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Learn how to change behavior.

The world's largest collection of resources and data on behavioral science.

Tactics that change behavior

Coaching or Counselling

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Coaching or Counselling

Coaching or counselling here refers to having a trained person provide guidance to someone attempting a behavior. Many mental health and lifestyle programs utilize coaching in various forms, including phone calls, video chat, text messaging, or in-person sessions. Some programs have replaced some or all of these traditionally human-delivered touchpoints with AI or rules-based interactions.

Depression rating

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Depression rating

Depression rating simply refers to having someone rate their mood. Often, this may be an informal method like a smiley-face based Lickert scale or choosing a word from a list, rather than using a standardized instrument like the Beck Depression Inventory.‍

Change Effort

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Change Effort

Changing effort refers to modifying the difficulty, or sometimes perceived difficulty, of a behavior in order to change its likelihood of occurrence. This often entails making a behavior easier by reducing its intensity or frequency. This is a tactic advocated by BJ Fogg’s model of behavior change.

Covert Learning

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Covert Learning

Covert learning refers to imparting educational information into non-traditional methods of delivery. For example, a film where someone learns cognitive behavioral therapy techniques or receives training on body-weight fitness exercises may teach someone how to do these (or at least generally what they are). People may also learn the consequences of a behavior through watching someone else experience them, and this concept (viarious experience) is a key component of Bandura's social cognitive theory.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

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.

Checklists

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Checklists

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

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Active Choice

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.”‍

Clawback Incentives

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Clawback Incentives

Clawback incentives refer to a framing effect applied to rewards where participants are intended to experience losing the reward via noncompliance rather than accruing it for successful performance of the behavior.For example, a hypertension management program may credit its participants $200 at the beginning of the month, and reduce or "claw back" the amount by $3 each time the patient does not take their medication. The alternative would be starting the month at zero or the previous ballance and adding $3 each time the patient takes the medication.