One day, my wife and I were driving along in the car through the countryside when, all of a sudden, my wife said “What?!” I replied with “What, what?” She said, “What are you pointing at?” I said “I’m ...

Changing our behavior is a self-engineering challenge with few equals. I’m talking about long-term, sustained change, not short-run bursts that sputter out before real change happens. Whether the ...

Over the course of four sessions, my patient, Stacey, and I worked toward her goals of sleeping more, checking her email less and spending more quality time with her family. She successfully developed ...

Understanding, predicting, and changing behavior is the holy grail of managers, politicians, and academics alike. I sat down with eminent social psychologist Prof Saadi Lahlou of the London School of ...

Breaking a bad habit can feel like swimming against a current. You know it isn’t serving you, but your brain defaults to it anyway. A bad habit is a learned behavior that’s performed automatically in ...

Making people feel positive about themselves gets better results than negativity. Here’s a common pattern in my house. See if it seems familiar to you. After my husband showers, he often forgets to ...

Pandemics, global warming, and rampant gun violence are all clear lessons in the need to move large groups of people to change their behavior. When a crisis hits, researchers, policymakers, health ...