. Think about it, do you take a vitamin? Shouldn’t you get all those ‘essential nutrients’ out of your diet?
The trap they are warning you to avoid is getting lax on putting the veggies on their plates. My son loves broccoli, but I’ve also had broccoli thrown at me many times. I still serve it and put it on his plate every time. Sneaking in veggies isn’t a bad approach; it just shouldn’t be the only approach.
As for another example, I was just commenting on spelling skills to a co-worker. What would we do without spell checkers, or calculators? I see these things as letting us off the hook to learn how to spell properly, or to learn (especially see this in schools now) how to do math in our head or using long division.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Good examples, Carla.
The use of spell check and calculators, I think, is a way out of learning. I agree with you, and believe spelling and math and other basic concepts need to be taught first, where the student needs to have a clear and solid grasp of the concepts. If one doesn’t learn the concepts, then using such tools as a replacement for the learning is not helping the student develop their critical and higher order thinking skills. The tools might help them in some way, but could their mental development and capacity to learn be stalled? The tools are not helping them to know.
We have all been given the ability to reason and to choose, but only going through the learning process helps us to reason, and to choose what is best.