A Big Fat Crisis (17 page)

Conditioning is very hard to unlearn. Multiple studies have been done to see how difficult it is to extinguish associations. If we see Bill Cosby with Jell-O in a few commercials, we may link the two together for months and maybe years to come.
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Our brain’s anatomy developed slowly over hundreds of thousands of years. And it is only in the past few centuries that we have been able to create artificial environments, where a person doesn’t have to hunt for food and can find it with little effort. The brain has not evolved as quickly as our environment has, and it still processes inputs and information as if we were living in an era with no media or other mass communications. Our brain doesn’t automatically make adjustments for advertisements, persuasive media, or other background noise.

Modern uses of conditioning are intended to suppress or override the thinking part of our brains and shift our decisions and preferences to choose specific brands. We all know that is what advertisers try to do, yet somehow we don’t really believe that it works on us. Until we start looking at real examples of how conditioning works, it just doesn’t seem plausible that we can be influenced.

The success of the beverage industry is a case study in how conditioning has made the spread of sugar-sweetened sodas a global phenomenon. The use of conditioning principles in marketing has resulted in sales of expensive sugar water to impoverished millions who would be healthier if they spent their money on more nutritious drinks or more nutritious foods for themselves and their families. The greatest success has been with Coca-Cola, whose strategy for more than a century has been to get the familiar red-and-white logo firmly imprinted in people’s minds everywhere in the world.

On a trip to South Africa I visited a township where people live in shacks made of tin. Residents usually do not have running water in their homes and rely on a communal well and toilet. Many children are small, undernourished, and stunted. Yet it wasn’t uncommon to see
the locals drinking Coca-Cola, even though in South Africa, ounce for ounce, Coca-Cola is more expensive than milk.

On Robben Island, a national monument where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for decades, the only billboard that can be seen from the prison is sponsored by Coca-Cola. In South Africa Coca-Cola has become the most popular beverage and the largest employer. In fact, Coca-Cola is the largest employer in all of Africa. Many small townships have their welcome sign sponsored by Coca-Cola.

Ron Irwin, a brand consultant and writer based in Cape Town, has written:

    
Coke [is] the ultimate American product, manages to assimilate itself into utterly foreign cultures by utilizing local advertising campaigns that brilliantly link its products to people’s aspirations and passions. Throughout the late nineties the South African advertising agency of Sonnenberg Murphy Leo Burnett (SMLB) helped promote the drink to the townships and villages through emotively linking Coke with Africa’s great obsession: soccer. It also introduced a locally famous commercial, shot in Morocco (ironically one of the few countries in the world yet to enjoy Coke), that likens drinking your first Coke to your first kiss. Lately, SMLB has linked Coke to the African concept of
seriti
(community respect) by airing commercials that show an African boy become a man of stature in his township by selling Coke.
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The most effective advertising makes strong associations between products and our deepest desires, associations that belie the long-term consequences of consuming unhealthy food products. Instead, for the brief moment we consume the product we can feel as if our desires have been realized.

Can Conditioning and Priming Be Used to Reduce Consumption?

At the same time that the principles of conditioning were being applied to marketing in the early part of the twentieth century, scientists were trying to use conditioning to help people eat less.
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As early as
1924, aversive conditioning was used to help people lose weight. One researcher asked subjects to drink vinegar, which was accompanied by a clicking noise. By pairing the clicking noise with drinking a caustic vinegar solution, the hope was that the revulsion from drinking the vinegar would transfer to other foods. The approach failed except for one volunteer, who successfully rejected orange juice when it was offered with the clicking noise.

In a few obesity treatment trials in the 1950s, experimenters gave electric shocks to subjects when they viewed tempting (unhealthy) foods, when they reached for the foods, or while they repeatedly said the word “overeating.” None of the approaches worked.
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In another aversive conditioning trial, bad smells were paired with favorite foods.
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For thirty minutes, three times a week for four weeks and then twice a week for five weeks, six subjects were told to handle, smell, and imagine tasting, chewing, and swallowing their favorite foods, and then they were exposed to the smell of skunk oil and other disgusting and noxious smells. After nearly a year, five out of the six lost an average of fourteen pounds, but the sixth subject gained fourteen pounds and reported that the odors never had any effect on her. Most of the subjects reported that the conditioning seemed to last only two to three months. In the end, success was attributed more to the relationships developed between the clinicians and the subjects than to the odor conditioning.

Another approach similar to aversive conditioning is called covert sensitization. In this therapy, subjects are asked to relax and then are told vivid narratives in which they approach forbidden foods and become nauseated and vomit. Several studies tested this technique, but the success was rather modest, with subjects losing an average of just five pounds.
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Other conditioning approaches have followed the line of research developed by B. F. Skinner. In this type of therapy people who successfully lose weight are rewarded with approval and tokens or cash (also called token economies). Other experiments used punishment, so that when the subjects failed to lose weight, they also lost personal possessions like clothes and money. These latter approaches were tried among persons institutionalized for mental illness. They were
not successful in the long term, although they did have positive results in the short term.
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The main problem with eating is that it is a reinforcing activity. Eating is its own reward. If we were able to make eating less pleasurable, as a species we would probably not survive.

Rewarding people financially for losing weight has also been tried repeatedly, but so far no studies have been able to show sustained results.
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Today, the most effective behavioral treatments for obesity typically include a combination of nutrition education, social support, and reducing food cues; but in general, even the success of these approaches is modest and short-lived.
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By contrast, priming may have more potential to help people decrease their consumption because of the way it triggers our brains and can support existing goals. In one experiment, European researchers Esther Papies and Petra Hamstra measured how many free samples of meatballs customers ate when a sign on a shop’s door announced that a recipe that was “good for a slim figure” was available at the counter. The number of free meatballs eaten was also measured on days when the sign was not on the door.
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Customers concerned about their weight ate fewer meatballs when the sign was on the door than when it wasn’t. The sign had no influence on customers who were unconcerned about their weight. Of those apparently influenced by the sign, 80 percent said they didn’t see it. This was a short-term study, so we don’t know whether such signs would make a difference in the long run. However, the study does suggest that priming could help support people who want to control their consumption.

Although conditioning techniques do not appear to work as an effective therapy to decrease eating, scientists have tried to understand why conditioning is so effective at increasing eating. In 1956 Dr. Albert Stunkard showed that obese individuals could not reliably recognize when their stomachs were empty and thus did not really know when they were physiologically hungry.
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In 1968 Dr. Stanley Schachter tried to show that obese people were more sensitive to external conditioning cues than people of normal weight.

In one experiment Schachter altered two clocks so that one ran at
half-speed while the other ran at twice the normal speed.
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He invited forty-six obese and normal individuals to the lab at 5 p.m., and in the first five minutes he removed their watches with the excuse that the watches would interfere with the polygraph machine used to measure their heart rates. He then had them wait for thirty minutes; for one group the clock showed it was 5:20, while for the other group the clock showed 6:05. At that time he came in with a box of crackers and invited the subjects to help themselves while they completed a personality inventory. He gave them ten minutes to complete the task and then determined how many crackers they ate. The obese subjects whose clocks showed 6:05 ate twice as many crackers as the obese subjects whose clocks read 5:20. Time conditioned their perception of hunger.

Unexpectedly, the normal-weight subjects ate twice as many crackers at 5:20 as at 6:05. Several of the normal-weight subjects turned down the crackers at 6:05, saying, “No thanks, I don’t want to spoil my dinner.”

In fact, both groups were conditioned to time, but the obese subjects did not restrain themselves at 6:05, whereas the normal-weight people did. If the normal-weight people typically ate regular meals, they were probably hungry at 5:20 and realized they still had some time until dinner, while the obese people relied on the clock to tell them how hungry they were.

A very different explanation for heightened responsiveness to external cues among the obese was advanced in 1983 by C. Peter Herman, Marion P. Olmsted, and Janet Polivy from the University of Toronto.
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They compared how 338 obese and normal-weight individuals responded when offered dessert in four different ways at a high-class French restaurant. For the first method, the waitress simply handed out a dessert menu, saying nothing. The second method allowed the diners simply to see the dessert. The third method used social influence: the waitress stated, “I recommend the cake (or pie). That’s what I’d have.” The last method combined seeing the dessert with social influence: here, the waitress showed two desserts and recommended one.

The obese diners were no more likely than normal-weight participants to order dessert when they got the dessert menu, but were 67
percent more likely to order when they saw the dessert or when the waitress recommended one. It was also hypothesized that perhaps obese individuals are more compliant, that they responded more to the pressing request of the waitress.

Other studies have shown that obese individuals are more likely to model the behavior of others.
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People who have become obese may also become more sensitive to food cues.

We Are All Vulnerable

The primary job of marketers is to figure out what factors get us in the buying mood. Yet being vulnerable to marketing and to the suggestions or entreaties of others is not always bad. Human capacity and proclivity to be flexible, to continually learn, to be willing to experiment and try new things, and to allow ourselves to be touched emotionally have led to much of the positive advancements of modern civilization. However, these human assets can also become weaknesses when they are exploited for purposes that neglect our well-being.

Have you noticed that sales clerks and cashiers are increasingly responding in an upbeat manner, smiling, looking you in the eye, addressing you by your name, and forever asking if there is anything else they can do for you? Even if we know such behaviors may be artificially scripted, like a teenager using sweet talk to prime us so we will agree to lend the car, the goal is also for the salespeople to make us like them and to positively lift our mood. We may not believe it really influences our choices, what we buy, or how much we eat. But it does. (Or they wouldn’t be doing it.)

Food marketing is sophisticated, and most of us don’t realize when we are being collared. We might be patting ourselves on that back, happy that we found a great new beverage or cracker or other snack food that we love. But behind the scenes, the marketers have been carefully searching us out and studying how to seduce us. They know we are on our own, and that makes it easier for them to have their way with us. The only proof of our having been manipulated is the extra weight around our middles and a nagging feeling that it’s time to eat.

PART III