BJ Fogg is the founder of Stanford University’s Behavior Design Lab, one of America’s most respected behavior scientists, and author of the bestselling book “Tiny Habits.”
These are some of the observations he made in a 2018 interview with the Stanford Graduate School of business on how building habits is the key to behavioral change.
- For decades, maybe longer, people have assumed that if you just give people information it will change their behavior. And this doesn’t work very well. And so I decided to give this problem a name, this fallacy a name and that’s what it’s called, the information action fallacy.
- And it goes like this. If we give people information that will then change their attitude, and then with attitude change they will then change their behavior. Now those links between information and attitude change, that’s not a very reliable link. And even if you can change somebody’s attitude, that doesn’t necessarily change their behavior.
- Habit formation isn’t a product of simply doing something over and over again. It’s not a function of repetition, it’s a function of emotion.
- Bringing our behavior in line with our goals is easier than we think — we just have to know the emotional levers to pull.
- It’s long been said that repetition is the key to creating habits. And that’s just not true. It’s emotions. What role does repetition play? Well, if you do a behavior and you feel strong, positive emotion as you do it, that habit will wire in very quickly. It’s not the repetition that’s creating the habit, it’s the emotion that you feel.

THIS IS THE BIG TALK
The Big Talk is a fundamentally different approach to security awareness and one that will make all your other awareness messaging make much better sense.
A BIG PERSONAL BONUS
The habits changed by The Big Security Talk will go far beyond the workplace and help to protect every family and generation from the surge in AI-aided scams and frauds.
MEET THE BIG TALKER
In the Big Security Talk, security veteran Neal O’Farrell blends his more than 40 years in global cybersecurity with the unique and sometimes blunt take of an Irishman.
