The Power of Fifty Bits by Bob Nease

Our brains handle an amazing amount of information. Almost all of it happens without our conscious awareness. Our conscious mind has a narrow bandwidth of about 50 bits per second according to engineer and designer Bob Nease.

The result of this narrow bandwidth is that much of human behavior is characterized by inattention and inertia. In his book The Power of Fifty Bits, Nease suggests that we accept the limitation of our brains and design things in a way that help us make and stick to good decisions.

Nease has practice in designing such systems. As the chief scientist at Express Scripts, he and his team looked for ways to get people to use less expensive drugs and pharmacies, refill prescriptions on time and stick to treatment regimens. He calls the techniques he developed “fifty bits design.”

Because our brains have so much information to handle, they use shortcuts. These shortcuts are not always adaptive to modern life. They are still geared toward tribal life in a dangerous wilderness.

He focuses on dealing with these shortcuts. We feel a lot of pressure to fit in; we follow social norms and go along to get along. We are very averse to loss. We seek to enjoy rewards today and push off losses as long as possible. As a result, it is easy to have good plans and intentions, but hard to actually change our behavior.

Nease offers strategies to interrupt, circumvent and utilize these strong tendencies to turn people’s good intentions into actions. You can interrupt a process briefly to require a choice between options. You can ask people to commit now to actions in future situations. You can make the desirable choice the default and require action to change it. You can get attention by inserting a message where people will already be looking. You can frame choices in more compelling ways.  You can make a good choice a side benefit of doing a fun or desirable activity. In all things you can make good choices easier to implement and bad choice a little harder.

It is hard to do justice to these strategies in a few words. Nease provides examples from his own work and from the research of others. He also provides insight into which strategies are best suited to certain situations and how they can be used together to greater effect. He also considers some ethical considerations of using fifty bits design.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Nease, Bob. The Power of Fifty Bits: The New Science of Turning Good Intentions into Positive Results. New York: HarperCollins, 2016.