Owain Service

It’s a curious and wonderful thing about the human condition that we are often a mystery to ourselves

Think Small is not a checklist.

We usually assume that when we set ourselves a goal we will probably pursue it with focus and attention, drawing heavily on our slower, reflective system.

is hard to disagree with the basic idea that, in principle, it’s good to ‘encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves’.

that the work of the Behavioural Insights Team, and psychology more generally, should be open. This is not just in the interests of institutional transparency, but because this is a body of knowledge that should be ‘democratized’, or open to all.

we spend too much of our time either indulging in our dreams, or dwelling on the negatives. What we should be doing is a little bit of both

habits are the holy grail of behavioural change because they herald the possibility of automatic behaviours – reducing the amount of cognitive effort required to perform them.

Then, every fortnight, each time Paul met with Melissa, he was encouraged to think about what specifically he was going to do and when

He wrote down each of these tasks and linked them to a moment in his daily routine – like making sure he sent out three applications for jobs on Monday morning after breakfast.

It is that human beings have two different ways of taking decisions and processing information.