From NPR, this is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Here's a question we get asked all the time.

How do you change someone's behavior?

Now, awesome would it be if you, the victim, decided to not get upset?

Experts trying to change the way we live our lives.

The biggest single cause of global warming, along with deforestation, which is 20% of it,

is the burning of fossil fuels. Oil is a problem and coal is the most serious problem.

Presidents trying to reshape our culture.

For we have a choice in this country, we can accept a politics that breeds division,

or we can come together and say, not this time.

We like to think we change people's behavior through information,

through education, through persuasion.

Now, these things often don't work, but we keep doing them because we have an unshakable faith

in a core assumption about human nature.

If you want to shape how people behave, you must first change the way they think.

Today, we look at a very different approach.

One that will take us on a journey from the outskirts of Budapest in 1944,

to the hills of Rwanda a half century later.

This week on Hidden Brain, how to change behavior, it's not what you think.

When Irvin's style was a small child, his family had a living caretaker named Maria Gogan.

Irvin had his own name for her.

We call her March, which is an abbreviation of the Hungarian word Marchka, which means cat.

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