Why We Should Invest in our Surroundings

I recently hooked up another monitor to my laptop at my home workspace and it’s added a lot of unexpected value to my day. It’s a simple addition really, most corporate offices provide their employees with two monitors. I’ve experienced the typical benefits an additional monitor promises to bring: my research experience while working has become smoother and my posture a little bit better.

But this monitor has affected my behavior in other ways as well. I’ve started reading more. The monitor makes it so much more enjoyable to read an ebook or a long article that I’ve found myself automatically pulling them up when I have free time, time I usually would have spent scrolling through social media. I also find myself writing notes while I’m reading, something I wouldn’t do that often beforehand. The extra monitor makes it easy to have both a note taking app and a book open at the same time without having to reduce text size. These extra notes in turn have made my own writing become much easier. I’ve inadvertently begun to create a repository of compelling anecdotes and data points that I can seamlessly implement to illustrate a point I’m trying to make.

How did one monitor make me read, retain, and write more?

The ripple effect of my extra monitor reminds me of a principle Atul Gawande discusses in his book, The Checklist Manifesto. He describes something he calls a behavior change vehicle. This is something that, when introduced into an environment, doesn’t seem like it should yield significant change. But, the effects of this vehicle ripple out, affecting behavior in a variety of unexpected ways. Gawande provides an excellent example of one of these in action: Safeguard Soap in Karachi, Pakistan.

Karachi is one of the world’s most populous and dense cities, with over 16 million inhabitants. The city suffers from inadequate public health infrastructure; over tens of thousands of children die from diarrhea and other infections every year in the city. One of the leading causes of these diseases is unsanitary drinking and bathing water. But, changing the public health infrastructure of a city is a decades-long undertaking.

Presented with this pressing problem, public health officials tried an unintuitive approach. They randomly chose 25 neighborhoods and assigned them “hand washing promotion.” An official would distribute Safeguard brand soap to these houses and conduct weekly check-ins for a year. At these check-ins, the officials demonstrated soap best practices while recording data regarding disease rates.

The results were astounding. Children under 5 had a 50% lower incidence of pneumonia and children under 15 had had a 53% lower incidence of diarrhea. What’s really fascinating is that almost all of these households already had soap and practiced hand washing (many would already walk quite a distance to wash their hands after using the restroom, due to the cultural importance of cleanliness). The soap was not the reason this experiment was so successful — it was the way the soap was introduced into the environment. First, the health officials didn’t come as scolders; they came bearing a gift and positive encouragement. Second, the soap, although not particularly more sanitary than other soaps, was one that was considered a high quality brand. And third, the officials encouraged people to expand the instances when they used soap to more than just after the bathroom: when cooking, changing infant diapers, or washing clothes.

Gifting a different version of something people already had and encouraging use of it in novel ways was enough to tremendously change the behavior of the inhabitants of these neighborhoods. My extra monitor, to a much lesser degree, accomplished something similar. I didn’t buy a new laptop or carve out more reading and research time in my day. Instead, the monitor’s simple addition naturally resulted in these changes. When watching a YouTube video, I find it significantly easier to open the notes app and jot down a quote or statistic that resonates with me. When looking for something to do to kill time, opening the Books app and reading on my larger screen is much more enjoyable and so I find myself doing it with more frequency. The monitor is a different version of something I already have that encourages use in novel ways.

I think it’s a worthwhile exercise for all of us to identify places in our life where we can implement behavior change vehicles. All it takes is identifying something you use a lot in daily life, pinpoint what you mostly use that thing for, and ask if that thing is best suited for that purpose. Would a small tweak or simple add-on greatly enhance your experience and change the way you behave?

This might seem unintuitive. We convince ourselves that we do or don’t do certain things because we’ve made that decision. I don’t read because I don’t have time, because I don’t want to, because there’s nothing worth reading. We convince ourselves that we are in control. But, that’s simply not true. A large part of our behavior is a function of our environment. This happens at a simple level like snacking: a study at Google showed that people ate less snacks when snacks were placed a little farther out of proximity. This also takes place on a more profound level, like morality: another study showed that people made more severe moral judgements when asked to make a judgement while exposed to a fart smell as compared to people exposed to no smell.

This is unsettling. I do certain things and make particular judgements because I’ve rationally concluded that that’s what should be done. The thought that something as small as an extra monitor stands in the way of me reading or an unpleasant smell makes me a harsher person robs me of a sense of control. But, I think this is also liberating. Our environments are usually changeable. We can try removing unhealthy snacks from our house or have nicer smelling friends (working on it). Intentional study and change of our environments can change the way we act.

Our surroundings obviously aren’t the ultimate explanation of our actions. Willpower and introspection are just as important. But, even if small changes in our surroundings can yield a 20% change, I think that’s a thing to be optimistic about and worth spending time on. You’ll get some unexpected results.

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