The Three Laws of Human Behavior
What are the Three Laws of Human Behavior?
The Three Laws of Human Behavior were proposed by Aline Holzwarth in 2019, applying Newton’s laws to human actions. These principles state that actions persist in their current state unless influenced by changes in friction or motivation, behavior depends on personal and environmental factors, and each decision involves trade-offs and possible unintended consequences.
The Basic Idea
If you took physics in high school, you’re familiar with Newton’s three laws of motion. These rules describe the relationship between the motion of a body and the forces acting on it, and were first proposed in the 17th century by English mathematician Isaac Newton.¹ Remarkably, Newton managed to distill complex and difficult physical concepts into three simple, universal rules.
The three laws of motion are:
- A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force.
- The force acting on an object is equal to the mass of that object times its acceleration.
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Until Newtonian physics was displayed by quantum mechanics and general relativity in the early 20th century, these laws were thought to describe how all objects and their motion are impacted by forces. They are still used frequently in calculations and do reflect the motion of objects accurately — unless we are talking about quantum particles or extremely massive bodies. But can we apply these laws to anything else? In a 2019 article for Behavioral Economics, Aline Holzwarth, a behavioral scientist, used Newton’s laws of motion to inform three laws of human behavior.²
These three laws are:
- Behavior tends to follow the status quo unless it is acted upon by a decrease in friction or increase in fuel.
- Behavior (B) is a function of the person (P) and their environment (E), or B=f(P,E).
- For every decision made, there are tradeoffs and the potential for unintended consequences.
Although human behavior is complicated, Holzwarth suggested that these laws can at least capture very general behavioral tendencies.
And just as Newton’s Laws describe the motion of physical objects, these Laws of Human Behavior aim to provide a general model for how humans behave. People tend to stick to the status quo unless the forces of friction or fuel push us off of our path; behavior is a function of the person and their environment; every decision includes tradeoffs and the potential for unintended consequences.
– Aline Holzwarth
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
El Dr. Sekoul Krastev es científico especializado en decisiones y cofundador de The Decision Lab, una de las principales consultoras de ciencias del comportamiento del mundo. Su equipo trabaja con grandes organizaciones -empresas de la lista Fortune 500, gobiernos, fundaciones y multinacionales- para aplicar la ciencia del comportamiento y la teoría de la decisión al bien social. Es doctor en neurociencia por la Universidad McGill y actualmente es profesor visitante en la Universidad de Nueva York. Su trabajo se ha publicado en revistas académicas, así como en The New York Times, Forbes y Bloomberg. También es autor de Intention (Wiley, 2024), un bestseller sobre la ciencia de la agencia humana. Antes de fundar The Decision Lab, trabajó en Boston Consulting Group y Google.
