Our approach to goals and challenges can be categorized into two main motivational mindsets: prevention focus and promotion focus. These concepts, developed by social psychologist Tory Higgins, describe how we frame our desires and how that shapes our behaviour.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_TOX9mjEtw

Gamification services are hailed as effective tools for influencing users’ behaviours, increasing engagement, motivation, and enhancing learning. In the field of behaviour change, transformative outcomes have been reported for gamification services; with some conceptualisation undertaken regarding transformative gamification services. However, there is a lack of research on practical implementation of transformative gamification services. Also, previous studies have often isolated a single component of gamification and not discussed the synergistic effects and behavioural outcomes of the experiences that the combination of gamification elements can create. To bridge this gap, we provide an implementation framework for transformative gamification services. This is achieved by identifying different components of transformative gamification from a social marketing and transformative service research (TSR) lens and their behavioural outcomes. To do this, we delve into game design, gamification and behaviour change literature and suggest a practical implementation framework which incorporates users' perspectives in the form of transformative values, user engagement types (play typologies), and consumption/service encounter experiences. This research contributes to gamification theory and practice by furthering the understanding of transformative gamification services in social marketing and TSR. It also provides behaviour change practitioners with detailed steps for implementation of such services aiming to create positive behavioural changes.

Anticipated regret can indeed be a powerful motivator. When you think about what you don’t want in the future—and the picture in your mind is unpleasant enough—it can influence the decisions you make right now. While anticipated regret sometimes comes across as fearmongering, it can be done more artfully. In behavior change communications, we can apply the right dose of this strategy to prompt a person to action.

Results indicated that emotional shift messages generated more talk than single-valence messages because they elicited greater emotional intensity and deeper message processing.

Do you wonder why people are so inconsistent? Why people often seem to contradict themselves? Why they believe things they know aren't true? Why they say “Don't do X and then do that very thing? Robert Kurzban explains why. The reason is that the human mind is modular, made up of a large number of parts with different functions. Sometimes these parts conflict with one another.

Free Behavior Design, Innovation and Change Tools These frameworks started out as internal tools we would use on client projects at Aim For Behavior, that would help us save time and create better outcomes for the customers and the companies we were working with. We are always adding more frameworks or iterating the current ones based on the feedback.

We constructed brand names for diverse products with consonantal stricture spots either from the front to the rear of the mouth, thus inwards (e.g., BODIKA), or from the rear to the front, thus outwards (e.g., KODIBA). These muscle dynamics resemble the oral kinematics during either ingestion (inwards), which feels positive, or expectoration (outwards), which feels negative. In 7 experiments (total N = 1261), participants liked products with inward names more than products with outward names (Experiment 1), reported higher purchase intentions (Experiment 2), and higher willingness-to-pay (Experiments 3a–3c, 4, 5), with the price gain amounting to 4–13% of the average estimated product value.

The motivation index was informed by the FBM, which characterizes motivation as three sets of opposing constructs—acceptance/rejection, hope/fear, and pleasure/pain [14]. Applying the FBM, we coded and analyzed responses from the key informant interviews conducted in Yopougon Est. The results of this analysis were used to develop 12 items that were aligned with each FBM motivation construct.

“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.

Causal layered analysis, a theory and practice of organisational, social and civilisational change, seeks to transform the present and the future, through deconstructing and reconstructing reality at four levels. The levels are: the litany or day to day unquestioned views of reality, the systemic, the worldview/stakeholder perspective and the deepest, often unconscious, myths and metaphors. Problems are considered at all four levels and multiple worldviews and stakeholders are brought into to consider alternatives. By moving up and down layers and considering alternative perspectives, transformative policy and strategic solutions are created.

Why do we believe misinformation more easily when it’s repeated many times?

I hope this post gives some ideas to product leads on how to use the Decision Stack as a mental model in all sorts of conversations. The stack is a really powerful coaching tool. It is a framework that helps you to discuss things like: How to achieve alignment and directional clarity across the board. Use the Stack to connect the dots. Ask why things are the way they are and how the organization is planning to reach their goals. Use it to discuss goals and where shared goals would be possible. Use it to discuss team topologies, team empowerment, and mandate.

Personas are a widely used tool to keep real users in mind, while avoiding stereotypical thinking in the design process. Yet, creating personas can be challenging. Starting from Cooper's approach for constructing personas, this paper details how behavioral theory can contribute substantially to the development of personas. We describe a case study in which Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is used to develop five distinctive personas for the design of a digital coach for sustainable weight loss. We show how behavioral theories such as SDT can help to understand what genuinely drives and motivates users to sustainably change their behavior. In our study, we used SDT to prepare and analyze interviews with envisioned users of the coach and to create complex, yet engaging and highly realistic personas that make users' basic psychological needs explicit. The paper ends with a critical reflection on the use of behavioral theories to create personas, discussing both challenges and strengths.

Deliberate ignorance is a potential barrier for information interventions aiming to reduce meat consumption and needs to be considered in future interventions and research. Self-efficacy exercises are a promising approach to reduce deliberate ignorance and should be further explored.

In this short follow up post we explain how and why we combine systems thinking and behavioural approaches. We start by introducing the concepts of ‘systems’ and ‘systems thinking’ before explaining why Systems thinking is useful to combine with a behavioural approach.

The Wheel of Progress® is a framework created by Eckhart Boehme and Peter Rochel leveraging jobs-to-be-done principles and methods to evaluate why customers “hire“ a given product or service to accomplish a Customer Job. Jobs to be done It provides a canvas to be used when conducting consumer research to evaluate the journey a customer takes from first thought to use of the solution (consumption/job satisfaction). In addition, it enables one to evaluate the four forces of progress at play (push, pull, habits, anxieties) in regards to 'switching behavior'. Finally, one is able to evaluate constraints (internal, external, time-based) that impact the customer journey.

Long-term behaviour change is essential to many societal and personal challenges, ranging from maintaining sustainable lifestyles to adherence to medical treatment. However, prior research has generally focused on interventions dealing with bounded, present-tense, and discretely measurable behaviour change problems, evaluated via relatively short-term trials. This has led to a skewed prioritisation of behaviour change techniques and left a critical gap in design guidance. Hence, there is an urgent need to (i) examine how behaviour change techniques can be abstractly prioritised and (ii) related to contextual, embodied interventions during long-term behavioural design. We address this need using a Delphi survey method with 12 international experts on behavioural intervention complemented by a reanalysis of over 100 real-world cases. This provides the basis for examining how experts prioritise the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy (BCTT) for the long-term, as well as how this corresponds to real-world long-term interventions. Based on this we provide essential, and as a first, guidance for long-term behavioural design as well as contributing to wider research on how to deal with the demands of long-term behaviour change.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? According to digital storyteller, Brian Clark it doesn't! In this DIY conversation, Brian Clark applies the philosophical concept of phenomenology to art in the digital age.

BEHAVIOURAL DESIGN TOOLS. Need a sidekick in your Behaviour Thinking journey? We’ve got you covered with tools and theories. Let’s go.

Info, research, questionnaires/scales, info on application to specific topics

this study presents a measurement instrument for evaluating susceptibility to seven social influence principles, namely social learning, social comparison, social norms, social facilitation, social cooperation, social competition, and social recognition. Each principle is represented by a construct containing six theory-driven items, both positively and negatively framed. Further, the study introduces a social influence research model that describes how the seven social influence constructs are correlated and impact each other.

To this end, we acknowledge the extant criticisms of social marketing – for being unethical (Laczniak & Michie, Citation1979), lacking reflexivity (Tadajewski & Brownlie, Citation2008), being power agnostic (Brace-Govan, Citation2015), being neoliberally oriented (Moor, Citation2011), being culturally insensitive and imperialist (Pfeiffer, Citation2004), being pseudo-participatory (Tadajewski et al., Citation2014) and for responsibilising the individual (Crawshaw, Citation2012). Accordingly, we recognise that social marketing needs the resources and repertoires available to appropriately respond to the current challenges and to critique. We argue that key pillars to this response are the adoption of a more critical research agenda (Gordon, Citation2018), a broader theoretical base, and a commitment to careful reflexivity, each of which are commitments of CSM. This special section of the Journal of Marketing Management on ‘Critical Social Marketing: Towards Emancipation’ provides the space to grapple with extant and emergent critique within the contextual challenges of our time, and to collectively contribute to the development of CSM and its future agenda.

(ie, Towards a Unified Theory of Behavior - all the biases boil down to the same underlying thing) One of the essential insights from psychological research is that people’s information processing is often biased. By now, a number of different biases have been identified and empirically demonstrated. Unfortunately, however, these biases have often been examined in separate lines of research, thereby precluding the recognition of shared principles. Here we argue that several—so far mostly unrelated—biases (e.g., bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, outcome bias) can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward belief-consistent information processing. What varies between different biases is essentially the specific belief that guides information processing. More importantly, we propose that different biases even share the same underlying belief and differ only in the specific outcome of information processing that is assessed (i.e., the dependent variable), thus tapping into different manifestations of the same latent information processing. In other words, we propose for discussion a model that suffices to explain several different biases. We thereby suggest a more parsimonious approach compared with current theoretical explanations of these biases. We also generate novel hypotheses that follow directly from the integrative nature of our perspective.

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Here is an interesting way to visualize how to design for behavior using the COM-B Model and the Behavior Change Wheel If you don't know the Behavior Change Wheel, it is a framework developed by Susan Michie, Robert West and colleagues at UCL It is comprised of 19 different behavior change frameworks. At the center sits The COM-B Model: COM-B is used to look for the barriers or enablers to a behavior Capability (both physical and psychological) Opportuntity (both physical and social) Motivation (both reflective and automatic) It is a powerful way to analyze what may be stopping your customers or employees or even yourself of making the choices you already wanted to do. Outside the COM-B model (center of the wheel) sit the Intervention Types - which can include Education, Incentivization, and Training. As for the example here used in diabetes prevention design: The wheel has been filled with interventions and ways to deliver the intervention in this example. (I may have done it a bit different, but still a good representation) It looks at the Patient level - to Increase the patient's awareness of pre-diabetes It looks at Provider's Level - Improve communication skills, and teachable moments at diagnosis It looks at System Level - Invitation by physicians as well as social marketing. This of course is a small example of how the model could help you go from challenge to outcome.

Implementing new practices requires changes in the behaviour of relevant actors, and this is facilitated by understanding of the determinants of current and desired behaviours. The Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) was developed by a collaboration of behavioural scientists and implementation researchers who identified theories relevant to implementation and grouped constructs from these theories into domains. The collaboration aimed to provide a comprehensive, theory-informed approach to identify determinants of behaviour. The first version was published in 2005, and a subsequent version following a validation exercise was published in 2012. This guide offers practical guidance for those who wish to apply the TDF to assess implementation problems and support intervention design. It presents a brief rationale for using a theoretical approach to investigate and address implementation problems, summarises the TDF and its development, and describes how to apply the TDF to achieve implementation objectives. Examples from the implementation research literature are presented to illustrate relevant methods and practical considerations.

Robert Meza Miro boards compiled in one place

M. Bilal Akbar1 · Elizabeth Barnes