Nir’s Note: This guest post is written by Max Ogles. Max is an editor for NirAndFar.com and heads marketing for CoachAlba.com, a mobile health startup. Follow him on Twitter and read his blog at MaxOgles.com.
Last year, The Huffington Post published some fascinating statistics about the U.S. prison population. The headline for the article blared, “America Has More Prisoners Than High School Teachers.” It’s no secret that the United States has a high rate of incarceration, not to mention a recidivism rate of nearly 60% for serious criminals.
These stark facts put into perspective the incredible work of the Delancey Street Foundation, a drug and rehabilitation center based in San Francisco. Delancey Street accepts the most hardened criminals and drug addicts; most have multiple felony convictions. (more…)
Nir’s Note: This guest post comes from Stephen Wendel, Principal Scientist at HelloWallet and the author of Designing for Behavior Change. Steve’s new book is about how to apply behavioral economics to product development. Follow him on twitter @sawendel.
It can be extraordinarily difficult to stop habits head-on. Brain damage, surgery, even Alzheimer’s disease and dementia sometimes fail to stop them.1Eldridge, Laura L., Donna Masterman, and Barbara J. Knowlton. 2002. “Intact Implicit Habit Learning in Alzheimer’s Disease.” Behavioral Neuroscience 116 (4): 722. But why are they so difficult to change? (more…)
Eldridge, Laura L., Donna Masterman, and Barbara J. Knowlton. 2002. “Intact Implicit Habit Learning in Alzheimer’s Disease.” Behavioral Neuroscience 116 (4): 722.
Nir’s Note: In this guest post, user experience designer Aaron Wilson, discusses a deep flaw of our digital devices and makes an audacious prediction about the future of consumer technology. Follow Aaron on Twitter @aarowilso.
No one wants to make a mistake like the one Clifford Stoll made in 1996. In the February issue of Newsweek Magazine, his now infamous article carried the headline, “The Internet? Bah!”
An “online database,” Stoll wrote, will never replace your daily newspaper. To futurists like Nicholas Negroponte who predicted that one day we’d buy books and newspapers “straight over the Internet,” Stoll responded flippantly, “Uh, sure.”
Clifford Stoll is not a stupid man. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy, was a system administrator at Berkeley Lab, and is considered by some to be the father of digital forensics.
Stoll has a wild Einsteinian head of grey hair that bounces as he jumps around a room. His voice has the inflection and excitement of a cartoon character and he hardly stays on topic for more than a few minutes. As he waves wildly in conversation you might catch a glimpse of the notes scribbled on his hands.
Attempting to predict the future, as Stoll did, is always a terrible idea. If you’re right, you won’t be completely right. And if you’re wrong, it will be blindingly obvious in retrospect. However, at the risk of “pulling a Stoll,” I feel compelled to share some visions of the future of consumer technology, in order to hopefully expand our thoughts on what we mean when we talk about technology.
Nir’s Note: An edited version of this essay appeared in The Atlantic. Below is my original.
It’s not often an app has the power to keep someone out of a strip club. But according to Bobby Gruenewald, CEO of YouVersion, that’s exactly what his Bible app did. Gruenewald says a user of his app walked into a business of ill repute when suddenly, out of the heavens, he received a notification on his phone. “God’s trying to tell me something!,” Gruenewald recalled the user saying, “I just walked into a strip club — and man — the Bible just texted me!”
YouVersion recently announced its Bible app hit a monumental milestone — placing it among a rare strata of technology companies. (more…)
Imagine walking into a busy mall when someone approaches you with an open hand. “Would you have some coins to take the bus, please?” he asks. But in this case, the person is not a panhandler. The beggar is a PhD.
As part of a French study, researchers wanted to know if they could influence how much money people handed to a total stranger using just a few specially encoded words. They discovered a technique so simple and effective (more…)
Whether designing customer behaviors or your own habits, you’ll benefit from understanding the research I share from user experience design, behavioral economics, and neuroscience.
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