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Earlier this week, the fire alarm sounded loudly and persistently in EveryFit’s office.  And yet both our team as well as friends at another company decided not to skedaddle urgently, even though our lives could have conceivably been on the line.  In fact, many of us questioned whether we should have left the building at all.  One guy said that in college, he used to sleep through fire alarms, and the rest of us nodded in agreement.  In sum, the value of doing nothing seemed greater than the perceived probability that we were going to die in a fire that was raging through our building.

With sirens blaring, the fire trucks rushed through the building to discover, as we had thought, that there was no actual fire.   This incident reinforces many insights into social behavioral psychology that are as relevant in everyday life as they are in triggering healthy behavior change:

1)      The anchoring of false alarms – Similar to the story about crying wolf, if you’ve lived through false fire alarms before, you’re unlikely to believe that there’s anything different this time around.  People are pattern-driven, so a trigger must offer evidence to defy the pattern in order to be effective.

2)      Fire alarms trigger only one human sense – you hear the ingratiating sound of the alarm, but none of the other four senses are immediately engaged, unless you’re in the middle of the fire.  Bottom line: the more senses engaged, the more credible and influential the trigger. If you can see the fire with your own eyes, feel the heat, and/or smell the smoke, you’re more likely to stop, drop, and roll.

That said it’s not necessary to engage multiple senses to trigger a desired action.  For anyone focused on behavior change, it’s important to deliver triggers that engage the most valuable human sense for the task at hand.  In the case of fires, sound alarms arguably engage the least valuable sense for convincing people to leave a burning building.  After all, you can hear the alarm but you likely can’t hear the fire.

3)      Social interaction is a double-edged sword – On the one hand, if a colleague were to burst into the office and warn us all that a fire was raging, it would have been an effective trigger for us to move.  On the other hand, if we’re all anchored by our past experience with false alarms, we’re likely to sit still and go down in flames unknowingly.

What does this tell us? Above all, it indicates that social proof is very powerful, but that social influence based on anchored thinking is likely to lead to inaction and disaster.  Solomon Asch’sclassic conformity experiments in the 1950s are a case-in-point that social anchoring can lead people astray, even if their initial inclination towards an action or response is correct.

Every day, doctors tell patients that if they don’t manage their chronic diseases—such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular conditions—they’ll die.  And yet the vast majority of people still consume too much sugar, spend too much time on the couch, and don’t see the immediate relationship between their behavior and the consequences of their diseases.

The lesson:  most of your doctor’s advice is like a fire alarm, where the immediate reward of inactivity and bad nutrition is still more visible, tasty, fragrant, and tangible than the prospect of dying.   For behavioral triggers to be actionable, they must be credible, engage the dominant human sense for a given task, and apply the power of unanchored social proof.  Until then, we all risk going down in flames.