Luckily, behavioral science can help close the intention-action gap, offering a toolkit to help change behavior for the better. Here are three ways we can apply lessons from behavioral science to drive sustainable engagement:

How does design work? ‍ We’re asked this question often and we’ll always be curious about it. The reality is that design is useful, a bit mysterious, and forever in flux. Right now, this is a guide to some of what we know—and don’t know—about how design works.

This chapter illustrates how the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) and the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) have successfully employed behavioural insights. Using such learning, the chapter lays out an ambitious agenda for social change: (i) from BBBP to BADLAV (Beti Aapki Dhan Lakshmi Aur Vijay Lakshmi); (ii) from Swachh Bharat to Sundar Bharat; (iii) from “Give it up” for the LPG subsidy to “Think about the Subsidy”; and (iv) from tax evasion to tax compliance. First, a key principle of behavioural economics is that while people’s behaviour is influenced significantly by social norms, understanding the drivers of these social norms can enable change. In India, where social and religious norms play such a dominant role in influencing behaviour, behavioural economics can therefore provide a valuable instrument for change. So, beneficial social norms can be furthered by drawing attention to positive influencers, especially friends/ neighbours that represent role models with which people can identify. Second, as people are given to tremendous inertia when making a choice, they prefer sticking to the default option. By the nearly costless act of changing the default to overcome this inertia, desired behaviour can be encouraged without affecting people’s choices. Third, as people find it difficult to sustain good habits, repeated reinforcements and reminders of successful past actions can help sustain changed behaviour

Consider three levels: literal, liberal & lateral. Example: social proof... Literal: share the percentage of people who follow the norm in general Liberal: tailor the claims to what “people like them“ do Lateral: suggest popularity rather than stating it

Co-design with young people is the act of co-creating alongside stakeholders and young people to ensure that the results of the design meet the needs of those young people. Here are four key resources for background information to co-design. Download this visualisation (PDF, 4.3 MB) to learn where co-design sits on the spectrum of approaches to program design Use this template (PDF, 13 MB) as a reminder for the five principles of co-design This article contains historical and modern case studies of co-design in action The Outer East Children and Youth Area Partnership Co-design [OECYAP] has created a detailed resource of the theoretical and practical workshop content by co-design expert, Ingrid Burkett

I started with the raw list of the 175 biases and added them all to a spreadsheet, then took another pass removing duplicates, and grouping similar biases (like bizarreness effect and humor effect) or complementary biases (like optimism bias and pessimism bias). The list came down to about 20 unique biased mental strategies that we use for very specific reasons. I made several different attempts to try to group these 20 or so at a higher level, and eventually landed on grouping them by the general mental problem that they were attempting to address. Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — primarily to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting mental errors) that they introduce.

NEW URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3324907

Nudges span an exceedingly wide range, and their number and variety are constantly growing. Here is a catalogue of ten important nudges — very possibly, the most important for purposes of policy — along with a few explanatory comments.

Consumers, employees, students, and others are often subjected to “sludge”: excessive or unjustified frictions, such as paperwork burdens, that cost time or money; that may make life difficult to navigate; that may be frustrating, stigmatizing, or humiliating; and that might end up depriving people of access to important goods, opportunities, and services. Because of behavioral biases and cognitive scarcity, sludge can have much more harmful effects than private and public institutions anticipate. To protect consumers, investors, employees, and others, firms, universities, and government agencies should regularly conduct Sludge Audits to catalogue the costs of sludge, and to decide when and how to reduce it. Much of human life is unnecessarily sludgy. Sludge often has costs far in excess of benefits, and it can have hurt the most vulnerable members of society.

However, nudges aimed at reducing carbon emissions could have a pernicious indirect effect if they offer the promise of a ‘quick fix’ and thereby undermine support for policies of greater impact.

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Learn how to use cognitive biases to increase your product's conversion rates, engagement level, and retention. A must-read article for every entrepreneur and product manager dealing with UX, UI and B2C products.

an interesting case study, even outside of the IT issues, of what can happen when something designed for one culture is not adapted appropriately for another. From the very beginning, they should have had Danish doctors, nurses and designers involved in identifying the modifications that needed to be made. Just translating the words is not sufficient (and even that didn't seem to work very well).

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social proof, peak end experience, gifting, spark curiosity, offer "delighters"

A central challenge for all health-related gamification programs is engaging participation, particularly among high-risk patients. Several design elements commonly found within gamified health and wellness programs could be made more engaging by incorporating behavioral insights.

Similar to Bartle's Player Type matrix - defines the actions that players/users can do: Compete, Express, Collaborate, Explore

Like the physical properties of the universe, human behavior is complicated. And just as Newton’s Laws describe the motion of physical objects, these Laws of Human Behavior aim to provide a general model for how humans behave. People tend to stick to the status quo unless the forces of friction or fuel push us off of our path; behavior is a function of the person and their environment; every decision includes tradeoffs and the potential for unintended consequences.

So what counts as the “right” kind of problem for behavioral science to solve? Put more bluntly: How might our sense about what we should solve, or even what qualifies as a problem worth solving, be biased by how we think about what we can solve?

To gain a better understanding of how to build a successful nudge unit, we recently talked to 14 experts who have led initiatives in sectors from financial services and healthcare to advertising and retail (see sidebar, “Fourteen experts forging the future”). Most stressed that while nudging is a catchy term, it does not do full justice to the broad applications of behavioral science to the businesses for which they and their units are responsible. Behavioral science, for instance, encompasses debiasing and other tools for driving behavioral change, including incentives, education, and awareness.