Results indicated that emotional shift messages generated more talk than single-valence messages because they elicited greater emotional intensity and deeper message processing.

Out of the 93 behavior change techniques that can be used, on average only 7 were chosen, and the most common were related to: 1. Feedback on behavior 2. Goal setting 3. Action planning As the study says: “within the “Goals and Planning” BCT group, only 3 out of 9 BCTs were utilized.

Start with the Quick 2+1™ to find your answer. The next phase is to trust your intuition to Label™ and Mirror™ the circumstances or dynamics that may have led to the confrontation. Then use a little Dynamic Silence™ to allow room for a response from the other side. Once they respond, use mirrors and labels to encourage them to keep talking and gather the information you need to get to the heart of the matter.

Do you wonder why people are so inconsistent? Why people often seem to contradict themselves? Why they believe things they know aren't true? Why they say “Don't do X and then do that very thing? Robert Kurzban explains why. The reason is that the human mind is modular, made up of a large number of parts with different functions. Sometimes these parts conflict with one another.

The new toolkit crosses local, central and international government action. It has many of the elements of the previous framework but also covers new ground. The most obvious is that we have changed the horizontal axis to better reflect the way government works in practice. This has meant including a number of new areas namely, influencing, engaging, designing, developing, resourcing, delivering and controlling (or managing). The vertical axis still follows the same logic from ‘softer’ more collaborative power at the top, down to more formal government power at the bottom of the axis. The update includes many familiar things from nudging behaviour to convening power and also adds new areas like deliberative approaches such as citizen juries. This is the framework for Policy Lab's new Government as a System toolkit. The new Government as a System toolkit framework. When looking across the whole system, it now has 56 distinct actions. Of course this isn’t an exhaustive set of options, you could create more and more detail as there is always more complexity and nuance that can be found in government. Importantly, we want policymakers to be considering how multiple levers are used together to address complex problems.

Over the past decade, behavioural scientists have identified five different holistic effects which can all impact on the overall effectiveness of a behaviour change intervention. Some of these effects or concepts can be positive, whereas others may end up neutralising the effect of any nudge, or worse, having a negative impact: Licensing effects Compensating effects Positive spillover effects Displacement effects Systemic effects or what we are calling ‘nudge fatigue’

In the first in his series of columns Ogilvy UK's head of strategy argues that accommodating behaviour - rather than adapting it - might be key to its change

Scientific evidence regularly guides policy decisions1, with behavioural science increasingly part of this process2. In April 2020, an influential paper3 proposed 19 policy recommendations (‘claims’) detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandemic-related research articles that empirically investigated those claims. We report the scale of evidence and whether evidence supports them to indicate applicability for policymaking. Two independent teams, involving 72 reviewers, found evidence for 18 of 19 claims, with both teams finding evidence supporting 16 (89%) of those 18 claims. The strongest evidence supported claims that anticipated culture, polarization and misinformation would be associated with policy effectiveness. Claims suggesting trusted leaders and positive social norms increased adherence to behavioural interventions also had strong empirical support, as did appealing to social consensus or bipartisan agreement. Targeted language in messaging yielded mixed effects and there were no effects for highlighting individual benefits or protecting others. No available evidence existed to assess any distinct differences in effects between using the terms ‘physical distancing’ and ‘social distancing’. Analysis of 463 papers containing data showed generally large samples; 418 involved human participants with a mean of 16,848 (median of 1,699). That statistical power underscored improved suitability of behavioural science research for informing policy decisions. Furthermore, by implementing a standardized approach to evidence selection and synthesis, we amplify broader implications for advancing scientific evidence in policy formulation and prioritization.

Thinking Styles are the archetypes that you would base characters on, like characters in TV episodes. (Try writing your scenarios like TV episodes, with constant characters.) Characters think, react, and made decisions based on their thinking style archetype. BUT they also switch thinking styles depending on context. For example, if you take a flight as a single traveler versus bringing a young child along–you’ll probably change your thinking style for that flight, including getting to the gate, boarding, and deplaning.

Free Behavior Design, Innovation and Change Tools These frameworks started out as internal tools we would use on client projects at Aim For Behavior, that would help us save time and create better outcomes for the customers and the companies we were working with. We are always adding more frameworks or iterating the current ones based on the feedback.

“We tested the effectiveness of different messages aimed at addressing climate change and created a tool that can be deployed by both lawmakers and practitioners to generate support for climate policy or to encourage action,” says Madalina Vlasceanu, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the paper’s lead author. The tool, which the researchers describe as a “Climate Intervention Webapp,” takes into account an array of targeted audiences in the studied countries, ranging from nationality and political ideology to age, gender, education, and income level. “To maximize their impact, policymakers and advocates can assess which messaging is most promising for their publics,” adds paper author Kimberly Doell, a senior scientist at the University of Vienna who led the project with Vlasceanu. Article: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cr5at Tool: https://climate-interventions.shinyapps.io/climate-interventions/

From a process perspective, our task then becomes figuring out the optimal behavioral flow that reduces the friction between intentions and desired behaviors and stimulates progression through the journey – assuming at least a moderate interest in what is being offered by the organization.

The fact of the matter is that each market/user group has its own particular set of situational and psychological differences that determine which behaviors will be adopted and which will never even be attempted. The job of every product team, whether they know it or not, is to make it as easy and delightful as possible for their target market/user group to perform a behavior that they find doable, useful, compelling, and enjoyable that also leads to an important business outcome for the company. If any of these things are missing, there is no Behavior Market Fit and the project and any associated products will be a failure.

FDA/Rescue

The motivation index was informed by the FBM, which characterizes motivation as three sets of opposing constructs—acceptance/rejection, hope/fear, and pleasure/pain [14]. Applying the FBM, we coded and analyzed responses from the key informant interviews conducted in Yopougon Est. The results of this analysis were used to develop 12 items that were aligned with each FBM motivation construct.

Resources to help you address frictions in your government services, improving customer experience.

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

Our results show that a decadeslong effort to educate the U.S. public about recycling has succeeded in some ways but failed in others. These efforts have made recycling an option that consumers see as important – but to the detriment of more sustainable options. And it has not made people more effective recyclers.

“We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model.” So said Jason Collins in a recent blog, perhaps somewhat provocatively likening the use of biases as akin to the activity of ancient astronomers who were required to compile an exhaustive number of deviations to retain the broken model of the universe revolving around the earth. Collins challenge is whether the model at the heart of behavioural science is similarly broken.

Nudging provides a way to gently influence people to change behavior towards a desired goal, e.g., by moving towards a healthier or more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Personalized and context-aware digital nudging (named smart nudging) can be a powerful tool for efficient nudging by tailoring nudges to the current situation of each individual user. However, designing smart nudges is challenging, as different users may need different supports to improve their behavior. Determining the next nudge for a specific user must be done based on the user’s current situation, abilities, and potential for improvement. In this paper, we focus on the challenge of designing the next nudge by presenting a novel classification of nudges that distinguishes between (i) nudges that are impossible for the user to follow, (ii) nudges that are unlikely to be followed, and (iii) probable nudges that the user can follow. The classification is tailored to individual users based on user profiles, current situations, and knowledge of previous behaviors. This paper describes steps in the nudge design process and a novel set of principles for designing smart nudges.

If you have ever been tasked with influencing a behaviour, you will know that it is critical to understand that behaviour in context. You need to understand the issues faced by the people affected. At BIT, we refer to the process of understanding behaviour in context as Exploring. Exploring is about discovering what people do and crucially why.

If we are to use behavioural science as a lens to understand behaviour, we need to make sure that our lens is not always ‘zoomed in’ on the individual and their immediate situation but that we also ‘zoom out,’ so that we can see the wider social, cultural, economic and political environment. When we do this, we can see more clearly how our responses and behaviours are not only the result of our individual psychology but are also socially, economically and historically situated. There is a nuanced balancing act between the individual and these wider ways in which our behaviour is shaped that will inevitably be a source of debate and disagreement.

Below, I’ll break down the three key steps to creating a compelling pitch for behavioral science. A bonus: you can put it all together in one minute or less to make a short—and sweet—sell on our amazing field.

Draft your emotional Before/During/After for each moment. Challenge yourself to superforecast how you think people will feel at each moment. Design, adjust, re-adjust.

The JTBD Canvas 2.0 is a tool to help you scope out your JTBD landscape prior to conducting field research. It frames your field of inquiry and scopes of your innovation effort.

In 2022, Nick Chater and George Loewenstein published a pre-print called ‘The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray’. The paper argues that “behavioral scientists“ have focused too much on policy ideas that aim to shape individual behavior (the “i-frame“), rather than the systems in which people behave (the “s-frame“) and therefore they “may have unwittingly promoted the interests of the opponents of systemic change”. I greatly respect the authors of this article and agree with their ultimate goal of applying behavioral science to public policy more effectively. However, I find this paper to be deeply flawed and ultimately self-defeating. My concerns come in three categories.

The toolkit presented here guides the policy maker through a methodology that looks at Behaviours, Analysis, Strategies, Interventions, and Change (abbreviated “BASIC”). It starts with a BASIC guide that serves as an indispensable and practical introduction to the BASIC manual.

Personas are a widely used tool to keep real users in mind, while avoiding stereotypical thinking in the design process. Yet, creating personas can be challenging. Starting from Cooper's approach for constructing personas, this paper details how behavioral theory can contribute substantially to the development of personas. We describe a case study in which Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is used to develop five distinctive personas for the design of a digital coach for sustainable weight loss. We show how behavioral theories such as SDT can help to understand what genuinely drives and motivates users to sustainably change their behavior. In our study, we used SDT to prepare and analyze interviews with envisioned users of the coach and to create complex, yet engaging and highly realistic personas that make users' basic psychological needs explicit. The paper ends with a critical reflection on the use of behavioral theories to create personas, discussing both challenges and strengths.

To do so, we propose a framework, which rearranges the 17 SDGs into five main categories to which concepts from behavioural and social scientists can relate: wellbeing, inclusivity, sufficiency, empowerment, and resilience (WISER; panel). The WISER framework can enable behavioural scientists to both design their interventions in a way that encompasses several SDGs, and to more clearly report and review how their interventions contribute to behavioural change towards SDGs, thus enhancing progress towards planetary health

But this deluge of information — in which you are naturally very invested — can also prove overwhelming and unhelpful. We’re big fans of brands like WHOOP and Oura, and regularly encourage readers to dig through Apple’s Health app…but you need to be honest with yourself. If fitness tracking is psychologically increasing your feelings of inadequacy and physically increasing your perception of pain, it’s not worth it. At the least, it’s going to torpedo your performance (at work, in workouts, etc.)

Deliberate ignorance is a potential barrier for information interventions aiming to reduce meat consumption and needs to be considered in future interventions and research. Self-efficacy exercises are a promising approach to reduce deliberate ignorance and should be further explored.

An interactive tool to help you take a behaviourally informed approach when designing your communications