This narrative review summarizes several health equity frameworks to help digital health practitioners conceptualize the equity dimensions of importance for their work, and then provides design approaches that accommodate an equity focus. Specifically, the Double Diamond Model, the IDEAS framework and toolkit, and community collaboration techniques such as participatory design are explored as mechanisms for practitioners to solicit input from members of underserved groups and better design digital health tools that serve their needs.

Promoting agency – people's ability to form intentions and to act on them freely – must become a primary objective for Behavioural Public Policy (BPP). Contemporary BPPs do not directly pursue this objective, which is problematic for many reasons. From an ethical perspective, goals like personal autonomy and individual freedom cannot be realised without nurturing citizens’ agency. From an efficacy standpoint, BPPs that override agency – for example, by activating automatic psychological processes – leave citizens ‘in the dark’, incapable of internalising and owning the process of behaviour change. This may contribute to non-persistent treatment effects, compensatory negative spillovers or psychological reactance and backfiring effects. In this paper, we argue agency-enhancing BPPs can alleviate these ethical and efficacy limitations to longer-lasting and meaningful behaviour change. We set out philosophical arguments to help us understand and conceptualise agency. Then, we review three alternative agency-enhancing behavioural frameworks: (1) boosts to enhance people's competences to make better decisions; (2) debiasing to encourage people to reduce the tendency for automatic, impulsive responses; and (3) nudge+ to enable citizens to think alongside nudges and evaluate them transparently. Using a multi-dimensional framework, we highlight differences in their workings, which offer comparative insights and complementarities in their use. We discuss limitations of agency-enhancing BPPs and map out future research directions.

Over the past decade, behavioural scientists have identified five different holistic effects which can all impact on the overall effectiveness of a behaviour change intervention. Some of these effects or concepts can be positive, whereas others may end up neutralising the effect of any nudge, or worse, having a negative impact: Licensing effects Compensating effects Positive spillover effects Displacement effects Systemic effects or what we are calling ‘nudge fatigue’

But this deluge of information — in which you are naturally very invested — can also prove overwhelming and unhelpful. We’re big fans of brands like WHOOP and Oura, and regularly encourage readers to dig through Apple’s Health app…but you need to be honest with yourself. If fitness tracking is psychologically increasing your feelings of inadequacy and physically increasing your perception of pain, it’s not worth it. At the least, it’s going to torpedo your performance (at work, in workouts, etc.)

Sir Humphrey, incensed that Hacker is pushing ahead with his “Grand Design”, delivers a masterclass in how to conduct a government opinion poll.

The following is from Dr. Bucher’s forthcoming book, Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change. I chose this section because it touches upon a PeopleScience theme: being successful and effective behavioral practitioners while also, and primarily, being good.

In this presentation Liz Barnes, Vice Chair of the CIM Charity and Social Marketing Group, will discuss which tactics we should be worried about, which techniques might be considered unethical and ways we can influence and persuade with integrity.

Insights from the behavioural sciences are increasingly used by governments and other organizations worldwide to ‘nudge’ people to make better decisions. Furthermore, a large philosophical literature has emerged on the ethical considerations on nudging human behaviour that has presented key challenges for the area, but is regularly omitted from discussion of policy design and administration. We present and discuss FORGOOD, an ethics framework that synthesizes the debate on the ethics of nudging in a memorable mnemonic. It suggests that nudgers should consider seven core ethical dimensions: Fairness, Openness, Respect, Goals, Opinions, Options and Delegation. The framework is designed to capture the key considerations in the philosophical debate about nudging human behaviour, while also being accessible for use in a range of public policy settings, as well as training.

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.

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?

In that study, gender and ethnicity information was removed from descriptions of potential job candidates. It was a study designed to interrupt unconscious biases against women and ethnic minorities. The results were surprising - blind recruitment made things worse for women and members of ethnic minorities. These results illustrate the limits of behavioural economics in action.