Do you think this will work to get people to stop texting and driving?
People often show an amazing ability to emotionally recover from difficult circumstances. I devoted my second book, You’re Stronger Than You Think, to this topic. Now comes some really cool research, showing that people’s ability to bounce back from adversity depends, not all that surprisingly, on their underlying personality traits. Although this result is not…
A dozen years ago, my wife filled out an NCAA bracket on a popular website. Out of more than 1 million entries, she finished somewhere around 17th. Think about it: 17th out of a million. Clearly I married up! I mean everyone says their spouse is one in a million, but how many really mean…
The Wall Street Journal article linked below discusses why changing behavior may take more than the kind of nudges some behavioral economists have been promoting. As Lehrer points out, this is an idea I have been pushing (but not shoving, of course!) for a while.
Is ‘Nudging’ Really Enough? – WSJ
In his book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov tells a story about a PR agent who was trying to create some buzz around a topic. No one seemed interested. And then the agent had an idea: “I dashed off a fake internal memo, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to…
Put our brains into the modern food environment, and you have a recipe for disaster. Our brains are hardwired to crave calorie-dense foods, this craving no doubt arising from our evolutionary time spent on the Tundra where calories were often scarce. But our modern food environment surrounds us with calorie-dense foods, forcing us to deplete…
With Thanksgiving behind us, many Americans will not assemble together for a home-cooked meal again for a while. By some estimates, people living in large cities consume the majority of their meals outside the home — at restaurants, coffee shops, bars and food trucks. No surprise, then, that anti-obesity policies are increasingly focused on helping Americans…