In selecting multiple interventions, you’re shooting for something psychologists call optimum distinctiveness: a range of options that together cover as much of the spectrum as possible, but with relatively little overlap.

That is actually what we are trying to do by mapping the pressures. By understanding the rain and my pushing down and your pushing up and gravity and all the rest, we are laying the groundwork for creating the interventions that effectively change that behavior to get us to the world we want. We can’t start adding or removing pressures until we

The key is to focus those insights on behaviors, not on how we create them. You have to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Good behavioral scientists are T-shaped: they have one area of deep expertise (the legs of the T) and broad interests across other disciplines (the arms of the T). So on Fridays we have an hour when someone teaches a method from their legs to the rest of us for whom that isn’t our core discipline, broadening our arms. And then we spend another hour

↑ ↓ 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

Because we’re wired to influence what others do, we’re constantly creating to get what we want.

Which is why we don’t mind p = 0.2 at the pilot stage.

Janitors can be behavioral scientists, if they start hacking on how to make men pee in the fucking urinal instead of on the floor (the real reason for urinal cakes: they’re just for target practice).

There are four major types of potential insights: quantitative, qualitative, apocryphal, and external.