Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change

Since we’re picking on tech companies, let’s go with another fan favorite: Facebook. In June 2014 they, along with some Cornell researchers, published a paper10 that revealed a massive intervention in which the company manipulated the contents of users’ newsfeeds to contain either more positive or more negative content, which then caused users to p

myth that is really just about privilege and stacking the deck with high cards. Adam Grant thoroughly debunked this in Originals and he’s hardly the only one; the focus on risk taking is a product of cognitive bias. Remember what The Streets said—validation is what makes a low straight work—and add in a little boxing wisdom: slow is smooth, smooth

When we focus on novelty, we lose sight of behavioral outcomes. And while using validated pressures to inform our designs can help guard against the natural tendency to pursue interventions that feel unique, they aren’t a guarantee; just as data can be used to justify bad business decisions, pressures can be used to justify bad interventions.

we can do this by ramping up or down all sorts of inhibiting pressures. Physical availability is one factor, but so is psychological availability.

Again, we wouldn’t eat M&M’s because of branding or ubiquity alone if they tasted or looked terrible, but given that they’re delicious, all of the extra cultural connotations certainly help drive consumption.

“How much more likely does the flu shot letter make people to get a shot?” and “How can we be sure that this will generalize beyond these two hundred people?” This is why there are two numbers your quantitative research is likely to report: an effect size and a p-value. Effect size answers the first question: it tells you whether the letter was rea

↑ ↓ Mind-bending, I know. But remember the goal of this book: I want you to actually create behavior change, every single day. And sometimes simple frameworks are the best way to get that done. These arrows represent the balance of competing pressures that create our behavior: promoting pressures—the up arrow—make a behavior more likely and inhibit

Remember, the goal is behavior change, not knowledge—we don’t have to know precisely which part of an intervention drives the behavior, so long as the overall intervention is scalable and results in worthwhile behavior change.

Advances in social psychology and behavioral economics have greatly increased our ability to understand why people do what they do and thus to intervene to create change. Couple this knowledge with the ability to deploy interventions via random assignment through connected devices and the internet, and data sensors that allow us to measure those in

Finally, some important notes about dualities. It is fundamentally true that any pressure that can be used to make behavior more likely can also be used to make it less likely; in the same way that stronger promoting or weaker inhibiting pressures make a behavior more likely, weaker promoting or stronger inhibiting pressures make it less likely.