Our life outcomes are powerfully determined by seemingly trivial, repeated acts. Our health, for example, depends on thousands of daily choices-to eat well and exercise regularly, to avoid smoking, and to take medications as prescribed. Yet 40 percent of premature deaths each year result from suboptimal behavior. The authors argue that the most promising avenue for making behaviour change 'stick' is to take proactive steps to change our habits. They provide advice for achieving this by 'targeting the situation' and 'shifting cognitions'. In the end, they show that there is an enormous untapped opportunity at hand to enable sustained improvements in daily decisions on a collective level.

In our daily lives we frequently face a tension between what we want to do (i.e. what we desire) and what we believe we should do. The authors summarize the key findings on 'want/should conflict' and discuss a series of interventions that policymakers, organizations, and individuals can use to promote more future-oriented, should choices. In the end, they show that the better we understand want/should conflict, the more successful we will be at designing effective interventions that shift behaviors in societally-beneficial directions.

When making decisions, we all rely too heavily on intuition and use flawed reasoning. But it's possible to fight these pernicious sources of bias by learning to spot them and using the techniques presented in this article, gleaned from the latest research. They'll open up your thinking about possible outcomes, objectives, and options and lead to better choices. To broaden your perspective on the future, the authors suggest, you can use proven tactics for improving the accuracy of estimates and preparing for contingencies. You'll think more expansively about your objectives if you come up with many possibilities before deciding what's most important, get input from others, and then carefully examine one goal at a time. And you'll generate better options if you identify several and evaluate them side by side. Don't settle for the first one that's acceptable; imagine that you can't pursue it, and you might find an even stronger alternative. Strong emotional attachments or investments make cognitive biases even harder to overcome. When that's the case, use checklists and algorithms to stay focused on the right things, and set "trip wires" to trigger planned responses at key points in the decision-making process.

Research by esteemed academics has uncovered a wide variety of biases that plague decision makers on a regular basis. Thanks to them, we know that predictable errors lead people to commit sub-optimal acts on a regular basis, ranging from undersaving for retirement to engaging in needless conflict and accepting the wrong jobs. Unfortunately, we have yet to uncover systematic strategies to help people overcome these biases and behave more optimally. The authors get started on this path, focusing on strategies that can lead to better decisions, which involve leveraging the human tendency to default to 'Type 1' -- or automatic -- mental processing.

Research shows that people favor pleasurable "want" options if the consequences are immediate, and good-for-you "should" options if the consequences will occur in the future. That finding offers potentially profitable opportunities.