"People who always give nothing are rational fools who blindly follow material self-interest." --- Richard Thaler (2016)
Inspired by Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, the “Rational Fool” serves as a whimsical yet thought-provoking representation of the human tendency to act against our own best interests despite possessing rational capabilities. This concept, rooted in behavioral economics, challenges the traditional economic assumption of humans as perfectly rational decision-makers.
This drawing aims to spark curiosity and discussion around the fascinating intersection of psychology and economics, highlighting the importance of understanding behavioral biases in our everyday lives.
Through this playful visual metaphor, I invite visitors to explore the intriguing complexities of human behavior and decision-making, ultimately encouraging a deeper appreciation for the nuances of our choices.
Downloadable Content – Raw Notes
Interested in diving deeper into Richard Thaler’s work on Misbehaving? Download my unfiltered notes below ?
"Success with money relies more on Psychology than Finance,and doing well with money has little to do with how smart you are, and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people." --- Morgan Housel (2020)
“The Psychology of Money“ by Morgan Housel is an insightful guide that puts the spotlight of financial success squarely on the shoulders of human behavior. In this world of complexity, how you behave with money is more important than what you know about money.
With a blend of research, anecdotes, and stories of personal experiences, Housel illuminates the significance of better understanding your own behavior, and how that is far more responsible for your financial outcomes than your skill.
The following one-page visual guide has been created by me to help you apply the teachings from Morgan’s book to your life. See below ?
Downloadable Content – Raw Notes
Ready to dive deeper into Morgan Housel’s work on The Psychology of Money? Download my unfiltered notes below ?
What we eventually accomplish in life may depend more on our passion and perseverance than on our innate talent - Angela Duckworth, Grit (2016)
In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth unpacks the attributes/traits of those individuals who possess grit which is defined as holding the same top-level goal for a very long time and having the passion and perseverance to see your ultimate goal through.
She challenges the unconscious biases we all have towards talent, especially in the way that we all rush to anoint people as extraordinarily talented whenever they accomplish a feat worth writing about. As much as talent counts, effort counts twice as you can see in the following picture of skill and achievement:
What we all achieve depends on talent (how fast we improve skill) and our effort. But as you can see in the above picture, effort factors in the calculations of achievement twice. This is because effort builds skill and at the very same time, effort makes skill productive!
Similar to the findings of Daniel F. Chambliss by the end of the book it is clear the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary. High level of performance is, in fact, an accretion of mundane acts.
Steve Young: An Example of a Paragon of GRIT
“You cannot quit. You have the ability, so you need to go back and work this out.” - Steve Young’s Dad, (circa 1980s)
Steve Young is the epitome of a GRIT Paragon. When he was a freshman at BYU, he was the 8th string quarterback and was barely even getting any practice time. Like most freshmen when things don’t go according to plan, Steve called his father (whose nickname was actually Grit).
Steve’s dad basically said the following: “You can quit but you can’t come home because I’m not going to live with a quitter. You’ve known that since you were a kid. You’re not coming back here.”
With the words of his father ringing in his ears, Steve Young stepped up his game and put the work in. By all accounts, he threw over 10,000 spiral passes at a practice net the summer between his freshman and sophomore year. By his sophomore year, he had risen to QB2 and by his junior year he was BYU’s starting QB. In his final year with the Cougars, Steve Young won the Davey O’Brien award for the most outstanding college quarterback in the country.
Then … It happened all again when he got to the San Francisco 49ers. He spent 4 years on the bench as the backup to four-time Superbowl champion, Joe Montana. And because of his experience at BYU, Steve stayed, learned, and flourished under Montana’s apprenticeship. He eventually got his chance and the rest is history.
Steve Young: A Gridiron Paragon of Grit. From every touchdown to each hard-fought comeback, his relentless determination on the field defines the true essence of grit. A quarterback icon who faced challenges head-on, Young embodies the spirit of unwavering passion and perseverance.
When Steve Young retired, he was the highest-rated quarterback in NFL history.
Final Thoughts
Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole.
People with grit are paragons of perseverance and effort. As much as talent counts, effort counts twice as much with them. They develop their skills by hours and hours and hours of deliberate practice beating on their craft. They master the capacity to do something repeatedly, to struggle, and to have patience over the long-term. But most importantly, they develop the stamina to go over something again and again and again no matter how difficult it is.
In closing, greatness is actually doable because greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable. When it comes to how we fare in the marathon of life, effort counts tremendously, and consistency of effort over the long run is everything. Great things are accomplished by those people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them.
Little Habits and Characteristics That Can Make You More Gritty
Seek to continuously improve
Focus on the daily discipline of trying to do things better than you did yesterday
Remember that the 10-Year Rule Applies to developing skills: thousands and thousands and thousands of hours spent in deliberate practice over years and years and years
Love what you do
Remember that sustained effort over the long-run counts more than talent
Interpret setbacks and failure as a cue to try harder rather than as confirmation that you lack the ability to succeed
“There are two systems of thought: The Intuitive System 1, which does the fast thinking, and the effortful and slower System 2 which does the slow thinking, monitors System 1, and maintains control as best it can within its limited resources.”
--- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (2011)
Introduction
The fact remains whether we like to admit it or not, our minds are susceptible to systematic errors in thinking and judgment. And when we are under pressure or lacking total information, our minds are strongly biased toward causal explanations. To wrap our minds around all the ways we make mistakes in our thinking and judgment, Daniel Kahneman simplified the mind into two systems:
The Intuitive System 1 thinks VERY FAST
The effortful and controlled System 2 thinks VERY SLOWLY
The point Kahneman drives home in his book is by learning to recognize these patterns of thinking in yourself, you can minimize the mistakes when the stakes are highest.
System One … The Hare … All Gas No Brakes!
To put it quite simply: System 1 thinking is impulsive and intuitive and is designed to jump to conclusions from very little evidence. What’s worse, System 1 isn’t designed to know the size of the jumps it is making in its thinking. With System 1, WHAT YOU SEE IS ALL THERE IS (WYSIATI), and because of this, only the evidence at hand counts. In the absence of an explicit context, System 1 will generate its own context, and it really excels at constructing the best possible story … Are you scared yet? If not you should be!
System 1 is highly adept in one form of thinking … Automatic and Effortless. It identifies causal connections between events, sometimes even when the connection itself is spurious.
System Two … The Tortoise … All Brakes No Gas!
Like most things in life, there is a yin-and-yang or balance to things. Your brain’s method of thinking is no different. If System 1 is your default, fast, and reflexive method of thinking, System 2 is the opposite of this. To be specific, System 2 controls thoughts and behaviors, and it is the only system that can follow rules, compare objects on several attributes, and make deliberate choices between options.
Okay… Now What?
Here is the thing… Regardless of Systems 1 and 2, our brains are pattern-matching machines subject to a plethora of cognitive biases. Here are a couple of my favorites:
Anchoring Effect
Availability Heuristic
Halo Effect
Hindsight Bias
Representativeness Heuristic
We often ignore relevant statistical facts and we rely almost exclusively on rules of thumb. When you factor in that System 1 is our default fast way of thinking, and the deep, deliberate, and controlled System 2 way of thinking is lazy and hard to consistently deploy, it’s not surprising that we humans make a ton of decision-making errors. Often, we are inconsistent in our evaluations, and we often make errors in summary judgments. Kahneman found in his research that humans when asked to evaluate the same information twice frequently give different answers.
Reading through Daniel Kahneman’s work convinces me of a couple of solutions to human decision-making shortcomings that a lot of us humans are not going to like to hear… Humans need help to make good decisions, and there are informed and unobtrusive ways to provide this help:
Whenever we can replace human judgment with a formula, we should at least consider it.
Since machines are more likely than human judges to detect weakly valid cues, we should consider complementing or augmenting human-only judgments with human + machine judgments
Maximize predictive accuracy by using machine logic, especially in low-validity environments
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman set out to improve the ability in all of us to identify and understand errors of judgment, and choice in others, and ultimately in ourselves! He wanted to provide his readers with a richer and more precise language to discuss decision-making and thinking within the brain. Because our System 1 method of thinking is our default and intuitive way of thinking, it’s easy for us to ignore relevant statistical facts that don’t fit the patterns we want. By nature, our slower and more methodical way of thinking (System 2) takes more time than we want and is lazy by nature. Humans need help to make good decisions because there is overwhelming evidence that we Humans can’t think rationally 100% of the time.
What Will I Do Differently As a Result of This Book?
Learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid making significant decision-making mistakes when the stakes are high
Understand that even when I think that I am being rational there is a good chance my default System 1 way of thinking has quickly pattern-matched and downplayed disconfirming information.
Understand how deep the halo effect goes in clouding/painting my judgment of a person with a favorable first impression versus not.
The major source of error in forecasting is our prevalent tendency to underweight or ignore distributional information. We forecast based on information in front of us (WYSIATI).
Consequently, I will therefore make every effort to frame the forecasting problem so as to facilitate utilizing all the distributional information that is available
Here is the thing … We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone’s intention.
This fact means that we humans often misclassify random events as systematic and we are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.
This means for me, as I continue to plan I MUST EMBRACE THE RANDOMNESS OF LIFE!
Lastly, beware when I am in a good mood and I have had limited sleep … My System 2 will be weaker than usual and I should pay extra attention to my default System 1.
Downloadable Content
Thinking Fast, and Slow is a must-read for anyone interested in gaining insights into the Human mind and the manner in which decisions are made. The following book notes have been created to help you with your understanding of Daniel Kahneman’s concepts within Thinking Fast, and Slow.
"Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped."
--- Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit (2012)
Summary
At the center of the Habit Loop sits the Craving Brain which looks for simple cues and clearly defined rewards. A typical habit emerges when the brain finds a way to save effort, and habits are powerful because they create neurological cravings. When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision-making. Although you never can really extinguish bad habits, you can change a habit by keeping the old cue and reward but changing the routine.
Three-Step Loop
A cue triggers the brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use
The routine is physical or mental or emotional
The reward helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future
How To Change a Habit
By focusing on the keystone habit, you can fix a myriad of other habits in the process. You must work to identify cues and choose new routines in order to change your habits. But for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible.
In closing, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits’ routines and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it.
The real power of habit is the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. It is important to note that no matter how strong our willpower is, we are guaranteed to fall back into our old ways once in a while
An integrated brain is the foundation of resilience and well-adjusted children. The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Sigel and Tina Payne Bryson breaks down 12 simple and easy-to-master strategies that will help you respond more effectively to difficult situations with your child, and build a foundation for strong social, emotional and mental health.
You should read this book to better understand how to turn the everyday “survival” moments as parents into thrive moments, where the important and meaningful work and connecting of parenting can take place.
Never forget that we parents can provide the kinds of experiences for our children that will help them develop a resilient and well-integrated brain!
Do you believe that ability is fixed and needs to be proven? Or do you believe that ability can be developed through learning? Most of us would agree with the second statement. Yet in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck proves time and time again we humans often live in a fixed mindset (statement one), and often do so without even knowing it.
At the heart of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, is a detailed walkthrough of two types of views you can adopt for yourself: (1) the fixed mindset and (2) the growth-mindset. Under the fixed mindset, you believe your qualities and that of others is cared in stone and this creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. Under the growth-mindset, you believe that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and ultimately through learning. Each mindset can have profound affects on the way you lead your life and view life in general. The following blog post will unpack some of the things I learned through reading this book.
Inside the Mindsets
When you think of yourself under the eye of each mindset, you quickly realize that there are two meanings to everything the happens in life. Better said, there are two ways of seeing every interaction or happening… Two sides of the same coin. The following chart details the differences in mindsets across a few domains of life:
While far from exhaustive, the two lists above show pretty clearly that the fixed-mindset is limiting by its very nature. Yet Carol Dweck shows in her book that time and time again we have a hard time avoiding the fixed-mindset even though we understand that it hampers our ability to live our best life.
Don’t Buy Talent, Buy The Growth-Mindset
Sports has a funny way of helping us see things clearly (and often times less clearly [insert smiley face). When we think about the greatest athletes of all time in each of their domains, we don’t believe they got to their greatest heights by talent alone.
From Michael Jordan to Tiger Woods to Babe Ruth and back to Wilma Rudolph, we intellectually understand that talent + relentless hard work is the ultimate recipe for their success. Yet in our day to day lives, we shun this idea, oftentimes without even realizing. Malcolm Gladwell suggests that this happens because people prize natural endowment over earned ability. As much as our culture talks about individual effort and self-improvement, deep down, he argues, we revere the naturals.
The fixed-mindset can trick us into believing that natural talent should not need effort. In fact, those with the fixed-mindset even go as far as to think that effort in general is for the others, the less endowed. Carried away with their superiority, “these naturals” with the fixed-mindset never ask for help and never learn how to work hard nor cope with setbacks. This way of thinking can contribute to very negative outcomes Take a look at the following two images with quotes from two of the world’s greatest champions in sports:
Both Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, two of the greatest athletes of all-time, clearly exhibit the growth-mindset. They stand out because of their commitment and effort to honing their craft. And this is the key to their overall success. People with the growth mindset think it’s nice to have talent, but that’s just the starting point.
Long-Term Corporate Health Needs Growth-Mindset Leadership
Evidence shows time and again, leaders with the fixed-mindset over the long-term lead organizations astray. From Lee Iacocca to Albert Dunlap, back to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, and over to Steve Cash and Jerry Levin, these fixed-mindset leaders fostered cultures of big egos, blind heroism, and entitlement, which eroded their company cultures and destroyed their chances at long-term sustainable corporate health.
Fixed-mindset leaders want to be the only big fish so they stifle others to make them feel a cut above the rest. These leaders foster environments full of negative assessments, stereotypes, and often prejudices that put their employees in the fixed-mindset ultimately holding them back from success. Instead of learning, growing, and moving the company forward, everyone within is more worried about being judged. This is why fixed-mindset leadership is so detrimental for long-term corporate health.
In contrast to these fixed-mindset heroes, stand growth-mindset leaders in action like Jack Welch, Lou Gerstner, and Anne Mulcahy that focused all their efforts in establishing cultures focused on learning, growth, and collaboration, not individual brilliance. Organizations steeped in the growth-mindset embody a zest for teaching and learning, an openness to giving and receiving feedback, and an ability to confront and surmount obstacles.
Working Towards a Growth-Mindset
Whether you are a parent, business leader, coach, spouse, or athlete, working towards the growth-mindset will have meaningful impact in your life. But how do we actually instill these principles in our lives? And how do we maintain the growth-mindset once “we get there?”
Moving towards a growth-mindset takes plenty of time and effort to achieve and maintain so it’s important to first understand this right at the outset. The growth-mindset starts with believing that all people can develop their abilities. This belief in people’s ability to grow and learn is the heart of the growth-mindset. Changing one’s mindset towards the growth-mindset also starts with a deep appreciation for hard work, trying new strategies, and consistently seeking input from others.
When you face setbacks, the growth-mindset is about responding with interest and treating these setbacks as opportunities for learning. In short, moving from a fixed-mindset to the growth-mindset is all about embracing all the things that have felt threatening: challenge, struggle, criticism, and setbacks.
Changing your mindset isn’t about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way. Embracing the growth-mindset is a way of life that will change you from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework. It’s a journey that takes time but as Carol Dweck proves time and time again in her book, it’s a journey that is well worth taking.
In summary, the growth mindset looks a bit like this:
“Knowing who we are is hard. It’s hard. Eliminate who you are not, first, and you’re going to find yourself where you need to be… The race is never over, the journey has no port. The adventure never ends, because we are always on the way.” [1]
Regardless of how enlightened we think we are, we all struggle to better understand ourselves. And this struggle leads to a lot of personal discontent in our lives. Recently, I was given a copy of The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need by a good friend of mine who is way more in touch with the occult than I am.
Historically, my only interactions with the subject of astrology were usually in the form of modern day horoscope columns in mainstream magazines and newspapers. From these columns, I understood that I was a hardworking Virgo but I never really thought much more than that. In reality, astrology has way more to offer than a weekly horoscope from Cosmopolitan.
Astrology is defined as a pseudoscience that claims to divine information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects (usually the planets and stars). When you break that down more simply, at its core, astrology offers you a different compass or lens into who you are. If you are willing to do the work to find and analyze your Birth Chart, astrology can help you find some deeper insights into who you are.
Looking to the Heavens from Earth
Because each entity in our solar system moves at a different speed and rate, and in a separate path or orbit, the combination of the placement of the planets are almost endless. At the moment of your birth, the Sun, Moon, and planets were in a particular arrangement in the heavens. This exact arrangement will not be repeated for 4.32 million years!
Astrology analyzes how the Sun, Moon, and planets in their specific arrangements interact with one another to shape the various aspects in your life, ultimately helping to answer questions about yourself. Since astrology takes an Earth-centric view of the cosmos, the 10 celestial bodies (planets) of astrology are the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. And each planet represents a different set of characteristics and qualities which rule over different parts of our lives. The following picture depicts the 10 celestial bodies of astrology and the characteristics each governs/rules over:
Every single person has the same 10 planets in their astrological birth chart, but each with varying power and influence. And each planet expresses themselves uniquely based on the zodiac sign they were located in at the time of your birth.
A Personal Look at My Birth Chart
Using Cafe Astrology.com, I created my Birth Chart. I then used Joanna Martine Woolfolk’s book on astrology to analyze my personality traits based on the position of each astrological body at the time of my birth:
I guess I am more than just a hardworking Virgo!
As you can see from the above, I am so much more than a hard-working Virgo. There were definitely aspects of my personality that surprised me, and others that confirmed what I already knew about myself. But all in all, spending some time analyzing myself through the lens of astrology helped me understand a lot of factors that have interacted to shape my life, for good and for bad!
In Closing
Roughly 30% of Americans believe in the merits of astrology as a whole. I, like most people, doubted the validity of the practice given the rise of pop astrology and horoscopes in mainstream magazines and newspapers. But having spent some time reading The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need, and analyzing my Birth Chart, I can definitely say that there is way more to astrology than I realized before.
People might say that astrology suffers from the confirmation bias as we seek to confirm pre-existing theories or beliefs about self. Though they may be a hint of truth to that, it’s hard to deny the point that there are influences beyond our controls. Whichever higher power you place your faith in, the constant drive to understand self is a ceaseless human desire.
The ultimate reason astrology exists is to answer questions about the self. I have learned that there are so many more dimensions of my being. I hope that after reading this post you will open up to a new way of looking at yourself. Invest some time with astrology and see what you will learn about yourself.
Google the phrase “differences between men and women” and you will get close to 572 million results. It’s a topic that is as old as time, but Louann Brizendine’s Female Brain focuses these differences squarely on our brains. From birth, “boy-behavior” and “girl-behavior” is hardwired into the brain, thus making us much more predictable than we think.
The Female Brain was written in 2007 during the rising tide of behavioral and neuroscientific research, and is a fascinating read for anyone interested in better understanding some of the whys behind female and male behavior. In the following write up, I will unpack some of the gender specific behavioral differences that are driven by the “simple” biological differences between the female and male brain.
Blame it on Testosterone, Estrogen, and Progesterone
As Louann Brizendine details in the Female Brain, there are no neutral unisex brains. Hormones make our brains uniquely female and male. The specific three hormones that drive most of the brain differences between the sexes are: (1) Testosterone (2) Estrogen (3) Progesterone. The deeper science between these three hormones aren’t relevant for this post but what is relevant is the specific role each of these hormones plays in the development of the female and male brain.
The rising tides of estrogen and progesterone assure that all female-specific brain circuits become more sensitive to emotional nuance such as approval or disapproval and acceptance or rejection. Female brains are programmed to prioritize connecting, bonding and keeping the peace. In direct contrast, testosterone has been shown to decrease the communication-specific brain circuits in the male brain, often leading men to seek out conflict and decreased socialization. Literally, the differences in the sexes come down to the hormone levels in females and males which determine the parts of our brains that are primed for different types of behaviors.
The Female and Male Brains
Over the millions of years that humans have walked on this Earth, female and male brains have evolved along some of the following lines:
The amygdala is the brain’s center for fear, anger, and aggression and it’s physically larger in men.
The prefrontal cortex is the brain’s center for planning, decision-making, problem solving, and self-control and it’s relatively larger in women.
Most neural connections in the male brain run between the front and back parts of the same brain hemisphere, which accounts for the better spatial skills and motor (muscle) control in men
Many more neural connections go from side to side across the left and right hemispheres of the female brain. This accounts for women’s better verbal skills and intuitive abilities.
The male brain has larger centers for aggression and action and is wired for pursuits that require solitary work. The male brain is finely tuned to sense threats, connect through sex, react quickly, and respond directly to spoken cues of others.
The female brain has larger centers for nurturing, communicating and forming social bonds, and is wired for pursuits that require interaction with others. The female brain is finely tuned to read faces, hear emotion in tones of voice, and respond to unspoken cues of others.
In Closing It’s not that men and women are from two different planets as John Gray wrote in 1992. It’s more simply that women and men have different brain realities caused by differences in testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone. These hormonal differences give women the edge when it comes to connecting emotionally, observing fully, and communicating effectively, and thus are ultimately better at sustaining deeper relationships with others. So the next time you have a communication disagreement with someone of the other sex or have a challenging time understanding their point of view, remember to give yourself a bit of grace because “boy-behaviors” and “girl-behaviors” are simply hardwired into our brains at birth.
Human behavior is one of the hardest things to predict and understand. And the more we learn about ourselves, the more we realize that our decision making is very flawed. To put it bluntly, humans do not make decisions in a rational and truly thoughtful way. We are very flawed thinkers who have tendencies to make suboptimal decisions. Consequently, “nudges” can be used to alter our behavior towards more optimal outcomes.
Nudge was written in 2008 by the father of behavioral economics Richard Thaler with help from Cass Sunstein. As a major challenge to the concept of traditional Economic Man (Homo economicus), Nudge rejects this hyper-rational model of the individual. Instead it posits that individuals are simply Humans plagued with automatic thinking, biases, prejudices, irrationality, and uncertainty in their decision making.
The entire premise of this book lies in the fact that Humans are not Economic Man. We don’t make unbiased forecasts. We don’t choose unfailingly well. And consequently, we need help to make more rational and optimal decisions in our lives. Enter the Nudge.
The simplest definition of a nudge is any factor that significantly alters the behavior of Humans in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.
The key factor in the nudge is that it’s not a coercive action. Its focus is on trying to influence choices that will make Humans better off in the short and long terms. Thaler and Sunstein really believe that people should be free to do what they like and even opt into undesirable arrangements if they really want to. As policy makers and private institutions then, it’s on us to make it easier for people to exercise this freedom in the direction that makes their lives better, which is why we use the nudge.
How We Set Up Choice Matters as Well
Because Humans are not Economic Man, the manner in which choices are presented to us can greatly influence our decisions. The best way to explain this concept (choice architecture) is to think through how food is offered in a cafeteria. By moving healthy food forward to the beginning of the line or to eye level, choice architects can greatly impact the frequency with which healthier food is chosen. It’s the same reason why retailers put impulse buy items near checkout and why they move items throughout their stores from place to place.
As a choice architect, you have the ability to influence outcomes simply by how you lay out and present options. Small yet seemingly insignificant details will have major impacts on people’s behavior.
In Closing
Humans have a tendency to move towards a state of inertia, and given this we don’t always make the decisions that are in our best interest. To quote the Guardian, “real men and women are inconsistent, ill-informed, weak-willed, and lazy. We can’t be bothered to fill out the form that would get us in the company pension plan, we forget to cancel subscriptions and we slump on the sofa eating doughnuts when we should be doing yoga. We are virtually incapable of balancing the temptations of today with the rewards of tomorrow; for some of us, even instant gratification isn’t quite quick enough.”
Nudges can save us from our inability to act rationally and the core of this book drives home this very point.
