Group incentives refer to structure where an individual's likelihood or size of reward is influenced by others. The intention is to leverage positive peer pressure by causing compliant participants to influence less compliant participants to improve their behavior.
For example, sales teams may be offered a bonus based on an office's collective revenue generation or provided all individuals meet a baseline level of performance. Similarly a multi-site franchise may offer an incentive for whichever location improves their performance the most over the prior month.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a therapuetic approach to improving mental and behavioral health. The core philosophy is that behavior can be modified by noticing and correcting patterns in thought that influence the behavior. Modern CBT is typically associated with Albert Ellis and Alan Beck.
The structured and rules-based nature of CBT have made it a popular candidate for digital interventions and application by lightly-trained or even untrained practitioners.
Micro-incentives refers to small rewards, typically frequent and cash-based, given out on a per-behavior basis.
A prominent example is Wellth, a program for people with chronic illness delivered via app. Some participants are given around $2 each time they take a medication or measure their blood pressure and submit a photo.
In related studies, e.g. Petry et al. (2015), participants' compliance with these behaviors was significantly higher than those who did not receive the incentives, and the behaviors persisted several months after incentives were removed.
Micro-incentives can be layered with other reward approaches such as lotteries and non-financial incentives.
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.
Random screening refers to unannounced checks of whether someone has been compliant with a given behavior.
These are frequently used via biomarkers, e.g. testing if someone has been taking recreational drugs by delivering a urine test.
Self-monitoring or tracking simply refers to a person measuring their behavior, experiences, cognition, or other data points over time.
Often, merely tracking a behavior can influence the likelihood or frequency with which a person performs the behavior or related ones. For example, many pedometer studies increase walking activity merely by improving awareness, and many interventions that merely consist of rewarding someone for weighing themselves result in weight loss. Similarly, when cognitive behavioral therapy patients track which cues or environments are associated with undesired behaviors or thoughts, they may begin to avoid them.
Unfortunately, people often find tracking behaviors tedious and lose interest after a short period, so behavior designers should seek to reduce the burden of self-monitoring by collecting information automatically or doing so in a low-effort way.
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.
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.
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