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.

“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/

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.

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.

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.

One language shift that can help is moving from “audiences” to “actors.”

This article reviews 10 techniques used to identify opinion leaders to promote behavior change. Opinion leaders can act as gatekeepers for interventions, help change social norms, and accelerate behavior change. Few studies document the manner in which opinion leaders are identified, recruited, and trained to promote health. The authors categorize close to 200 studies that have studied or used opinion leaders to promote behavior change into 10 different methods. They present the advantages and disadvantages of the 10 opinion leader identification methods and provide sample instruments for each. Factors that might influence programs to select one or another method are then discussed, and the article closes with a discussion of combining and comparing methods.

Photos they want with advice they need More than half of Kiwis over 65 have encountered a scam in the last 12 months. Help keep your loved ones safe from scammers by creating a Screen Saver with handy banking safely tips for them. Take a photo of your kids holding a sign with one of our tips, and apply it to the wallpaper on their device so they have photos they want with advice they need. It’s a fun and effective way for you and your kids to fight scams together.

Behavioral research clearly shows that our preferences depend on the context in which we make decisions. It is, therefore, more important to understand how a situation affects (purchasing) decisions rather than how people with similar traits tend to behave.

An Inclusion Nudge is a design based on insights from behavioural and social sciences to steer the unconscious mind to change behaviour in direction of inclusiveness by targeting the behavioural drivers, judgment and choice processes, and perceptions.

The Saudi General Authority for Statistics is running an ad gently asking people to stop inviting census takers into their homes for coffee and meals.

In 2010, Colombia's defense minister contacted an ad agency to create an idea to demobilize FARC members, the oldest guerrilla army in Latin America. The agency, after spending over a year talking to nearly 100 of its members, learned two main things (1). -First, guerrilla members are ordinary men and women and not only guerrillas, a fact which is often forgotten after 60 years at war. -Secondly, they are more likely to demobilize during Christmas as it is a sensitive and emotional period. Based on these insights, they had a clever idea to put a Christmas tree in strategic walking paths in the middle of the jungle that would light up when someone passed by with a message promoting demobilization. The results? Three hundred thirty-one people who demobilized named this idea as one of the reasons to do so. Over the years, several campaigns from the same agency were quite successful, and overall, they were named in over 800 demobilizations. Causality, of course, cannot be established. Nevertheless, any measurable, non-violent efforts like this one are praised. Next time you think you have a difficult-to-reach customer, maybe think again!

You may be wondering: If users want personalization, then what’s the problem? The problem is that personalization is a bit like walking a tightrope. A very thin line separates the “good” kind of personalization from the creepy kind. “I like it because it’s so similar to me” can easily become “I don’t like it because it’s eerily similar to me.” “This is relevant to me and saves me time and effort” can easily become “The algorithm is stereotyping me and that’s not cool.” This switch from good to bad is where user psychology comes in. Understanding the real reason why personalization works can help us understand why it does not work sometimes.

Schwartz has spent much of his career emphasising the shared, universal nature of values and in one paper with Anat Bardi, he demonstrates that Benevolence, Universalism and Self-direction values are consistently rated most important to most people across different cultures. The answers he has just given map pretty neatly onto Self-direction and Benevolence (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Value structure across 68 countries – Public Interest Research Centre (2011) based on Schwartz (1992) The Schwartz model shows that values have neighbours and opposites, that values close together (e.g. Humble, Honest) tend to have similar importance to people, that values far away (e.g. Equality, Social Power) act more like a seesaw – as one rises in importance, the other falls. When you add to this that values connect to behaviour (that Universalism and Benevolence are associated with cooperation, sustainable behaviour, civic engagement and acceptance of diversity – that Achievement and Power are most emphatically not), and that values can be engaged, you have more than a model: you have an imperative for all the activists and campaigners scrabbling around for the messages and tactics that are going to change the world.

The five psychobehavioral segments of Americans Surgo identified from its survey are: 1. The “Enthusiasts” (40% of the U.S. population). Every person in this group said they would get the vaccine as soon as it is made available to them. There are no barriers to vaccination 1 for people in this group—in fact, the key challenge will be ensuring vaccine supply meets their demand before they lose enthusiasm, as we’re seeing now as people struggle to sign up. 2. The “Watchful” (20% of the U.S. population). For this segment, social norms are important: Before they get the shot themselves, people in this segment first need to see that others in their peer group or community are getting vaccinated and having safe, positive experiences. 3. The “Cost-Anxious” (14% of the U.S. population). For this segment, time and costs are the primary barriers to getting the vaccine. Every member of this group reports having delayed seeking care for their health in the past due to the expense. The irony: Only 28% of people in this group lack health insurance, indicating that their concerns about costs override having insurance to cover them. 4. The “System Distrusters” (9% of the U.S. population). This group primarily believes that people of their own race are not treated fairly by the health system. Members of this group are likely to belong to, but are not exclusively, communities of color. There are multiple, complicated barriers for this segment, but most of them are related to trust in and access to a health system that has an inequitable history. 5. The “Conspiracy Believers” (17% of the population). This segment has perceived barriers around COVID-19 vaccination that Surgo believes are simply too hard to shift in the short term. It includes people who don't believe in vaccines in general, but the primary barrier for people in this group is their very specific and deeply-held beliefs around COVID-19. Every person in this group believes in at least one conspiracy theory: ○ 84% believe that COVID-19 is exploited by government to control people ○ 65% believe COVID-19 was caused by a ring of people who secretly manipulate world events ○ 36% believe microchips are implanted with the COVID-19 vaccine The three most persuadable psychobehavioral segments Surgo recommends prioritizing are the “Watchful”, “Cost-Anxious” and “System Distrusters” for maximum benefit. Each segment has specific barriers to overcome:...

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.

At BehaviourWorks, we often prioritise behaviours using the Impact-Likelihood Matrix (figure below). In this approach, behaviours are prioritised by mapping them based on: The impact they have on the problem they are intended to address. The likelihood of the target audience adopting the behaviour.

types of people re: org change

The Rwandan prescription for Depression: Sun, drum, dance, community. “We had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave. They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better, there was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again, there was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy, there was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again. Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave.” ~A Rwandan talking to a western writer, Andrew Solomon, about his experience with western mental health and depression.

NEW URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3324907

When it comes to motivating people to vote, identity theory is influential. Studies have shown us that how we refer to people ahead of a vote can influence their likelihood to vote. In short, if we use a noun (a ‘voter’) rather than a verb (‘to vote’), we can see double digit increases in voter turn-out. To be clear, this is one of the largest effects identified in a large-scale field experiment — an uptick of over 10%, simply as a result of reframing the request to use the vote. Identity theory tells us this happens because the noun version (‘a voter’) speaks to our self-concept; wanting to align with what society expects of us, increases the likelihood of us engaging in that behaviour. It’s an opportunity for positive distinctiveness.

The amount and nature of value in a particular product or service always lie in the eye of the beholder, of course. Yet universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in current markets or break into new ones. A rigorous model of consumer value allows a company to come up with new combinations of value that its products and services could deliver. The right combinations, our analysis shows, pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth. We have identified 30 “elements of value”—fundamental attributes in their most essential and discrete forms. These elements fall into four categories: functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. Some elements are more inwardly focused, primarily addressing consumers’ personal needs. For example, the life-changing element motivation is at the core of Fitbit’s exercise-tracking products. Others are outwardly focused, helping customers interact in or navigate the external world. The functional element organizes is central to The Container Store and Intuit’s TurboTax, because both help consumers deal with complexities in their world.