Trigger Happy

Read good Fast Company article from the brothers Heath, the guys behind Made to Stick. It's a really great book that I really need to read one day.

They wrote about triggers.

If you have something you don't want to forget, don't scrunch up your brain and try really hard to retain it; just install an environmental trigger to do the remembering for you...



[In a] study, students were paid $20 to report their daily eating habits. Then they were offered a seemingly unrelated opportunity to give feedback on a public-health slogan. One group of students saw the slogan "Live the healthy way, eat five fruits and veggies a day." Another group saw "Each and every dining-hall tray needs five fruits and veggies a day." In both cases, the idea is the same--eat more fruits and veggies--but the slogan with the tray hooks into a specific cue in the environment.



The students didn't much like the tray slogan. They found it corny and rated it half as attractive as the more generic slogan. Meanwhile, the professors were keeping an eye on what the students ate. Those who got the generic "Live healthy" slogan, without the trigger, didnt eat any more fruits and vegetables. The same goes for those who got the tray slogan but ate in cafeterias without trays. But students who ate in cafeterias with trays ate 25% more fruits and veggies over the course of the next week...



Triggers can also be the secret weapon of the underdog, because the "little guy" can co-opt the well-known imagery of a larger opponent to create an environmental trigger.