This year, I’ve had the great pleasure of reading the Harry Potter books to my seven-year-old son (an activity I highly recommend to all parents). In one of my favorite scenes from the series, Harry cleverly uses behavioral science to help his best friend succeed. On the day of a major sporting event, Harry tricks his teammate and fellow wizard, Ron, into believing that a bit of a valuable and rare luck potion is in his breakfast. Ron’s confidence soars as a result, and his performance on the field is unusually strong. However, we learn that no magic was actually deployed—Harry just relied on sleight of hand to mislead his friend and thereby change his mindset.
This scene offers a terrific illustration of the power of the placebo effect (or the benefits produced by fake treatments when we believe they’re real). As Stanford psychologist Alia Crum explains in today’s Q&A, once you recognize that what we believe changes our behavior and our physiology, which in turn changes our outcomes, you’ll see how often mindsets and the placebo effect can influence our lives.
But before we go there, here are a few of my favorite listens and reads of the month…
This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads
Brave on the Waves: In this recent Choiceology episode, I interviewed Harvard economist Katherine Coffman about her research showing that women tend to take fewer risks than men with equivalent skills and how we can all more optimally calibrate our risk-taking.
How to Be More Creative: This Atlantic article (excerpted from NYU marketing Professor Adam Alter’s terrific new book Anatomy of a Breakthrough) highlights how important persistence is to creativity, contrary to our intuitions.
Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today by UCLA marketing Professor Hal Hershfield is a fantastic new book out next week that behavioral science fans won’t want to miss!
Finally, LinkedIn and The Next Big Idea Club recently teamed up to make a wonderful series of five podcast episodes sharing key lessons from my book, How to Change (timed fortuitously to correspond with the two-year anniversary of its release). You can check them out here:
Q&A: Why does your mindset matter?
In this Q&A from Choiceology, Stanford psychology Professor Alia Crum shares her research on the power of mindsets and placebo effects.
Me: Could you explain what a subjective mindset is?
Alia: A mindset is a lens or frame of mind through which we perceive the world. It's typically based on our core assumptions. The world is very complex and uncertain. It's basically impossible to understand reality as it is, so we have these simplifying frameworks to help us make sense of it. For example, one mindset we hold is our core assumptions about stress. You might hold the mindset that stress is debilitating or that stress is enhancing.
Me: Could you talk about how your research shows our mindsets can affect our health outcomes?
Alia: Yeah, the mindsets we hold really matter.
We know in medicine that in some cases, a large proportion of the benefit of taking a pill is because you believe you're taking an effective medication. Ellen Langer and I tested an extension of this in the context of exercise. We worked with a group of hotel housekeepers who were getting good exercise—far beyond the Surgeon General's requirements—just by showing up to work. But we also realized that most of them didn't view their exercise in that light. They had the mindset that it was just hard, painful work. So, we wanted to see what would happen if we could shift their mindset. We randomized them to two conditions and told half that their work satisfied the Surgeon General's recommendations for a healthy lifestyle, and that they should expect to see those results.
We found that the women who received this information lost weight and dropped blood pressure and body fat compared to the control group. I was like, “wow, this is the placebo effect.” I call it a placebo effect, but really, it’s the effect of changing our mindsets.
Me: Could you talk about why this happened? What’s going on that makes mindsets so powerful?
Alia: We think that mindsets influence our health through multiple pathways. One is through our emotions. The room attendants felt like they were getting good exercise and that made them feel better about themselves. They could have had more positive moods throughout the day, better self-efficacy, and better sense of self-worth. We know through a lot of research that both a positive affect and low negative affect can have physiological repercussions. Another pathway is through attention. So, what we believe to be true about the world changes what we pay attention to. For the room attendants, now being told that their work is good exercise, they might notice at the end of the day that their muscles are sore, but they attribute that to having engaged in good exercise, not to hard and tiresome work.
We couldn't be sure in the room attendant study, but they might've been putting a little more oomph into making the beds or were a little bit more motivated in other ways. So, it starts to make sense when you break it down. I think a lot of people are surprised by these findings, but the fact that our minds and our mindsets more broadly can influence our physiology and our health is really not that surprising.
Me: Could you also describe your work looking at mindsets and dietary decisions?
Alia: For this study, we had people come to our lab and drink two milkshakes separated by a week. So, it was the same person drinking the same milkshake at two different times. At one time, they were told the milkshake was a low fat, low calorie, diet shake. 140 calories, no added sugar and so forth.
The other time, they were told it was an indulgent 620 calorie, high fat, high sugar milkshake. What they believed they were drinking changed their physiology in important ways. Specifically, we found that when they thought they were drinking an indulgent milkshake, their gut peptide ghrelin, which is a physiological marker of satiety, dropped at a threefold rate compared to when they thought they were consuming a more sensible, healthy diet shake.
Me: That’s really remarkable. How do you think we can leverage mindset effects to make it easier to achieve our goals or improve our lives?
Alia: I think the most important thing about mindsets is to realize that we have them. We aren't just reading the world as it is. We’re filtering reality through our preexisting assumptions, beliefs, and expectations. I think when we start to realize that a whole new world opens for us. We can stop asking, “what do I need to do differently?” Or “how do I change my life circumstances?” All those things are good, don't get me wrong. But there's a whole range of influence we can have by being mindful of the mindsets we have, and deliberately shifting those mindsets towards more adaptive ones.
I think about this a lot in my own life, raising my child. She's turning two in a few weeks and the mindset I'm most focused on with her right now is about healthy eating. One thing we learned from the milkshake study was that having the mindset that you're eating healthily is actually not very useful because it leaves you feeling physiologically unsatiated. We also know from other work that that mindset leads people to assume the food's going to taste worse. So, we've been working on how we can create a mindset where she views healthy foods as delicious, even indulgent. Hopefully, it will help her have a better relationship with food throughout her life.
Me: As a parent, I really love that insight. Thank you so much, Alia, for taking the time to chat with me about your research.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
To learn more about Alia’s research on mindsets and the placebo effect, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in June!
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and author of the Wall Street Journal Bestseller How to Change