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Lesson Info

Attribution & Choice

When we think about this this these feelings influence all sorts of choices that we make in our life and they do this in many different ways one of the ways that they do it is that the faster we think about things, the more that we like them okay and I can influence and you can influence how easy it is to think about certain things. So one of the one of the great effects in psychology it was discovered by a guy named bob zion's who who did this work on what's called mere exposure the mere exposure effect is the idea that you like something better just from having seen it before think about like a rock concert you've gone too you know the band always plays their hit from the radio last and everybody goes crazy now it is always possible that the song that's been playing on the radio is in some objective sense that band's best song but that's not really what's going on for the most part it's usually that that's the song everybody's heard and when you've heard a song before the second time...

you hear it the third time, the fifth time you like it better all right even if you didn't like the song at all when it first came on and my my my favorite experience with this mere exposure effect is summer nineteen, eighty four was working right off cape cod at a summer camp and I saw the movie ghostbusters in the theater and and when I heard the ghostbusters theme song I thought it was the stupidest song I've ever heard in my entire life I mean really I just I thought it was a joke, right? I literally thought thought the song was so bad it was a joke but the song was on the radio all summer okay and by the end of the summer like I love that I love that now even now right you get that song going and I could be you know, it's like but but I remember when I first heard I was like, this is horrible okay? But just the exposure to it made me feel good about it because I could follow along with it you know? And now of course it's also associate you have lots of other things that that, um that are positive memories but but at the time it was just the repeated exposure to it um there's also something called prime ing I can make you make it easier for you to think about something by preparing you to think about it. So you know, way back on monday morning we talked about uh s o day session one right in the morning way did this exercise where we where we talk, where we had to list vegetables right? And we talked about the fact that they're that memories all about these connections between things and so one of the things that those connections do is that if I mentioned one thing, it will prepare you to think about other related things as well. So if I if I were to talk about doctors that makes you it makes it easier for you to think about things like nurses and hospitals and other medical related thing okay, so if I prepare you to think about something, I can make it easier for you to think about it and actually make you like that thing better just by preparing you to think about that as opposed to just diving into something. So in a business context, ask yourself why it is that you don't just ask for something right away like your first statement is someone isn't an ask it's you establish some context first, why do you have to do that? Well, people will tell you all these stories about, well, it's important to have a relationship and things like that and that is of course part of what's happening in these discussions, but another part of what's happening is you need to prepare people to think about something because the more easily they can think about it, the more they're going to like it and so you engaged in this conversation before asking for something in part to make it easier for them to think about, because that increases their positive feeling when they're thinking about it, which makes them more likely to say yes, there's also some very bizarre effects out there, there's the what one of the most bizarre ones is something called the name letter effect. So most of us are very familiar with our name and so that's, something that, for each of us is something that's, that's, that's easy for us to think about. And so what happens is we are actually favorably disposed towards things that share letters and sounds with our name. Somebody actually went through and did an analysis of the records of the american dental association and found that their arm or dentists named dennis than you would expect by chance. I don't know why that is, but but the argument is that it is in part that people might be looking around for what I want to do for a living and be attracted to something they feel good about it think dentistry that feels good. I wonder why I don't know, dennis, why does it feel right now? If you explained, if you make it obvious why it is that they might go pay me? I don't like dentistry after all, but but, you know, it's it's interesting, right, how these little things can sometimes influence what it is that we feel positively about it when you feel positively about it you learn more about it it makes you easier makes it easier for you to think more about it you know it's that whole you know sort of for want of a nail the war was lost right I mean a lot of our life actually builds up like that it's these little things that build on each other over time that end up becoming who we are you know, at the end and then of course we look back and tell a story that has nothing whatsoever to do in all likelihood with the factors that actually influenced our behavior because that motivational systems so deep inside the brain um other things other ways that that that that we can create these attribution tze there's something called affective prime ing so ask yourself for exam you ever seen that michelle entire ad with all the babies why why are they doing there right they're doing it because everyone most everyone thinks babies air really cute right babies make you feel good so and tires don't make you feel anything generally you know actually my area the country has a lot of people get very excited about tires but for the most part like when I look at tires I just I don't get any don't get strong feelings over the other but your pear babies with tires and you get and then after awhile presumably some of that rubs off on the tires and I usually tired go okay? I don't know but so you're getting this kind of prime ing because you have associate id the the this object with something that's really positive so we get that as well here's that pdf that we've talked about that work book on page thirty eight of the booklet so this is in section three for session three um and there's a there's an exercise labeled a fluency exercise and there are that there are two pages thirty eight and thirty nine and on pages thirty eight thirty nine you're going to read to product descriptions and uh and just tell us how you feel about that product so why don't you go ahead and do that? And while you're doing that chris and I are gonna have a a conversation about something going on on the a lot of ideas in the chat room people are kind of throwing out different notions of interpreting this information now here's an interesting question why is holding something for instance like a warm cup of coffee? Why does that make you have positive feelings that could then get attributed to someone you meet like while holding a warm cup of coffee? And I guess this could be interpreted whenever you're in that positive state of mind? Why does that make people seem more positive when meet them for the first time yeah eso so think about this right what we're what we're talking about here is situations in which we create positive feeling and there's lots of sources of positive feelings so one of those sources could be that morning cup of coffee you know or you know, so why is that morning cup of coffee feel good? Well it's warm, which is which is you know, and if you think about why do we drink a warm drink in the morning because you know you're actually a body temperature's a little bit lower when you're asleep and so that warmth actually helps to create a little bit of arousal for you? Coffee has some caffeine in it caffeine creates arousal so you get you get you get you get all that gone plus, you know, often you're drinking coffee in a safe, comfortable and so all of this is really designed to make you feel pretty good in the morning and so now you've got this positive affect but of course it's what you do every morning so there isn't anything special to attribute it to you don't look around and think, uh, this is just my wonderful life, so now you're looking around the world, what is the source of this emotion what's the source of this affect and now you meet somebody and you think you you are the source that positive affect I like you okay and that's that's a big piece of what's going on the natural follow up question is is this also apply what we're talking about emotional eating when you kind of get the positive effects from eating something maybe the ben and jerry's that's been talking about yeah yeah no I mean I think there's lots of these kinds of sources of positive affect in our world and eating is definitely a piece of it and and of course this could be good or bad, right? I mean, it's it is wonderful for us to feel good about the foods that we and to feel good while we're eating foods um it can be a little bit dangerous at the point where somebody starts to use the food as the way of feeling good because if that's the that's the only thing you find that you can do in your environment in order to feel good about it then that that's one of the ways that people can end up getting into a kind of problem eating behavior but but for the most part yeah and that's actually you know, if you think about you know the kinds of things that people do when they go on dates right why do you what do you do when you go on a date? You go out for coffee, you go out for food why do you do that? I mean partly it's because those air those air circumstances where you can actually sit down and have a conversation but partly it's also because they are settings themselves that create positive affect you know you don't want to go to aa horror movie on a date right? Because at the end of the movie you're like you scare me right and that's just that's just not conducive toe getting into a relationship with somebody but having a good meal glass of wine you know good food, tasty food a little warmth you know, in a in a cozy environment you're feeling good about the circumstance makes you more likely I feel good about the person that you're with unless you can't communicate with them in which case you have this halting slow frustrating conversation and then you go yeah gotta go um all right, so we had this fluency exercise now the point of this exercise if you if you didn't get to see this if you if you didn't download the pdf um all right, I'm gonna try I'm just trying to show this to you there were two product descriptions one of which was written in a horrible font right it's it's this it's this really its script close together small and then the other product description was written in in a in a much clearer fun you know one of these beautiful sand serra funds now the point of this is if you you know, you know, obviously in a setting like this where we're already talking about this stuff it's hard to really get this store to think toe work, but but often in experiments they do this and what they find is if I make something really hard for you to read difficulty cause the font is bad you don't necessarily realize that the difficulty you had while reading it was making this frustrating and so you begin to think I don't like this product because it was hard for me to read the font, okay? And if it's easy to read if it's if it's easy for you to understand and to read what you're reading, then that fluency transfers over to the product itself, so if you're trying to make a good impression advertising or inter personally or whatever it is, you want to be easy toe understand, easy to read, write the mohr difficulty it is free for people to understand what they're what what it is that you're trying to tell them because of the way that you're saying it, the more that people are going to have a negative impression of you even if the content of what you're saying is something that they would normally agree with all right? This is one of the reasons you know, people, people sometimes who have difficult to understand accents you could ask why today why would someone ever want to work on that accent and make themselves easier to understand I mean that's a part of who they are and the answer is because if people are having difficulty understanding you then they might actually, um feel worse about your message not because of of what you're saying but because of how it's being said did you have a question? Well, no, I just realized that when I was reading the first one that was difficult to read, I thought consciously of the fact that oh, you know probably was just some difficulty with getting it on to this pdf does not art's fault as I was okay with it because I could pinpoint right, right yeah and so if you're able t be able to come up with a reason for it then then you then think then that frustration you get is not attributed to the situation itself but a lot of times were unaware of these factors and of course we're talking about attribution right now so that concept is there. So you start looking for reasons why things might be easier difficult but a lot of times you're just going through the world and you don't necessarily realize, you know, I mean, so for example you know, imagine you know you're driving somewhere and and you're listening to a radio station and there's a little static you know you might just be trying to listen and having trouble hearing the station because it's just out of range and you're not really thinking about the fact that oh there's a cause for the static is a reason why it's hard for me to understand this all right, it's one of the reasons why you should never have like a first business conversation on a cell phone right? Because cellphones air really compressed the signal it's much harder for people to understand you over the cellphone really put yourself in a situation in which you could be heard as clearly as possible right because you want people to be feeling good generally speaking about the interaction they're having because that positive feeling will transfer itself to whatever it is that you're talking about so um ask yourself another question right? Well, there was a fluke I just did okay, so ask yourself why is there so much advertising in our world right? Why does what is advertising do and think about some of the companies that advertise mean some companies have to advertise because you don't know who they are and so they have to inform you about who they are but almost every ad that you will experience that I want you to pay attention to this for for the day think of every time that you encounter and add ask yourself is this actually telling me something I didn't know already okay and if you think about a lot of advertisers my favorite advertiser in terms of their effectiveness is coca cola is there a person on the planet unaware that coca cola makes beverages? Nobody we all know so why does coca cola continued advertise you could say well, they don't really need to everyone knows who they are but they do need to advertise and the reason they need to advertise is that every time you see that coca cola ad it creates additional ease of thinking about coca cola the next time that you are in an environment in which you're buying something to drink and now you know, think about that think about how it is that you make a decision so you're standing lets you know you're standing at a fast food place because you've got to get you got to get lunch in a hurry you order your sandwich and uh and now you're thinking I need a drink and you don't want to spend ten minutes thinking about all the reasons why various drinks they're going to be uh the one that you should pick because remember we talked about you've got to make that trade off between the effort you put into things in the accuracy you got this long line of people behind you you're looking and you and your eye lights on the coca cola logo and you go I'll have a coke right why? Because it was easy to think about felt positive bought the coke okay, so they're all over precisely because that they're going to try and get you to be thinking quickly about about having a coca cola when you're in that environment and in fact coca cola is brilliant at this they make you stare at their logo's in every act you know you go to the movies and they have a two minute ad in which they take you on a journey through the center of a vending machine and what are you actually doing? You're staring at a bottle of coke for two solid minutes right? Brilliant much more brilliant than many ads so often that that that coke nicole ad is preceded by a car ad in which there's all these fast cuts of a car you're not sure where it is and in the last five seconds of the ad they show you the brand of the car right they've got that ad has been utterly worthless from a from a advertising standpoint because they haven't actually made you stare at that logo for two minutes and you don't you're the end you're not going to get that same feeling of fluency so unless your ad is introducing somebody to something that they've never ever heard of before never ever seen before you want to get people staring at the things that they're going to see when they're going to be buying or using the product because that creates that that that fluency that ease of thinking about something that makes you feel good about okay so that's a big part of what we're trying to do what somebody's trying to do when they're advertising but this means now if you're on the side where what you do is your creating advertisements you want to understand that because that's that's what you want to do when you are promoting something to people but it also means that each of us lives we are bathed in a world of advertising for one thing we have given up uh we don't like to pay for stuff anymore we would rather have somebody else pay for it for us as and what they get in return for paying for it is access to our environment right? And so you know, I read a magazine and there are all of these advertisements in my environment that air flashing past me that were influencing what it is that's easy and hard for me to think about right when I watched television when I go to the movies um this cost is being defrayed in part by people who have paid to get in my environment they are influencing what it is that I think about whether I want it to or not most of us don't realize this most of us think you know what? I can ignore the ads I'm not going to be affected by advertising because I'm too smart for that but the fact is that advertising is not influencing how we explicitly think about things what it's influencing is what we feel good about and we feel good about it because we've been staring at the logo or we've been staring at the logo paired with a cute baby right so coca cola's brilliant and another thing everything else in the ads are always cute those polar bears are adorable right so now I'm staring at a logo and there's cute polar bears right so I'm feeling good partly because it's easy for me to think about coke and partly because I'm getting this affect from the polar bears right um ask yourself right why does goodyear so here's another tire thing you know tires are boring right? You parent with cute babies goodyear doesn't pair with babies they fly a blimp over football games why silly except when people go to football games you're aroused it's interesting there's noise and there's excitement and there's people running into each other and and you're feeling all of this amazing stuff and you look up and there's tires so again it sze creating this association between something that ordinarily wouldn't inspire very much and uh and this excitement you're creating this kind of of effective prime ings effective conditioning okay um so a lot of advertising has its influence by the feelings that it creates in you and so as consumers, one of the things that this means is that we need to be aware of our environments right? I have actually tried very hard in my life to get rid of as much advertising as I can I don't watch I don't watch normal television, you know have a nap tv and I use that I buy you know, whatever movies or tv shows I want to watch I you know, I listened toe public radio's that I'm minimising the number of ads that I'm being exposed to not that public radio doesn't have any advertising but it's there's less of it right? Spend your life cutting out as many other sources of people getting into your environment as possible on the idea behind that is you actually can't get rid of the influence of those ads on your life because they're getting in there through mechanisms that you actually don't have any control over they're having their influence on you because of what what it is that it makes you easy. What what it makes it easier for you to think about what it is that makes you feel positively and so uh the less of it that you're exposed to the more opportunities that you have to influence what it is that you're going to feel good about rather than having someone else pay for the opportunity to decide what it is that you're going to feel good about um, so that's really a lot of what it is that advertising is doing for you and doing to you, um now not only do just just positive feeling influence the decisions you make, negative feelings influence the decisions that you make a cz well, now it will come as a surprise to no one that we don't like to feel bad, right? We actually actively avoid situations that make us feel bad. So when you're feeling bad about the prospect of doing housework, you know, to housework when you feel feeling bad about the prospect of cutting vegetables, you don't cut vegetables. Um, not only do we try to avoid things that make us feel bad, we actually avoid situations that make us feel bad, which means that we spend less time making decisions in situations in which those decisions air associated with some kind of negative outcome or negative feeling. So sometimes in life we are forced to contemplate decisions that are the lesser of two evils, right? Neither outcome is going to be good. We're just trying to find the one that's less bad. Uh, in those situations, we often spend less time thinking about those things, then we should, because we just want to get out of the situation because thinking about it in general makes us feel bad, and we just want to get it over with but sometimes we actually ought to spend a little more time thinking about it because even though that decision process doesn't feel pleasant, the decision itself is important enough that it warrants a little bit more time if you look at the research there's also, um, there's also evidence that people will, um, not comply with medical tests that might give them bad news. So you hear stories about, you know, people who are not feeling so well, they think they might be sick, but they don't go to the doctor because if you go to the doctor, you could get bad news, and if you get bad news, then that would feel bad. Of course, if you really are sick, the faster you catch it, the more likely it is that you're going toe, you have a good outcome, so you ought to do it quickly. The longer you wait, the more negative things that could happen, right? But we avoid doing some of these things just because we're worried that we're going to get bad news in this situation, you know, it's like somebody who gets a piece of mail, uh, I actually remember this when I got, um, uh, when I when I applied to college, I remember, um, that, um I'd applied to college and the letter came uh at home and I had applied it was december so you know in april if you get in you get a fat letter and if you don't get in you get a thin letter so there's so you sort of know whether you got in from the packet itself but in december if you if you applied for a december admission you get a letter either way so the letter itself doesn't give you any information and so I got home and there was a letter and I have been waiting for days for this thing to come and this is before email were just stuff just arrived right? So the letter arrived and I got home and I was like, you know what? I'm going to take the trash can in honor I spent twenty minutes finding other tasks to do around the house before I finally sat down and opened the letter because I didn't want to you know have the prospect of getting the bad news and in the event I got in so is actually okay, which is why I'm you know it's it's a happy story in retrospect, but but I remember avoiding looking right it's not like I was going to change the outcome right? That outcome was determined that letter had been sent days earlier, right? But I I didn't want I didn't want the prospect of the bad news and so I avoided opening um and and and and in general we often differ choices in tasks that might be stressful and this is another source of procrastination right? Is that we know that something might have some stress involved with it when we get started and so we just put it off I'll do tomorrow I'll get to it um this happens a lot with like phone calls that you have to give to give bad news to somebody right? Like if you've ever if you've ever been hiring someone or if you if you have teo I've had this with with negative performance evaluation so I have I have people that I have to evaluate every year and generally speaking they do a great job and I get to tell them positive things but every once in a while I have somebody who's really not working as effectively as they could and you know, I've had I've had to fire a few people in my life and I usually takes me a couple of days to kind of worked my way up to doing it. You know, even I've had times where I've actually had conversations with the person I know I have to fire and rather than sitting down and saying, look, we need to talk I'm like hey has a gun oh, good, yeah, you know? And finally I'm like, okay, I have to do this it's right? Because, you know, it's going to be an unpleasant thing to do. So we defer those situations, um, toe overcome negative affect again, we talked about this a little bit, right? One of the things you want to do is to see if you can create some kind of positive mood associated with something. This is easier to do for things that have both kind of positive and negative components to it. There's, hard to put a positive spin on, I have to fire somebody, I admit, but but when there's something that I might where there is a positive element, try to focus on that positive element, maybe maybe give yourself a little unexpected gift if you can. It can't be that unexpected if you give it to yourself, but give you so, you know, give yourself the opportunity to do something fun on dh see if you can find a way to overcome it or, you know, sometimes just recognize that that you know what recognized that because there's negative affect associated with this, that that I'm gonna have trouble getting into it. And so I really need to just, you know, move forward with it and and released take it seriously that is recognized the source of my desire teo teo, get to avoid doing something, um now you might say to yourself you know what I said this is emotion stuff if we could just get rid of this man life would be so much better um but it turns out that's actually not the case because actually remember these feelings that you have are the reflection of the way that your motivational system is working and so you actually want to take that into account when you're making decisions and in many situations actually you're getting great information from the way you feel about something so for example one of the largest purchases that anyone will ever make in their lives is the purchase of a home and if you watch people buying houses very few people go through that process going yes well that's got plenty of counter space it's got it's got the you know the yard is it z got exactly a third of an acre which is perfect for us it's good you know they don't go through that list they walked through the house they go and no and they walk out of the house then they walked into another husband oh I love this place and you think to yourself really should you make such a significant purchase in your life perhaps the largest expenditure of money you'll ever make in your life on the basis of the fact that you are overwhelmed with positive feeling in your life in that moment and the answer is yeah probably why? Because when you have that really positive feeling part of what's happening is that your motivational system is reacting to all of the ways in which this space can help you to achieve your goals and actually when you are walking around that space for the rest of your life, it is that engagement with the motivational system that is going to drive your experience of being in that location and all of those things on your checklist they're very cold, right? They are not necessarily going to influence your experience all that much now some of them might write I just moved to this new house and one of the things that was not obvious about the house at all influence the choice of the neighborhood, which is I found a place where I don't have to get any on any highways to get back and forth to work anymore and that's made my life immeasurably better but that just constrained where I looked for a house and not which house uh I ended up behind but that but that emotional investment that that feeling that gets generated from being in the space turns out to be extraordinarily good information about how you're going to interact with this in the future right now that's not to say that therefore you should go out and buy a house you can't afford, but you should definitely take that feeling as valuable evidence in the process of making these kinds of purchases and deciding whether you like something same thing with you know your choice of of of, you know romantic partners, right? It's you know, you know, this is someone you're gonna have to tow, you know, engage with you should have some positive feeling if somebody's creeping you out take take note of that right there's you know that's that's that's there's a reason for that, right? You know, listen be willing to listen to the feelings that you have, um let me give you an example. So so when is this kind of positive feeling? When is this a good indication that that this is something you should pay it tension to in choice situations it's important in situations in which there's a lot of information that needs to be integrated like there is when you're meeting a person or there is when you're when you're looking at a house and also in a situation in which it might be difficult for you to talk about the information that is driving the choice. So classic experiment got done by a guy named tim wilson. He did this study in which people did some random experiment in the lab and then after the experiment was over they said, listen, as part of your payment for being in this study, we want to give you a poster and people had a choice. They could either get a fine art reprint like a monet or something or this cute kitten poster with a with a funny saying on ok, now some people were told, look at these posters, decide which one you want tell us which one you want. Other people were told, um, tell us which one you want and tell us why you want it. Now, if I if I ask you for the reason why you did something that bias is your choice towards the things that are easy to talk about now, most people don't have a finely honed vocabulary for their artistic aesthetics. Unless you've taken like an art appreciation class, you don't know why you like it. You just know that you like it, whereas that cute kitten poster oh, it's, cute it's got a funny saying, you know, it's easy for you to describe why you like it. So it turns out that the people who were just you were just told pick the one that you like tended to pick the fine art reprint, whereas the people who were told pick the one that you give us a reason and take when they tended to pick the cute kitten posters now you might say, well, but who was right? How do you even know? Well here's where the fun part comes in this is an experiment of course. So what they did was they said good check off which one you want and then we'll order the posters and we'll call you in a week and then you'll come and pick up what you what you picked so they come so they call people they say come on back to the live picture what you no pick up your poster they get to the lab and now they say listen you know as it turns out we ordered too many posters so actually you could have whatever you want so they were basically giving people a chance to change their mind if they wanted and what they found was the people who picked the cute kitten poster tended toe switch their choice to pick the fine art reprint afterwards but the people who picked a fine are reprint they stuck with their choice. Okay, so what this suggests is that if I put you in a situation in which I force you to, uh, talk about something that might be difficult for you to talk about, I'm a bias your choice away from that and then I may put you in a situation in which you make a decision that isn't really in keeping with your long term desires, I just forced you to pick something that was easier for you to talk about so in situations like that it's really good to pay attention to what you're feeling where it can be dangerous toe rely on those feelings is when you're in situations in which those feelings could be manipulated so if you're in an environment in which there's been a tremendous amount of advertising where people have been manipulating how you feel about things and how easy it is for you to think about those things then your feelings alone might actually be getting you into trouble because they're dry they're driving you towards decisions that are being influenced by the other people who've paid to be in your environment I think what we'll do is summarized here in one quick question if it was just sort of if you're in that situation let's sit with the posters where you you picked what you could articulate best but it turns out that's not really what you wanted how does that affect your future choices when if you just make that kitten poster work do you continue to make choices that you'll just make work versus when do you say enough? I really want to state what I want yeah so that's a good question I mean obviously you know, one of the things that you want to do is is I think what happens in the long run is if you've made a siri's of choices that were mediocre for you you've made them work but you're not feeling on a regular basis, you're just not feeling wonderful, right? Right? And I think we all you know, I'll get into those situations every once in a while, where you just look at your life and you go, yeah, right in those situations, you can begin to look around your world and sometimes it's helpful to have another person walk around the world with you to ask yourself, what where's the coming from is it is it just isn't my environment, you know, is that the things that I'm doing is that the people I'm interacting with them, I stuck in a routine that is that is frustrating for me. What is it about those things? And then and then begin to see you now and then, and then you can begin to ask questions like, well, how did I get myself into this situation, right? So for example, if you're the sort of person who keeps watching lousy comedy movies began, you never feel good about him. Ask yourself, why am I doing that? And you may realize, well, because when I sit down to watch the movie, I'm always worried I might be bored by something that could be more enriching this is a signal that maybe I should break out of my rut and try the thing that feels a little bit less good in them in the initial moment because that actually might be more fulfilling for me I have to change a habit and we've talked about the fact that changing habits always feels a little uncomfortable at first, so maybe that feeling of gives you the energy to overcome that initial resistance to doing something differently and could put you in a situation in which you might experience something that's a little bit more profound than what you've been having before. So just to summarize where we went this morning so far we talked a little bit about feelings about affect and the affect is the feelings that you experience from situations in your life that affect has two dimensions it has valin ce positive negative it has arousal strong or weak affect his feelings, but we often then interpret those feelings into emotions that we experience happy, sad, stressed, anxious, joyful okay, those emotional experiences sometimes are a true reflection of where that affect came from, but often they're not often they're actually attribution sze we've made on the basis of the best information we've got about where they came from, we can get it wrong and and that can be a problem in several situations it could be a problem if it influences our willingness to stick with habits if the affect has come from a source that that isn't really related to how important that habit id that that new goal is to us. And it can influence our choices all over the place. Allow those feelings to influence your choice in situations in which you're integrating a lot of information. But be aware that people who have paid to get into your environment are also going to influence those feelings. And when they do that, um, they're goingto bias your choices towards things that they have made easier to think about and towards things that they have associated with positive things in the past.