#4 Pizza Parties & Casinos: The Psychology Behind Momentum

What do pizza parties and casinos have in common? In this episode, we answer this question as we dissect the psychology behind pizza parties and casinos to understand change momentum, which is crucial in implementing change within ourselves and organizations. 

Transcript

Pizza parties. Celebratory dinners. We’ve all been to one. Maybe it was the one at the office for the team that won some inhouse competition. In elementary school, you might recall the pizza party you could win if you read the most books that year. Take a moment and think about what those celebrations felt like in those different contexts. 

Welcome to “Change, Actually”—a podcast about change—in the workplace, in organizations, and in ourselves. I’m your host, Hillary Chan.  I’ve spent years helping leaders, humans, including myself, and organizations navigate change--grounding what makes us human into practical strategies for individual and organizational growth.  If this sounds like you, subscribe/follow the podcast. 

For ease of reference, I’ll continue to label the notion of celebrations with the term “pizza parties.”  So, here’s how I used to feel about pizza parties. As a kid, it was such an exciting event to look forward to—the reward of a pizza party felt like an acknowledgement of the effort I used to read the pile of books that year. As an adult, you might have already realized, it’s not the same. In adulthood, your employer gives you “pizza parties”, but in different forms. And in change, we try to sprinkle the feelings of what pizza parties used to give us as kids to help build what we call change momentum. Ultimately, the feeling of winning is very necessary, it keeps us invested, but it can be very short-lived, very temporary. 

So if it’s so temporary, why bother creating the feeling of winning at all? 

Even though the excitement can fade, feeling like a winner, feeling acknowledged, matters, regardless the size of the win--whether because you made progress or had a “pizza party” –the reward itself can still have strong effects. For example, casinos are known to give passerby small amount of cash for free play. Free cash—you’d cash it in and buy yourself a snack, right? Most people don’t. It’s why the gaming industry, the industry that encompasses casinos, lotteries, online betting, etc., is so lucrative—because as humans, we love and can become addicted to small wins. It motivates us.

Pizza parties make us feel the small wins, and also give us something else—hope. In medicine, a placebo, often called a sugar pill, can make a person feel better simply because the brain expects the intervention to work. Studies on the placebo effect finds that the sugar pill can actualize the hope of feeling better into reality. Does it always work? Not always. 

In 1955, Dr. Henry Beecher reviewed multiple clinical trials and found that over a third of patients reported significant relief from their symptoms even though they were only given the placebo. Now, it’s important to note, placebos don’t fix a root issue, but the relief felt is still important and very real.

Likewise, the effect of pizza parties don’t necessarily speak to the power of the change itself. But it is needed to ease people into the change and keep them invested in the change. Think about someone on a fitness journey to build more muscles.  It can feel small, but it is an important win for the person to acknowledge that they lifted weights even once this week. And acknowledging for themselves that they lifted weights to work towards the journey will help them lock-in even more in upcoming weeks.

Let’s clarify something though, change momentum, part of which is building hype, is not about using the placebo effect or pizza parties to over-celebrate a win that might deserve less praise. Might sound a tad extreme, but we are not in the business of con artistry. It’s about keeping the momentum and allowing us to maintain engagement on the change. Hype can be more than just fluff. Hype can be an extremely powerful tool when developing and implementing change in organizations and within ourselves.

Building hype translates real successes (small or large) into something more palpable to the heart. And when it comes to accepting change, the heart can be a huge resistor or enabler of the change.

Like, and subscribe so that you can tune in next time, when we talk about how to strategically wield hype to increase the successful adoption of change.

Remember, pizza parties can be worth the hype, because hype keeps us invested, and that’s “change, actually.”