Many challenges the world faces arise from broken behavioral systems: systems with multiple levels of interacting actors in which people make the best choices they can given their limitations. However, by doing so, they generate outcomes that no one actually wants.

In these systems, people are embedded in a context that shapes their behavior. Their actions then shape both how the system behaves and the very set of choices that the individuals within it face, often in non-obvious ways.

Once we start looking, it is not hard to find these broken behavioral systems: they arise in everything from fisheries management to racial wealth inequality to corrosive norms of behavior on social media.