SuperBetter: How a gameful life can make you stronger, happier, braver and more resilient. Jane McGonigal
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to more real-world exercise, right away.
To confirm this surprising phenomenon, the Stanford researchers have conducted five different studies to date. They all show the same thing: vicarious exercise and vicarious weight loss significantly increase self-efficacy, and as a result, real-world exercise.23
So what does this mean for you, today? The VHIL virtual doppelgängers aren’t available to the public yet—although undoubtedly, vicarious exercise technology will become widespread in the future. In the meantime, this research should be a powerful reminder that self-efficacy, not motivation, is the key to building up your willpower and determination to do things that are difficult. If you need to boost your own self-efficacy without the help of virtual reality, focus on specific skills and abilities that you can increase, even if it’s only the tiniest bit each day. Run for one minute longer. Do one more push-up. Walk one more block. The key is to commit to a specific improvement at the start of each workout. Every time you set a slightly more challenging goal and successfully achieve it, you’ll activate the neural networks that support increased self-efficacy and determination.
If you want the full avatar experience, however, a simpler version of vicarious exercise may be available to you today. Meredith, forty, an elementary school teacher in Phoenix, Arizona, discovered this trick by accident when she started playing the computer game The Sims, a kind of computerized dollhouse in which you create custom avatars and help them achieve their career and family goals. “Not sure what to make of this,” she wrote me recently, “but my Sim seems to have inspired me to exercise and talk to my neighbors more.” It turns out that Meredith had created a Sim version of herself—same hair color, eye color, height, weight, and even fashion sense. And watching her virtual doppelgänger work out and socialize in the computer game triggered the motivation and self-efficacy to do it herself. “The instant results that my Sim gets when she works out or chats with neighbors is so satisfying!” she told me. “Seeing the immediate reward the avatar gets makes it look so easy.”
As in Dr. Bailenson’s lab, the instant gratification of virtual feedback seems to have triggered real-world self-confidence in Meredith. It also triggered a helpful awareness of priorities. “I think it’s the panel that shows the Sims’ needs that really inspired me,” she said, referring to the way Sims games keep score by reminding you that your Sim characters need things like exercise and social activity to be happy and healthy. “I started thinking of what my own panel would be like,” Meredith told me. “I realized I needed to spend more time doing the things that make me feel good. Funny how a computer game can teach you something important about yourself!”
We’ve looked so far in this chapter at heroic qualities like determination, grit, and perseverance. These character strengths help you overcome the kind of tough obstacles and achieve epic goals that can make you an inspiration to others. But there’s another kind of heroic quality that increased self-efficacy can provoke: altruistic qualities.
In another series of experiments at Dr. Bailenson’s Stanford University lab, participants were invited to learn how to “fly like Superman,” using a special virtual reality flying simulator.24 Players would fly through a city landscape, controlling their flight path through their own physical gestures. To give you an idea of what it might feel like to interact with this kind of simulator, here are the game play instructions given to the study participants:
Lift your hands over your head to take off. To land, drop your hands to your side. Where you point your hands is where you will fly. To move faster, move your hands together. To fly slower move your hands apart.
Players were instructed to search the city streets for a crying child. That child, they were told, is diabetic and needs you to deliver insulin to save his life.
The physicality of the experience was an essential component of this game’s design, for two reasons. First, the researchers wanted to give participants the chance to learn a new and unfamiliar skill. By following the instructions and successfully learning how to control the simulator, players would experience a burst of self-efficacy. Second, the researchers wanted to evoke classic mental associations with superhero characters. The ability to fly through the air using only your own power evokes, for most people, the idea of a benevolent superhero like Superman. The researchers’ hypothesis was that by having a firsthand experience of effectively developing a superpower usually associated with superheroes, participants would be more likely to behave heroically toward others in everyday life.
To test this hypothesis, another set of participants were invited to play the same game, but with a different set of rules. They were told that this game would take them on a helicopter ride through the city. Instead of directly controlling their own flight, they passively experienced a tour of the same streets. Like the other participants, however, they were instructed to look for a crying child, so they could land the helicopter and deliver life-saving medicine.
All participants were allowed to keep playing until they successfully completed their rescue mission. Then—and here comes the clever part of the experiment’s design—the researchers staged a fake accident, which happened after the participants had finished playing the game but before they left the lab. Would they notice a person in need—a young woman who suffered a spill—and would they come to her rescue?
It turned out that participants who controlled their own flight in the simulator jumped up to help three times faster, and helped for twice as long, as participants who simply wore the same virtual reality headset and enjoyed a passive helicopter ride through the city landscape. In fact, every single person who learned how to fly helped the struggling person, whereas a full 20 percent of the helicopter passengers completely ignored her.
The important take-away from this study is that players who had direct control over their rescue mission were significantly more inspired to help others. Even though all the participants received the same prosocial “help others” messaging, self-efficacy was ultimately a much more powerful boost of altruistic behavior.
This finding was confirmed in another twist of science, when the Stanford researchers invited yet another group of participants to use the flight simulator without a rescue mission. This group of players learned how to “fly” but were not asked to find a crying child or deliver life-saving medication. This nonrescue group, despite not receiving any “help others” messaging, also was quicker to jump to the rescue and spent more time helping than were the helicopter passengers with a rescue mission. The direct experience of a superpower was enough to change their real-life behavior, even without the subconscious priming of a fictional rescue mission.
The superhero story, it turns out, doesn’t matter as much as the super-empowering experience of having full control over a successful outcome. If you want to tap into your own heroic nature, give yourself the chance to master new skills and experience success—whether it’s in a game or a sport, in the kitchen or the garage. Whenever you feel strong and capable, you’re more likely to use those strengths and capabilities to help others.
Superpower simulators aren’t the only gameful way to unleash your heroic altruism. Here’s a quest inspired by one of my favorite scientific papers from the past decade, written by researchers at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and New York University’s Stern School of Business, and conducted with Princeton University psychologists. The paper, titled “From Student to Superhero,” documents a simple psychological trick you can use anytime, anywhere, to increase your own real-life heroic behavior.
QUEST 13: The Superhero Mirror
Your quest instructions come straight from a psychology lab at Princeton University:
“For this task we would like you to describe the characteristics of a superhero. Think of a superhero, and list the behaviors, values, lifestyle, and appearance associated with these characters.”25
Go ahead and do this now.
What to do: Take at least two full minutes to list everything you can think of that describes a generic superhero: what