This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Here's a question we get asked all the time.
How do you change someone's behavior?
How awesome would it be if you, the victim, decided to not get upset?
Experts trying to change the way we live our lives.
The biggest single cause of global warming.
Along with deforestation, which is 20% of it, is the burning of fossil fuels.
Oil is a problem and coal is the most serious problem.
Presidents trying to reshape our culture for we have a choice in this country.
We can accept a politics that breeds division or we can come together and say, not this time.
We like to think we change peoples behavior through information, through education, through persuasion.
Now these things often dont work, but we keep doing them because we have an unshakable faith in a core assumption about human nature.
If you want to shape how people behave, you must first change the way they think.
Today we look at a very different approach, one that will take us on a journey from the outskirts of Budapest in 1944 to the hills of Rwanda a half century later.
This week on hidden brain how to change behavior it's not what you think.
When Erwin Staub was a small child, his family had a live in caretaker named Maria Gogan.
Irwin had his own name for her.
We called her mach, which is an abbreviation of the hungarian word muchka, which means cat.
Thats because much told Erwin and his sister bedtime stories.