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Learn how to change behavior.

The world's largest collection of resources and data on behavioral science.

Tactics that change behavior

Depression rating

TACTICS

Depression rating

Depression rating simply refers to having someone rate their mood. Often, this may be an informal method like a smiley-face based Lickert scale or choosing a word from a list, rather than using a standardized instrument like the Beck Depression Inventory.‍

Education or Information

TACTICS

Education or Information

Education refers to empowering a person with more knowledge or training than they had previously. While providing information alone is often a suboptimal way to drive meaningful behavior change or long-term interventions, the right message at the right time can be a powerful part of a behavior change strategy.‍

Change Effort

TACTICS

Change Effort

Changing effort refers to modifying the difficulty, or sometimes perceived difficulty, of a behavior in order to change its likelihood of occurrence. This often entails making a behavior easier by reducing its intensity or frequency. This is a tactic advocated by BJ Fogg’s model of behavior change.

Active Choice

TACTICS

Active Choice

Active choice, sometimes referred to as enhanced active choice or forced choice, refers to removing default options and often increasing the salience of potential decisions through emphasizing the consequences of one or more of the options. Coined by Punam Anand Keller and colleagues in 2011, it was originally intended to address concerns around paternalistic nudging for use in situations where forcing the default option may be considered unethical. In one of the original studies, CVS customers were given the choice to enroll in automatic refills of medications via delivery. The choices they were presented were ""Enroll in refills at home"" vs “I Prefer to Order my Own Refills.”‍

Checklists

TACTICS

Checklists

Checklists are an age-old tactic for remembering to do certain tasks. Checklists are sometimes used to measure behaviors that should take place with a certain frequency, e.g. every day or X times per week, and other times, to ensure certain steps are followed every time a person does a complex behavior.For behavior designers, the challenges of checklists often entail choosing the right behaviors, breaking them down to the correct level of granularity for a given population, and serving them up in the proper context or sometimes with personalization. They are likely underutilized and consistently improve the performance of even experts, like pilots and surgeons.

AI or Chatbot

TACTICS

AI or Chatbot

Using a chatbot or simulated conversational interaction.‍

Behavioral Economics

TACTICS

Behavioral Economics

Behavioral economics is the exploration of how people make consequential decisions where psychological and sociological factors may influence the outcome or process. It is often considered the fusion of economics and psychology (which itself was an interdisciplinary field entailing medicine and philosophy). The exploration of psychological factors in economic decision-making, including deviation from rationality, traces well back to classical and neoclassical economics (i.e. Gabriel Tarde, Wilfredo Pareto, and John Maynard Keynes) and prior to psychology becoming a formal discipline. Behavioral economics is often associated with behavior change tactics like smart defaults, reducing friction or barriers, increasing salience, incentives, active choice, and commitment devices.‍

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

TACTICS

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT is a therapeutic approach originalled developed by Steven Hayes. It borrows from previous concepts like cognitive behavioral therapy and Morita therapy. The principles of ACT are fairly systematic and lend themselves well to program design, finding empirical support in adaptations like 2morrow's smoking cessation and pain management interventions.‍

Research on behavior change

PAPERS

Physical activity with spiritual strategies intervention: a cluster randomized trial with older African American women.

BEHAVIOR

Physical Activity

TACTICS

Spirituality

PAPERS

Nutrition education worksite intervention for university staff: application of the health belief model.

BEHAVIOR

Diet & Nutrition

PAPERS

Pathway to health: cluster-randomized trial to increase fruit and vegetable consumption among smokers in public housing.

BEHAVIOR

Diet & Nutrition

TACTICS

Motivational Interviewing

PAPERS

Continuous glucose monitoring counseling improves physical activity behaviors of individuals with type 2 diabetes: A randomized clinical trial.

BEHAVIOR

Physical Activity, Disease Management

PAPERS

Randomized Controlled Pilot Study Testing Use of Smartphone Technology for Obesity Treatment

PRODUCT

Lose It!

BEHAVIOR

Physical Activity, Diet & Nutrition

TACTICS

Education or Information, Reminders, Cues, & Triggers, Self-Monitoring or Tracking, Social Support, Feedback

PAPERS

A comparison of two delivery modalities of a mobile phone based assessment for serious mental illness: native smartphone application vs text-messaging only implementations.

BEHAVIOR

Mental Health & Self-Care

PAPERS

Interrupting pathways to sepsis: Effectiveness of an intervention to reduce delays in timely care for sick children in rural Bangladesh.

BEHAVIOR

Other

PAPERS

Value-Based Insurance Design Improves Medication Adherence Without An Increase In Total Health Care Spending

PAPERS

Increasing screening mammography in asymptomatic women: evaluation of a second-generation, theory-based program.

BEHAVIOR

Other