Matt Wallaert

Matt Wallaert is a behavioral psychologist and entrepreneur focused on building products and programs that create behavior change to help people lead better, happier lives. A published academic who continues to collect data and remain active in academia, he uses research and insights about human behavior in his work as an entrepreneur and as a frequent expert source for the press. He is always looking for new ways to make things better and hopes to advise 1,000 projects before he dies. Currently located in Seattle, Matt prefers cowboy boots to dress shoes and Legos to blank paper. He is a dedicated Oregonian and believes strongly that the Pacific Northwest is the best possible place to live. He is a graduate of Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong (IB) and Swarthmore College (psychology and education), spent some time in a graduate program at Cornell University (social psychology), and is brother to Josh, brother-in-law to Jelena, and son to Rick and Jo.

Opposing forces theory is my shorthand for a relatively simple way of understanding human behavior. Speaking in sweeping generalizations, all decisions and behaviors are the the product of two fundamentally opposing sets of forces: reasons to do something (promoting pressures) and reasons not to do something (inhibit pressures). These can be internally or externally generated, and how receptive you are to internal vs external cues can itself be acted upon. The reason this is such an important concept in behavioral change is that if you want to inspire a particular behavior that is not already occurring (or make an existing behavior occur more or less frequently), you start by understanding the balance of forces behind the current state of the world. Once you know why people are doing what they are doing, you can figure out whether you need to remove obstacles or place more in the way, or make something more or less rewarding, or address competing behaviors.