How systems shape human decisions
A personal research lab about how the world works.This blog explores how human decisions emerge within larger systems. Across markets, technology, and society, I’m interested in the structures that shape behavior: incentives, narratives, and networks of influence. Most essays start with a simple observation: a strange market behavior, a shift in an industry, or a pattern in how people make choices. From there, I try to understand the system behind it.
About
HI, I’M TRINH!
I’m interested in how people make decisions and how the systems around them shape those decisions.
My academic background is in British and American literature, where I first became fascinated by how language shapes belief and how culture frames perception. That turned out to be a useful starting point for everything that came after: working across markets and organizations exposed me to the same question at a different layer: how incentives, information, and environments influence real-world behavior.
Over time, I began to see markets, organizations, and even industries as decision systems. People rarely act in isolation. Their choices emerge from networks of influence, incentives, and narratives, and the structures that produce those choices are usually more interesting than the choices themselves.
This is where I think through those structures. Across business, technology, and society. Less interested in what happened than in why, and what that reveals about how things actually work