Understanding Our “Wiring” Can Help Us Live Better

During the past couple of years, I’ve written several articles on this blog about the importance of our understanding ourselves at as deep a level as we can. Doing so not only helps understand our individual faults, so that we can correct them, but also helps us understand that we have built-in biases that can be exploited. (For further information on these cognitive biases, check out my article on Living With OCD and Other Mind “Quirks”.)

Advertisers have been exploiting some of our biases for years. They will continue to, of course.

But some of our biases can be used to our advantage, by us and by others who are in a position to use those biases and “the way we are wired” to give us a needed nudge.

There is a new and fascinating book out on this subject, entitled Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness [affiliate link]. I learned of this book from a Mind Hacks article entitled Bias we can believe in. One of the things that intrigued me about the book was what the article had to say about one of its coauthors, who now works for President Obama:

“President Obama is still relying on behavioral science. But now his Administration is using it to try to transform the country. Because when you know what makes people tick, it’s a lot easier to help them change.

And the fact that Obama has picked behavioural economist and Nudge co-author Cass Sunstein to head up the policy tweaking ‘Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ office is evidence that behavioural science is being taken seriously in the new administration.”

I was so intrigued by this that I bought the book. I’m a little more than half-way through, and wanted to take a break and let some of the fascinating material soak in. I highly recommend this inexpensive book. It will give you some good insights into our decision-making process, and how the “lizard part of our brain” makes many of our decisions. [Our brain consists of an Automated part, which is essentially the same brain our reptilian ancestors had, plus a Reflective part that evolved around and on-top of that ... a lot of our decisions are made with the automated part of our brain, and this book is, in part, about how to exploit that.]

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Also, if you have already read this book, I’d like to hear what you thought of it. Obviously I like it.