About
About The Human Decision
Most behavioral science content fails in one of two ways.
It's too shallow — a three-minute read that gives you a cognitive bias name, a quick explanation, and a listicle of “ways to avoid it.” You feel briefly informed. By Tuesday you've forgotten it existed.
Or it's too academic — rigorous, carefully qualified, and completely impenetrable to anyone who doesn't already have a PhD in the subject. Important work, inaccessible world.
The Human Decision was built to occupy the territory between those two failures.
The space for writing that takes behavioral science seriously — that follows the evidence, names the mechanisms, and resists the temptation to oversimplify — while remaining genuinely readable for the intelligent non-specialist.
Why this matters now
We are living inside the largest behavioral experiment in human history.
Billions of people are navigating digital environments specifically engineered to exploit the vulnerabilities of the human attention system. Making consequential decisions under cognitive conditions — distraction, overload, decision fatigue, social comparison — that systematically degrade judgment. Working inside organizations that measure performance against goals while inadvertently destroying the cognitive conditions required to achieve them.
Most people sense that something is wrong. That they're more scattered than they want to be. That their decisions don't always reflect their values. That the world has gotten faster and noisier but somehow not richer or clearer.
They're right. Something is wrong. And it has a name. Multiple names, actually. Behavioral systems with mechanisms, loops, costs, and — most importantly — addressable architectures.
What we do
We build original frameworks for understanding modern human behavior. Not frameworks borrowed wholesale from academic literature — though academic literature informs everything we do. Original syntheses. New language for things people have always experienced but couldn't name.
We write essays that take the time to be right. Long enough to develop an idea properly. Short enough to respect your attention. Evidence-based, but never joyless.
We work with organizations that want to build environments around how humans actually function. Not the idealized rational actor of classical economics. Not the fully-motivated, fully-focused employee of corporate wishful thinking. The actual human — biological, distracted, emotional, capable of extraordinary depth and also chronic avoidance, often simultaneously.
For the curious
If you've always been slightly more interested in the why beneath the behavior than the how-to-fix-it above it — you're in the right place.
If you find yourself noticing behavioral patterns in yourself and the people around you and wanting better language for what you're seeing — you're in the right place.
If you're a leader who suspects that most organizational interventions address symptoms rather than systems — you're definitely in the right place.
Welcome to The Human Decision.
Start with the frameworks. Or with the newsletter. Or with the piece about the Erosion Loop, which most readers say is the thing that made them stay.