"We live in a paradox. Never before has humanity had access to more information, faster. Yet our decisions, from what we eat to whom we vote for, what we watch and who we date, remain stubbornly resistant to facts alone. Public health campaigns armed with statistics fail to shift behavior. Climate science, however substantive, struggles to ignite action. Heavy economic data rarely changes minds about policy. The uncomfortable truth? We are not the rational creatures we pretend to be."
"At every level of human existence, from the individual seeking purpose to communities navigating shared values, from nations crafting policies to our species confronting planetary crises, we operate through a complex interplay of aspirations that give us direction, emotions that move us, thoughts that make sense of chaos, and sensations that anchor us in certainty. Traditional behavior change communication, grounded in knowledge deficit models, treats humans as computers awaiting better data."
Human choices increasingly resist factual information despite unprecedented access to data. Decisions about food, politics, entertainment, and relationships are shaped more by meaning, emotions, aspirations, and sensations than by facts. Individuals choose careers for identity and purpose, evaluate candidates through trust and feeling, and seek narrative coherence over objective truth. Communities and nations organize around shared stories rather than statistics. Knowledge-deficit approaches to behavior change fail because they treat people as information-processing machines. Generative AI aligns with neuroscience insights by engaging humans as meaning-making beings. Effective behavior change requires addressing affective, narrative, identity, and sensory anchors alongside facts.
Read at Psychology Today
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