Influencing daily behavior

Light products
Many people are fat or have overweight and want to loose some weight. That is why they are pleased to read that the packing of a product has the words "light" or "less fat". Usually, these words give reliable information about the content of the food package, but quite frequently the message is not unbiased.

Remarks like "light" have a psychological meaning. People who want to loose weight, usually have quite some appetite. They more or less make a compromise by buying "light" food, but eating the same amount of food or even more. As a result, they do not loose weight but take about the same amount of calories, as they would when buying regular food.


Buying a car
Psychological Issues
Although a car is built for transportation, many psychological issues are involved. They are introduced by the sales department of the car company as part of the sales strategy, to sell more cars.

Large headlights and thick bumpers give you a feeling of safety. Also, people like dark colors because this suggests that the car is well painted with several layers. Consumers like elegant gadgets, like the Mercedes star at the front of the car. Such an ornament stands for a reliable car from a company with a long history of high quality cars. Broad tires and a spoiler give the impression of a sports car, which is attractive for some other people.

Odor
Odor also affects consumer behavior. New cars have a particular smell. This smell is associated with novelty, innovation, which makes people willing to pay more.
It is not unusual to use artificial odors, especially when selling used cars.
Infulence on road
Governements strive to reduce the amount of traffic accidents. This can be done by making the traffic situations more clear. An example of this is the traffic light. In every country you have a red light, an orange or yellow light, and a green light. They are always situated at the same place, the red one on top, the orange one in the middle and the green one at the bottom. So when you are colour-blind you know that when the lowest light is shining it is safe to drive.

When you drive on a highway, you often drive at high speed. You get a lot of information from road signs. Your speed makes it very difficult to immediatly understand every sign. To make you notice and understand the traffic situations, road signs therfore are repeated frequently. An exit is announced a lot of times to make sure people will follow the right track.

Another way of making the road more clear is the use of trees and billboards next to the road. For example: when a roundabout has trees around it drivers will be able to see it from far. For the safety of the road-users it is good if they slow down a bit when aproaching a roundabout. To assist this governement has developed a smart solution. Next to the road approaching a roundabout trees are placed with an interspace that gets smaller. So the driver gets the illusion that he is speeding up because he is passing more trees per second with the result that he will slow down.


Following the rules
In a former section we have told you what can be done to make road-signs better visible. But people can see them and still ignore them. In the Netherlands there are a lot of traffic-offences, just because people ignore the rules intentionally. So what can government do about this?

Solutions
One option for this is of course more police. Then there will be more tickets and people will better follow the rules.
But there are cheaper options. It is generally known that when someone sees a police car he will drive more slowly (research has proved this is about 95%). So when people know they are inspected, they will follow the rules. So you can place screens along the road indicating when people drive too hard, without ticketing them. In The Netherlands this method has had great influence on the driving behavior of the car drivers.
You can also put a screen along the road which indicates the percentage of cars that drive too hard. This method is based on the same theory as the previous one.

Another option is to increase the penalties, when people will get a penalty of $2000 for driving too fast, they will think twice before speeding.
Something that also works is to mention the penalty for ignoring a road-sign. For instance: you see a road-sign which says the speed limit is 60 miles pro hour, and under the sign it says: penalty $200. Then people are less likely to exceed this limit.

The general solution is that when people know the consequences they will better follow the rules.



Influences of music
Music can have great influence on our behavior. When you feel tired, music can make you feel cheerful. If you feel tired, you work less efficient and you are less accurate. Then it is useful to play a merry song that makes you feel cheerful.
For an employer this is useful information. Research has demonstrated that employees have a weakened concentration period twice a day: at the end of the morning and in the afternoon. When there is music at those moments, the employees will work better.

Explanations for the influence of music
It is not quite clear why it is that music can have influence on our behavior. Some people think that it has something to do with the heart-beat. Western music has a rhythm that approaches the heart-beat: 70 to 80 beats per minute. Music that peps you up has a little higher beat, and music that calms you down has a little lower beat.

Influences of Music on your Behavior
Music can also influence your behavior by diverting attention. People who have claustrophobia feel better in a small elevator with music in it, the dentist uses music to relax people before an operation, and telephone-exchange services use music to make people wait instead of ringing off.

Radio
Radio channels know the influence of music too. To make you cheerful they have special music-scheme's like G-B-H-I-C. A "G" means a song from the seventies, a B is a number 1 song, and so on. These schemes are thought out by psychologists.


Medical fear
A lot of person have phobias for doctors, especially for dentists. About 40% of the people have a fear to go to the dentist. Most of them know that their fear is irrational but they still feel anxiety. Normal phobias often result from a frightening experience, but this theory is not applicable to a doctors visit. Sometimes a fear for a doctor results from negative experiences of others, but that is just occasionally. Most of the time anxious behavior cannot be cured.
Solutions
What can be done about it?
Some people say that the fear of going to a doctor depends on how a visitor is treated. Calm music in the waiting-room and some magazines can have a positive influence (of course no medical magazines), plants can have the same effect.
The doctor himself can also adjust his own behavior while treating his patients. A doctor has to give his patients the impression that he is an expert, so people feel safe with him and with what he is doing. He must also tell the patient what he is going to do and why, this make the patient feel safe and reduce the fear.

Keeping Control
Psychologists of The British Association for the Advancement of Science have discovered that when you let a person think that he handles the situation he will feel more safe and will experience less fear. They did an experiment in which a dentist's patient had a switch with which he could turn off the dental drill during the operation. All the patients said they felt more safe during the operation, although nobody of them really used the switch.

The conclusion of this is that a patient can do little himself, but that it is the task of the doctor to help the patient with his anxiety. When the doctor takes the right measures it will help the patients to control their anxious behavior.



Supermarket
A supermarket sells products that everyone needs, so you might think that they do not have to force you into buying something. But that is absolutely untrue, a lot of things in a supermarket are done to make you buy more products and more expensive products. What do they do exactly and how does that work?

Selling Tricks
A long time ago supermarkets had baskets to put your shopping's in. But the disadvantage of this was that when you bought many products, the basket got really heavy. So to make yourself more comfortable, you stop shopping when your basket is filled with products, to prevent you from dragging a heavy basket. To solve this the supermarkets got trolleys; this makes you buy more products.
The whole supermarket is full of signs indicating that a product is on sale. These signs have two results: first it makes the supermarket less monotonous, but it also makes you buy more products. The sale signs make you think that you are buying something cheap, but often you would not have bought it, if it would not have been for sale. So instead of saving money, you spend more money.
They have also thought about the way you walk through the store. When you want to go to the pay-desk you have to walk through the whole store, and they hope that you see something then that you might need and then buy it. But there is also a fixed route, that a lot of customers walk. The owners of the supermarket know this route and try to take advantage from this. Most of the people are right-handed and it is easier for them to take something from a rack that is on the right site, so the most expensive products are put in the rack on the right.

Packing
The packing of a product also influences choice. The color and shape of the packing must fit with the product. For instance a round product indicates that the product is soft and of course you choose the color that corresponds with the product. That is why a coffee packing is very often brown.
The packing must be recognizable from far off and must look qualitative good. The packing is very important because people have an expectation of a product and when the product looks good, they will buy it.


Product ingredients
Research of the consumer council has proven that people feel uneasy when preparing food when they only need to add some water. They think the result will be of low quality and it gives them the feeling of being lazy.
Manufacturers know this and adapt themselves to this situation by not adding egg-powder or milk-powder in the factory, and telling the customer in the directions for use that he has to add fresh milk and fresh eggs. This gives the consumer the feeling that he has really bought and made a good product.
Another way to give the consumer a good feeling about a product is to give some alternatives for preparing the food. This gives the consumer the opportunity to give the food his own personal touch and it will make him feel good. A positive side-effect of this is that the product won't get bored.

Labeling
The label of a product is designed carefully. The label must attract people to the product and it must be recognisable. The direction for use is also important and manufactorer have to pay due attention to it. When a direction of use is written in a difficult way, people won't buy the product again. But the label must not be too easy either, because people could then get the feeling that the product is of a low quality.

The readableness can be tested by psychological tests. An example of such a test is Flesh, this program counts the average of syllables. On the ground of this you can see whether or not a description is good.
The readableness of a label can also be tested by using the description in practice. This is of cource a pretty expensive method.



Domestic animals
In the United states there are about 150 million domestic animals. The care for those animals costs about 6 billion dollars each year, so there must be some good reasons for keeping domestic animals.
The American magazine "Psychology Today" asked her readers to fill out a questionnaire about themselves and their domestic animals. They got thirteen thousand responses. The result of this test learned that 88% of the respondents have a domestic animal for relaxing, 79% consider the domestic animal to be their best friend and 66% keep a domestic animal as a good topic for conversation.


Reasons for Domestic Animals
The reason for keeping domestic animals used to be safety and catching mice, but nowadays people keep domestic animals for their own pleasure.
Some people assert that keeping an animal is good for the psychological development of children, the children would develop a better sense of responsibility and they would be emotionally stronger. Some people even assert that children will be more intelligent when they grow up with a domestic animal.
So animals are a good way to influence the behavior of children.
A domestic animal does not only have benefits. For example, when you cannot handle the dog, the dog has to be brought up again.
And when an animal dies, there is often a lot of grief. Animals just do not get older then human beings.

Influence on Emotional and Physical health
Domestic animals also influence the emotional- and physical health. American research demonstrates that when you stroke an animal, your blood pressure and your hart-beat will decrease.
Domestic animals help people with psychological disorders. If people suffering from schizophrenia will walk dogs and will coddle them, they can cure.



Natural Rhythm-not sleeping
For thousands of years man have followed the time of the day and the night. Nowadays we work and sleep whenever we want, because we have electrical lights. This is very useful for hospitals, transport services and industry. The result of this is that our natural rhythm of sleeping and waking is being affected.
Figures from the United States
An investigation in the United States has demonstrated that 50% of the factory-workers fall asleep during work. This mostly happens short after lunch.
A lot of people working in shifts have sleeping problems. Some people can handle this problem pretty good, but others do not. They sleep shorter, get tired and are quickly irritated. As a result of this they have more accidents. In some air-crashes irregular working hours have been the main reason for the accident.

Causes of having trouble sleeping
Bio-psychologists try to find out the reason for the sleeping problems by working irregular working hours. The National Institute of Mental Health discovered that sunlight blockes the production of melantonine, which is a compound that makes you sleep.
As the result of this discovery scientists suggest factories to have a light on at night, which is 5 times sharper than normal light. Another advise was to change the air-conditioning temperature and change the kind of food in the canteen. This would help the employee's to change their biological clock