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A thousand days of stale popcorn
A gym, a morning radio broadcast, and a streak counter are all answers to one question: how do you get someone to keep going when you can’t count on them wanting to?
A research team once handed out free popcorn to people arriving at a cinema. Some of the buckets held fresh popcorn. The rest held popcorn that had been popped a week earlier and had gone soft and chewy in the way week-old popcorn does. Nobody was told which kind they had. Then the researchers measured how much each person ate.
Before you read on, decide what you think happened.
People who didn’t usually eat popcorn at the movies ate much less of the stale popcorn than the fresh. That’s the sensible result, and it’s the one most people predict. The regulars, the ones who always get popcorn, ate about the same amount either way. They weren’t fooled. Asked afterwards, they said the stale popcorn was bad. They ate it anyway, at the normal rate, while reporting that they didn’t like it.
Then the team ran the study again somewhere else. Same kind of people, same two kinds of popcorn, but this time in a meeting room with movie clips playing on a screen. In the meeting room, the regulars ate less of the stale popcorn too.
