A Big Fat Crisis (16 page)

Priming is pervasive in our environment, but it only works when we are not aware of it.
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If the parents knew the kids were only being nice just to get them to loan the car, they might overcompensate and be more likely to say no.

Many cues in the environment prime us to think about food. Although food advertising presumably is intended to make us buy a particular brand and type of food, people who are exposed to tempting food cues, regardless of the brand, typically react by feeling hungry. Dr. Jason Halford at the University of Liverpool has studied the subject of priming in children extensively. His conclusion: not only does viewing ads lead children to eat greater quantities of food, but overweight children are more sensitive to and recognize a greater number of ads than thinner children.
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In a recent study, Dr. Jennifer Harris of Yale’s Rudd Center invited 118 children and 98 adults to watch television with food advertising.
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The children were divided into two groups. The experimental group saw the equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon program with four thirty-second commercials promoting high-sugar cereal, waffle sticks and syrup, fruit roll-ups, and potato chips, while the comparison group saw the cartoon with four commercials advertising games and entertainment products. The children were each given a bowl of goldfish crackers (150 grams) to snack on while they watched. After they finished watching, the amount of goldfish remaining was weighed. The kids who saw the cartoons with food commercials ate 45 percent more goldfish than the other group, even though goldfish crackers were not advertised.

A similar result was shown for the 98 adults who were asked to watch a sixteen-minute episode of the improvisational comedy show
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
with four minutes of eleven commercials embedded. Everyone saw the same seven commercials for nonfood items, but one group saw an additional four commercials for fast food, candy, and soda; another group saw commercials advertising healthy food: a granola bar, orange juice, oatmeal, and an instant breakfast beverage; and the third group saw four nonfood commercials. Afterward, the adults were asked to participate in a taste test, and the researchers weighed the remaining food to calculate how much they ate. The
adults seeing the four junk food commercials ate the most, and those seeing the healthy food commercials ate the least.
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Why would seeing unhealthy rather than healthy food prime us to eat more? Shouldn’t any food make us hungry? Apparently not. Seeing foods with high sugar and fat—also called “palatable” foods—whets our appetite more than seeing fruits and vegetables. This is probably the consequence of a hardwired evolutionary drive to favor instant energy and concentrated calories.

No Defense Against Priming

Eye-tracking experiments also prove that we are influenced by advertisements we do not intentionally look at. Several studies show that people reading a magazine or looking at a website cannot accurately recall the ads placed in the sidebars. Yet when asked to select items to buy from a list after being exposed to sidebar ads, subjects were more likely to choose items that were in the ads.
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These studies explain why many companies are dashing to post their advertisements in the sidebars on websites.

Apparently, we can also be primed to consume more by subliminal images—ones that we cannot consciously perceive—and they don’t have to be pictures of food. Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson, professors of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, invited subjects to their laboratory to participate in an energy drink taste test.
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Beforehand, the participants watched a video with embedded subliminal images lasting sixteen milliseconds. (A typical movie has twenty-four frames per second, so sixteen milliseconds is shorter than a single frame. We typically have to see at least two or more frames to consciously notice the image.) The first group was shown a sixteen-millisecond image of a person smiling, the second group was shown a person with a neutral expression, and the third group was shown a person frowning. Afterward they were offered an energy drink. Individuals shown the smiling person consumed more of an energy drink, and rated it more favorably than the other groups, whereas those shown subliminal pictures of an individual frowning drank the least and rated the beverage lowest. A negative mood may lead us to be more critical, effortful, and cautious, and to use our analytic cognitive resources.

So why does subliminal exposure to a smiling face make someone consume more than seeing a neutral or negative expression? A smile does not just lull us into complacency; it is an indication of happiness. Psychologists have proposed that happiness sensitizes people toward rewards; in other words, a smile might make us react a little more strongly to food.
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When we are in a positive mood, we react more quickly and resort to automatic, heuristic-based (think shortcut) processing. Restaurateurs know that people order more when they are in a good mood. Maybe that’s why Ronald McDonald is always smiling, as are nearly all mascots that advertise products.

In our everyday world, then, with all kinds of stimuli surrounding us—some that are positive, some that are negative—what determines which of the primes will influence us? And with food stimuli all around, why is it that all of us are not eating all the time?

Priming does not work the same way on everyone. All the experiments just described affected a substantial portion of the participants, but not all of them. We know why primes work in most people, but it is not clear why some individuals are less sensitive to primes than others.
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In studies looking at how two different primes influence behavior, researchers discovered that when primes are consistent with overall goals, they enhance behavior; but when they conflict with goals, they undermine behavior. So if people are on a diet and would like to control their weight, all the environmental cues promoting food will interfere with their goal to eat less.

Social psychologists James Shah and Arie Kruglanski showed repeatedly that when individuals were subliminally exposed to conflicting goals, their performance on a variety of tasks was undermined, and they were totally unaware that an external prime had influenced them.
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If the prime is irrelevant, it has no effect.

Branding, Conditioning, and Pavlov’s Dogs

Today, the primary way the food industry uses conditioning as a strategy to sell us products is through branding. Branding is a comprehensive approach that coordinates a variety of elements to achieve a consistent, memorable, overall look and feel for a company, service, or product. Typically, that means that products have a standard logo and color; a
unique typeface; and a clear, concise, and compelling message. Think of Colonel Sanders’s face on a bucket of KFC chicken or the green and yellow colors of Subway’s name on its sandwich wrapping paper, napkins, and menu boards.

Advertisers spend a great deal of time and money to make sure that the brand works: they create mock designs and logos and conduct focus groups to see how people react to them. Once they have a brand that grabs our attention and makes us think positive thoughts, they develop a strategy to disseminate that brand image. To do so, they take great pains to increase exposure to the brand, so it is burned into the consumer’s brain and becomes the brand of choice.

A popular technique to promote brands using the principles of conditioning is through celebrity endorsement, which is used in about 20 percent of TV commercials. Because celebrities generate positive feelings, pairing them with specific products generates positive feelings toward the products.
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Think of the cachet that Bill Cosby brought to Jell-O products, imbuing them with a wholesome family friendliness. When Pepsi gave Beyoncé a $50 million contract in 2013, the company obviously hoped her fans would consider the soda as alluring as the singer. Celebrities automatically attract attention because they are familiar and appealing. If the celebrity has something in common with the product being endorsed, the ads are even more effective.

When we think of conditioning, many of us recall Pavlov’s classic experiment in which he rang a bell before feeding his dogs. Subsequently the dogs would salivate just upon hearing the bell. Classical conditioning is a form of associative learning, which guides not just animals but also human behaviors and judgments. When two things are paired together, we learn that they are associated. If we see one, we typically also think of the other. And moreover, when there is a close association between two things, we automatically tend to transfer the qualities of one to the other, whether or not the qualities actually apply.

The power of conditioning that comes from pairing different things together has been exploited by the advertising industry since the 1920s. The credit for applying these principles to advertising goes to John Watson, a psychology professor hired by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.
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Watson noticed that customers couldn’t distinguish
between different brands of a product and that they typically made decisions based upon the image of the product rather than the product itself. With this insight, one of the first commercial campaigns Watson developed was for Pond’s Cold Cream. A letter from the Queen of Romania requesting supplies of cold cream was turned into an advertisement and a testimonial. Sales increased dramatically, as people began to associate royalty and high quality with the cream.

Although this approach may seem quaint and relatively harmless, what is so insidious about the use of conditioning principles in advertising is just how little awareness people have of how these techniques influence their behaviors. Questioning buyers as to their reasons for purchase is unlikely to yield an explanation because the mechanism for the association is usually below their radar. It is only in the past thirty years or so that careful experiments have determined how advertising influences individuals in ways they are unable to recognize.

Mere Exposure Conditioning and Product Placements

Although conditioning effects are strong, the impact of simply seeing a product also influences the likelihood that a consumer will choose it. In the jargon of psychology, this has been called “mere exposure conditioning” in contrast to “affective conditioning,” in which a positive (or negative) stimulus is paired with the product.
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Mere exposure is simply seeing or perceiving something without it being paired with another stimulus.

Repeatedly seeing an ad for a soft drink, for example, increases our preference for that beverage. We don’t have to be aware that we saw it. In fact, the effect of mere exposure is stronger when we don’t even remember that we saw that particular drink. Once we consciously perceive something, then we have the opportunity to evaluate it and attach meaning. But if we see it without paying attention, it becomes part of a familiar background. If there is nothing negative about the drink, our brain evaluates it as safe, and when we are later exposed to that drink with an array of others, we are automatically more likely to choose it instead of one that we have never seen before. This is one
reason why the large food and beverage companies try to make their advertising ubiquitous.

Another surprising finding is that being exposed to the same objects repeatedly generates a more positive general mood compared to being exposed to multiple objects. Although we are excited by and attracted to novelty, we also tend to like seeing the same things over and over. Repetition provides a familiar comfort.

Robert Zajonc, the Stanford University professor who first identified the phenomenon of mere exposure conditioning, considered this to be of important adaptive value. Developing preferences for objects that have no negative attributes allows us to automatically distinguish objects and habitats that are safe and should guide us into making positive and long-lasting social attachments.
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Another increasingly popular conditioning technique is product placement, mentioned in the previous chapter, an application of mere exposure conditioning. Product placement works best when it is well below our awareness. It has been compared to subliminal advertising because the product is casually included in the film props.
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British researchers Susan Auty and Charlie Lewis looked at the impact of product placement of Pepsi in the movie
Home Alone
.
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They showed one group of children a short clip of the family eating pizza, milk, and drinking Pepsi, while another group saw a clip of similar length but with the star eating macaroni and cheese and drinking only milk.

After the screening, the children were invited to help themselves to a drink before they participated in an interview. The experimenters surreptitiously recorded what they chose. On the table were an equal number of small cans of Coke and Pepsi. Mindful that in Britain Coke outsells Pepsi three to one, the researchers thought that if there were no effect of the product placement, more children would choose Coke. Indeed, among the control group (which didn’t see the scene with the product placement), 58 percent chose Coke and 42 percent chose Pepsi. But in the group that saw the scene with the Pepsi product placement, the choices were almost reversed: 62 percent of the children chose Pepsi (38 percent chose Coke).

Over the past few decades, product placements in movies and television have grown enormously. Some blockbuster movies resemble
nothing but a string of product placements in search of a story. Not only do they increase familiarity by mere exposure, but they offer double value by pairing the products with celebrities. This is why Oreo cookies were recently integrated into an episode of
Modern Family
.