Chapter 15. From reader to neighbor
Every number in the book has a source. To keep the book short, the notes live here instead of in print. Each source is listed with the section of the book it supports and the words it backs up, in the order they appear in the chapter. Web addresses are links; a page may have moved since the date shown.
Ten sessions, at your own pace: “you remember what you pull back out of your head far better”
Roediger and Karpicke, “Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention,” Psychological Science, 2006.
Ten sessions, at your own pace: “The effect was medium to large across 94 studies of the implementation intentions”
Gollwitzer, “Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans,” American Psychologist 54, no. 7 (1999): 493-503; Gollwitzer and Sheeran, “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38 (2006): 69-119. The meta-analysis covers 94 independent tests with 8,461 participants and reports an effect of medium-to-large size (d = .65).
Be the peer, not the preacher: “What moved them a lot was the people around you” · Worth repeating: “When a person’s spouse quit smoking, that person’s own odds of smoking fell”
Christakis and Fowler, “The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network,” New England Journal of Medicine 358, no. 21 (2008): 2249-2258. In the Framingham Heart Study network of 12,067 people followed from 1971 to 2003, a spouse quitting reduced a person’s chances of smoking by 67%, a friend quitting by 36%, and a coworker at a small firm quitting by 34%.
Be the peer, not the preacher: “The Ottawa Charter, the founding document of modern health promotion”
World Health Organization, Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, 1986.
Be the peer, not the preacher: “Albert Bandura showed in the 1960s and 1970s that people learn”
Bandura, Social Learning Theory, Prentice-Hall, 1977.
Be the peer, not the preacher: “found that almost nobody adopts a new practice because an expert told them”
Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th edition, Free Press, 2003 (first edition 1962).
Be the peer, not the preacher: “people follow what he called descriptive norms, meaning what the people around them”
Cialdini, Reno and Kallgren, “A Focus Theory of Normative Conduct,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990.
What not to do: “lost more to cryptocurrency fraud than any other age group in 2025”
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report (April 2026), ic3.gov, retrieved September 2026. Reported cryptocurrency-related losses were $11.4 billion across all ages, of which $4.35 billion came from complainants aged 60 and over, the largest amount of any age group; total reported internet-crime losses were $20.9 billion.
Be the peer, not the preacher
Ryan and Gross, “The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities,” Rural Sociology 8, no. 1 (March 1943): 15-24. Nearly half of the farmers (49%) named salesmen as their first source of information, but neighbors were the source most often credited with the decision to adopt (45.5%, against 32% for salesmen), and the lag between first hearing and first use was roughly five years.
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