Question
What is Gibson affordances?
Quick Answer
Physical cues in your environment trigger more reliably than mental intentions.
Example: You decide to drink more water. You rely on remembering to do it — and by 3pm you've had one glass. Now place a full water bottle on your desk before you sit down each morning. You don't need to remember. The bottle is there. You drink. Anne Thorndike's 2012 cafeteria study at Massachusetts General Hospital found that simply placing water bottles in baskets near food stations — making water visible where people already stood — increased water sales by 25.8%. Nobody was told to drink more water. The environment said it for them.
This concept is part of Trigger Design in the How to Think curriculum.
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Go beyond the answer
This topic is part of Close Your Knowing-Doing Gap — a guided sequence of 19 lessons.
After completing this path you will understand why knowing what to do was never enough, have a trigger-based system that initiates action without willpower, know why self-discipline fails and system design succeeds, and experience the relief of closing the gap between your intentions and your behavior — because the system does what motivation couldn't.
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