Self-monitoring or tracking simply refers to a person measuring their behavior 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.
That said, 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-cost way.
Social benchmarking refers to comparing a person's behavior, trends, or status to others. Often, merely providing data on others can change behavior by leveraging social norms.
For example, letters comparing homeowners' use of electricity with peers were found to significantly reduce the amount of energy used by high-consumption households compared to non-comparison messages.
Behavior substitution refers to attempting to eliminate a problematic behavior by replacing it with another one.
Often, the substituted behaviors are intended to have similar sensory qualities (e.g. drink flavored sparkling water instead of soda). The goal is typically to disassociate the original behavior from its cue, enabling the more positive behavior to be triggered automatically.
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.
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.
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.
