Switch

Picture a Saturday matinee at a Chicago movie theater in 2000. Mel Gibson is on the screen. The audience has been handed free buckets of popcorn, and they are munching their way through Payback. What they don't know is that the popcorn is five days old, intentionally stale, popped to the texture of styrofoam packing peanuts. They also don't know that the size of their bucket is about to dictate how much they eat. People with the large bucket polish off fifty-three percent more than people with the medium one. Same stale popcorn. Same boring stretch of movie. The only thing that changes is what's in their hands.

When the researcher tells the eaters afterward what they did, almost everyone refuses to believe it. "Things like that don't trick me," they say.

This is the gap Chip and Dan Heath spend Switch trying to close. We think behavior is driven by character and willpower, by how badly we want something or how disciplined we are. But behavior is usually driven by the bucket. Change what the bucket looks like — change the situation around the behavior — and you change what people do, even when they swear they're immune. Switch is about how to change things when change is hard, and the surprising news is that hard is mostly an artifact of looking at the problem the wrong way. The book is built around one framework, three big surprises, and roughly two dozen stories that you will probably remember the next time you try to get yourself, your team, or your spouse to do something different.

Chapter 1: Three Surprises About Change

The Heaths borrow a metaphor from psychologist Jonathan Haidt to explain why change feels so hard. Imagine a tiny rider perched on top of a huge elephant. The rider is your rational mind. He plans, analyzes, thinks about the long term, holds the reins. The elephant is your emotional mind. It feels things, wants comfort, has bursts of fierce energy, and weighs about six tons more than the rider does. When they agree, the elephant trots peacefully along. When they disagree, the rider has about ninety seconds before his arms get tired and the elephant wanders off toward whatever it actually wanted.