Model

Starting with the basics of survival and reproduction...

At any time, there's a particular environment and corresponding likelihood of certain behaviors surviving in that environment. As time passes, the environment changes, along with the ranking of behaviors. Sexual reproduction recreates the most of the same behaviors that have survived so far, with some variation to find better behaviors and/or adapt to environmental changes.

Over time, these variations turn useful behaviors into generalized reward mechanisms. For example, if there are many types of food in your environment, or the available food keeps changing, you're much better off with a general desire for food, rather than a desire for a specific food with limited or non-existent availability.

What behaviors are useful?

A good shortcut for answering this is to use the Hunter Gatherer period as a historical reference point, representing the majority of humanity's existence, without cultural noise, and before people transformed the environment. We can summarize the Hunter Gatherer lifestyle as working in small teams, with flexible hierarchies, to get resources, and stay alive long enough to reproduce and help their children do the same.

As we move to the present, we see improvements in technology, and more complex hierarchies. These make survival much easier, but they've also make it easier to hijack your reward mechanisms, getting the reward without result that reward is meant to produce. Now, you can survive while spending most of your time hijacking your reward mechanisms. Or choose not to survive, and still live a happy life.

Now, stepping back to the bigger picture. Survival is the base reward mechanism, on top of which we have increasingly specific reward mechanisms. For our purposes, we'll define the next layer with the following categories: finance, health, and social. And to account for hijacking, we'll split the categories into behaviors that improve survival and those that don't. With this, we have enough information to start discussing how to change people's behavior.

Behavior Change

Changing people's behavior is easy, deliver more reward for less effort. With the above model, there a few obvious ways to do this.

• Use better tools
  • To be more productive and/or more strongly trigger reward mechanisms
  • The hard part is finding productive tools better than the hijacking tools
• Increase the overlap of categories
  • For example, people are much more likely to exercise in a social context
• Change the distribution of time spent on each category
  • The first hour of exercise or socializing is more rewarding than the 80th hour of work in a week.

You should change yourself first. Then, if you're able to solve your own life, shift towards helping (changing) others. The personal benefits of helping others are indirect, but have the potential to scale. I mention personal benefits to clarify that helping people still triggers reward mechanisms and is itself a potential behavior change.

• Increase your influence
  • The amount you're benefiting other people, indirectly benefiting yourself

Perhaps, this is only being more socially productive, but I think there's a categorical difference between direct and indirect social benefits. Moreso as you get to scalable social patterns like mass communication and hierarchical organizations.

Scale

A more complete answer to why people behave in certain ways, beyond reward mechanisms, will often include some organizations (or mass communication) making it feasible or easier, and encouraging it.

So to understand individual behaviors, we must also understand organizational (group) behaviors. Again, we can do this by looking at how they survive... what are their reward mechanisms?

The basic rule for organizational survival, is to make it's workers/operators continue showing up by providing some reward. There's a limited number of ways to do this successfully:

• Clubs (church, etc),
• Charity
• Business
• Education (including books, TV, social media)
• Government (including political organizations)
• Etc.

As you dig further into understanding organizational reward mechanisms, you can better decide which organizations to engage with, or how to create/modify an organization to compete for influence.

Closing

People behave in ways that trigger their survival-motivated reward mechanisms, in a world of unprecedented optionality and giant hierarchies working to influence them.

• Program computers
• Perform any task
• Program more people to perform tasks

I started thinking about programming people in high school. I thought I'd learn about it in my psychology or business classes, but it was never mentioned, so I assumed it wasn't possible. Until I read "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg. This book taught me that programming influencing people was possible, and more generally, there are open-secrets to be found in books.

Moving beyond the basics of influence, I wanted to know why it worked. And what should I influence people to do? My curiosity lead to more questions, and it became clear that understanding people means understanding: philosophy, biology, history, business, finance, politics, art, etc.

Now, after reading more than 200 books (and watching thousands of YouTube videos) across all major fields of study, it's time to start sharing what I've learned...

Why do people do what they do?

Survival

To be alive today, you must have survived yesterday. We know many things about your path to the present because there are a limited number of ways to get here.

The general strategy is to stay alive and have kids.

This is the root of human behavior, but it feels like we're missing something. There are many behaviors that don't obviously relate to survival. And many types of people, including those who decide not to have kids.

The idea that isn't obvious is the majority of behaviors come from unconscious decisions.

We're all running mental scripts in our head. They're imperfect, unable to handle every unique circumstance in a changing environment. They're learned from your experiences, culture, or genetics, so there's overlap between different people, but also room for many different outcomes.

If these decisions are important, why aren't we aware of them?

Consciousness is for making new decisions, not for repeating important ones. Over time, important decisions progress from being conscious to unconscious to genetic.

In short, people behave through unconscious scripts pointed towards survival, but influenced by their experiences, culture, genetics, etc.

Stories

We're wired to communicate in stories (conscious scripts). They're essential to survival, as a way to predict and/or control the future. The format is understandable in its simplest form: "John did X and got Y."

But the complexity multiplies as you add more people. Family, school, business, country, etc. These are stories we all know. Each with roles we spend our lives learning and playing.

For a story to survive, it needs people to play the roles. And if the story, in turn, helps them survive... motivating traits, among the story's actors, begin moving from conscious to genetic.

One major drawback of stories and predicting the future is we become aware of death. Stories aren't very motivating when they end with "and then he died and everyone soon forgot about him".

How do we cope with this? More stories, of course.

• You're not really going to die
• Your family will survive
• Some project, system, or idea of yours will survive

Of the many stories people believe, they'll invest most deeply in the ones they're using to deny death.

Worse than our own death is the death of everything, nihilism. What's the point if we're all going to die? The further you think into the future, the more likely your story will collapse. At this point, your options are to adopt a religion, or stop thinking so much.

In short, people live through stories, and prefer ones that promote survival and allow them to deny death.

Technology

We build tools to better understand and control the environment, and then build better tools. This process leads to exponential growth.

Is growth good or bad? In theory, every step forward increases our odds of survival (after a little time to adjust). In reality, that step forward might be a step over the edge of a cliff.

To be more specific, technology changes which traits survive (same as stories). And also changes which stories survive (or vice versa). This creates a dangerous instability. It takes time to make counterbalancing adjustments.

In short, fast changes are dangerous, but we're accelerating.

Closing

In conclusion, people do what their internal or external scripts tell them to do. The scripts are written for survival, but things don't always go as planned.