In 1966, researchers went door to door in Palo Alto asking people to put a badly hand-painted billboard on their front lawn.
On one street 17% said yes. On another, 76%. Same billboard, same man, same script. The only difference was a three inch sticker somebody had asked them to display two weeks earlier.
This episode is about why that happened, and why it explains twenty years of diets that died on day nine.
Points mentioned
The Palo Alto billboard study, and the detail almost nobody quotes
Why desire is a starter motor, and what happens when you build twenty years of attempts on one
Daryl Bem's 1967 finding that his own field thought was backwards
The stranger with the clipboard, and why he doesn't take dictation
Beth from Roseburg, and the order things happened in for her
Why there's no morning where you wake up transformed and know it
Escape the Willpower Trap
Thirty days of handing your brain new evidence, in the right order, until the file says something different about who you are.
