I’m going to try to shock you with some numbers. They show that we might have a warped view of the popularity of some habits, but also that even sma

The Big Impact of Small Changes

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2021-06-22 19:00:03

I’m going to try to shock you with some numbers. They show that we might have a warped view of the popularity of some habits, but also that even small changes in our collective behavior can have huge ripple effects.

Maybe you’re not surprised by those figures. I was. They’re a sign that we sometimes believe that behavioral changes from new technologies are far more commonplace than they really are. Why? I’ll offer two possible explanations.

The first one is that people (and journalists) tend to pay more attention to what’s new and novel. That might be particularly true if the behavioral changes are happening to relatively affluent people. The vast majority of American workers kept doing their jobs in person even in the depths of the pandemic, but about half of professional workers at one point did their jobs away from an office because of the coronavirus.

And Peloton, the maker of $2,500 exercise bicycles for streaming fitness classes, has about 2.1 million customers paying to use its exercise bicycles or treadmills. For comparison, about 3.5 million households in the United States had birds as pets during a recent year, according to a veterinary trade group. Peloton might be less popular than parakeets, but it gets far more attention.

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