Edward L. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the founding father of concepts in Public Relations (PR), is known for linking Freudian psychoanalytic theories to influence consumer behaviour.

In their landmark 1959 report often referenced in leadership theory, social psychologists John R. P. French and Bertram Raven pinpointed five bases of power: Legitimate: when people perceive that your rank in a formal hierarchy—e.g., manager, CEO, or president—gives you the right to “prescribe” their behavior Reward: when people perceive your ability to distribute rewards for completed tasks or met goals Coercive: when people perceive your ability to distribute punishments and disincentives (the opposite of reward power) Expert: when people perceive your special knowledge or expertise, which causes them to defer to your expertise Referent: when people feel “oneness” with you or a desire to be like you, leading to their respect and admiration of you Referent power is considered the most potent because it doesn’t require that a leader micromanage, use coercion, or reward to influence others. People follow a leader with referent power based on who the leader is and how they behave. According to French and Raven, referent power has the broadest range of influence of any power, allowing it to be leveraged on a large scale.

Start with the Quick 2+1™ to find your answer. The next phase is to trust your intuition to Label™ and Mirror™ the circumstances or dynamics that may have led to the confrontation. Then use a little Dynamic Silence™ to allow room for a response from the other side. Once they respond, use mirrors and labels to encourage them to keep talking and gather the information you need to get to the heart of the matter.

“We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model.” So said Jason Collins in a recent blog, perhaps somewhat provocatively likening the use of biases as akin to the activity of ancient astronomers who were required to compile an exhaustive number of deviations to retain the broken model of the universe revolving around the earth. Collins challenge is whether the model at the heart of behavioural science is similarly broken.

Below, I’ll break down the three key steps to creating a compelling pitch for behavioral science. A bonus: you can put it all together in one minute or less to make a short—and sweet—sell on our amazing field.

One language shift that can help is moving from “audiences” to “actors.”

You don't have to track calories every day to lose weight, new research suggests Calorie counting with a smartphone app is a popular weight-loss strategy, and research shows it can work even if you don't track every bite. Tracking your food can help you lose weight by keeping a calorie deficit, eating less than you burn. But you don't need to monitor every meal — researchers found even part-time calorie tracking can help. Consistency, rather than perfection, can add up to healthy changes over time, researchers said.

Hi, I'm Robert I hope this concept card is useful for you and helps you add a new tool to your toolbox. As someone who helps teams develop products, services and experiences, I did not see many open resources out there that combine behavioral science with other strategy and design processes, so I decided to take my experience and create frameworks and boards to share for free. If you have questions on the framework you can connect with me on Linkedin or see my website.

A unique compendium of the latest behavioural insights, distilled, applied and combined to strengthen your ideas

Wow - detailed and useful guide to creating a strategy

BC patterns are a collection of reoccurring solutions used in Behavioural Design to change people’s behaviour. They are patterns that designers, change makers and problem solvers can consider when solving people problems and designing behaviour change.

This toolkit has been designed by the Research and Evaluation Unit (RIMU) at Auckland Council to be useful to those wishing to improve public programmes or services, policy development, or team decision-making. It draws on a range of existing resources produced by the Behavioural Insights Team, the OECD and others (see ‘other resources’ on the next page). This toolkit has two components that can be used either separately or together. The first component is a step-by-step process for developing a behavioural intervention. It guides the user through understanding existing behaviours, identifying a desired behaviour, brainstorming ideas for promoting the desired behaviour, and robustly testing the best ideas. The user should follow the steps in the order they are numbered. It is focused on key questions to ask at each step. It is not a complete guide to how to answer these questions, however, and the user may need to rely on other research and evaluation resources to help with each step. The second component of the toolkit is a series of ‘brainstorming’ cards. The cards cover many important behavioural principles to keep in mind when looking to improve programmes, policies, or decision-making. Each card includes a description of the behavioural principle, some examples, and suggestions for how to apply the principle. They can be used on their own or to brainstorm ideas as in the step-by-step process above. To help with navigation, the card set has been organised into a series for better services and a series for better decisionmaking, although there is overlap in the use of the cards. The former is marked with a red dot in the top left corner and the latter with a green dot.

Method:Three participatory workshops were held with the independent Welsh residential decarbonisation advisory group(‘the Advisory Group’)to (1)maprelationships betweenactors, behavioursand influences onbehaviourwithin thehome retrofitsystem,(2)provide training in the Behaviour Change Wheel framework(3)use these to developpolicy recommendationsfor interventions. Recommendations were analysed usingthe COM-B (capability, opportunity, motivation) model of behaviourtoassesswhether they addressed these factors. Results:Twobehavioural systems mapswere produced,representing privately rented and owner-occupied housing tenures. The main causal pathways and feedback loops in each map are described.

The issue is: We try to solve every single box in the problem tree. If people don’t know about something, then we solve it by raising awareness. If people don’t care about something, then we solve it by getting them to care more. If people are doing illegal behaviors because of a lack of enforcement, then we solve it by increasing enforcement. We go through the whole set of problem tree causes in this manner, writing objectives with a one-to-one match per problem. Not only does this result in a long list of objectives, which will quickly overwhelm us, it also traps us into solving behavioral problems using logic-based approaches.

Schwartz has spent much of his career emphasising the shared, universal nature of values and in one paper with Anat Bardi, he demonstrates that Benevolence, Universalism and Self-direction values are consistently rated most important to most people across different cultures. The answers he has just given map pretty neatly onto Self-direction and Benevolence (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Value structure across 68 countries – Public Interest Research Centre (2011) based on Schwartz (1992) The Schwartz model shows that values have neighbours and opposites, that values close together (e.g. Humble, Honest) tend to have similar importance to people, that values far away (e.g. Equality, Social Power) act more like a seesaw – as one rises in importance, the other falls. When you add to this that values connect to behaviour (that Universalism and Benevolence are associated with cooperation, sustainable behaviour, civic engagement and acceptance of diversity – that Achievement and Power are most emphatically not), and that values can be engaged, you have more than a model: you have an imperative for all the activists and campaigners scrabbling around for the messages and tactics that are going to change the world.

We fall off track because a part of us isn’t sure that the goal we’re working toward is going to make our lives better. This causes inner conflict, and when there’s inner conflict, we do the easiest thing of all: nothing. I’ve presented this simple worksheet to many clients, and I’ve found that it helps determine what’s really holding them back.

Contrary to popular opinion, feelings aren’t the opposite of rationality; they are evolutionary rationality made flesh.