Category Archives: Behaviour Change

Applying Behavioural Insights to change my own life II

Posted in Behaviour Change, Behavioural Architecture, Choice Architecture, Life, My life by

Almost 2 months of eating vegetarian food: proud of my achievement, especially because it is more about behaviour change rather than any other reason involved.

I promised to update some of the techniques I use, and I mostly wanted to speak about a simple framework: EAST, designed by a smart team. It should be Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely.

Easy
– harness the power of defaults: vegetables are always there, I don’t need to decide what to eat each time.
– reduce the ‘hassle factor’: I always buy meatless products, it’s somehow more simple to eat meatless when there’s no meat around to make me crave.

Attractive
– attract attention: whenever my partner buys meat, I tend to do a bit of choice architecture in the fridge – the colourful, fresh vegetables are always in the front rows, and my food looks amazing all the time. It’s easy to pick it up and pleasant to eat.
– design rewards and sanctions for maximum effect: my rewards are purely motivational, as my self-esteem increases every time I choose to go meatless. Sometimes is harder than others, but this creates a positive attitude and high confidence that I can do what I want.

Social
– public commitments work! I told everyone around me I am a vegetarian, so I can’t even touch bacon without being harshly judged. I have to keep my promise to them, if not to myself!

Timely
– it’s easier to change behaviours if the habit is already disrupted, so I decided to go vegetarian immediately after I returned from a trip to Barcelona, when my eating habits were disturbed anyway.

The EAST framework is not only easy to use, but specially designed to change people’s behaviours by policy-makers. You can find more about it here.

Behaviour change: the COM-B model

Posted in Behaviour Change, Behavioural Architecture by

Earlier this week, at the Designing and Characterising Behaviour Change Interventions event, UCL Centre for Behaviour Change launched a useful tool for those interested in behaviour change interventions: The Behavioural Change Wheel. Based on the COM-B model (capacity, opportunity, motivation and behaviour), the Wheel offers valuable insights into designing and implementing strategies for behaviour change, by synthesising 19 behaviour change frameworks and policies to a theoretical analysis of the target behaviour in context.

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(source here)

The COM-B model is a new method of specifying intervention content in terms of their Behaviour Change Techniques (BCTs), and has been pioneered at UCL. More here.

Landfills in the UCL library

Posted in Behaviour Change, English, My life by

Sooo, exams finished, more time to read what I mostly enjoy, maybe write here more often too.

While doing some work in the library, I noticed how annoying it is that people don’t recycle. Paper, food waste, plastic cans: everything goes in the same place. I asked someone why there aren’t any bins to recycle and the answer was students don’t use them. I can hardly believe this, so I sent them an email with my request and a solution for it: to nudge people to recycle more, stick photos of landfills on the general bin. If students actually see what happens with their waste, they will probably recycle.

This is how UCL Science Library cluster room looks like now:

PhotoGrid_1399588447690

I’m looking forward to seeing the outcome, and hopefully post a different picture next time.

Applying Behavioural Insights to change my own life

Posted in Behaviour Change, English, My life by

I decided to turn vegetarian. Yes, I love animals and I believe there is just a game of chances that we spoil cats and kill chickens, yet my affection for living creatures and a sort of disgust for blood are not the only reasons for this radical decision. I decided to apply behavioural change strategies on myself and this seemed a good goal.

How it works (and it works, do not bring the “discounting effect” of priming as a cons):

– creating negative associations: I try to pair meat with blood. I like meat, but I’m sensitive to blood. So whenever I see a chicken breast sandwich or a burger, I try to imagine that meat being full of blood.
* to work, the association must be real. In this case, in order to have meat, for sure some blood was lost, because a living creature had to die.

– the mirror technique: research shows that we are more prone to eat healthily if we see ourselves in the mirror. We usually seek positive self-knowledge, we like to see ourselves as being good and nice and deserving. Looking at myself in the mirror before going to the kitchen / out to eat will remind me that I don’t want to be bad.

– creating rules: no moment of hunger. Our cognitive energy is limited during the day, if I don’t eat enough and I’m hungry and tired, I might have to fight with both hunger and the decision to refrain from meat.
* this also means eating before going out or before someone starts cooking: if I’m hungry, I’ll just eat something I find around and that something is likely to be meat.

– the default option: meatless is the standard, if I crave a hamburger, I have to decide to go and buy it, or decide if it’s good or not and why it isn’t and go back to some of the stages I mentioned already. So vegetables and fruits are the norm, and the effortful decision is opting for meat.

I will gradually post other tricks I use. For now, I just started and it’s going surprisingly well.

A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behaviour, by Dan Ariely

Posted in Behaviour Change, Behavioural Economics, English by

I am sometimes surprised to hear people’s reactions to what I study. “Psychology, aha, unrelated to this event. What brings you here?” My honest answer is that exactly psychology brings me wherever I go. It’s hard to speak about business without considering behaviours. Yours or others, be they your clients, colleagues, managers. Whenever you say “people”, you say attitude. You say behaviour. You just said psychology.

One of the most important knowledge I ever came across is Dan Ariely‘s book, Predictably irrational. It’s one of the best works published on Behavioural Economics – psychology married to business.

Dan Ariely just started another series of “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior”, an online MOOC on Coursera. He will cover some of the material from his 3 books: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.

I highly encourage everyone to take this course. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s life-changing, and you will understand why psychology is important.

Babies of the Borough

Posted in Behaviour Change, English, social marketing by

I spent my sunny Sunday in South-East London today. It’s a place renown for its high criminal activity. And I remembered a campaign created a while ago by Ogilvy and Mather which tries to decrease criminality.

In Woolwich, antisocial behaviour is reduced in an unconventional way: local baby faces are painted on the walls of shops shutters. Baby faces seem to promote a caring response in human beings and this project uses the environment to moderate behaviours.

_62351763_babyshopsposterimageSource: BBC

I felt safe today. For sure CCTV contributed to this feeling. Yet, it’s in our human nature to be careful and protective when it comes to helpless babies. It’s how we make sure our species survives. You wouldn’t hurt a baby, would you?

The Enlightenment: Social Architecture

Posted in Behaviour Change, Behavioural Economics, English, My life, social marketing by

I always believed that if all the brilliant minds in this world would team up to do good around, the world would be a better place. People called me from dreamer to optimist to idealist to fool.

Yet these days we had a talk given by an UCL alumnus who works for the British Government now, who mentioned “behavioural architecture”. I can’t stop but thinking that this is something I would like to devote my whole psychological knowledge to: changing behaviours. For social good.

From behaviour architecture to social marketing was only a step. I was surprised to see there are a couple of professional bodies who devote their work for social good and there is even a conference on social marketing (set up only last year apparently, this is yet a new field).

To clarify, social marketing is not social media marketing. According to European Social Marketing Association, Social Marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviours that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good.

Social Marketing practice is guided by ethical principles. It seeks to integrate research, best practice, theory, audience and partnership insight, to inform the delivery of competition sensitive and segmented social change programmes that are effective, efficient, equitable and sustainable.

This is how my new aim in life begins: I am now specialising to become a behavioural architect, aiming to make the world a better place. Yes, you can call me a dreamer.

The paradox of choice

Posted in Behaviour Change, English by

I’m currently reading a book that helps my “maximizer” tendencies. I always want the best option available and I usually suffer to get it (wasted time, wasted cognitive energy, etc.).

I understand that, in order to have a happier life, I should create rules for choosing and take the “good enough” option (be a “satisficer”). How do you know when an option is good enough? If you have a threshold in mind for as many decisions as you can, then things are simpler. I have a rule of thumb for wearing jackets, for instance, so I don’t have to choose each day what to wear and then be unhappy anyway with my choice because of so many other options left behind.

For the maximizer in you, make yourself a present and read Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.