Behavior Modification - Make it Fun

By Kevin Meyer

A couple of interesting videos came my way recently showing how human behavior can easily be changed by making the new behavior more interesting and fun than the old one.

Take, for example, what happens if you convert a stairway into a musical device akin to a piano, which actually plays tunes.  Watch how how many people go up the escalator next to the staircase, before and after the change.

That could have an interesting effect on our waistlines.  Let's try another... putting an interesting sound inside a standard public trash can.

A significant increase picked up trash, even enlisting some free child labor to clean the park. I do wonder how it somehow worked for the signing and therefore presumably hard of hearing folks in the first scene.

So how can you use this concept in the workplace?  Improve safety?  Improve 5S organization?

Make it fun.

Comments

[Jamie Flinchbaugh]

Thanks Kevin. A good way to start the weekend reading.

[William Pietri]

And this need not be just in the clever but shallow way done here. For example, many have observed that Wikipedia is the world's largest text-based MMORPG that just happens to produce an encyclopedia as part of the game.

Games are things that are fun even if they're pointless. But people also like doing things that have a point. If you can arrange work processes in ways that are, like games, intrinsically satisfying, then doing work need not feel like work.

[Dan Markovitz]

Ah, the irony of VW promoting this: they make their cars fun to drive (Fahrvergnügen), which makes people want to drive more, instead of walk, use mass transit, bicycle, etc. Perhaps they should make their cars less pleasant?