About Us

About The Why We Project

Ask someone why they bought the thing, joined the group, opened the app again, and they will give you a reason. It will be sincere. It will usually be wrong.

That gap, between the reason we give and the reason that was actually operating, is what this publication is about.

Why we do what we do

The Why We Project asks one question and asks it nine ways. Why we look. Why we engage. Why we act. Why we belong. Why we come back. Why we care. Why we exist and endure. Why we move. Why we crave.

Behind each of those is a century of research that most people have never had put to them in plain language: attention, motivation, attachment, habit, meaning, appetite. The findings are sitting in journals and in books that a few hundred thousand people have read. We think they belong to everyone who has ever wondered why they did something they did not plan to do.

We started with the commercial version of the question, because that is where the founder's career had been. Marketers, product managers and designers spend their working lives trying to move people, and the good ones know that the honest answer to "why did this work" is more interesting than the slide that claimed credit for it. The question turned out not to stop at the checkout. The same machinery that gets someone to buy is the machinery that gets them to the gym, or keeps them from it, or holds a friendship together.

How we try to understand it

We read. Properly, from the source, with the page open. Every article here is built from the primary research and from the books that first put it into the world, and we say which. When we report a number, we say what it means in ordinary words and keep the figure in the sources list for anyone who wants to check.

We say who said it, and whether anyone checked. A lot of what passes for psychology in public is a finding from one study, reported once, and repeated for twenty years. Some of it held up. Some of it did not. Every claim on this site carries its origin and its evidence status, and when a famous result has not survived being tested again, we say so rather than quietly leaving it out.

When two serious people disagree, we keep both of them. Each position gets set out in its strongest form, as its holder would put it, and then we say where we land and when we decided. A reader who cannot find enough here to disagree with us has not been given enough.

We name the limits. What a study can and cannot tell you sits in the open, not in a footnote. This costs us cleaner conclusions. We think it buys something more valuable.

And we write it to be read. The findings are hard enough without the prose adding to it. Simpler to follow, with nothing taken out.

Who we are

The Why We Project is written by a small team, each with a background in the field they cover. The founder spent fifteen years in consumer psychology and product across Europe, Africa, the Gulf and Asia, and built this publication out of the reading system he kept for himself. The pillars covering mind, body and food are written or reviewed by people trained in clinical psychology, exercise science and nutrition, and articles in those areas say who wrote them and who checked them.

We are not a clinic and nothing here is advice for your particular situation. We are a publication that takes the research seriously enough to tell you what it actually says.

Where we stand

Opinionated, and open about it. Sourced, and open about that too. Corrected in public when we get something wrong.

If you have read this far, you probably have your own version of the question. That is who this is for.