Why is it so hard to change behavior?

All traditional and technical problem-solving techniques have failed to solve human behavioral issues. Why is it so hard to change human behaviors and habits?

In an organization context, some ‘carrot-and-stick’ programs may work in the short term to change habits and behaviors, but change won’t be permanent. As the famous saying goes: old habits die hard. Organizations either have to choose to live with their hardcore workers who refuse to change or just fire and replace them.

When human behavioral issues are the root-causes to many societal problems, society suffers. Nothing would or could change people’s habits and behaviours unless their brains could be ‘washed’ or reset. There is a famous Chinese proverb: 江山易改，本性难移, meaning “it’s easier to change the mountain than to change behavior”, which remains very true till today. 

Take the case of our continuing efforts to nudge people to return their trays and crockery after eating at public hawker centres. The latest observation survey showed that only 30% or less of the people return their trays despite the many educational campaigns in the past 3 decades. Why is it so damn tough to get people to return their trays after eating? Everyone from government agencies to civil groups know the real issue lies in people’s mindset and attitude of “I don’t really care!”

No ‘carrot-and-stick’ solution could work for such social problem as ‘carrots’ need funding (nobody wants to dig into their pockets) and the ‘stick’ means legislations and constant monitoring and enforcement in every public eating places. They are simple non-sustainable in the long term.

Studies in human psychology and neuroscience have shown that people change their behaviour only when the change brings relief to their pains, i.e. no pain no change. So in conclusion, to cause change in behaviour and habits, we must create pains. This is the only viable and workable strategy to our decades-old problems nobody has managed to solve. Deploying this “No Pain No Gain” approach with a smart and a simple ‘fool-proof’ engineering design, such behavioral problems could easily be solved as shown in this example here. There is really no need for any expensive and advanced technological solutions. One just needs to determine the root-cause(s) to the problem and think and dig deeper for a workable solution. When we need to deal with ‘fools’, we just need to find a fool-proofing method(s) to counter them.

This is the Poka-Yoke Way, only remaining way to solving this behavioral problems (originally called fool-proofing in Japan but was later changed to mistake-proofing to avoid being offensive).