Just as Bloomberg worked to increase the visibility of information that would dissuade consumers from making unhealthy choices, he also worked to decrease the prominence of other hazards. He banned smoking in city restaurants and bars, parks, plazas, and beaches. After the success of these measures, he pushed the city council to adopt measures that would ban the display of tobacco products in stores. Bloomberg aimed to make sellers keep tobacco products out of sight, except during a purchase by an adult or during restocking. They had to be stored in cabinets or drawers, under the counter, or behind a curtain. Though the city did not move forward with that product-display restriction initiative, the mayor wanted to push sellers to deglamorize tobacco, to decrease how appealing it looked. “Don’t make it look like it’s a normal product,” Bloomberg said. “Cigarettes are not a normal product.”
Bloomberg’s rationale in all of these initiatives was based on numerous studies backing up the idea that what falls in our line of sight can nudge our choices, even despite our best intentions to the contrary. A survey of nearly three thousand smokers, ex-smokers, and smokers trying to quit found that a quarter of them said they’d bought cigarettes on impulse after seeing a tobacco display at a cash register, even though they weren’t shopping for cigarettes. And one in five smokers trying to quit said they’d stopped going into stores where they usually bought their smokes because they knew if they stepped inside, they’d buy them.
We may be unable to change the types of products managers place next to the cash registers. We likely can’t decide whether soda or cigarettes are sold in the cooler or on the counter at eye level or high above our line of sight. But awareness may be one way to decouple the automatic impact of visual frames on our actions. If we know that the aspects of our visual landscape that fall inside the frame shape our wallet’s bottom line as well as our health, we can intervene on what might otherwise be an automatic response to what we see.
At the same time, if we are aware that how we frame things can directly influence the choices we make, we can intentionally choose to structure our home, office, or wherever we spend our time in ways that can promote better choices. Because what falls inside our visual frame shapes what we do, we can be conscientious about what we see in the spaces we live in. We draft plans and form intentions, of course, but we still need to catalyze actions that push us closer to meeting our goals.
Psychologist Wendy Wood discovered just how powerful the contents of a frame can be. She calls these framed-up instigators of automatic action “visual sparks.” Wood studied students for whom a healthy lifestyle was important, but who were uncertain about how to best adjust to a new environment as they started their first year of college, having just left home. They wondered: What routes are safe to run in the morning? What gym is the cleanest? Do the dining halls have healthy options? Despite the demands a new place can bring, students who found that their new neighborhoods contained some of the same visual cues—the same sparks—as their old ones better sustained their exercise routine than those who didn’t have familiar visual cues to trigger their old habits.
The power of visual sparks is evident in our brains. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter released in the brain by neurons when we are doing things that we really enjoy—when we eat delicious food, have sex, play video games, or even do cocaine. When researchers study dopamine, they often choose to involve monkeys as the test cases. This isn’t such a bad deal for the monkeys, because they get to do pleasurable things, like drinking juice. Think happy hour with a corporate credit card. Researchers know that when monkeys drink juice, their brains experience a rush of dopamine. The monkeys learn that if they press a lever, they get a sip of juice. And—though at first it doesn’t seem like such an important detail—when the monkey bellies up to the juice bar, a red light comes on. It doesn’t change any part of what happens. The monkey still presses the lever. He still gets a shot of juice. But over time, he mentally cuts out the middleman and associates the light with the juice. What researchers have found is that eventually just being in a red-lit room produces a dopamine rush—without the sip of juice. For the monkeys, the red light is a visual spark, and this spark triggers a response in the most basic brain circuitry, just as seeing a neighborhood gym can elicit an urge to hit the treadmill in some people who enjoy exercising.
Furthermore, motivational sparks can have an impact when they are unleashed on not just one or two monkeys or a handful of college students, but on organizations as a whole. A telecom company in the Netherlands worked with psychologist Rob Holland and his team to test the large-scale influence of visual sparks. The company aimed to reduce its impact on the environment. Its managers decided that for the first few months, they would focus on having employees recycle paper and plastic cups.
They installed recycling boxes in common areas to collect the items. A special team repeatedly instructed employees about these recycling boxes and underscored the ease as well as the importance of using them. Despite setting the goal, the amount of paper and plastic cups in the personal wastebaskets did not decrease.
The researchers then asked employees to explicitly write down their intention (hopefully on a piece of scrap paper they would eventually recycle). Employees wrote things like “If I finish my coffee, then I will put the cup in the recycling bin next to the water cooler.” This simple statement, paired with the visual spark, made a world of difference. Before the researchers intervened, employees had been tossing well over 1,200 plastic cups into their personal wastebaskets each week. But, in the week after employees set intentions that could be visually sparked, employees threw away far fewer than 200. This strategy reduced employees’ bad habits by 85 percent and helped the company reach its overall goal.
In the Line of Sight
There was one room in our Connecticut home that realistically could and should house the drum kit. We didn’t design the place but found ourselves with a room in the basement with no window onto the outside world. The walls were twelve-inch-thick concrete, reinforced with rebar, and the ceiling was able to support the weight of the disco ball Pete had given me for our first Christmas together. (We have a special kind of love and gifting style.) The drums sat directly underneath, and if you hit the bass drum hard enough, the mirrored ornament would start spinning, even when in its OFF position. We conjectured that the previous owners probably used this space as a workout room or a dance studio, and maybe they really wanted to get a good look at themselves on their way out because one wall was covered in mirrors—which doubled the sparkling effect of the disco ball. If you have vertigo, best to not visit during a rehearsal.
Besides its bunker-like properties, there was one other feature of this room that made it the perfect choice to lay down the set. You had to walk through this space to get to the garage. Every time I wanted to leave the house by any means other than on foot, I had to pass by the drums. Kick my shoes off at the door? See the kick drum staring me down. Jump into the car for a quick grocery run? Trip over a pair of drumsticks I no doubt threw across the room in frustration during my last practice.