What is diffusion of innovations behavior?

Diffusion of innovations behavior is a concept in personal epistemology: When a small experiment works expand it carefully to a larger scale.

Example: You ran a two-week experiment: blocking social media for the first ninety minutes of your workday. The results were clear — you completed deep work tasks 40 percent faster and reported higher satisfaction in your evening journal. Now you want to expand it to the entire morning, every day, permanently. If you flip the switch all at once, you lose the flexibility that made the experiment work. Instead, you extend in stages: first, ninety minutes becomes two hours for one week. Then you add Saturdays. Then you test a full morning block on weekdays. At each stage, you observe whether the gains hold or whether new friction emerges. By the time you reach the full-morning, every-day version three weeks later, you have evidence at every scale — not just hope extrapolated from the original pilot.

This concept is part of Phase 56 (Behavioral Experimentation) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for behavioral experimentation.