Behavioral Design

Behavioral Design

11 min read

Behavioral Design

A catalog of every page in this wiki, grouped by type. Browse below, or use the search (top of the left sidebar) to jump straight to a topic.

How this is organized

Pages are grouped by type — sources, entities, concepts, syntheses, comparisons. Within each section, alphabetical by title.

Sources

Summaries of raw documents in raw/. One per source.

Entities

People, places, organizations, products.

  • B.F. Skinner — behaviorist; discovered variable ratio reinforcement
  • Charlie Munger — Berkshire Vice Chairman; brief appearance on victim-mentality-as-political-weapon (stub, single source)
  • Daniel Kahneman — psychologist; prospect theory, loss aversion, 2002 Nobel
  • David Deutsch — physicist/philosopher; The Beginning of Infinity, The Fabric of Reality — “all life is problem-solving”
  • Duolingo — language-learning app; canonical streak deployment; Duo mascot; agency-mode streak design (freeze, soft goal); recurring A/B-test reference
  • Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew; founder of modern public relations / 20th-century propaganda; Propaganda (1928)
  • Headspace — meditation app; three A/B-tested conversion wins across two sources (multi-intent goals, “guest pass” rename, longer trial on annual)
  • Ishida Mitsunari — 16th-c. Japanese administrator; the tea-pouring monk Hideyoshi recruited; led Toyotomi loyalists at Sekigahara (1600)
  • Jonathan Parra — lead designer at Superwall; 4,500+ paywalls hand-built; “no perfect paywall” thesis; bullet-list baseline + gray-hat drawer cascade
  • Joseph Choy — founder of Consumer Club; host of the Superwall podcast as of 2026
  • Kent Berridge — neuroscientist; 1989 “wanting vs liking” finding; dopamine as anticipation chemical (parallel to Schultz)
  • Marc Andreessen — Netscape co-founder, a16z; popularized the Four kinds of luck taxonomy via the “Pmarca” blog
  • Mobbin — mobile/web design-pattern library; both publisher (1,460-flows survey) and subject (“Pro” labels A/B test, +35% free-to-paid)
  • Naval Ravikant — investor/aphorist; AngelList, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
  • Oda Nobunaga — 1534–1582; first of Three Great Unifiers of Japan; Hideyoshi’s lord and mentor; assassinated at Honnō-ji
  • Richard Thaler — behavioral economist; mental accounting (2017 Nobel)
  • Robert Cialdini — social psychologist; seven principles of influence + pre-suasion
  • Sensimity — neuroscience-informed player-research company (facial coding + emotional intensity for mobile-game studios)
  • Sigmund Freud — founder of psychoanalysis; the suppressed-desire and group-credulity theses Bernays operationalized
  • Superwall — mobile-paywall infrastructure + A/B testing platform; data substrate behind much of the wiki’s paywall craft; publishes the Superwall podcast
  • Takenaka Hanbei — 16th-c. Japanese strategist; recruited by Hideyoshi after twelve visits; author of seek rather than solicit, task rather than train
  • Tim Gabe — product/UX designer; ex-Spotify; founder of Zipsnap; pattern-study author on consumer gamification
  • Tokugawa Ieyasu — 1543–1616; third unifier; founded Tokugawa shogunate (stub — appears at margin in Swordless Samurai)
  • Toyotomi Hidenaga — 1540–1591; Hideyoshi’s half-brother and chief adviser; the disagreement function; his death the book’s hinge
  • Toyotomi Hideyoshi — 1536–1598; peasant-born unifier of Japan; middle of Three Great Unifiers of Japan; subject of The Swordless Samurai
  • Wolfram Schultz — neuroscientist; dopamine and reward anticipation
  • Yu-kai Chou — gamification author; PBL is the scoreboard of a game, not the game itself

Concepts

Ideas, frameworks, theories, techniques.

  • Age of Warring Clans — sengoku jidai; ~1467–early 1600s; the period the Three Great Unifiers of Japan closed
  • Aha moment — the first time a new user actually feels the product’s value; the destination an onboarding flow exists to deliver
  • Amor fati — Nietzsche: love what is necessary; the philosophical antithesis of victim mentality
  • Anchoring bias — the first piece of information disproportionately shapes the rest; trial-length-as-anchor (Headspace 14-day-on-annual) and price anchoring
  • Anthropomorphism — assigning human emotions to non-human things; the cognitive substrate mascot strategies run on
  • Authority — Cialdini’s 5th: people defer to credentialed expertise (an authority, not in authority)
  • Ben Franklin effect — getting someone to do you a favor makes them like you (consistency bias, benign direction)
  • Certainty effect — certain outcomes over-weighted vs probabilistic equivalents; Uber range→single price (double-digit lift)
  • Cognitive load — mental effort budget; friction at the wrong moment is fatal; Slopes one-tap trial (+25% activation)
  • Commitment and consistency — small commitments shape identity; public proclamations rewrite belief
  • Completion drive — Gestalt-closure-based engagement; Apple Watch rings as the canonical case; “anticipation toward closure”
  • Decoy effect — a clearly inferior third option shifts choices toward a target
  • Divide and conquer — fracturing a population into hostile groups makes it easier to rule (Machiavelli, Bernays)
  • Endowment effect — owning something raises its perceived value; the “endowed value” mechanism behind piggy banks and idle-game retention
  • Familiarity principle — engineered familiarity via personalization (Zajonc mere-exposure roots); Speechify reading-environment setup; the new-car-mirrors level of tweak is enough
  • Fear of missing out — anxiety about loss; distinct from but often stacked with dopamine-driven motivation
  • Fit body, calm mind, house full of love — Naval’s three things money can’t buy
  • Four kinds of luck — blind / hustle / spotting / character — the higher kinds are deliberately cultivable
  • Framing effect — equivalent options elicit different choices via wording; “trial” → “guest pass” (Headspace +7%)
  • Gamification S-curve — feature richness has diminishing then negative returns; Habitica as the right-tail case
  • Gift vs receipt — Tim Gabe’s reward-delivery framework: anticipation → reveal → afterglow; ceremony triggers dopamine, flat receipts bypass it
  • Goal-gradient effect — motivation rises with proximity to a goal (Hull 1932); Marathon progress bar; counter-pattern — progress cues backfire on uncommitted users (TypeForm)
  • Group psychology — the grouped individual loses critical faculty; the substrate Bernays-style propaganda exploits
  • Habit loop — cue / craving / response / reward; the four-stage descriptive frame for habits (Clear, building on Duhigg, Skinner, Schultz)
  • Habit-vs-surprise dilemma — reward systems need predictable cues + variable rewards
  • Hook, habit, hobby framework — three-stage mobile game monetization model
  • Idle games — the genre with the highest retention; mechanically minimal play, maximally compulsive
  • Infinite progression — design pattern of refusing terminal achievement states; uncapped metrics + non-destructive resets; the architecture above loss aversion
  • Intrusive omnipresence — a game property that runs continuously, generating constant low-grade pressure to return
  • Lifestyle inflation — rising income consumed by rising standards of living; “the biggest trap” per Naval
  • Liking — Cialdini’s 4th: people say yes to those they like; driven by similarities + praise
  • Loot boxes — randomized reward mechanic; stacks variable ratio + dopamine + near-miss
  • Loss aversion — losses feel ~2× as strong as equivalent gains
  • Mental accounting — people sort money into mental buckets and treat each differently
  • Mimetic desire — humans copy desires from others (Girard via Thiel); the engine of wrong-game competition
  • Onboarding flow — the screen sequence between first launch and becoming a real user; length isn’t the variable, texture and pacing are
  • PBL fallacy — Points/Badges/Leaderboards as the default failure mode of consumer gamification; the scoreboard is not the game
  • Paywall design — the discipline of architecting and A/B testing subscription paywalls; no universal best, but a stable bullet-list baseline + a small set of moves (annual default, cancel anytime, generic Continue, hidden picker, native styling) that travel
  • Payment decoupling — abstracting cash into chips/tokens/currencies to dull the pain of paying
  • Peak-end rule — Kahneman’s remembering-self heuristic; experience memory ≈ (peak + end) / 2; the framing for why onboarding shape matters more than length
  • Personal monopoly — David Perell: the state where the market for what you make can’t find it elsewhere
  • Pre-suasion — what you say or do before a message biases how it’s received (Cialdini’s 2016 thesis)
  • Prestige mechanic — voluntary reset for a permanent multiplier; re-injects dopamine surprise after a plateau
  • Progressive disclosure — reveal complexity gradually; people don’t fear commitment, they fear the unknown; Blinkist 7-day itinerary (+23% trial signups)
  • Propaganda — Bernays’s discipline: bypass conscious rationality, target unconscious symbolic substitution at the group scale
  • Recast bad fortune as good — Hideyoshi’s Secret of Survival; the operational cousin of Amor fati
  • Reciprocation — Cialdini’s 1st: gift first → felt obligation to return; reframed from the giver side in Hideyoshi’s Secret of Reciprocation
  • Retirement — Naval’s reframe: when today is complete in and of itself, not an age or a pension event
  • Reward prediction error — dopamine encodes the delta between predicted and actual reward (Schultz)
  • Scarcity principle — limited / vanishing things feel more valuable
  • Self-Determination Theory — Deci & Ryan’s three needs (autonomy/competence/relatedness); gamification meta-analysis shows the field over-delivers on the first two
  • Servant leadership — the leader’s job is to serve, multiply, and remove obstacles; the doctrine The Swordless Samurai argues for
  • Skill stacking — combine several above-average skills into a unique stack with little competition
  • Social comparison theory — Festinger 1954; ranked comparison against similar others; Tim Gabe’s “invisible scoreboard” lock-in layer; Strava’s 3.9M deleted activities case
  • Social proof — Cialdini’s 3rd: under uncertainty, people copy comparable others
  • Streak — daily-counter retention mechanic; motivational→obligational drift; under regulatory scrutiny
  • Tamagotchi effect — the attachment that forms when a digital thing appears to need you back (Bandai 1996 → modern mascots); raises switching cost
  • The 35 Secrets of the Swordless Samurai — the maxim catalog from Hideyoshi’s deathbed-memoir leadership treatise
  • Three Great Unifiers of Japan — Nobunaga → Hideyoshi → Ieyasu; the trio who closed the sengoku jidai
  • Unity — Cialdini’s 7th (added 2021): inside a “we” group, persuasion compounds
  • Variable ratio reinforcement — unpredictable rewards drive the most compulsive behavior
  • Victim mentality — self-disabling external attribution; Naval’s “easy for you to say”; Munger on its political weaponization
  • Zeigarnik effect — incomplete tasks stay active in memory more strongly than complete ones (Zeigarnik 1927); the open-loop mechanism behind streaks, multi-step welcome flows, and resumable progress

Syntheses

Topic overviews pulling from multiple sources.

(none yet — will emerge once 2+ sources cover overlapping ground)

Comparisons

Side-by-side analyses.

(none yet)

About

A personal knowledge base on behavioral design, persuasion, and product psychology — talks, books, and essays read closely, then summarized and cross-linked into concept and entity pages. New sources are folded in over time.

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