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What did patients text us when we didn’t ask them to tell us anything?
An in-depth analysis of replies to COVID-19 vaccination outreach reveals thanks, angst — and much more.
The art of reverse psychology: How an understanding of reactance can help guide better marketing :: Social Change
Picking the “right“ message - Dr. Kate Wolin’s Substack
This highlights some really important things to consider in creating behavior change interventions - there isn't one “user journey“ - as Amy said many times, personalization will matter (and we can have a whole other conversation on what personalization means). There may be a “dose“ effect for some people where they need to accumulate a certain understanding before any message works and it is more about the dose than the personalization (or not) of the most proximal message.
Anticipated Regret & Changing Health Behavior Now | Lirio
Anticipated regret can indeed be a powerful motivator. When you think about what you don’t want in the future—and the picture in your mind is unpleasant enough—it can influence the decisions you make right now. While anticipated regret sometimes comes across as fearmongering, it can be done more artfully. In behavior change communications, we can apply the right dose of this strategy to prompt a person to action.
Emotional Shifts in Health Messages as a Strategy for Generating Talk and Behavior Change: Health Communication: Vol 0, No 0 - Get Access
Results indicated that emotional shift messages generated more talk than single-valence messages because they elicited greater emotional intensity and deeper message processing.
The Influence of Celebrities and Religious Leaders in Addressing Rumours on Social Media | SpringerLink
New Psychology Study Unearths Ways to Bolster Global Climate Awareness and Climate Action
“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/
Influencers 101: Best Practices and Practical Approaches for Public Health Campaigns Lessons learned from tobacco prevention campaigns
Repeating Things Makes Them Seem True, Sort Of | Psychology Today
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds | The New Yorker
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.
Deliberate ignorance—a barrier for information interventions targeting reduced meat consumption?: Psychology & Health: Vol 0, No 0
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.
Developing Behaviourally Informed Communications - World Health Organization Collaborating Centre On Investment for Health and Well-being
An interactive tool to help you take a behaviourally informed approach when designing your communications
Frontiers | Emotional responses to climate change information and their effects on policy support
Introduction: As emotions are strong predictors of climate policy support, we examined multiple discrete emotions that people experience in reaction to various types of information about climate change: its causes, the scientific consensus, its impacts, and solutions. Specifically, we assessed the relationships between four types of messages and five discrete emotions (guilt, anger, hope, fear, and sadness), testing whether these emotions mediate the impacts of information on support for climate policy. Methods: An online experiment exposed participants (N = 3,023) to one of four informational messages, assessing participants' emotional reactions to the message and their support for climate change mitigation policies as compared to a no-message control group. Results: Each message, except the consensus message, enhanced the feeling of one or more emotions, and all of the emotions, except guilt, were positively associated with policy support. Two of the messages had positive indirect effects on policy support: the impacts message increased sadness, which in turn increased policy support, and the solutions message increased hope, which increased policy support. However, the solutions message also reduced every emotion except hope, while the impacts, causes, and consensus messages each suppressed hope. Discussion: These findings indicate that climate information influences multiple emotions simultaneously and that the aroused emotions may conflict with one another in terms of fostering support for climate change mitigation policies. To avoid simultaneously arousing a positive motivator while depressing another, message designers should focus on developing content that engages audiences across multiple emotional fronts.
It’s Time to Abandon “Target Audiences” | LinkedIn
One language shift that can help is moving from “audiences” to “actors.”
The secret tricks hidden inside restaurant menus - BBC Future
Norm-Nudging: Harnessing Social Expectations for Behavior Change by Cristina Bicchieri, Eugen Dimant :: SSRN
Predicting which type of push notification content motivates users to engage in a self-monitoring app - PMC
Adherence Canvas - Improve adherence & behaviour change in health.
Improve Adherence to Health Tech. Solutions The Adherence Canvas is a tool to guide and measure the consideration of adherence to improve it during the design and development of medical technology.
Changing minds about changing behaviour: Obesity in focus
When it comes to reducing obesity, evidence shows that changing food environments is more effective than measures that try to educate or change the behaviour of individuals. The interventions that participants consider to be most acceptable are the same as those that they perceived to be most effective at tackling obesity. However, the interventions that were reported to be least effective and least acceptable — such as reducing portion sizes and the taxation of unhealthy foods — may actually have the greatest potential for promoting healthy eating at the population level. While we must be cautious with how we interpret correlations like this, it suggests that addressing the disconnect between the evidence base and public understanding may be a viable way of influencing public acceptability
Crisis communication: A behavioural approach - GCS
1. Introduction 6 1.1. Definitions 6 1.2. What is behaviour, and why does it matter in a crisis? 6 2. What will people do in a crisis? 7 2.1. What common assumptions are made about crisis behaviour? 7 2.2. How can we anticipate actual crisis behaviour? 9 2.3. How does trust in government, or lack of it, influence crisis behaviour? 11 3. How can communications encourage the right behaviours in a crisis? 12 3.1. How should we communicate in a crisis? 12 3.2. How should we communicate about threats and risks? 14 3.3. How can communications change public risk perception? 17 3.4. How can we make the most of the public’s assistance? 19 3.5. How can communications encourage compliance with guidance and regulations? 21 4. How can communications discourage harmful behaviour in a crisis? 23 4.1. How can we avoid negative backlash effects? 23 4.2. How can communications help maintain social order? 24 4.3. How can communications maintain trust in a crisis? 26 5. Case study: COVID-19 pandemic
How Humanizing Disease Could Be a New Public Health Tool
people are more likely to comply with health recommendations when diseases are anthropomorphized and given human-like traits, such as names, personalities, or jobs.
Risk & Uncertainty - Decisionmaking Matrix
56 Email Copywriting Tips For 2022
Text message “nudges” that initially increased Covid vaccine uptake were not effective later in pandemic – Research Digest
Does scaring people work when it comes to health messaging? A communication researcher explains how it's gone wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic
TheoryPicker
Which theory of behavior change can help you plan a health communication intervention for a large audience? There is no single right answer, but some theories will fit your needs better than others. The purpose of this tool is to rank-order some commonly used theories by their degree of fit with your behavior change challenge.
Artificially intelligent chatbots in digital mental health interventions: a review
Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change | WIRED UK
I sort of believe that - Frontline BeSci
There are surely many ways in which our beliefs can be quite nuanced. We examined the different ‘styles’ of belief we come up against in a variety of the work we do and observed a number of ways these styles appear: Suspension of disbelief: We know not to look too closely at something – we think that overall it is a good thing (e.g. recycling) but aware of possible discrepancies (e.g. being poorly disposed of) that may or may not lead us to question our positive beliefs. We are aware of the possible conflicts but this does not make our belief in the value of recycling any less valid. There are a great many beliefs that we have that could be challenged yet they serve us sufficiently well that we do not need to interrogate them too closely (political representation, eating meat) Inconsistent beliefs: Linked to this, we may hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. We may know that wild fires are a natural phenomenon that predates climate change; but also that the fires we see in many areas today are of a much greater intensity and frequency. Exactly which is responsible cannot really be picked out, we can only really see the patterns emerging at a more macro-level, so it is not unreasonably to either hold both as true for even consider that the fire you have experience is a normal wild fire. Off-loading beliefs to others: Much of the time our beliefs about how things work is not something that we each individually work out, but we rely on a community of knowledge to work on our behalf. How many of us can be sure that our beliefs are correct about how vaccines work or indeed even how a zipper work. If we are questioned, then we recognise that our belief about how something works is tenuous but we have a good enough sense of it that allows us to function. Unformed beliefs: Sometimes we have not quite worked out what our beliefs are about something, which means that we may well move about in those beliefs or in the strength to which we hold onto them. The vaccination example outlined earlier is a good case in point. Not sure fully believe it but ‘there is something in it’ beliefs: Recent work we have been doing on Conspiracy Theories suggests that people may consider something is believable (e.g. Princess Diana’s death in a car crash was not accidental) but at the same time, in a different question then say they ‘do not fully believe it but there is something in it’. So what might seem like a belief is actually something much more akin to a questioning stance.
Addressing Myths and Vaccine Hesitancy: A Randomized Trial | American Academy of Pediatrics
CONCLUSIONS Debunking strategies that repeat vaccination myths do not appear to be inferior to strategies that do not repeat myths.
Build Technology that Feels Like a Friend to Form a Habit | NirandFar
Opinion | Your Friend Doesn’t Want the Vaccine. What Do You Say? - The New York Times
chatbot conversational “game“
A systematic review of narrative interventions: Lessons for countering anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and misinformation - Aleksandra Lazić, Iris Žeželj, 2021
Getting Practical: Integrating Social Norms into SBC | Breakthrough ACTION and RESEARCH
OSF | The COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Handbook.pdf
Our project tracks behavioural science evidence and advice about COVID-19 vaccine uptake. The handbook is for journalists, doctors, nurses, policy makers, researchers, teachers, students, parents – in short, it’s for everyone who wants to know more: about the COVID-19 vaccines, how to talk to others about them, how to challenge misinformation about the vaccines. The handbook is self-contained but additionally provides access to a Wiki of more detailed information, found here: https://sks.to/c19vax.
Can Shocking Images Persuade Doubters of COVID's Dangers? - Scientific American
UK government messaging on Covid-19: Five principles and recommendations for a COVID communication reset | Independent SAGE
Five principles for an effective COVID-19 lexicon 1. Messaging never merely provides factual information – communication unavoidably conveys many assumptions (the subtext, indirect meanings, inferences, and implications). 2. Messaging should be lexically and grammatically precise and thus easy to enact and adhere to. 3. Messaging should be ‘irony-resistant’. 4. ‘Branding’ or sloganeering should not come at the expense of clarity and precision. 5. Messaging should be underpinned by evidence about what is effective.
This Is How To Change Someone’s Mind: 6 Secrets From Research - Barking Up The Wrong Tree
Again: you don’t convince people. People convince themselves. Studies done as far back as the 1940’s by Kurt Lewin showed that lectures about why people should change their behavior were effective a measly 3% of the time. But when people self-generated reasons for the same activity, behavior change occurred 37% of the time. People reject ideas they are given and act on ideas they feel they came up with themselves.
It’s how you say it: Systematic A/B testing of digital messaging cut hospital no-show rates
A checklist for prosocial messaging campaigns such as COVID-19 prevention appeals
How to win arguments and actually change someone’s mind
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.
Development and Testing of a Short Form of the Patient Activation Measure
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)
Crisis Communication Resource Guide: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Built by and for foundations & nonprofit organizations supporting communities at local, regional, national and global scale.
Spoon & Tamago on Twitter: “NHK conducted an experiment to see how germs spread at a cruise buffet. They applied fluorescent paint to the hands of 1 person and then had a group of 10 people dine. In 30 min the paint had transferred to every individual and
Playbook for Pandemic Response
Elspeth Kirkman on Twitter: “Hypothesis one: the idea of being identified as someone who doesn’t wash their hands is mortifying. We can use that for good. #COVID19 (Placement: outside door of individual toilet and sink cubicle) https://t.co/TlAmssLvwt“ /
Human-centred design in global health: A scoping review of applications and contexts
Behavioural and social sciences to enhance the efficacy of health promotion interventions: redesigning the role of professionals and people
applying behavioral science to health promotion
To veg or not to veg? The impact of framing on vegetarian food choice - ScienceDirect
We tested how reframing the name of the vegetarian food category shapes food choices. • Environmental, social, and neutral (vs. vegetarian) frames boosted vegetarian choice. • No consistent differences emerged among the three non-vegetarian frames. • We investigated the underlying psychological mechanisms behind the main effects.
Fear or Hope: Which Motivates More?
And as to the central question of using both fear and hope: “I think we're in a moment where fear is a stronger motivator than hope,“ Parfrey began. “I'm looking at the evidence. I'm looking at Greta Thunberg. There is a tinge of the apocalypse in her framing.“ But Parfrey was quick to add that fear, by itself, isn't the only button to press. “The data is clear on this,“ he said. “The more dire the messages sound, the more individuals will tuneout. And I say this with full-knowledge that the climate picture is dire. You have to be honest, you have to present the sobering information, yet we still have the choice before us to dramatically improve the situation or make it worse. The choice is still ours.“