Chapter 7: Understanding Human Behavior in Designing Building-Scale Sustainable Ecosystems

Because of evolutionary pressures, humans have developed certain traits that are expressed in the makeup of the social, cultural, political, and economic systems in which they participate. These traits have been analyzed and abstracted in theories as general as Maslow's hierarchy of needs [1] and as specific as Thaler et al.'s theory of "nudge" [2]. All of such theories recognize, either explicitly or implicitly, the power of incentives in understanding human behavior. When misguided incentives are combined with various kinds of human cognitive biases, it is plausible that the resulting systems have suboptimal performance.