Good intentions
Over the past couple of months, I serendipitously ran across a few new studies relating to ideas we’ve talked about before. They all have to do with how our environment (broadly defined) helps or hinders our quest to follow through on good intentions. Today, I wanted to share a few shorter pieces on this theme.
First, light and darkness.
Heavenly light
After a day spent working alone, Virginia Woolf liked “to step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six.” The presence of strangers provided an escape from solitude. And the darkness helped. As she wrote: “The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves.” (h/t Harper’s essay)
As we’ve talked about before, and in line with Woolf’s observations, darkness can make us feel uninhibited and less aware of ourselves. Meanwhile, bright light can make us feel more self-aware.
Can the self-awareness that bright light brings translate into us acting more like the person we hope to be? A recent study tested this idea by measuring the impact of lighting on two healthy behaviors – eating healthy food and exercising.
In one experiment, participants were led into a lab space that was either bright or dim. In the bright condition, the ceiling lamps were on. In the dark condition, the room was lit by computer monitors (spooky!).
Participants answered a few questions and were told they’d then move to another room to complete another study. But before they left the space, they got a nice little surprise. There were some snacks left over from a previous experiment. Would they like one? There was a choice between a banana and a small can of Pringles (they could also choose not to take a snack).
Surprise snacks. Who you are vs. who you want to be.
Whether the room was bright or dim, a similar proportion of people didn’t grab a snack (around 12%). But the brightness of the space influenced snack choices among those who did. In the bright condition, the most common choice was a banana (48% of choices). But, by the light of computer monitors, people let themselves go, snacks-wise. Pringles were the most common choice (57% of choices).
A second experiment extended the same method to look at exercise. Or at least the intention to exercise.
Participants again entered the bright or dim lab space and were told they’d answer a few questions before moving on. While in the space, they were asked about their upcoming exercise intentions. They also rated their self-accountability with statements like “I need to do more to meet the standards I have set for myself in terms of my health.” Yikes. Self-accountability is intense.
People in the bright condition had stronger intentions to exercise and higher self-accountability. And the self-accountability ratings mediated the relationship between brightness and exercise intention. Or, in English: being in a bright space increased people’s intention to exercise by increasing their self-accountability.
To test whether this relationship was causal, in a final experiment the researchers directly increased people’s self-accountability. How? By asking some of them to justify their healthy or unhealthy choice. The idea was that asking for a justification would force people to consider what they were doing and how far their behavior was from their standards, which should minimize the effect of light on their choices. And, indeed, that turned out to be the case. When people had to justify their choices, room lighting had no effect on their choice of a healthy vs. unhealthy option.
Outside of lighting in real spaces, I wonder if lighting in photographs might similarly influence us to see what is pictured through a self-accountable or uninhibited lens. For example, I noticed that ad-style photos of alcohol often make it look as if the viewer is in a dark space (examples here, here, here and a tutorial to achieve this kind of effect here). It would be weird and almost subversive to see something healthy, like a salad, lit in this way. We expect salad to be doused in heavenly light.
Aside from health behaviors, self-accountability can also increase our preference for products that have ethical attributes, like being made sustainably. So perhaps one way to increase people’s choices for sustainable products or services could be to brighten up the environment, real or virtual, in which these choices are made. Under a spotlight, we can’t hide from ourselves or our standards.
Working and working out
Speaking of upholding self-created standards, have you ever planned to do something “good for you” at night only to fail after an exhausting day at work?
I used to fail catastrophically, and extremely consistently, at exercising in the evenings before I took a dose of my own medicine (behavioral science) and intervention-ed myself into running every single weekday morning.
If you’re like me, you’re not alone in finding it hard to do good things after a demanding day. And the setting sun is only part of the problem.
To see how a person’s work environment might affect what happens after work, a recent study tested how demands in a work task affected people’s subsequent motivation to exercise.
The researchers set up a simulated call center for a smartphone maker named PHONIAK (nice). One hundred participants, who were students, were randomly assigned into a low or high demand condition in this pseudo-workplace.
Everyone was given a training manual and started to handle customer requests. First, they received eight recorded customer inquiries and answered them by recording their own responses back. To ramp up the pressure, they were told to work as fast as possible.
In the low demand condition, the customers were friendly, and participants were told to act authentically. In the high demand condition, customers were rude and demanding, while participants were asked to act very friendly and to “serve with a smile”.
Next, participants had to calculate prices for customers that took into account discounts and tax rates. AKA they had to do math problems. The low and high demand conditions differed in how difficult these math problems were.
In the grand finale of simulated customer support, it was time to interact with a “real” customer (i.e., a research assistant acting as a customer). Participants received an email with an inquiry and had to call the customer back to answer it. Participants in the low demand condition interacted with a friendly customer and could act naturally, while those in the high demand condition got a jerk they had to serve with a smile.
After completing the whole simulation, which took around 40 minutes, participants went into a separate break room. In the break room, there was a stationary bike and an appealing alternative – a place to sit and a stack of magazines to flip through.
They started out on the bike and were told to ride it for as long as they wanted. After that, they were free to relax and choose a magazine to read. The key outcome measure was how long people rode the stationary bike.
People in the low demand condition—those who didn’t have to deal with unfriendly customers, suppress their emotions (yes, emotional work is still work), or do harder math problems—rode the bike for around 30% longer than those in the high demand condition.
More demanding work translated to less time spent doing the harder free time activity—exercise.
This experiment was able to test whether increased work demands can cause us to subsequently exercise less. But correlational studies in real-life work conditions come to similar conclusions. Even though people perceive exercise to be good at helping them recover from a stressful workday, the same people tend to exercise less after stressful workdays.
It’s a good idea, but one that’s hard to follow. As we’ve talked about, healthy behaviors, aside from our preponderance to stand, tend to decrease over the course of the day. So, if there’s something that requires more than just good intentions, it’s probably better to plan for it earlier in the day.
Virtual restoration
For people working in a demanding environment, what are ways to reduce stress and restore mood during breaks?
Well, nature is a powerful tonic. A walk or run outside can do us good. But what if there’s no nature around? It could be time for a digital substitute. A recent study tested the restorative value of nature videos during breaks.
There were two similar experiments, one with students in a controlled lab setting and one in the field with workers of a large German company participating in a break room.
First, participants completed a survey rating their positive and negative feelings. Then, everyone saw nature scenes. Some experienced the videos in a low immersion medium (a laptop screen), some in more immersive VR.
There were three conditions in total. In a low immersion calming condition, participants watched a slow-moving video about the beauty of Ireland on a computer screen. In a high immersion calming condition, participants experienced the same video in VR. In a final high immersion stimulating condition, participants experienced another VR nature video that was more exciting. It was made up of Kenyan safari scenes: grazing zebras, bathing elephants, and dozing lions.
After seeing the nature scenes, everyone was asked about how restorative the experience had been – how fascinated they were by it and how much it helped them forget their work and feel relaxed. After that, they rated their positive and negative feelings again.
Image source. Calming and stimulating nature shots.
VR helped. The immersive experience was more restorative. People found it more fascinating, and it helped them relax and forget about their work. Both VR experiences (calming and stimulating) increased positive feelings and decreased negative feelings by helping people feel “away” from work. The stimulating safari scene had an additional benefit of increasing positive feelings by increasing feelings of fascination.
Am I going to start watching safari vids on work breaks? An evidence-based “probably”.
Could VR breaks be restorative enough so that people follow through on their good intentions after the workday is done? That could be a nice study.