Senior Project Blog Post 1

Switch by Chris Heath and Dan Heath is a book about change.  It is difficult to get people to adopt new habits because our hearts and minds rarely can reach an agreement.  Switch talks about a study done by psychologists in Chicago in 2000.  Moviegoers going to see Mel Gibson's Payback were given free buckets of purposefully stale popcorn in order to study their eating behavior.  They were given different sized buckets, each far too big to finish completely, but when they measured the amount of gross popcorn each group had eaten, those with the larger buckets ate 53% more than those with the smaller buckets.  It seems like an unimportant conclusion but the data shows there is an issue with the way we address issues and try to solve them.  Public health experts would say that those who ate too much need to be motivated to eat better.  That is a difficult, and often even impossible task.  Habits are often subconscious behaviors, thus educating someone on the benefits on better eating won't have much of an effect.  It ends up being an easy solution.  All you have to do is change the bucket size.  The study's data clearly showed bucket size as the number one determining factor in snacking size.  This pertains to entrepreneurs and my project because business is a largely psychological profession.  The product you create must make fulfill a consumer's desire or solve a consumer's problem.  For example an entrepreneur trying to help people eat healthy would be more successful at solving the problem if they created a product that helped limit people's serving sizes than if they tried to educate people on the dangers of large portion sizes.  The book describes this situation as a situational problem masked as a people problem.  It will be difficult for me to convince old-time coaches to believe in a system of charting player development data and reading about child athlete psychology (a people problem), so if I can figure out a way to alter the situation and create an environment in which they have "smaller buckets," I think that will be the key to a successful endeavor.