Whenever you're trying to change a behavior, you should ask yourself the following four questions:
1. Am I clearly prompting the target person to do the behavior I want?
2. Is the behavior really hard to do?
3. Is the target person motivated to do the behavior I want them to do?
4. Am I rewarding the target person for doing the behavior?
That's it.
That's your behavior-design checklist.
Innovative solutions based on how people act and make decisions in the real world are often buried in academic journals. The Behavioral Evidence Hub (B-Hub) brings them into the light of day. On the B-Hub you’ll find strategies proven to amplify the impact of programs, products, and services—and improve lives. Projects + checklists
We demonstrate that the mere-measurement effect occurs because asking an
intention question is not perceived as a persuasion attempt. In experiments 1 and
2, we show that when persuasive intent is attributed to an intention question,
consumers adjust their behavior as long as they have sufficient cognitive capacity
to permit conscious correction. In experiment 3 we demonstrate that this finding
holds with product choice and consumption, and we find that persuasionknowledge
mediates the effects. In experiment 4, we show that when respondents are educated that an intention question is a persuasive attempt, the behavioral impact of
those questions is attenuated.
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.
Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker's spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener's brain activity mirrors the speaker's activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.
In it, he examined the work of psychologists and neuroscientists who are studying the human penchant for storytelling. What they are discovering is fascinating, but it boils down to this: People are wired to enjoy stories.
Here are some key quotes that I took away from Hsu’s article:
Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. … People in societies of all types weave narratives … And when a characteristic behavior shows up in so many different societies, researchers pay attention: its roots may tell us something about our evolutionary past.
However narrative is defined, people know it when they feel it. Whether fiction or nonfiction, a narrative engages its audience through psychological realism — recognizable emotions and believable interactions among characters.
[T]he best stories … captivate their audience, whose emotions can be inextricably tied to those of the story’s characters. Such immersion is a state psychologists call “narrative transport”.
[M]ost scientists are starting to agree: stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition.
A 2007 study … found that a test audience responded more positively to advertisements in narrative form as compared with straightforward ads that encouraged viewers to think about the arguments for a product. Similarly … labeling information as “fact” increased critical analysis, whereas labeling information as “fiction” had the opposite effect. Studies such as these suggest people accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode as opposed to when they are in an analytical mind-set.Scientific American Mind - September 18, 2008 The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn Our love for telling tales reveals the workings of the mind By Jeremy Hsu When Brad Pitt tells Eric Bana
In April 2018, almost 1,200 people gathered in Indonesia for the Summit on Behaviour and Social Change Communication. Practitioners, researchers, donors, and leaders from more than 400 organisations travelled to Nusa Dua from the Asia Pacific region, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America. This issue features ten papers prepared by SUMMIT participants based on their presentations. They cover a range of challenges from using story-telling to help fishermen in Belize deal with threats to their occupations, and influencing adolescent girls and boys in India to address gender discrimination and stereotyping – to the use of social media to change norms regarding babies’ health in Malawi.
The prank says something very powerful about consumer behavior: When it comes to quality, perception is reality. The shoppers believed they were purchasing luxury footwear because they were fed an array of social and environmental cues, not because of the shoes themselves.
Andrex has become a great case study in modern marketing, because it represents the logical outcome of two dominant trends: the mission escalation trend and the conversation trend. Both are waves of brand thinking that have swept all before them in recent years, and it’s not exactly Andrex’s fault that they have been caught up in it. It’s just that the nature of their business means stretching both trends to breaking point.
First, there’s the mission escalation trend. This is the homeopathy of marketing. It involves taking the functional purpose of any given product, diluting it to a slightly more abstract level, then diluting it again and repeating the process until you reach a level of abstraction so remote that any sense of specific purpose has been lost entirely. So if your product is a bar of chocolate, it’s not about giving people something chocolatey to eat, it’s about giving them a tasty treat. And it’s not about giving them a tasty treat, it’s about giving them a treat in a wider sense. And it’s not about the treat as such, but the enjoyment you get from that treat. And it’s not about the physical enjoyment, but the emotional enjoyment. And it’s not about the emotional enjoyment, but joy itself. And it’s not about experiencing joy, it’s about believing in joy. And now your brand purpose is more closely aligned to Buddhism than it is to chocolate.
Cowry developed three interventions to tackle these challenges and improve health and safety: painting the canteen a shade of pink proven to reduce stress hormones; introducing a gold card system whereby workers who demonstrated safe behaviours entered a weekly prize lottery; and having specialists walk around site asking scripted questions that prompt workers to think about safety.
•Despite its sequential nature, healthcare seeking is often analysed as single event.
•We demonstrate the value of sequential healthcare data analysis.
•Descriptive analysis exposes otherwise neglected behavioural patterns.
•Sequence-insensitive indicators can be inconsistent and misleading.
•Sequence-sensitive evaluation hints at adverse behaviours of wealthy patients.
Good, very concrete communications with examples of exactly how much of a difference an individual can make to prevent people from feeling overwhelmed and like they can't make a difference on the issue
At Dropbox, we’ve found that metaphors are a powerful tool to help people explore and share their experiences in more creative and meaningful ways.
We use metaphors in research so people can talk about their experiences through a different lens. We can do this simply by inviting people to make a comparison through a single question. Or we can facilitate entire interviews by using tools to symbolize and explore meaning together.
The Theory & Techniques Tool is an interactive resource providing information about links between behaviour change techniques (BCTs) and their mechanisms of action (MoAs). This information is based on MRC-funded research triangulating evidence of links made by authors in published scientific studies and by expert consensus [Project Website - http://www.ucl.ac.uk/behaviour-change-techniques]. It was developed to support intervention designers, researchers and theorists in the development and evaluation of theory-based interventions.
Three of the best-known health messages are eating five portions a day of fruit and vegetables, getting 150 minutes of exercise a week and quitting smoking.
But what evidence is there that these have worked?
Effective visualizations communicate complex
statistical and quantitative information facilitating
insight, understanding, and decision making.
But what is an effective graph?
This cheat sheet provides general guidance and points
to consider.
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