I Made Myself Want it More, It Barely Worked.

In 2006, Thomas Webb and Paul Sheeran ran something different from a survey. They ran experiments. 47 of them. Instead of just measuring people's existing intentions and watching what happened, researchers actively intervened to make people's intentions stronger, clearer goals, more commitment, more resolve and then measured whether behaviour actually followed.

The intention manipulation worked. It worked well. Across the 47 studies, the average effect size on intention was d=0.66 a large effect, in research terms. These interventions genuinely changed how much people wanted to act.

Then they measured the behavior change that followed.

d=0.36 Small to medium, Less than half the size of the intention shift that caused it.

Sit with that for a second. This wasn't a case of intentions failing to form. Researchers successfully installed stronger intent in real people, under controlled conditions, and it still only weakly leaked into actual behavior.

That rules out the easiest explanation for the intention-action gap, the idea that "people just don't want things enough", and if you could only convince them to want it more, the behaviour would follow. The data says no. You can turn the wanting dial up considerably and the doing dial barely moves.

So if it's not the size of the intention, what's actually gating whether it becomes action? The honest answer is: something sits between the two, either friction, context, timing, environment or multiple and no amount of wanting harder gets around it. That gate is the actual thing worth engineering.

That's the specific problem Brick is built to sit inside of. Not the wanting. The gate.

Abdurrahman Ishaq Muhammad