Nir And Far: Business, Behaviour and the Brain

There are various ways of classifying lies: by their consequences, by the importance of their subject matters, by the speakers’ motives, and by the nature or context of the utterance. Perhaps the most useful way to classify lies is by to the people who tell them. Understanding lies and liars can help us avoid getting duped as well as protect us from drifting into dishonesty ourselves. You can read...

Nir’s Note: This guest post was written by Cheryl Maguire The laundry hamper was overflowing with dirty clothes. Lacking the motivation to throw it into the wash, I pushed the clothes down deeper into the bin so I could fit more clothes. This occurs almost every other day. When you are married and the mother of three kids, the laundry is a never-ending task especially since we are all active in sp...

I once worked with a person we’ll call “Dick.” Dick always told me he’d get things back to me “today or tomorrow,” but he seldom did. Dick didn’t have to tell me he’d get things to me that soon. He could have said, “next week” or “as soon as I can,” and I would have been fine with that. Instead, Dick had a habit of promising to deliver by a certain date, but he wouldn’t follow through. You can rea...

Over the past few weeks, people have asked me for my review of the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma . It’s no surprise. One of the film’s central themes is that social media is like an addictive drug, and I wrote the book on habit-forming technologies: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products . I also have a personal connection to the film. In August of 2018, I sat with the filmmakers fo...

Society’s fear of technology  destroying our children’s future has reached a fever pitch and many parents have resorted to extreme measures. A quick search on YouTube reveals thousands of videos of parents storming into their kids’ rooms, unplugging the computers or gaming consoles, and destroying their devices. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Screen Time for Kids: Give Them What The...

Imagine you bought a new phone, but at the end of each day, every day, the operating system crashed. Would you keep using the faulty phone? Of course not. You’d take it back to the store, complain, and get a new one. And yet, many people run their entire lives on a faulty operating system. It’s called the to-do list. Have you ever met someone who runs their day using a to-do list and actually fini...

Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they “knew it all along” – when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known2. In other words, when we’re looking back at an event after it already happened, knowing that outcome influences our perception of the events leading up to it. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Hindsight Bias: Wh...

What stresses you out? How do you deal with that dreaded feeling? And did you know there’s a bullet-proof method for disarming stress? You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: How to Turn Off Harmful Stress Like a Switch https://www.nirandfar.com/handling-stress/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and...

Which of the following is true?     A. Screen time is the leading cause of anxiety and depression amongst teenagers     B. Studies have found that screen time shrinks people’s attention span to less than that of a goldfish     C. Studies show screen time causes addiction     D. None of the above The correct answer: D....

Society’s fear of technology  destroying our children's future has reached a fever pitch and many parents have resorted to extreme measures. A quick search on YouTube reveals thousands of videos of parents storming into their kids’ rooms, unplugging the computers or gaming consoles, and destroying their devices. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Screen Time for Kids: Give Them What The...

You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Be a Schedule Builder, Not a To-Do List Maker https://www.nirandfar.com/todo-vs-schedule-builder/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other i...

In 1967, a catchy tune by The Beatles, “All You Need is Love,” became the anthem for the Summer of Love. The Flower Power culture embraced the song and its message, “love is all you need.” If someone had asked humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers what the song meant, he might have said, “ Unconditional Positive Regard !” Although it didn’t quite roll off the tongue the same way, Rogers introduced t...

When Harvard’s Leslie Perlow began to study The Boston Consulting Group, she was well aware of the firm’s round-the-clock reputation. After conducting interviews with BCG’s staff, Perlow found that this reputation was coming at a major cost. Employees were leaving the elite consulting firm, in part because they lacked control over their schedules . To address the issue, Perlow offered a simple pro...

What are the ethical responsibilities of companies that are able to manipulate human behavior on a massive scale? It’s a question one hopes technologists and designers ask themselves when building world-changing products — but one that hasn’t been asked often enough. Operant conditioning, intermittent reinforcement, the search for self-actualization — the techniques used by product managers at the...

As parents, we all want to raise kids who are smart and focused, especially in a world where digital distraction seems to be inescapable. (Even tech titans like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have strategies for limiting their children’s screen time.) Why? Because in the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: Those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others a...

Nir's Note: This article is part of a series on "The Hooked Model in Action." Previous analyses have included Slack , Fortnite , Amazon's Echo ,  Tinder , and The Bible App . Note, I never take compensation for writing articles on my blog. Could there be a behavior more antithetical to human nature than exercise? Our caveman ancestors, if they could observe our workout habits today, would thi...

Email is the curse of the modern worker. Some basic math reveals just how big the problem is. The average office-dwelling professional receives a hundred messages per day. At just two minutes per email, that adds up to three hours and twenty minutes per day. If an average workday is nine to five minus an hour for lunch, then email eats up nearly half the day. Realistically, though, that’s a very c...

Why would the companies that make your phone want you to use it less? If tech is “hijacking your brain” with their “irresistible” products, as some tech critics claim, why are these companies now acting against their own interests? Perhaps the tech giants have had a change of heart or have been persuaded by public pressure to change their ways? Hardly. I studied the sophisticated psychology these...

Many parents are concerned with their child’s seemingly obsessive video game play. Fortnite, the most recent gaming phenomenon, has taken the world by storm and has parents asking whether the shooter game is okay for kids. The short answer is yes, Fortnite is generally fine. Furthermore, parents can breathe easier knowing that research suggests gaming (on its own) does not cause disorders like add...

Habits are hot. Self-help articles extol the power of habits and books on the topic sell by the millions. Yet, like many pop psychology topics, the conventional wisdom about the effectiveness and application of habits is frequently outdated, misapplied, or flat out wrong. Building habits to change behavior the right way can be a wonderful tool to improve your life. But false notions about what hab...

I know how distractions work from the inside. For over a decade, I’ve helped tech companies build products to keep you clicking. In fact, I wrote the book about it in 2014: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products . I wrote Hooked for companies who wanted to help their customers build healthy habits, like going to the gym regularly and eating right. But in the process of researching the book, I...

Nir’s Note: This post part of a series on cognitive bias co-authored with and illustrated by Lakshmi Mani . Discover other reasons you make terrible life choices like confirmation bias , hyperbolic discounting and distinction bias . It’s New Year’s Eve. There I am on the dance floor - it’s teeming with people and there’s hardly space to breathe. Loud thumping music pierces my eardrums and I have n...

From comic books and radio programs to TV shows and Atari games, the world has always been full of things that distract us. Today, most of us blame our phones or, more specifically, social media, Words with Friends, or Netflix as the reason we can’t get anything done. Yet these aren’t the real culprits. Instead, our distraction is usually driven by our desire to escape discomfort, including boredo...

Everyone struggles with dwindling or misplaced motivation from time to time, and I'm no exception. Thankfully, I've learned to overcome my penchant for procrastination: getting what I want done, even when I don't feel like it. Learning the difference between the two kinds of motivation, extrinsic and intrinsic, made all the difference. Take the dirty work of household chores. Today, I'm generally...

Is your email inbox taking over your work-life? Are you unable to get any “real” work done because you’re too busy responding to emails? Do you feel stressed, distracted, and overwhelmed when you see new emails pop up in your email inbox? You’re not alone. The average office-dwelling professional received 100 messages per day. Researchers have found that when people are interrupted during a task,...