To become a better catalyst for change, Berger suggests to: Find the gaps. Rather than push or persuade someone, highlight a gap between their attitudes and their actions, and then get them to persuade themselves. For example: If someone is reluctant to wear a mask at work, ask them if they would wear one if their child or elderly parent were in the office. Ask why that same care or concern isn't present with their colleagues? Provide a “menu” of choices. Rather than unilaterally force a single solution on others, give people the freedom and autonomy to choose from a few options. This is one way to reduce people’s gut resistance, and again, help them persuade themselves. Cut through perceived risks. If people feel like a new idea is controversial or risky, explain your personal experience as to why you think it is more relatable and less extreme than they think.

case study of anti-smoking program for kids that backfired

not really a lit review, but covers key behavior change concepts and how they can be applied to covid

The Patient Activation Measure is a valid, highly reliable, unidimensional, probabilistic Guttman‐like scale that reflects a developmental model of activation. Activation appears to involve four stages: (1) believing the patient role is important, (2) having the confidence and knowledge necessary to take action, (3) actually taking action to maintain and improve one's health, and (4) staying the course even under stress. The measure has good psychometric properties indicating that it can be used at the individual patient level to tailor intervention and assess changes. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-6773.2004.00269.x)

Built by and for foundations & nonprofit organizations supporting communities at local, regional, national and global scale.

This handbook has been compiled by Well Made Strategy (WMS) who have extensive professional experience developing impactful strategic communications across a range of sectors from security to financial inclusion, education, agriculture, health and governance. WMS helps individuals, organisations and networks harness the power of strategic communications to influence policy change, prepare for and anticipate crises, inform the national discourse, build will for social reform and nudge entire communities towards new ways of thinking and behaviours. We have developed this handbook to serve as a guide to strategic communications for those interested in using strategic communications but who may not have an in-depth understanding of the concept.

The purpose of this workbook is to provide a workspace for you to develop your own communications strategy by working through the various modules of the Strategic Communications for Social Change handbook. While the workbook is separate from the handbook, they are closely linked to each other.

Explore your policy problem from a behavioural perspective

It’s not that all change is bottom-up, but: long-lasting change usually is (here is why) it’s always worth asking yourself if what looks like a top-down change was initiated the bottom-up way. This phenomenon applies to many contexts: companies pivoting to what others (the bottom-up) proved working, managers promoting those employees who demonstrated deserving it, gatekeepers opening up once someone demonstrated having a (bottom-up) following. The top-down usually follows the bottom-up. More precisely, it goes as follows: The bottom-up initiates change, locally. If it sustains over time, the top-down formalizes it. The rest of the population adopts it, even if it lives far from who initiated point (1). The implication is: if you want change, do not live under the illusion that you need to wait for the top-down to give you the green light. The top-down will give you the green light once it is shown that your idea works (and it’s on you to show them).

To maximize the impact of Zika prevention programming efforts, a prioritization process for social and behavior change programming was developed based on a combination of research evidence and programmatic experience. Prioritized behaviors were: application of mosquito repellent, use of condoms, removing unintentional standing water, covering and scrubbing walls of water storage containers, seeking prenatal care, and seeking counseling on family planning if not planning to get pregnant.

Nudges have been critiqued for being too blunt of a tool. For instance, a retirement savings default may be helpful for a group of employees on average, but subgroups, say under-savers or over-savers, might be helped or harmed by this one-size-fits-all approach. As such, there have been calls to develop a more personalized approach to nudging (see here in our collection: “Imagining the Next Decade of Behavioral Science”). This paper outlines two dimensions that behavioral scientists could consider when designing personalized nudges: choice personalization and delivery personalization. Think of choice personalization as “personalization within nudges”—the method of nudge has been set (say, a default) but is tailored to specific individuals (different default leves of retirement contributions, for those over-savers and under-savers). Think of delivery personalization as “personalization as across nudges”—understanding the most effective method to nudge a certain individual. Personalizing nudges does come with data privacy and legal concerns, but these can be overcome, the paper argues.

Key Points: Behaviour modelling training (BMT) is a popular training intervention which focuses on changing behaviours on the job. BMT improves trainees’ knowledge, skills, and desired actions on the job You can design BMT to work even better, for example by describing both the “what” and the “why” of the new behaviors trainees learn

This website offers practical tools helping relief and development practitioners understand and tackle the barriers that prevent people from following the desired behaviours.

The Food Security and Nutrition Network Behavior Bank features results from Barrier Analysis and Doer/NonDoer Studies conducted by food security and other practitioners globally. (Click here for a description of Barrier Analysis.) You can browse the database by country, region, and behavior studied to look for results for a particular area/behavior, or to look for patterns of barrier and enablers for a particular behavior or set of behaviors.