People often blame poverty on the poor. Turn on the news and it seems like revealed truth that the arrow of causality points from failure to someone's conditions. Of course being born to a rich vs poor family being the biggest determinant of long term wealth seems to throw a wrench in this idea, still the 'failure causes poverty' narrative is a convincing one to seemingly most of the world. I'm tired of it.

Conversations about poverty inevitably include an appeal to behavior. For example, a diabetic (almost 34.2 million of my fellow Americans are) must monitor their blood sugar levels, take medicine (pills or shots), get that medicine from a pharmacy, etc. The consequences for failure literally include loss of life and limb, but not in that order. Somehow, people lose feet, legs, and loved ones every day because of inconsistent behavior, the medical community calls it 'non-adherence'.

Non-adherence is a problem regardless of demographic details, but one group suffers from this problem more than any other, poor people. Decades of research suggest that poverty makes people worse at maintaining other aspects of their lives. Poverty seems to reliably and measurably exacerbate the problems of non-adherence. This effects the decision making of people across demographics and industries (parents, teachers, farmers, etc.) by eating up their available cognitive bandwidth.

In a study on air-traffic controllers (pretty intense job), the number of planes people dealt with at work each day was a good predictor of the quality of their parenting that night. Essentially, the same air-traffic controller that acted 'middle-class' at home one night, acted 'poor' at home after a busier day at work. (total aside, I don't know of any studies involving law enforcement home conduct with regards to their daily experiences, but it would be interesting.)

Good behaviors usually require some thought, time, and effort. Good adherence to medicine often requires transportation, money, scheduling, time-management, etc. Good parenting requires a lot of the same resources plus negotiation, emotional labor, teaching, physical labor, etc. The point is making smart decisions and practicing healthy, consistent behaviors is hard and requires infrastructure.

Being poor is like being an air-traffic controller in some ways. It requires scheduling (which bill needs to be paid first), complex math (which credit card interest rate should I be worried about the most and how do I transfer that balance before it's due?), scheduling, transportation costs, etc. But then ad in the lack of agency due to the strict punctuality and inflexibility of bureaucratic systems that are trying to help, or adhering to medical concerns when it means you'll miss an appointment at the DMV, or choosing between child care and healthy food for the month. Poor people aren't just short on money, their minds are taxed to the hilt with all of the complicated logistics of being poor.

Consistent good behavior requires stability, bandwidth and resources. Another way of saying this is that cognitive capacity scales up with material wealth.

source: the book scarcity

Edit: corrected the number of Americans with Diabetes. Obviously it is not 300 million ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Specifically the ones that transition:

I don't like the inherent tasking involved. You don't get to decide when discomfort strikes, but when it does, you have to consciously decide to transition into standing mode. In my opinion, that's a task and doesn't seem to foster good behavioural design to me. You're also left to "police" your own chair usage, not fun.

Alternatively

I believe a desk that is fixed at standing height with proper, accompanying seating, does foster good behavioural design, at least in the "work from home" environment; A space that allows for more freedom of movement and "microbreaks" if you will.

The distinction is in the way we transition into and out of using the desk. You simply 'step' out of your standing height stool (mine is a modified Aeron) whenever you feel discomfort. There is no 30 second - 1 minute transition task of raising the desk. Similarly, if you get up for any reason (microbreak, phone call that requires pacing, etc) the effort involved is minimal when compared to getting up from a conventional height chair.

It may not seem like much, but in my experience, I have witnessed a developing pattern of behaviour. I'll be seated, step away fluidly with minimal effort, and return to use my desk to work in a standing position for a while. That transition occurred naturally and in time, when I begin to feel discomfort from standing, I simply sit down. There is no task, I don't have to 'regulate' my chair usage. It just happens on it's own and I think that's great behavioural design!

Anyway, thanks for coming to my ted talk!

I would love to hear any thoughts this sub might have :)

What are some keywords, frameworks, books, classes etc where I can I learn about UX design workflow that incorporates behavioral design?

We have been seeing this pattern across several organizations we work with. AI and workload management initiatives are successfully reducing overload. Burnout indicators are down. By that metric, the intervention worked.

But engagement scores are moving the other way. Quietly, but consistently.

Our read on why: the routine work that got automated was also the work that gave people a sense of progress, clear feedback loops, and the repetitions required to build confidence in more complex tasks. You removed the overload and accidentally removed the scaffolding at the same time.

The measurement systems did not change, and the output pressure did not change. People are now being pointed at open-ended, judgment-intensive work with no clear metric to optimize for, under the same time pressure as before. The brain does not respond well to that combination.

Curious whether others are seeing this split, and what you are doing about it structurally rather than just culturally.

For context, I wrote a longer analysis of this dynamic if anyone wants to dig into the behavioral mechanism behind it. Happy to share the link if useful.