Educational Attainment

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.‍

Implementation intentions are specific details for when and how a behavior should or will be performed. These are often formulated as ""if-then"" rules, such as:- "if I crave something sweet, I'll have fruit instead of candy"- "if I am in the mood for a cigarette, I'll wait 5 minutes—then, if I still want it, I can have one"Other examples include studies where flu vaccination uptake was higher in groups of people nudged to make more specific plans (i.e. picking a specific time and date, along with a mode of transport to a specific clinic). The same general effect was observed with voting behaviors. These are a generally low-cost tool to slightly improve the gap between intention and performance of a behavior.

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.

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.‍

Personalization refers to taking specific data from the individual in a behavioral intervention into account in offering a different experience vs. that given to others. An experience may be personalized based on demographic data, psychographic data, behavioral performance, or other factors.