Some of you may know that I published my second book a few months ago, De Gelukscode, (The Happiness Code in English, though it has not been published in English yet). Don't worry, this week's newsletter is not a sales pitch. I just want to share a study I describe in my book that I think holds an answer to a very interesting design challenge that can help us all: how do you design a context where people are healthier without using willpower? And how can the same thinking help us in other domains?
The answer to this challenge may be handed to us by looking at a town in Pennsylvania. In the early 1960s, a doctor named Stewart Wolf set out to explain why the people of Roseto were dying of heart attacks at a far lower rate than neighbouring towns, despite eating richly, smoking and doing hard physical work. He examined the water, the air, the genetics and the diet, but the usual explanations did not account for it. What set Roseto apart was its social structure, three generations under one roof, shared meals, streets and clubs that kept people in constant company.
Then came the proof. As Roseto modernised through the 1960s, with bigger houses and more privacy, the protective effect faded and the heart attack rate climbed to the national average. The thing keeping people well had never lived inside them. It lived between them, in how the town was arranged.
The principle is social cohesion, now an established determinant of health on a scale that sits alongside recognised physical risk factors.
So, what can you do with this insight?
We treat health as a private project of willpower and good choices, when a great deal of it is produced by how connected our surroundings keep us. And that is the heart of Behavioural Design. The health was never a property of the people. It was a property of the place, and a place is something you can design.
So how do you design that connection back in? Here are three practical moves:
Protect one shared moment. Roseto ran on the meal everyone turned up to. Find the equivalent in your world, the team lunch, the Friday coffee, the family dinner, and defend it as infrastructure, not a nice-to-have.
Engineer the unplanned encounter. Connection grows from bumping into people, not scheduling them. Put the coffee machine where paths cross, keep one route everyone uses, design in the small collisions that modern, efficient spaces tend to remove.
Notice what is quietly pulling people apart. Bigger houses ended Roseto's advantage. Look for the modern equivalent in your setting, the remote default, the closed door, the layout no one meets in, and reverse one of them.
I find this study quite liberating. Not only does it give me an excuse to have more coffee, it also turns our modest apartment, where we can hardly escape each other, into an asset. Okay, test me on that last one the next time I am on one of my clean up your mess rages. Just pour me another coffee then, and I will be all right.
Behavioural Design Summer School
Two days in Amsterdam with Tom and Astrid, and a small group of people ready to be more influential by September.
Day one builds a working Behavioural Design × AI workflow you can use from the following week. Day two: two masterclasses based on the founders' books, one on designing for happiness and energy, one on finding the leverage points that unlock stuck change.
Dinner together on the first evening. A follow-up session three months later. Both books included.
🇬🇧 20 & 21 August 2026 · English edition - only 3 spots left!
€1,749 excl. VAT
Now that we are on the subject of coffee…give someone a coffee loyalty card with ten stamps and they collect slowly at first, then faster as the free coffee comes into view. Give them a card with twelve stamps but two already filled, the same ten to go, and they finish faster, because progress feels closer. This is the goal gradient effect:
Our effort increases as we near a goal, and what matters is the sense of nearness, not the actual distance.
The practical move is to make progress visible and the finish feel close. Do not start people at zero if you can honestly start them partway. Show the bar filling, mark what is already done, break a long goal into a near one. Motivation is not only about how much someone wants the end, it is about how close the end appears.
Bring the finish line into view and people pick up speed on their own.
Here's to the stubborn optimists, who unlock the power of Behavioural Design for optimising work, life, and everything in between.
See you next week!
Astrid Groenewegen
Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.
Source:
Wolf, S., and Bruhn, J. G. (1993). The Power of Clan: The Influence of Human Relationships on Heart Disease. Transaction Publishers.
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