The beautiful and intricate Czech capital is like an anti-Silicon Valley.

Science works through experimentation and replication. Hypotheses are put forward; tests are run; and results are obtained. If something surprising or interesting is found in an experiment, other researchers can […]

Earlier today, I was speaking with a friend of mine about habit formation. In the middle of our conversation, he paused and told me: “The trick is to keep on […]

You’re not broken. I promise. I can understand why you would think you are, though. After all, you’re an expert in yourself. Like a fine painter, you’re so familiar with […]

Behind every behavior there are four potential explanations: It’s been done to solve a tangible and practical problem. It’s a habit (and thus an automatic response to a cue). It’s […]

“Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you […]

Two of the most fundamental human drives are: The drive to learn more about the world The drive to gain more control over one’s environment and circumstances While these may […]

Every occurrence is a mixed bag of good and bad, pleasure and pain.

In life, the most important skill is communication. It’s the bottleneck to almost every problem in almost every area of our lives. Effective communication is similar to magic, for it […]

One of the eminently amusing and frustrating things in life is how people suspend common sense when thinking about anything related to their bodies or their health. Most people understand […]

Everyone has a large number of great theories or ideas. Here’s one that I have: Wouldn’t it be great if all of the money that each person generated was split […]

I’ve always been struck by the power of envy. Other than anger, it is perhaps the most commanding emotion, able to instantly turn our stomachs and perceptions upside down. Envy […]

In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a strangely ubiquitous pattern: an obsession with what I would call “advanced features”, and a nearly complete disregard of what I would consider […]

For most of human history, it’s been recognized that we tend to follow the path of least resistance. We go to comical lengths to avoid work of even the most trivial sort. 

All of us think that we’re more “special” and capable than we are. This phenomenon has many different names in the psychological literature, but my personal favorite is “The Lake Wobegon effect” – a reference to a mythical town where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

A person is, in large part, the sum of their habits. We go through an evolutionary process each day, in which certain behaviors in our repertoire are selected for and […]

There are three primary ways that mobile technologies change our behavior:  1. By making things easier 2. By interrupting us 3. By giving us feedback By Making Things Easier: Let’s […]

In the last decade, the business and technology worlds have become obsessed with the science of the mind. The thinking goes as follows: if we understand the mind, in all […]

One of the trendiest ideas in popular psychology in the last few years has been that of “ego depletion” or willpower as a limited resource. Many different books have been […]

I’ve been thoroughly dismayed by Facebook the past couple of years. Maybe it’s a quirk of memory, but I don’t remember my feed being so full of political sparring and […]

Whenever I work with a company or talk to people in the business world, I’m always asked for a model or a set of scientific formulas that can “solve” behavior […]

In product design and life, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. All too often, we contrive complex, Rube Goldberg-like reasons for why things are or are not working. […]

It’s a classic idea in both Psychology and Economics that when things get cheaper or easier to do they get done more often. While this is an idea sculpted out […]

When I first started designing products, I used to mainly think about their aesthetics. That seems like the right, and obvious, thing to do. However, product design is not fine […]

Today I want to share the most powerful and useful model of behavior that I’ve ever encountered: The Fogg Behavior Model. There have been few other ideas that have impacted […]

In our culture, there are two diametrically opposed beliefs. The first is that we are powerful and strong creatures that have the ability to shape our biology and destiny in […]

As I’ve said before, technology reduces uncertainty. It does this primarily by speeding up processes, making what used to take days, weeks, or months take hours or minutes. With new […]

Life is full of next steps. In the academic literature, these things would be called “second order effects”. But, in real life, they’re called consequences (or unintended consequences). Each of […]

In an earlier article, I talked about the fact that we learn much better when we learn with our entire body – all of our senses. I called this “embodied […]

Reading is a fairly recent phenomenon. It’s generally accepted that language developed in the human species between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. The written word, however, came much later, and […]