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.
I used three words that I routinely used in talks, and that I had thought about for a long time before selecting for frequent repetition in my book on dieting. I thought they helped simplify a complex idea.
I was horrified that morning to realize that my three carefully chosen words could be mistaken for terrible diet advice if you plucked them out of the sentences they were in. I urged people to strive for their “leanest livable weight.” It looked like I was recommending that people diet until their weight was so low they could just barely cling to life. Did I mean that? Absolutely not. If anything, I meant close to the opposite.
This narrative review summarizes several health equity frameworks to help digital health practitioners conceptualize the equity dimensions of importance for their work, and then provides design approaches that accommodate an equity focus. Specifically, the Double Diamond Model, the IDEAS framework and toolkit, and community collaboration techniques such as participatory design are explored as mechanisms for practitioners to solicit input from members of underserved groups and better design digital health tools that serve their needs.
Latinx is broadly unpopular among Latino adults who have heard of it, according to the survey.
75% of Latinos who have heard of the term Latinx say it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, up from 65% saying the same in 2019.
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.
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’
Our results show that a decadeslong effort to educate the U.S. public about recycling has succeeded in some ways but failed in others. These efforts have made recycling an option that consumers see as important – but to the detriment of more sustainable options. And it has not made people more effective recyclers.
Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?
The toolkit presented here guides the policy maker through a
methodology that looks at Behaviours, Analysis, Strategies,
Interventions, and Change (abbreviated “BASIC”). It starts
with a BASIC guide that serves as an indispensable and
practical introduction to the BASIC manual.
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.)
The A/B test we carried out on Reddit provided valuable insights into the effectiveness of our AI vs team photographs. The results demonstrated that while AI-generated images attracted attention, our team photographs still had a significant impact on audience engagement and clicks.
To this end, we acknowledge the extant criticisms of social marketing – for being unethical (Laczniak & Michie, Citation1979), lacking reflexivity (Tadajewski & Brownlie, Citation2008), being power agnostic (Brace-Govan, Citation2015), being neoliberally oriented (Moor, Citation2011), being culturally insensitive and imperialist (Pfeiffer, Citation2004), being pseudo-participatory (Tadajewski et al., Citation2014) and for responsibilising the individual (Crawshaw, Citation2012). Accordingly, we recognise that social marketing needs the resources and repertoires available to appropriately respond to the current challenges and to critique. We argue that key pillars to this response are the adoption of a more critical research agenda (Gordon, Citation2018), a broader theoretical base, and a commitment to careful reflexivity, each of which are commitments of CSM. This special section of the Journal of Marketing Management on ‘Critical Social Marketing: Towards Emancipation’ provides the space to grapple with extant and emergent critique within the contextual challenges of our time, and to collectively contribute to the development of CSM and its future agenda.
With this thread, you’ll learn 9 lessons:
1. The Data Quality Framework
2. The Participant Relationship
3. Perfect introductions
4. Instructions that work
5. Helpful signposting
6. An enjoyable experience
7. Getting feedback
8. Progressive piloting
9. Types of quality control
Usually, creating an antipersona makes sense if your product or service:
deals with sensitive information that, if inadvertently exposed, can threaten the users’ or organization wellbeing (e.g., fraud, identity theft, harassment, disinformation, illegal content)
poses potential physical or emotional threats to people (e.g., injury, or death as the direct result of misusing the product).
If there is an opportunity for these harms to occur as the direct result of anyone using the product, there should be one or more antipersonas to represent the risk. Always balance the chance of such a misuse with its consequences in order to determine if an antipersona is worth creating. Even a misuse that is very unlikely to happen might be worth of an antipersona if its consequences are extreme.
A critical thinking approach to identifying how we fall prey to the psychologically exploitative strategies being used by some content creators on LinkedIn and other social media
Narrative capture is when an industry, company, or group changes the common narrative for their benefit, even if that just means changing the status quo. What are our baseline expectations? What is acceptable behavior? What is the way we measure fairness? What should we complain about?
As expected, narrative capture is different. Here are some of its forms.
To solve problems and suggest solutions on behalf of others is to have power. As a result, we behavioral scientists have a heightened responsibility: Being in this privileged position requires recognizing when and where assumptions about “what good looks like” might creep in. When we design interventions—even just determining what options are available, or what the default choice should be—we shape other peoples’ experiences in ways we may not always fully appreciate. And our decisions to address certain problems while leaving others aside implicitly declares what challenges, and audiences, we think are worthy of receiving attention.
The following is from Dr. Bucher’s forthcoming book, Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change. I chose this section because it touches upon a PeopleScience theme: being successful and effective behavioral practitioners while also, and primarily, being good.
In this presentation Liz Barnes, Vice Chair of the CIM Charity and Social Marketing Group, will discuss which tactics we should be worried about, which techniques might be considered unethical and ways we can influence and persuade with integrity.
The most common question I get on responsible design: ‘How do I actually embed ethical considerations into our innovation process?’ (They don’t actually phrase it like that, but you know… trying to be concise.)
Although I don’t love cramming a multifaceted field like ethics into a linear diagram, it’s helpful to show a simple process map. So here’s my attempt.
Artefact is proud to introduce The Tarot Cards of Tech: a tool to inspire important conversations around the true impact of technology and the products we design. The Tarot Cards of Tech encourage creators to think about the outcomes technology can create, from unintended consequences to opportunities for positive change. The cards are our way of helping you gaze into the future to determine how to make your product the best it can be.
Consequence Scanning – an agile practice for Responsible Innovators
A timely new business practice; Consequence Scanning fits alongside other agile practices in an iterative development cycle. This is a dedicated time and process for considering the potential consequences of what you’re creating
