Boost

Summary

The world’s leading researchers on human behavior and decision-making equip us with the knowledge, tools, and techniques to become better decision makers—and ultimately improve the world around us—in this powerful guide that builds on the insights of the influential bestseller Nudge. When it appeared in 2008, the surprise bestseller Nudge showed how a nudge—a prompt, encouragement, or signal that suggests a behavior—could help us make better decisions. Nudge became “a beacon for using behavioral science to guide decisions and policies,” according to David Halpern. But over the past eighteen years, that “beacon” has evolved. Where nudges led us to make better decisions, boosts now help us become better decision-makers. Nudges accept our natural tendencies or biases and work to shift our behavior in the moment. Boosts, by contrast, enhance our ability to reflect, decide, or achieve something that matters. An app that prompts a moment of thought before we open a social media feed to doomscroll is a boost. So is teaching kids to stop and think—rather than fight—in moments of disagreement. Boosts are designed to make us better decision makers in every part of our lives. Leading behavioural researchers David Halpern and Elisabeth Costa have run more than 1,000 experiments and interventions across more than seventy countries that show how behavioral science can improve our capacity to make better decisions, bolster our economies, improve our relationships, and harness tech to do good rather than harm. Boost pairs their rigorous scientific findings with a compelling range of stories, to reveal:

• How boosts can help us be better bullshit detectors
• How a boost led to a reduction in urban violence
• How asking about pizza and sports boosted a billion-dollar tutoring program’s success
• How a daring experiment at the world’s biggest social media company boosted its users into shapers of the platform and its rules

Boost puts humans back in the driver’s seat, empowering them to regain agency so they can shape—rather than be manipulated by—the forces around them. Boost equips us with knowledge, tools and techniques to boost our own decision-making, and shows how we can shape the world around us to make it easier for everyone to choose well. Against the backdrop of rapidly evolving AI, Boost ultimately asks us to make the biggest choice of all: to decide what kind of humans we want to be.