Human enthalpy
Nudges, changing things, UX for life
October 18, 2024 — October 20, 2024
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On large changes in human behaviour requiring small activation energy. Is this a natural category? I’m reluctant to say so, but the idea comes up so often that I will audition it.
1 On small changes in my own behaviour
2 At a societal scale
Intermittently made famous by think-pieces about high-impact behavioural interventions, e.g. Broken Windows (Kelling and Wilson 1982) and Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein 2009). This usage tends to get controversial, because of moral issues about transparency, agency, consent…
3 Incoming
Imagine you have a rule: you always walk whenever you’re traveling a mile or less, and you always drive whenever you’re going more than a mile. If you follow that rule, you will, paradoxically, travel two miles faster than you travel one mile. That’s the region beta paradox (Gilbert et al. 2004).
This effect has largely been forgotten, and that’s a shame because the region beta paradox points out something important: if you only take action when things cross a certain threshold of badness, sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things. If you feel miserable for a month, you might go to therapy. But if you feel a little bleh for a month, you might never do anything about it—“I mean, I’m not depressed”—and a month of bleh can stretch into years.