Debt Reduction

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.‍

Reducing friction or barriers to performing a behavior is simply making it easier or removing things that may be preventing someone from doing something. This is a foundational technique in changing behavior, and part of the UK Behavioural Insights Team's 4-point approach ("Make it easy"). That said, knowing where the friction and barriers exist may not always be straightforward, and different groups of people may experience different barriers in different contexts. Note: It is possible to remove too much friction. In a well-popularized study, a travel booking site found that delays in loading the best deals or travel options actually increased conversions. Similarly, longer input forms in digital interactions sometimes outperform, as people may consider the results more personalized or experience greater cognitive dissonance after having invested so much time in exploring the service.

Feedback entails providing qualitative or quantitative information about a behavior's performance or consequences. Performative information might include data on how a person's current diet tracks with nutrition recommendations or how their home power consumption compares with nearby households.Feedback on outcomes may include information about relative cancer risk based on current lifestyle factors or calculated net worth in 20 years based on the person's current savings rate and investment returns.‍

Environmental restructuring refers to modifying the physical environment around someone in order to influence their behavior.On the less intensive end, this could be as simple as having someone leave a pill bottle in a more obvious location or switch to using a pillbox with compartments for each day. More complex examples include carpooling potential voters to election sites to improve turnout, redesigning a workplace cafeteria layout to bias toward healthier foods, or setting up booths for influenze vaccination in offices or shopping malls.

Automation refers to having another person, group, or technology system perform part or all of the intended behavior. A prominent example is Thaler & Bernartzi's Save More Tomorrow intervention, which invested a portion of employees' earnings into retirement funds automatically and even increased the contribution level to scale with pay raises. Other examples include automatically scheduling medical appointments so the patient needn't do it themselves and mailing healthy recipe ingredients to the person's home to reduce the burden of shopping.‍

Defaults refer to what happens if a person makes no choice or goes with a pre-selected choice. The influence of defaults is a foundational component of behavioral economics. Perhaps the most famous example of defaults is the difference between opt-in and opt-out organ donation programs. While not universal, several studies have found that the rate of organ donation consent in a population seems to be influenced by the default (i.e., what happens if a person does not check a box or change the pre-selected preference on a form). Smart defaults do not only refer to one-off events, however. In the well-known Save More Tomorrow program, participants were not only included in a savings program by default, but the amount they saved was also changed over time automatically (again by default). Similarly, other behavior change programs have default settings that include at-home medication or food delivery, rules-based reminders on different platforms, etc.