Environment Theory

via Goodera

Environment Theory - The theory that the environment constrains your behavior and significantly affects your psyche, and these effects generally outweigh your will power over time*. Where environment is defined broadly, as any input to your mind and body that is external from your own person. Let’s look at a few examples:

People

  • You are the average of the five closest people you interact with. Chances are if all your friends were talking about Bitcoin in 2009, you’d probably be a millionaire many times over by now. But if most of your friends did drugs, you’re more likely to be an addict. 

  • This affects people in corporations too. How else could the same person who did cocaine and pulled 100 hour weeks at Goldman Sachs be a vegan, meditation retreat employee at Apple?

  • Though controversial, the Stanford Prison Experiment shows how normal people can exhibit sadistic tendencies when adhering to perceived roles of authority.


Information

  • Numerous reports show how doomscrolling on Twitter will make you depressed and your primary TV news source will determine your belief in QAnon conspiracy theories.


Physical

  • Night owls that generally sleep in will wake up early when camping.

  • Eating unhealthy food will make you feel sick.


Economic

  • Winning the ovarian lottery. A child born in the USA is much more likely to have a higher quality of life, than a child born in a 3rd-world country.

  • The wealthier a person, the more likely they are to fight tax hikes.


My assumption is you’ve already heard about most of these effects and agree with the theory. But you underestimate its impact, or at least its impact on you. I get it, yes, Twitter is not always a negative experience, or “I’m smart enough to tell the difference between propaganda and what is real”, or “there’s too much inertia to move out of this city.” But then COVID-19 happened...


The pandemic is the greatest example of an environment constraining your life. From lockdowns to wearing masks to testing your critical thinking. And not just negatively either, look how many people shifted their lives to fight the pandemic and help out. The extreme global focus tracking the disease and racing to discover, test, and distribute a vaccine is amazing (side note: I’ve never seen so many different tech people build so many similar versions of COVID tracking websites and vaccine appointment software). And people actually uprooted themselves in the remote work migration.


Although the pandemic is a wake up call, your environment is often this really powerful force in your life that is subliminal, accumulating in the background without your realization. On top of that, the human psyche is incredibly adaptive, so you tend to underestimate the effect of your environment the more you adapt; it compounds!


How can one measure the effect of the environment, without the need of a global pandemic to make it crystal clear? I suggest using thought experiments to contrast extremely different environments to get clarity. Here are a few simple examples:


  • Take a loudly cheering baseball fan and put them in a library. They will stop yelling.

  • Take a happy person, and put them in jail. They will be upset.

  • Take someone that’s burned out, and send them to paradise for a few weeks and they’ll feel much better.

  • Would this business proposal be accepted at a first-mover company or a copycat company?


So what’s the takeaway?


Even if unaware, your environment significantly influences your behavior and psyche. To the point where I’d argue your environment controls your destiny. To reassert free will you need to build awareness, break out of the mold, and experience other environments to gain more perspective. Build empathy by understanding the context behind a person’s actions. Take a hard look at the inputs you’re feeding into your mind, and curate them to avoid garbage in, garbage out. 


After sufficient exploration, choose the environment you want to live in, rather than be constrained by the one you happen to reside in.



*The strong version of the theory is that you can make any number of different people conform in the same environment.

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