soap-infused sticks of chalk

Well, if we want to sway other people to our “correct“ vision of things, we are most likely to do that by having a strong relationship with them. Ironically, it is through carefully and compassionately listening to others that we are more likely to sway their views.

Great examples of how behavioral insights have been applied to behavior change in India

2 excellent case studies

case studies

Nearly every major challenge the United States faces—from alleviating unemployment to protecting itself from terrorism—requires understanding the causes and consequences of people’s behavior. Even societal challenges that at first glance appear to be issues only of medicine or engineering or computer science have social and behavioral components. Having a fundamental understanding of how people and societies behave, why they respond the way they do, what they find important, what they believe or value, and what and how they think about others is critical for the country’s well-being in today’s shrinking global world. The diverse disciplines of the social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences ―anthropology, archaeology, demography, economics, geography, linguistics, neuroscience, political science, psychology, sociology, and statistics―all produce fundamental knowledge, methods, and tools that provide a greater understanding of people and how they live.

Discarding classical solutions such as information campaigns, it offers a much simpler alternative: make the healthy options more tempting. How? By changing their names. Several research teams in the US have tried this strategy in various school canteens and they found that making the names “seductive”, catchy or funny can induce children to eat healthier.

In this paper, we discussed multiple ways how behavior change interventions can backfire. We provided a framework to help facilitate the discussion of this topic, and created tools to aid academics in the study of this realm, and support practitioners to remain mindful of the potential risks.

Directing drivers to “think of themselves” successfully led to far more drivers switching off their idling engines: More drivers switched off their engines in the private self-focused condition (51%) compared with the baseline condition (20%). “The odds ratios revealed that drivers were 1.83 times more likely to switch off their engines in the instructive watching eyes condition, and 4.82 times more likely in the private self-focus condition than in the baseline condition,” Meleady and colleagues write.

When the growth team took a step back, they realized it wasn’t enough to trigger just any notification. They needed to “show the right things to users at the right time — creating ‘aha moments’” where the user experienced the product’s core value. Rather than indiscriminately bombard the user with notifications, they concluded that they needed to be “really thoughtful about which messages to send which users” and focus “more of [their] resources on engaging users that were likely to churn.” Taking a page from Facebook, here are 5 kinds of engagement messages that work to activate, retain, and grow customers. Highly personal and targeted, these emails show off your product’s core value, ferry your users to their “aha moments”, and get people engaging with your product and brand again and again.

Behavioral Design Teams: A Model for Integrating Behavioral Design in City Government - open source playbook

The doors will soon open at Saskatchewan's first children's hospital, but some psychiatrists say the building is rife with safety and suicide risks.

Two examples of campaigns tackling misbeliefs - one addressing misperceptions of the likelihood of an event (girls contracting HIV in South Africa) and one addressing misperceptions of social norms (women working outside the home in Saudi Arabia):

In this randomized clinical trial of 602 overweight and obese adults from 40 states across the United States, gamification interventions with support, collaboration, and competition significantly increased physical activity compared with the control group during the 24-week intervention. The competition arm had the greatest increase in physical activity from baseline during the intervention; during the 12-week follow-up, physical activity was lower in all arms, but remained significantly greater in the competition arm than in the control arm.

A habit is not necessarily a single action. Many behaviors that you may want to turn into habits have sub-actions involved in either instigating or executing the behavior. So there are a number of possible entry points to intervene to support the development of that habit.

However, when the ZCCP video was combined with the social nudge : “Many people in your community have also watched this video,’’ the video shifted the perception of social norms towards less acceptance of GBV i.e. people were more likely to believe that their community found GBV unacceptable and more likely to think that their community thought GBV was a serious issue.

Messages focused on the economic costs or negative impacts to individuals were more effective than motivational messaging in gaining support from the public and reducing the psychological distance of an environmental issue.

1. Nudges do not respect freedom. 2. Nudges are based on excessive trust in government. 3. Nudges cannot achieve a whole lot.

There are 6 implications I've drawn from this initial analysis: Authentic engagement - embed authentic engagement and feedback processes all through the campaign development journey Behaviour change levers audit - identify and review all of the behaviour change levers, not just those where communications can make a difference Medium, message, messenger - critically analyse the relationship between these for each creative execution Authentic inclusion - ensure diversity is embedded into your teams and planning processes and that this inclusion is authentic and supportive The constraints of comms - recognise circumstances where communications are not the most effective behaviour change and/or confidence building lever Remember that communications don't take place in a vacuum - reflect on how communications can have an impact on the system outside of comms touchpoints

The small changes are often the ones that make a difference. Our guide presents effective, light-touch strategies to help your students get to and through college.

To do so, we drew on a theoretical framework which highlights that defaults operate through three channels: first, defaults work because they reflect an implicit endorsement from the choice architect—your company’s HR department, your city’s policy office, your credit card company, your child’s school. Second, defaults work because staying with the defaulted choice is easier than switching away from it. Third, defaults work because they endow decision makers with an option, meaning they’re less likely to want to give it up, now that it’s theirs. As a result, we hypothesized that default designs that trigger more of these channels (also called the three Es: endorsement, ease, and endowment) would be more effective. In our analysis, we find partial support for this idea. That is, we find that studies that were designed to trigger endorsement (defaults that are seen as conveying what the choice architect thinks the decision maker should do) or endowment (defaults that are seen as reflecting the status quo) were more likely to be effective. In addition, we find that defaults in consumer domains tend to be more effective, and that defaults in pro-environmental domains (such as green energy defaults) tend to be less effective.

reactance

This commentary argues that social marketing and the application of behavioural sciences to policy constitute two converging paths towards better policies. It highlights points of convergence and divergence between both disciplines and the potential benefits of further embedding social marketing principles and methods within the recent trend of applying behavioural sciences to policy.

A free online course on behavioural insights for public policy from the Behavioral Economics Team of the Australian government

4 types of nudges/sludges and characters to represent them

demand for depression drugs is also witnessing a decline as end-users have more coping options at their disposal. The huge popularity of mental health apps, such as Headspace, Calm, Moodnotes, Pacifica, and SuperBetter has given patients more control over how they manage depression.

Common sense suggests that people struggling to achieve their goals benefit from receiving motivational advice. What if the reverse is true? In a preregistered field experiment, we tested whether giving motivational advice raises academic achievement for the advisor. We randomly assigned n = 1,982 high school students to a treatment condition, in which they gave motivational advice (e.g., how to stop procrastinating) to younger students, or to a control condition. Advice givers earned higher report card grades in both math and a self-selected target class over an academic quarter. This psychologically wise advice-giving nudge, which has relevance for policy and practice, suggests a valuable approach to improving achievement: one that puts people in a position to give.

Yet the characteristics of online environments – the deliberate design and the ability to generate enormous quantities of data about how we behave, who we interact with and the choices we make, coupled with the potential for mass experimentation – can also leave consumers open to harm and manipulation. Many of the failures and distortions in online markets are behavioural in nature, from the deep information asymmetries that arise as a result of consumers being inattentive to online privacy notices to the erosion of civility on online platforms. This paper considers how governments, regulators and at least some businesses might seek to harness our deepening understanding of human behaviour to address these failures, and to shape and guide the evolution of digital markets and online environments that really do work for individuals and communities.