This paper offers a refreshed and expanded view of how behavioural science can support sustainable development. It presents a comprehensive, evidence-based resource designed to help countries integrate behavioural insights into their policies and programmes for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At the heart of the paper is a global database of 201 behavioural and nudge interventions, each aligned with one or more of the 17 SDGs. You can explore the full database here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tWy0X2Aq08kIUNYG-Cw5FQsvakdKSyKGKen7_hc2F48/edit?gid=1627241714#gid=1627241714

A psychiatrist couldn’t keep up with the demand for mental health care. So he hired grandmothers. He asked himself a simple question: who do people already trust with their problems? The majority said it was grandmothers. They are wise, respected and embedded in the community. He trained them in basic therapy for common mental health disorders and gave them benches in public spaces. The results speak for themselves : → Thousands sought support → Depression symptoms dropped → A randomised trial showed it worked better than standard primary care

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK3ElXX5S6E

The Cultural Currents Institute's proprietary SPREAD framework is ideal for testing and refining messages and strategies at the conceptual phase, diagnosing and troubleshooting campaigns that may be struggling after launch, and accelerating efforts that have already found some success. The core concepts of the framework are introduced here. Simple to Remember and Share Plausible to its Intended Audience Relatable to Common Lived Experience Emotional and Evocative Actionable With Clear Steps Duplicable With Low Effort and High Fidelity

What works better is grouping the reasons someone struggles with a service, rather than segmenting the people who experience those struggles. This is the basis of the Universal Barriers to Access approach. Over time, the Government Digital Service received thousands of calls from people unable to use parts of its services. By analysing this data, we identified 11 common barriers—recurring patterns that explain why services fail for users, regardless of their background or situation.

Welcome to the Complex Systems Framework Collection, where you will find ways to consider the differences between simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. Whether you're a problem solver, leader, and/or learner, we hope you will find ideas here that resonate, challenge conventional wisdom, and push your thinking about complex problems in new directions.

Brian Cugelman

They collated 20 studies with 2,601 participants, studying the time it takes to turn new behaviours into automatic habits. ² The average time they reported? ➝ 106-154 days. With substantial variability, from 4-335 days. The time depended on factors like the: ↳ Type of habit ↳ Feelings about the habit ↳ Frequency performing the behaviour

drachten traffic experiment

Here, we develop a novel cognitive framework by organizing these interventions along six cognitive processes: attention, perception, memory, effort, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. In addition, we conduct a meta-analysis of field experiments (i.e. randomized controlled trials) that contained real behavioural measures (n = 184 papers, k = 184 observations, N = 2 245 373 participants) from 2008 to 2021 to examine the effect size of these interventions targeting each cognitive process. Our findings demonstrate that interventions changing effort are more effective than interventions changing intrinsic motivation, and nudge and sludge interventions had similar effect sizes.

An in-depth analysis of replies to COVID-19 vaccination outreach reveals thanks, angst — and much more.

The first objective was to provide an overview of all activities that were employed during the course of a research project to develop a relapse prevention intervention for interdisciplinary pain treatment programs. The second objective was to examine how co-design may contribute to stakeholder involvement, generation of relevant insights and ideas, and incorporation of stakeholder input into the intervention design.

Gamification services are hailed as effective tools for influencing users’ behaviours, increasing engagement, motivation, and enhancing learning. In the field of behaviour change, transformative outcomes have been reported for gamification services; with some conceptualisation undertaken regarding transformative gamification services. However, there is a lack of research on practical implementation of transformative gamification services. Also, previous studies have often isolated a single component of gamification and not discussed the synergistic effects and behavioural outcomes of the experiences that the combination of gamification elements can create. To bridge this gap, we provide an implementation framework for transformative gamification services. This is achieved by identifying different components of transformative gamification from a social marketing and transformative service research (TSR) lens and their behavioural outcomes. To do this, we delve into game design, gamification and behaviour change literature and suggest a practical implementation framework which incorporates users' perspectives in the form of transformative values, user engagement types (play typologies), and consumption/service encounter experiences. This research contributes to gamification theory and practice by furthering the understanding of transformative gamification services in social marketing and TSR. It also provides behaviour change practitioners with detailed steps for implementation of such services aiming to create positive behavioural changes.

Promoting agency – people's ability to form intentions and to act on them freely – must become a primary objective for Behavioural Public Policy (BPP). Contemporary BPPs do not directly pursue this objective, which is problematic for many reasons. From an ethical perspective, goals like personal autonomy and individual freedom cannot be realised without nurturing citizens’ agency. From an efficacy standpoint, BPPs that override agency – for example, by activating automatic psychological processes – leave citizens ‘in the dark’, incapable of internalising and owning the process of behaviour change. This may contribute to non-persistent treatment effects, compensatory negative spillovers or psychological reactance and backfiring effects. In this paper, we argue agency-enhancing BPPs can alleviate these ethical and efficacy limitations to longer-lasting and meaningful behaviour change. We set out philosophical arguments to help us understand and conceptualise agency. Then, we review three alternative agency-enhancing behavioural frameworks: (1) boosts to enhance people's competences to make better decisions; (2) debiasing to encourage people to reduce the tendency for automatic, impulsive responses; and (3) nudge+ to enable citizens to think alongside nudges and evaluate them transparently. Using a multi-dimensional framework, we highlight differences in their workings, which offer comparative insights and complementarities in their use. We discuss limitations of agency-enhancing BPPs and map out future research directions.

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.

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’

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.

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.

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

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.

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. Jobs to be Done

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. Jobs to be done

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.)