For another, avoidance motivation is non-specific: it leads you to choose your weight loss methods according to what will least inconvenience you, rather than what will produce the best results.
IAWYC, but I don’t see how this follows. If I want to get away from New York, I choose the fastest road, the same as if I were going to a point in that direction.
If I want to get away from New York, I choose the fastest road, the same as if I were going to a point in that direction.
If you have only ONE dimension of appropriate choice, sure. But the cognitive architecture for avoiding pain doesn’t seem to make the same kind of trade-offs that the subsystem for obtaining pleasure does. We’re willing to experience pain to get pleasure, but not as willing to trade one pain for reduction in another. We’ll prefer to wait around for something that promises to eliminate the pain without adding any new ones.
That’s why “easy” sells to people trying to lose weight, but “hard” sells to people who are trying to gain strength or build their body. Just look at the marketing for exercise products that boast just how tired their workout is going to make you, vs. the ones that emphasize how easy it’s going to be; the correlation is with the prospect’s direction of motivation, either towards or away-from.
If we were truly consistent in our motivated decision-making, everyone would advertise that their products are easy, as well as effective. In practice, advertising either targets easiness or toughness—with toughness being used as a proxy for effectiveness.
The “easy” products emphasize ease, comfort, and relief, while treating the results as almost incidental… and they also emphasize just how fat and ugly people’s “before” is. “Hard” products put more emphasis on their “afters”, sometimes not even bothering with any “before” pictures!
So, whether it makes logical sense or not, the marketers have figured out that we actually do think this way, and have rationally adapted to maximize their utility. ;-)
IAWYC, but I don’t see how this follows. If I want to get away from New York, I choose the fastest road, the same as if I were going to a point in that direction.
If you have only ONE dimension of appropriate choice, sure. But the cognitive architecture for avoiding pain doesn’t seem to make the same kind of trade-offs that the subsystem for obtaining pleasure does. We’re willing to experience pain to get pleasure, but not as willing to trade one pain for reduction in another. We’ll prefer to wait around for something that promises to eliminate the pain without adding any new ones.
That’s why “easy” sells to people trying to lose weight, but “hard” sells to people who are trying to gain strength or build their body. Just look at the marketing for exercise products that boast just how tired their workout is going to make you, vs. the ones that emphasize how easy it’s going to be; the correlation is with the prospect’s direction of motivation, either towards or away-from.
If we were truly consistent in our motivated decision-making, everyone would advertise that their products are easy, as well as effective. In practice, advertising either targets easiness or toughness—with toughness being used as a proxy for effectiveness.
The “easy” products emphasize ease, comfort, and relief, while treating the results as almost incidental… and they also emphasize just how fat and ugly people’s “before” is. “Hard” products put more emphasis on their “afters”, sometimes not even bothering with any “before” pictures!
So, whether it makes logical sense or not, the marketers have figured out that we actually do think this way, and have rationally adapted to maximize their utility. ;-)
Hm. I suppose I’ve never studied exercise literature that closely.