But sometimes it can be hard to find the time (and motivation) to exercise. So, what's the least amount of exercise you can get away with doing while still seeing these benefits? That answer depends on how fit you are to begin with.
Here's some good news: the lower your starting point is in terms of fitness, the less you have to do to see a benefit.
Nearly five years ago, in April 2020, just a few months into the pandemic, Jay van Bavel – a social psychologist at New York University – published a landmark paper aimed at helping those in power do just that. Bavel and colleagues' paper was influential as it made clear that governments couldn't rely solely on rules and regulations; they needed to motivate the public to follow them.
In doing so, they proposed 19 behavioural principles – policies that were rooted in decades of psychological research and designed to help guide the public's response to the pandemic. Many of these principles were adopted by governments around the world, in the hope that psychology might help 'nudge' us, or even shove us, towards safer behaviours. These principles took many forms, from encouraging a shared sense of identity – 'we're all in this together' type thinking – to targeting fake news and misinformation.
These questions were especially important to my own research, on adolescent social development and mental health. Could we really get young people to stick to these restrictions? And to what extent were the huge social sacrifices being asked of young people worth it in the long run? These unknown questions were hugely important to understand and to collect data on, and to understand what policies worked and were worth implementing.
So, my interest was piqued, and it wasn't too long before I found myself in the unusual position of having first-hand experience of very different approaches to the behavioural principles in action…
To support intervention developers in selecting BCTs to target specific MoAs, an online resource, called the Theory and Technique Tool (TaTT), was previously developed. This tool provides an evidence-based grid showing which BCTs are likely or unlikely to change certain MoAs. Recently, new tools—the Behaviour Change Technique Ontology (BCTO) and Mechanisms of Action Ontology (MoA Ontology)—were developed to include a wider range of BCTs and MoAs and provide more precise and computer-readable BCT and MoA definitions. By aligning the TaTT with these newer tools, we can support (1) ontology users in hypothesising about likely BCT-MoA links, and (2) TaTT users in identifying more detailed yet relevant BCTs and MoAs from the ontologies and using these in computer applications.
This study aimed to map the newer ontologies’ categories to the TaTT’s 74 BCTs and 26 MoAs. Researchers carefully compared and discussed definitions from both tools to create mappings. The study found that 85 BCTs in the newer ontology corresponded to 74 BCTs from the TaTT, and 56 MoAs in the newer ontology corresponded to 26 MoAs from the TaTT.
By linking the ontologies to the TaTT, this work makes it easier to use these tools together. This helps design and report behaviour change interventions more clearly and supports advanced uses like automated data analysis.
What can behavioural scientists do differently when working on complex problems?
Given the need for differentiated methods for different kinds of systems, and particular caution about existing approaches for complex and chaotic domains, applied behavioural scientists should be considering the appropriateness of the cornerstones of applied work, such as defining target behaviours. early on in strategic development, as shown in the table below.
The Cynefin framework is a ‘sense-making’ framework – where sense-making is defined by the author David Snowden as “making sense of the world in order to act in it”. It distinguishes between 3 primary systems: ordered, complex, chaotic, which are defined by the type of constraints (or absence of constraints) in that system. Each type of system is described not just how it is constrained, but also describes how to best take action.
What can behavioural scientists do differently when working on complex problems?
Given the need for differentiated methods for different kinds of systems, and particular caution about existing approaches for complex and chaotic domains, applied behavioural scientists should be considering the appropriateness of the cornerstones of applied work, such as defining target behaviours. early on in strategic development, as shown in the table below.
The Cynefin framework is a ‘sense-making’ framework – where sense-making is defined by the author David Snowden as “making sense of the world in order to act in it”. It distinguishes between 3 primary systems: ordered, complex, chaotic, which are defined by the type of constraints (or absence of constraints) in that system. Each type of system is described not just how it is constrained, but also describes how to best take action.
Our Behavioral Determinants Framework overlays the foundational theories from social psychology and behavioral economics onto the core challenge of marketing – identifying the factors that influence what people do. Our interventions are aimed at those behavioral determinants that move audiences beyond awareness and into action.
To simplify it all, we categorize these behavioral determinants into three categories: Fun, Easy and Popular. After all, fun, easy and popular is the heart of why we humans do just about anything. The Behavioral Determinants Framework helps us frame target behaviors to address an audience’s own wants and needs rather than trying to convince them to change their values and beliefs.
Personalized nudging (PeN) promises greater intervention effectiveness, especially for heterogenous populations. However, developments in PeN are hindered due to a lack of conceptual clarity and high methodological variability. We present a framework for PeN to tackle these challenges. We argue that personalization is contingent on personal data availability and choice environment malleability. Applying these factors to a nudge’s content, design, and underlying mechanism, we suggest that various levels of PeN exist, from simple name changes to more technologically sophisticated adaptive approaches. These levels highlight various novel methodological considerations, which we split into theory-driven (top down) and data-driven (bottom up) approaches. Finally, we discuss how our framework supports practitioner goals and reveals future research directions.
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Our study suggests that concerns around personalization and AI persuasion are warranted, reinforcing previous results by showcasing how LLMs can outpersuade humans in online conversations through microtargeting. We emphasize that the effect of personalization is particularly remarkable given how little personal information was collected (gender, age, ethnicity, education level, employment status and political affiliation) and despite the extreme simplicity of the prompt instructing the LLM to incorporate such information (see Supplementary Section 2.5 for the complete prompts). Even stronger effects could probably be obtained by exploiting individual psychological attributes, such as personality traits and moral bases, or by developing stronger prompts through prompt engineering, fine-tuning or specific domain expertise.
The Trauma-Informed Storytelling Toolkit offers customizable Google Doc
templates and resources to help nonprofits share stories that promote safety
and resist harm.
But because the very act of providing an answer closes the loop. You've solved the riddle. The thrill of the chase is over. Now everyone else is just expected to take your precious answer and dutifully apply it – to products, campaigns, media plans – without having experienced the journey that got you there.
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.
A practical, interactive tool that introduces Behaviour Change Techniques, considered to be the ‘active ingredients’ of behaviour change interventions. The tool walks you through how to identify and deliver Behaviour Change Techniques, drawing on the COM-B model and Behaviour Change Wheel.
A practical, online tool to walk you through the essential considerations to understanding and influencing behaviours that may be at play in your better-health issue.
A practical, interactive tool to help you consider and define your target behaviour and target population, as you create a ‘behavioural specification’.
We find that, acrossdomains, interventions designed to change individual determinantscan be ordered by increasing impact as those targeting knowledge,general skills, general attitudes, beliefs, emotions, behavioural skills,behavioural attitudes and habits. Interventions designed to changesocial-structural determinants can be ordered by increasing impactas legal and administrative sanctions; programmes that increaseinstitutional trustworthiness; interventions to change injunctivenorms; monitors and reminders; descriptive norm interventions;material incentives; social support provision; and policies that increaseaccess to a particular behaviour. We find similar patterns for health andenvironmental behavioural change specifically. Thus, policymakersshould focus on interventions that enable individuals to circumventobstacles to enacting desirable behaviours rather than targeting salientbut ineffective determinants of behaviour such as knowledge andbeliefs.
(PDF) Determinants of behaviour and their efficacy as targets of behavioural change interventions. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380329032_Determinants_of_behaviour_and_their_efficacy_as_targets_of_behavioural_change_interventions [accessed Jan 23 2025].
When people feel positive, they are positive about advertising, so brands should be targeting – or, better yet, creating – moments of happiness and relaxation.
n this essay, Sherine Guirguis and Michael Coleman tell the story of the lesson that shaped their careers. It was a lesson that occurred while navigating a particularly challenging set of circumstances—how to deliver polio vaccines to children in remote areas of Pakistan under Taliban control.
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.
Could this guide us towards a structured approach for assessing the level of community involvement in SBC programmes? At the highest level, “Citizen Control“, communities independently lead programmes with full decision-making authority. “Delegated Power“ and “Partnership“ designate significant community influence on programme decisions, either through majority control or collaborative governance. In contrast, “Placation“, “Consultation“, and “Informing“ indicate lower degrees of participation, where community input may be sought but is not necessarily instrumental in shaping outcomes.
This manual includes information about Open Policy Making as well as the tools and techniques policy makers can use to create more open and user led policy.
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.
In the first in his series of columns Ogilvy UK's head of strategy argues that accommodating behaviour - rather than adapting it - might be key to its change
Scientific evidence regularly guides policy decisions1, with behavioural science increasingly part of this process2. In April 2020, an influential paper3 proposed 19 policy recommendations (‘claims’) detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandemic-related research articles that empirically investigated those claims. We report the scale of evidence and whether evidence supports them to indicate applicability for policymaking. Two independent teams, involving 72 reviewers, found evidence for 18 of 19 claims, with both teams finding evidence supporting 16 (89%) of those 18 claims. The strongest evidence supported claims that anticipated culture, polarization and misinformation would be associated with policy effectiveness. Claims suggesting trusted leaders and positive social norms increased adherence to behavioural interventions also had strong empirical support, as did appealing to social consensus or bipartisan agreement. Targeted language in messaging yielded mixed effects and there were no effects for highlighting individual benefits or protecting others. No available evidence existed to assess any distinct differences in effects between using the terms ‘physical distancing’ and ‘social distancing’. Analysis of 463 papers containing data showed generally large samples; 418 involved human participants with a mean of 16,848 (median of 1,699). That statistical power underscored improved suitability of behavioural science research for informing policy decisions. Furthermore, by implementing a standardized approach to evidence selection and synthesis, we amplify broader implications for advancing scientific evidence in policy formulation and prioritization.
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.
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