Skip to content
Home » How to Motivate Yourself to Change Your Behavior: Tali Sharot (Transcript)

How to Motivate Yourself to Change Your Behavior: Tali Sharot (Transcript)

Tali Sharot at TEDxCambridge

Here is the full transcript and summary of Cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot’s TEDx Talk: How to Motivate Yourself to Change Your Behavior @ TEDxCambridge conference. She is the author of the book The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others. 

Listen to the MP3 Audio:

Tali Sharot – Cognitive neuroscientist

So, we all have some behavior that we would like to change about ourselves. And we certainly all want to help someone else change their behavior in a positive way. So, maybe it’s your kid, your spouse, your colleague.

So I want to share some new research with you that I think reveals something really important about what gets people to change their behavior.

But before I do that, let’s zoom in on one strategy that I think you probably use a lot. So, let’s say you’re trying to stop yourself from snacking. What do you tell yourself? Well, most people, in a monologue, will say, “Beware. You’ll be fat.”

And if this was your kid, you would probably tell him that smoking kills and, by the way, he’s in big, big trouble.

So, what we’re trying to do here is we’re trying to scare ourselves and others into changing their behavior. And it’s not just us. Warnings and threats are really common in health campaigns, in policy.

It’s because we all share this deep-rooted belief that if you threaten people, if fear is induced, it will get them to act. And it seems like a really reasonable assumption, except for the fact that the science shows that warnings have very limited impact on behavior.

So, graphic images on cigarette packets, for example, do not deter smokers from smoking, and one study found that, after looking at those images, quitting actually became a lower priority for smokers.

So, I’m not saying that warnings and threats never work, but what I’m saying is, on average, they seem to have a very limited impact.

And so, the question is: why?