Behavior Change and Interpersonal Connection (with Ting Jiang)
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Ting Jiang, an expert in behavioral science, about applying scientific approaches to behavioral health, quantifying relationship dynamics, fostering social connection through games, and redesigning everyday experiences.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Applying Behavioral Science to Personal Life
Limitations of Behavioral Economics Nudges
Automatic vs. Deliberative Decision Processes
Scientific Approach to Diagnosing Behavioral Problems
Personal Journey: Introspection, Stress, and Authentic Connection
The Challenge of Quantifying Intangible Values
Sweetcoin and Shitcoin System for Relationships
Social Norms, Customs, and Quantifying Sacred Things
Gratitude Game for Deeper Connections
Money, Happiness, and Long-Term Well-being
Generalizing Scientific Thinking to Personal Life
Overcoming Resistance to Behavior Change
The Role of Stories and Growth Mindset in Change
Modern Anxiety and the Value of Solitude
Designing Games for Deeper Social Connection
Repurposing Everyday Objects for Behavioral Change
8 Key Concepts
System One vs. System Two
System One is the automatic, reactive, and fast brain system, often driven by environmental cues and context. System Two is the more deliberative and slow decision-making process. People tend to overestimate their conscious participation in decisions and underestimate the influence of automatic processes.
Ostrich Effect
This is a heuristic and bias where people tend to avoid information that might be perceived as negative or overly important. Emphasizing the importance of an action can sometimes backfire, leading to procrastination or avoidance, because individuals might feel overwhelmed or afraid of not performing well.
Cultural Inertia
This describes the phenomenon where a culture continues to practice behaviors or beliefs that once made sense but have since become outdated. This momentum can cause customs or norms to persist even when their original purpose or benefit is no longer relevant.
Social Norms
These are social governance mechanisms designed to prevent individuals from acting solely in their self-interest at the expense of the collective good. Norms exert pressure to reduce 'free rider' behavior, but they can also be based on false beliefs or become outdated customs.
Customs
These are behaviors or practices that are passed down through generations without necessarily having a current deliberated reason or public benefit. Unlike norms, violating a custom may not incur an external cost to the public interest.
Sacred Goods
These refer to intangible values, such as love or the inherent worth of a child, which are considered beyond quantification or measurement. Attempting to assign numerical values to sacred goods can be perceived as diminishing their intrinsic value or making them conditional, which many find upsetting.
Immediate vs. Accumulative Happiness
Immediate happiness refers to short-term gratification, while accumulative happiness encompasses deeper, long-term well-being derived from meaning, purpose, and quality connections. The challenge lies in making these long-term benefits more salient and impactful in day-to-day decision-making.
Anxiety as a Smoke Alarm
This mental model likens anxiety to an overly sensitive smoke alarm in the brain, designed to detect danger. In the modern world, this alarm often triggers frequently without actual 'fire' (danger), becoming a constant nuisance that distracts and hinders daily functioning.
8 Questions Answered
Many interventions assume universal good decisions and try to make them frictionless, but they often fail to account for the varied contexts and underlying drivers of individual behavior, leading to inconsistent or small effects.
A scientific approach involves systematically mapping out the underlying drivers of a behavior, rather than relying on intuition, and then designing targeted, personalized interventions based on that diagnosis.
People often limit the application of their skills to their work domain, partly due to a societal norm that assumes free will and personal responsibility for behavior, rather than viewing personal behavior through a scientific lens.
It's helpful to first identify the positive benefits or values the person is getting from the 'bad' behavior, and then design a new behavior that provides similar benefits in a healthier way.
Abstract ideas, like saving money for the future, are not emotionally appealing. Turning these into vivid stories, such as imagining a happy retirement or a relieved future self during an emergency, can make long-term benefits resonate emotionally and become more motivating.
There's a societal aversion to quantifying sacred things because it can be perceived as destroying their value, making them conditional, or implying they are not unconditional or beyond measurement.
Yes, by spending time alone, individuals can discover their authentic selves, philosophical ideas, and deeper values, which enables them to listen better and connect more deeply with others on a non-superficial level.
Social norms are mechanisms that prevent self-serving actions at the cost of public interest, often enforced by social pressure. Customs are behaviors passed down through generations that may no longer serve a clear purpose or have public benefit, representing cultural inertia.
26 Actionable Insights
1. Acknowledge Your True Self
Practice audacious self-acknowledgment by identifying your true desires, values, and preferences, unburdened by societal expectations, to guide authentic life decisions.
2. Diagnose Behavior Scientifically
Apply a scientific approach to behavior change by first diagnosing the specific underlying drivers of a behavior (e.g., lack of motivation, self-efficacy, habit) before designing targeted interventions.
3. Embrace Trial and Error
Adopt a scientific discovery mindset, viewing life as a process of trial and error, and be open to learning from every experience, even ‘failures,’ to continuously upgrade your understanding and approach.
4. Model Future Self for Change
To effectively change behavior, envision your future self as a separate person and design the environment and strategies for them, rather than solely relying on future willpower.
5. Identify Decision Systems
Understand that many decisions are automatic (System 1) and not deliberative (System 2); recognizing which system is at play helps prevent misattributing intentions and improves decision-making.
6. Cultivate Behavioral Literacy
Develop a foundational understanding of behavioral brain science to comprehend what truly drives behavior and effective change strategies, moving beyond self-blame and reliance on willpower alone.
7. Allow Yourself to Slow Down
Grant yourself permission to reduce ambition, cut down on commitments, and practice mindfulness to alleviate subconscious stress and anxiety, fostering deeper introspection and authenticity.
8. Prioritize Authentic Connections
Recognize the profound importance of authentic social connections for well-being and actively seek ways to foster them, as they provide significant emotional rewards.
9. Connect Better Through Solitude
Intentionally spend time alone to foster self-discovery and connect with your deeper thoughts and values, as this introspection can enhance your capacity for more profound and authentic social connections.
10. Leverage Sudden Changes to Rebuild Habits
Capitalize on sudden disruptions or life changes, which naturally break existing routines, as prime opportunities to consciously rebuild habits from scratch in a more beneficial way.
11. Find Benefits of Bad Habits
When addressing a ‘bad’ behavior, identify the underlying benefits or positive value it provides, then seek to replace it with a healthier alternative that offers similar emotional or psychological rewards.
12. De-emphasize Importance to Act
Be cautious about over-emphasizing the importance of a task, as it can trigger the ‘ostrich effect’ and lead to procrastination or avoidance, especially for potentially stressful or confidence-lacking activities.
13. Storytell for Long-Term Goals
Convert abstract long-term goals into compelling, emotionally resonant stories that vividly depict future benefits, making them more motivating and easier to act upon in the present.
14. Quantify Intangible Values
Develop systems to make intangible values like love, gratitude, or meaning more visible and countable in daily life, such as using ‘sweetcoins’ for loving actions or gratitude notes, to reinforce positive behaviors.
15. Play Gratitude Note Game
Engage in a gratitude note game where you write specific appreciation notes for others, who then ‘accept’ them for points, fostering deeper conversations and increasing awareness of positive moments.
16. Gamify Connection with Music
Play the ‘Tit for Tat’ music game by exchanging songs with others, ensuring each new song shares a common element with the previous one, to create a unique and deeper social connection.
17. Use Deep Connection Questions
Employ ’no small talk’ questions, such as Clearer Thinking’s ’life-changing questions,’ to bypass superficial interactions and foster deeper, more authentic conversations with others.
18. Redesign Everyday for Well-being
Engage in creative exercises to redesign mundane everyday objects or experiences, repurposing them to support behavioral changes or make intangible well-being factors more salient.
19. Implement Relationship Currency System
Introduce a ‘sweetcoin’ system for loving actions and a ‘shitcoin’ system for chores, where each coin translates to a tangible reward (e.g., 10 minutes of massage), to make relationship contributions and tasks more visible and rewarding.
20. Actively Seek Gratitude
Intentionally look for moments and things to be grateful for throughout your day, as this practice can create more opportunities for positive emotions and strengthen connections.
21. Delay Conflict When Tired
Postpone important or emotionally charged discussions, especially during times of fatigue or stress, as these states can lead to automatic, less rational responses and misinterpretations.
22. Deliberate Money-Happiness Link
Deliberate on how additional income truly impacts your happiness beyond basic needs, considering the opportunity cost of spending to ensure money is used effectively for well-being.
23. Measure Authentic Happiness
Track your authentic happiness level as an indicator of your well-being, especially if you’ve experienced depression, to gain self-awareness and identify areas for improvement.
24. Use Social Accountability
Implement reminders and engage a social accountability buddy to help maintain consistency with habits like exercise and diet, leveraging external support to stay on track.
25. Maintain Habit Cues
Actively maintain the ‘choice architecture’ for new habits by keeping relevant cues and tools visible and accessible, as their absence can lead to a rapid decline in adherence.
26. Seek Support for Change
Gather support from people around you for your behavior change efforts, acknowledging that external support is crucial and you don’t have absolute control over your actions.
7 Key Quotes
The more decisions that we have to make over a day, the less we can afford making them all the time.
Ting Jiang
The more you emphasize the importance of an action, the more likely someone is going to procrastinate on it and actually decided not to, you know, there's actually lower uptake with the emphasis of importance.
Ting Jiang
Not everything that counts is countable and not everything that's countable counts.
Ting Jiang
The human mind sort of operates on stories. And so the kind of abstract idea of like, oh, I'm, you know, spending less money now so that I'll just have more money later. It's not at all emotionally appealing. But if you can, for example, imagine yourself when you're retiring and how happy you'll be that you'll have that extra money in your bank account, or you can even imagine, you know, an emergency happens and you're so glad that you save that extra money. Suddenly now you're turning that like abstract idea into a story and stories are what resonates on an emotional level.
Spencer Greenberg
We take failure so personally. And one of the drivers is the survival stress.
Ting Jiang
Anxiety as kind of a smoke alarm in the brain and the fire is trying to attack is danger essentially. And so for, you know, obviously in evolutionary history, this was really, really valuable, like prevented from us from doing all kinds of dangerous things and getting eaten by tigers and so on. But in the modern world, to many of us, our smoke alarms are like overly sensitive.
Spencer Greenberg
By spending more time alone, I was able to connect with others better.
Ting Jiang
3 Protocols
Sweetcoin and Shitcoin System for Couples
Ting Jiang- Start with each person having 10 sweetcoins.
- When one person does a loving thing for the other, they can decide how many sweetcoins it's worth.
- Sweetcoins are redeemable for 10 minutes of massage from the other person.
- Shitcoins can be earned by volunteering to do undesirable tasks (e.g., taking out trash) for the other person.
- The value of a shitcoin task is negotiated based on its unpleasantness and time, also equivalent to 10 minutes of massage.
- Keep coins visible to maintain retention and engagement.
Gratitude Notes Game
Ting Jiang- Create three physical 'pots' or containers, one for each person involved (e.g., Ting, her husband, a friend).
- Throughout the day, write gratitude notes to the other people, explaining what you are grateful for about them.
- During a designated time (e.g., dinner), share the gratitude notes.
- For every gratitude note 'accepted' by the recipient, the writer gains a point.
- The recipient may ask clarifying questions about the gratitude note before accepting it, fostering deeper conversation.
Tit for Tat Music Game
Spencer Greenberg- Player 1 sends a song they like to Player 2.
- Player 2 must send back a song they like that has something in common with Player 1's song (e.g., similar musically, country, lyrics, any shared element).
- The game continues back and forth, with each player finding a song related to the previous one.
- Limit replies to maximally one per day to prevent addiction and encourage deliberation (optional rule).