Loose Ends: Static Friction, Kinetic Friction, and Healthy Habits
Loose Ends is a series of random thoughts that I’ve concocted in the shower, during gym sessions, or on long drives. These are roughly crafted posts that explore those thoughts. The posts are often in an unfinished state, but I will occasionally go back to work on completing previous posts.
I am currently a tutor for the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) and have had the fortunate goal of revisiting ideas of physics. In this edition of Loose Ends, we’ll take a look at the relationship between behavior and the physics of friction.
If you’ve ever had to endure a course of college physics, you may have been introduced to the idea of static friction (coefficient μs) and kinetic friction (coefficient μk).
Static friction is the coefficient that measures how hard it is to move an object along its surface. Kinetic friction is the coefficient how hard it is to keep that object in motion once it is no longer stationary. These are resistive forces.
If we take a look at the table below, μs > μk. It’s harder to get things started than to keep things in motion. These are the ideas of inertia and momentum, and they are not restricted to physical phenomena, they can be applied to behavior as well.
Health and Frictionless Surfaces:
If we take a look at the table below, we can see that different materials have different coefficients of friction on different surfaces.
But if we apply this to behavior, we intuitively know that different people in different life contexts have different “coefficients” when it comes to making positive and healthier decisions for themselves. The easiest and most classic example is to contrast a child born to a wealthy and supportive family compared to a child born to poverty and a disrupted support structure. The latter would likely have more friction.
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So when we think about behavior, maybe a good question to ask is, “Where’s the friction?”
While this is an imperfect analogy, maybe this can lead to ideas about where we should allocate our efforts when it comes to reducing the friction to healthier lifestyles and building healthier infrastructures for our communities.
In search of a solution, I started reading this book called Nudge, written by Nobel Laureate in Economics, Robert Thaler. It proposes the idea that “nudges,” not just incentives, should be considered when it comes to helping people make better choices for themselves. In other words, by making it easier to make healthy options the default choice for the masses, there is a reduction in friction to healthier outcomes.
See you in the next post,
Genesis Dayrit
