People are hard to understand. "Why are they doing that? Can I change what they're doing?" In this essay, I'll build on the idea that humans are survival machines, introducing a model that maps everyday behaviors to survival, shows how to change people's behavior, and starts to explain modern society.
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A good shortcut for answering this is to use the Hunter Gatherer period as a historical reference point, representing the majority of humanity's existence, without cultural noise, and before people transformed the environment.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.
| Category | Purpose | Modern Examples | Hijacking | Productive tools |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finance | Get resources | Work, education | Gambling, video games, travel | Digital wealth |
| Health (physical or mental) | Increase lifetime output | Sleep, eat, exercise, security | Overeating, drug abuse | Access to foods, drugs, etc. |
| Social | Teamwork, more effective finance/health, reproduction | Family, friends, marriage, teacher, manager, politician | Parasocial or imaginary entertainment (video games, TV/movies, social media, porn), birth control | Global teamwork (countries, corporations), access to world's smartest |
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.