Public Safety

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.

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.

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.”‍

Priming in behavioral interventions typically refers to attempting to influence someone's behavior by brief exposures to certain words, images, sounds, or other stimuli beforehand. In cognitive psychology, priming effects have been found to improve the speed of processing related information (for example, naming an image when previously shown a related image vs. an unrelated one). Similarly, reminding someone of how to do a behavior or its consequences can be a way to influence them a brief while later by making this information more available in memory. Notably, several well-known priming studies have failed to replicate and it may be a less potent technique than previously believed. At the very least, priming should be considered to most likely impart effects only in the short term.