Bombardier beetles live pretty tranquil lives thanks to their ability to produce and shoot jets of boiling, noxious liquid at their attackers. Humans have defense mechanisms too, though they aren’t all quite so effective.
One defense mechanism that isn’t always working in our favor is our predisposition to comfort. Particularly in today’s news climate, it’s easy to see why our brain’s ability to tune stuff out might be beneficial in a lot of ways, but this instinct becomes a problem when we tune out things that might be beneficial, for example good advice.
Indeed, defensiveness is a big barrier to self-improvement, Yoona Kang, a postdoc at the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn, tells Inverse. Specifically, her research focuses on the question of how to make people more receptive to behavioral interventions. The results of her team’s findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“When you tell a smoker that smoking is bad, these kinds of messages are kind of implying that ‘what you’re doing isn’t good for you,’” Kang tells Inverse. “People are generally, fundamentally, motivated to feel good about themselves. And they’ll fight against these threats to maintain this kind of positive outlook.”
In the case of this study, Kang’s interventions focused on getting people to lead less sedentary lives by trying to prime them in certain ways, for example encouraging them to think about their values or encouraging them to think more compassionately. Her results are encouraging, and indicate the possibility these simple tactics can help us be more receptive to other interventions, in realms ranging from public health to personal finance.