Thinking & Personal Effectiveness
Changing what you do by default.
9 topics · 16 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
EAST: Four Simple Ways to Apply Behavioural Insights
The Behavioural Insights Team · 2014
Distils behavioural-science findings into four practical levers for redesigning an environment, making a wanted behaviour Easy, Attractive, Social…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action
Wendy Wood, Jeffrey M. Quinn & Deborah A. Kashy · 2002
A diary study finds roughly 45 percent of everyday behaviour recurs in the same location at the same time each day, and that these habitual acts are…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change
Albert Bandura · 1977
Argues that a person's belief in their own capability to execute a specific behaviour, not just their skill or motivation, is what determines whether…
+9 more at this level
12 of 16 works
The Behavioural Insights Team
Distils behavioural-science findings into four practical levers for redesigning an environment, making a wanted behaviour Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely, and argues most failed interventions skip one of the four rather than lacking evidence altogether.
link checked 17 Sept 2026BJ Fogg (Stanford)
Argues that behaviour change fails when it relies on motivation, and that a habit sticks when the action is made small enough to need almost none and is anchored to something already happening.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Wendy Wood, Jeffrey M. Quinn & Deborah A. Kashy
A diary study finds roughly 45 percent of everyday behaviour recurs in the same location at the same time each day, and that these habitual acts are accompanied by less thought and weaker deliberate intention than one-off actions.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David T. Neal, Wendy Wood & Jeffrey M. Quinn
Argues that habits are cued directly by recurring contexts rather than by conscious intentions, so changing behaviour reliably means changing the environment that cues it, not resolving to act differently.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Angela L. Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael D. Matthews & Dennis R. Kelly
Argues that sustained achievement over years correlates more with perseverance toward a single long-term goal than with talent or intelligence, and introduces a short scale to measure it.
B. J. Fogg
Proposes that a behaviour occurs only when motivation, ability and a trigger converge at the same moment, so a failed behaviour change is best diagnosed by asking which of the three was missing rather than prescribed more willpower.
Albert Bandura
Argues that a person's belief in their own capability to execute a specific behaviour, not just their skill or motivation, is what determines whether they initiate the behaviour and persist through setbacks.
Peter M. Gollwitzer
Shows that specifying in advance exactly when, where and how a goal will be acted on delegates control of the behaviour to the situation itself, producing far more consistent follow-through than merely intending to act.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward L. Deci & Richard M. Ryan
Argues that behaviour sustained by autonomy, competence and relatedness persists and feels better than behaviour driven by external reward or punishment, so the kind of motivation behind an action matters as much as its presence.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Katie Witkiewitz & G. Alan Marlatt
Reframes relapse from a binary failure to a probabilistic process shaped by identifiable high-risk situations, arguing a lapse is a single event to learn from rather than proof the whole change has failed.
Wendy Wood, Leona Tam & Melissa Guerrero Witt
Finds that habits persist strongly through stable circumstances but break down when a context such as moving home changes, showing environmental disruption rather than willpower is what actually interrupts an established habit.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bas Verplanken & Wendy Wood
Argues that habits resist ordinary persuasion because they run without deliberation, and that they are best broken by disrupting the context that cues them — such as a house move — rather than by supplying new information.
link checked 17 Sept 2026