 In this episode, we've been arguing for the power of the situation. We saw that channel factors are a really good way to bridge intention and action. Just that the situation is a really powerful predictor of human behavior. But it doesn't stop there. It's not like, oh, science teaches us that you have to look at the situation in order to predict human behavior. No, that's the cool thing about science. You can take what we've learned in the lab, what we know in these highly controlled situations, and flip it around. We can use what we know about the situation in predicting behavior to manipulating the situation to shape human behavior. That's exactly right. We talked about this idea of channel factors. As you said, what are the elements of the situation, the circumstance, the context? What are the trigger points that are necessary in order to elicit the behavior that we're looking for? One of the most important elements, I think, that we can do here is to clear those channels, in a sense. How do you get out of the way? How do you, in order to bridge intention and action, what can you do to make that as easy as possible for the person that you're trying to change the mind of? Yeah, this is a simple example, but I write a lot of emails in my work. And it's difficult, yes, to put yourself in the situation of the person that's receiving it. So how do I clear all the nonsense out of their way? So the nonsense would be the things that I'm interested in. Don't put the things that you're interested in. Put the things that they're interested in. Start with some context. Tell them how this situation will benefit them. And then finish with one sentence, a very clear ask for them. What is the next physical action that I would like you to take in order to move this forward? And don't send it five minutes before they're going to clock off. Don't send it when their workload is at their highest. Send it at a time that is conducive for them to do the next thing that you want them to do. That's exactly it. So you touched on a couple of things. One is making it as easy as possible for them to do what you want them to do. The other is empathy. Now, we know this is right from the beginning. We've been talking about how difficult it is to put yourself in the shoes of others, but to see things from their perspective. But the extent to which you can do that to be able to take the person, okay, I'm a CEO of this particular company. I have this going on and this going on. Now, what can I possibly do to see the world through their eyes to make my goals their goals? I hate to say that these are the things thereafter. These are the things that I'm after now. How do I make those align as closely as possible? The extent to which you can do that is the extent to which you're going to be successful. Now, one of the areas that you can use this really well, I think, which Lee Ross mentioned, is in donations, donating your organs, donating blood, donating to particular charities for various things. Another is in filling out petitions. If you want someone to get on board with something, to do it, to jump on the bandwagon along with everyone else, how do you do that? What are the things that you can do for them? And again, putting yourself in the shoes of the person who's filling this out, there was a really nice one I saw the other day. It filled in everything for you, right? Everything was all written. All you had to do was enter your name, your postal code, and click send. Now, just by making it that easy for the person, the numbers just climb as a result. Instead, if they have to fill out a 30-page form and actually do something on their own, and you're relying on the citizenship of the person and their goodwill, these very personality factors, then they're not going to do it. If you make the situation easy, then they will. Filling out the forms is a good one. You can design entire systems like this. So, there's a light flickering in the hallway near my office. And in order to get that fixed, I have to find a computer to go online, to find the website that I need to log a maintenance request or something like that. But I visited a hospital recently, and you can imagine how busy people are, doctors running around trying to help people. If they see a light flickering in the hallway, all they have to do is go to a whiteboard in the middle of the space, take out the pen, and then write a light flickering in hallway 5. And then somebody else takes that and puts that into the system and this thing. So in the hospital, that light gets fixed in my office. It's been like that for months. It's not going to happen. I'm never going to do it because the distance between my intention, what I want to do is fix that light. And the things I have to do in order to get somebody in the room to fix it is massive. That's right. And this is extremely important when it comes to really critical types of domains, like health or military or police, safety critical domains. If you're working in a nuclear power plant and you have to fill out a 30-page report to say that something is dangerous, yeah, that's not good, is it? I mean, I've looked a fair bit into this, what's called close call or near miss databases and what makes them successful or not. And the thing that seems to make them successful is the ease with which you make it for the users. I mean, in a hospital case, again, if you have to fill out a five-page report on the nature of the incident and everything else, people just aren't going to do it. And that matters. If you're going to leave scissors in a patient or a sponge nearby from the previous operation, yeah, that's not great. But if you can take out your phone and text, sponge almost left, boom, send, gone. And it's taken care of at that point. People are going to use it. The easier you make it for them, the more likely it is. And we heard about a bunch of these cases from Nisbet and Ross in the previous episode when it came to organ donation, opting out. People stick with the default options. If they don't have to do anything, they won't do anything. And they tend to stick with that. Drawing a map from point A to point B, making it clear. If you're holding a party and you want people to come, the easier you make it for the people to get there, the better it is. Tell them what bus to get on, what they need to do, what will it cost, what should they bring, all of these things. If they're lined up, then people will turn up and enjoy themselves. That's right. And this is one of the hottest or most lucrative areas, I think, in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, social psychology, I suppose, behavioral economics, they're all kind of melding together these days. But there are a bunch of teams. Ross has mentioned this group of team, this group of academics who are helping the Obama campaign. Yep, that's very successful. There's another in the UK called the Behavioral Insights team. There's a group out of Chicago, I think, called based by Richard Thaler on the Nudge Group, which you hear a fair bit about. All of these are kind of working on the same idea of making it as easy as possible for you to do one thing, to bridge intention and action, to make these channel factors as easy as possible, to isolate the bits of the context that are going to make the behaviors happen that you're looking for. Yep, but I don't think we're there yet. I mean, we promised people in opening this course that we'd give them the tools to change the world. And we have. We're up to episode 11. We started off with a more realistic expectation about how the mind actually works. We shattered some illusions and we've gone through a bunch of cognitive mechanisms for the basis of our beliefs. Now we've gone from predicting behavior to shaping behavior. But if we want people to go out there, to poke the world, to leave their mark, we need to make it more concrete. We need to show them these channel factors in action and how they can go out and make it work. And that's what we're going to do next episode in Change the World.