What makes behaviour change? Results after 8 years of research.

My life in the last years has been dedicated to understand behavior change. THE QUESTION I was trying to find an answer to was “Why don’t we do what we know we should do?”. On a very personal level and a societal level, this question has kept me up at night and got me out of bed in the morning. It was, what made me read hundreds of books and scientific papers, what motivated me to do my PhD, and what made me study topics from spirituality, psychology, philosophy, and history to sociology and ethnography.

This morning, I noticed that I have stopped asking myself THE QUESTION. For a while now, I have an inner sense of “I figured it out.” And this … having it figured out is far from having the answer. 

I have figured out that the answer to behavior change is way beyond my capacity -or I think anyone’s - to understand. Yes, of course, there are some insights and tools that help to nudge behavior in one direction. But there is no one tool - and that is what I was secretly and naively looking for - that will make us all change behavior towards sustainability. But behavior change is messy. It’s influenced by how we were brought up, what society we find ourselves in, whom we meet, what we happen to read… Most of it is out of our control. 

Behavior change, or a human in general for that matter, I came to understand, is as complex as the universe itself. And “How do we change behavior” is as complex a question as “does god exist.” So the best answer after eight years of intense research is “It is how the cookie crumbles.”

*That doesn’t mean that we can’t change or shouldn’t try, but I came to understand that the change is very likely to happen due to something we didn’t anticipate.