- It's apparently harder
to get a job at Google than it is to get into Harvard. Google employees are subject to a rigorous four to six-week interview process that asks sociopathic questions
like how many golf balls can fit into a school bus, and why are manhole covers round? But for the select few
geniuses that make the cut, there are a ton of weird
and wonderful perks to working at Google. Feeling restless? Hit the rock climbing wall, take a yoga class, or play
mini-putt on the roof. Need to de-stress? Try a nap in a $10,000
anti-gravity soundproof sleep pod fitted with cashmere eye-masks,
and duck-down duvets, or frolic in the rooftop
meadow growing strawberries, but there is one thing
that comes with the job that's not quite so fun, the weight gain. In this video, we'll
discuss why Google employees were gaining weight
and the psychology hack that Google used to fix that. New Google employees are actually warned that they should expect
to gain about 15 pounds during their first six
months of employment. You see, one of the most famous perks to working at Google is the food. It said that Sergey Brin,
Google's co-founder, decreed that no one shall ever
be more than 150 feet away from food while working there. Its offices in California and Manhattan have more than 35 cafes and restaurants offering free, gourmet
chef-prepared meals, and if that's not enough, there are hundreds of
micro-kitchens scattered around their offices, filled
with free-flowing candy, fruit, chips, snacks, and desserts, and although employees
of Google maybe geniuses, they don't have superhuman willpower. One employee said she didn't even realize how much she was eating
until she switched jobs and lost 15 pounds without even trying. This information isn't
surprising, however, as behavioral scientists
have known for years, how much influence our environment can exert over our actions. One of the best examples of
this is a Las Vegas casino. Casinos are designed to be a frictionless, fun and glamorous experience
designed exquisitely to separate you from your money. The sound of success
rings through the air, triggering thoughts that maybe next round. you'll hit it big too, and subconsciously encouraging
you to keep playing. ATMs are everywhere, so you
never have to go too far to pull up more cash, leaving little time to
rethink your decision. Bathrooms are hidden at
the far back of the casino and curving paths and flashing
lights catch your attention and lure you into playing one last game against your wallet's best interests. Alcohol is free and delivered
right to your chair, so you never have to stop
gambling for a drink, while simultaneously lowering
your inhibitions with liquor. As many gamblers may attest,
you may have entered the casino believing you'd only spend
the 200 bucks you brought in, but leave with an empty wallet. The seemingly innocuous
cues in the environment, encouraging you to spend more, stay in your seat and keep playing, work their magic to get you to behave differently than you'd anticipated. This is similar to what was happening to the employees at Google. Their work environment was
subtly encouraging them to eat more, prompting people to overeat, often without them even
realizing what was happening. As much as we'd like to believe we're always in conscious
control of our actions, our behavior in any given scenario is partially due to an interaction between our personalities, genes, and the environment we find ourselves in. Prompts and cues in our
surroundings grab our attention and suddenly prod and push
every one of us to behave in ways we hadn't anticipated for. Given an attractive prompt to
act or cue and easy access, convenience, countless studies
have shown that most people will, in fact, eat more. Nobel Prize winning
economist, Richard Thaler, coined the term nudge to
describe an indirect means of influencing behavior
toward a desired action. In other words,
redesigning the environment in such a way that it
subtly takes you down a path or guides you to a specific choice. One of the key elements of
behavior nudging is convenience. For better or for worse, a
quirk of human psychology is that people almost always take the path of least resistance. The more convenient an action is to take, the more likely we are to do that thing. While the more resistance
there is between us and the behavior, the less
likely we are to do that thing. So, to influence our behavior
toward healthy eating and weight loss, we
need only to restructure our environments so
that the healthy choice equals the easy choice, but of course, Google knows this, they're Google. They literally know everything. So what did they do? Using principles from behavioral science, Google managed to cut
the calories consumed by their employees by 3.1
million in just seven-weeks time without getting rid of
any of the high calorie or unhealthy options and how
they did it reveals insights into small changes we can all
make to make healthy choices much more easy and
sustainable for ourselves. (computer keyboard typing) Teeny, tiny differences in
convenience and simplicity make all the difference when
it comes to our decision. I'll try and illustrate
how seriously small we are talking here. For example, say you're thirsty
and you're equal distance from a fridge containing cold cans of pop and a tap where you can pour
yourself a glass of water. It takes half a second
to open a can of pop and 15 to 30 seconds to
fill a glass of water. Look at the difference in steps. Steps for pop. walk over,
open fridge, crack pop. Steps for water, walk over, open cupboard, choose glass, turn on tap,
run water for a second to get cold, and fill glass. Without intervention,
pop would be the path of least resistance here
when looking for a drink and those few extra seconds, though seemingly inconsequential, are often enough to make
pop the unconscious choice. To combat this convenience
bias, Google installed chill spa water canisters
everywhere you look and moved sodas and even bottled water to more distant locations. They flavored the water with
fruit and herb infusions to make it more appealing, placed it conveniently
all around the office, and made the containers effortless to use, resulting in water being much
quicker and more accessible than sugary drinks or even bottled water. (computer keyboard typing) The average person drinks
at least two cups of coffee per day, and many drink
considerably more than that. At Google, some coffee
stations were located directly beside a snack
bar about six feet away, so that every time you engage
in your daily caffeine habit, you'd be prompted with the
option to grab a snack, while other coffee stations
in the office were located across the room from the
snacks, about 17 feet away. When Google started
monitoring snack consumption, they found that 20% of
employees getting coffee from coffee bar A grabbed a snack, while only 12% did from coffee bar B. According to Google's own stats, that distance, just four
or five extra steps, was enough to reduce the
likelihood of snacking by as much as 23% for
men and 17% for women. To put these results into perspective, for a man who drinks three beverages a day using the near coffee machine
rather than the far one, say because the near station happens to be closer to his desk, can lead him to consume an
additional 81 snacks a year. You can see how this effect might play out in your own workplace or home as well. Coffee and donuts are a frequent pairing in break rooms everywhere. (computer keyboard typing) The abundant candy and chocolate at Google used to be available in
clear candy store-esque, free-flowing containers, showcasing all different types of fun and colorful candy options. As you can imagine, Google employees were known
to eat a lot of candy, which is particularly
problematic when you consider how particularly calorie-dense candy is. To combat this, Google made a few changes to put some friction points between their employees and the candy Sugary snacks like M&Ms were banished to the back of the kitchens, hidden away from view
in opaque containers. We've already seen how even
slightly increasing the distance between you and your
favorite treat can reduce how much of it that you eat, but removing unhealthy snacks
from your line of sight can also be very helpful in removing that visual cue to eat it. With the candy in full view at Google, people who are not even
thinking about candy were reminded daily of its presence, but that simple act of
removing it from sight removes that reminder to eat. This is why we sometimes
forget to eat produce that's probably hidden away
in a drawer in our fridge, but rarely forget to
finish that bag of chips rolled up by the TV. Simply moving unhealthy
snacks out of places you're most likely to see
them can go a long way in terms of reducing that
impulsive urge to consume them. (computer keyboard typing) Google cafes and kitchens
have been restructured using the principles of
convenience and resistance to highlight the healthiest choices. The salad bar is the first
thing you see when you walk into their cafes, followed
by big bowls of fruit, all front and center, easily
accessible, and front of mind. At their buffets, vegetables
are the first items on the line, and there are plenty of different enticing options. This way, once you reach the
meat, carbs, and desserts, your plate is already full
of the healthiest options. In just one month, the
amount of produce consumed by Google employees climbed by 2/3, and today, the company serves
over 2,300 breakfast salads, up from zero, two years ago. In some, whether you're working at Google, on the strip in Las Vegas, or sitting on your couch at home, your environment can either
support or undermine your goals. If you want to eat more of something or do more of something, make
it more convenient to do so. make it easier to eat, more
attractive, highly visible, or bring it closer to you, and if you want to eat less of something, make it more difficult to do
so, store it further away, don't leave it in your line of sight, and make it more difficult to get to. (upbeat music)
