Big America – More Better

by YankeeJim | January 18, 2012 at 03:35 am

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Go for it

I am on a rant of sort about American bigness. I was reading a book called Switch – a review is posted here. I want to share an excerpt from the first chapter describing a research project at Cornell that gets to my point. Dan Heath is the author and it is a good read.

“Three Surprises About Change – One Saturday in 2000 some unsuspecting moviegoers showed up at a suburban theater in Chicago to catch a 11:05 p.m. matinee of Mel Gibson’s action flick Payback. They were handed a soft drink and a free bucket of popcorn to stick around after the movie to answer a few questions about the concession stand. These movie fans were unwitting participants in a study of irrational eating behavior.” –Dan Heath

Movie fans were given large and extra-large buckets of wretched, stale popcorn. The study aimed to determine how much of the stuff people would eat, no matter how wretched. Second, would people who were given extra-large buckets eat more of their share than people with smaller buckets? The answer was, people with larger buckets eat significantly more than those with smaller buckets.

That’s the American way. Get large; eat larger, be largest.

http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752

“Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Book Review)

Jaymi Heimbuch

How to change things when change is hard. Yep...sounds like what the green movement struggles with every day. How do we get everyone to change things as ingrained as unsustainable eating habits? How do we get governments toshift energy policies? How do we get businesses to switch to zero wastepractices? These are HUGE changes that feel impossibly hard. And yet, they're not. At least, not according to the authors of Switch, a new book outlining exactly how we think, and how we can approach problems from new directions in order to make the big deal changes so vital to a sustainable future. From looking at "bright spots" - or the tiny fraction of things going right - rather than the problems, and examining how to direct both the logical and emotional parts of our brains so they're heading in the same direction, Switch makes change feel exciting, and possible. I first caught word of this book while skimming through a recent issue of Fast Company, which had an excerpt printed in it. In it, authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath discussed "bright spots" or looking at a problem not from what's going wrong, but from what's going right. Taking what's going right and copying it is a whole lot more fun and more effective than hemming and hawing over what's going wrong and figuring out how to fix it. You've already got a solution...so scale it up! That practical optimism is what permeates the book as it delves into human psychology and how we can do the impossible - change.”