Why Look Up

I started listening to a book on behavioral design whilst at the gym tonight, and even though I only got about 45 minutes into it, a couple of things stuck out to me. Firstly, was the recognition that mindset follows actions, rather than actions following mindset, something that I have been trying to get people to understand for a very long time. And secondly, I think that once upon a time, I would have been a pretty good behavioral designer.

The first behavior before mindset component is important because we have been conditioned over the last decades as if the reverse is true. We have been told that if we just change our minds, change our attitudes, then we will start to see the actions follow. This is nonsense of course, as it is like building a belief in a baby that they can walk, before they make an attempt. What actually happens is that once we try, once we repeat, once we get experience and proof, we start to believe.

The second part about being a decent behavioral designer, is less concrete, but I was reminded about my want to go into psychology a university, but instead deciding to go into business instead. I took this route because I felt it had a broader application, but in hindsight, I should have specialized narrowly instead. However, I also have a few friends who went into psychology, and have met many more since and there seems to be a common trait - they need a psychologist.

Okay, that might not be the actual case, but at least observationally, a lot of the people got into psychology because they themselves were struggling in some way and they wanted to understand what was going on internally in them, or in someone close to them. Similarly, a lot of the specialist doctors I know have specialized in areas where they have had personal impact earlier, like a family member or partner being impacted. We seem to gravitate to what we have experienced, which is of course quite natural.

Human behavior for me is probably similar, because I spent so much of my childhood observing peers, rather than interacting with them. And when I did interact, it was usually a negative experience for me, as I was bullied for being different. Yet, I was never really angry at them for their behavior, because very early on I recognized that they are products of their environment of both the culture of society and family that has shaped them in the past, and the dynamics of the present that influence them to act in particular ways also. For instance, most of the people I knew at school were pretty decent one on one, but once the group dynamics came into play, the cultural learnings of their family and society banded together to change their actions.

I always found it fascinating, even though it was simultaneously very painful. However, despite the difficulties, I never wanted to be anyone different than myself, never expected to be accepted or fit in with others, and never asked why these kids acted this way. It was just obvious. Their actions were working, even though their mindset wasn't a true believer. For many of these kids, once they got more experience in life, their behavior changed.

And this is probably why I have always taken the action before attitude approach, at least at my knowledge level. At the practical level, I procrastinate. But, my inability to apply, doesn't mean that what I know isn't the correct way, because in the moment, our behaviors aren't born out of a lot of deep thought, they are reactionary to the environment and they are performed on instinct. A child teasing another child doesn't spend a lot of time constructing a logical reason as to why or how, they just use their emotional brain to act.

Thoughtlessly.

You see what I mean? The majority of our behaviors are performed without our mind thinking too much about it, which means that if we want to change behaviors, it has to be made at that thoughtless level. This is where behavioral design comes into it, where changes in the environment can nudge an individual to make different choices even though their mindset hasn't changed at all. We can make different choices than we would normally make, without even recognizing that we made the choice at all - like changing the position of items in a store, or adding red sale tags on items to attract men. Because, men love a discounted item.

Besides this, the other part of the book worth mentioning is that while we often talk about what outcomes we want in life, and how we are going to get there, we don't necessarily consider what behavior we want to have. This is again something that resonates with my own experience, where we can know what we want, and we can have the motivation to get it, but if we don't behave in the ways to get it, it is likely out of reach. However, once we are able to know the behaviors we need to perform, it is easier to work backwards and design the environment to elicit those behaviors.

Likely, my feelings that I would be a good behavioral designer are misguided, but that doesn't stop me from being interested in observing and hypothesizing as to why we do the things we do, in the way we do them. I think we should all be amateur enthusiasts of human behavior, because so much of our wellbeing in life depends on others, and our interactions with them - so we should learn about ourselves, our reactions, and others, and theirs. Over the last few decades though, we have been far more focused on staring at our own bellybuttons, than to lift our eyes and have a look at what is actually going on in the environments we inhabit.

Taraz
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