BEHAVIOR CHANGE TACTIC
Checklists
Checklists are an age-old tactic for remembering to do certain tasks. Checklists are sometimes used to measure behaviors that should take place with a certain frequency, e.g. every day or X times per week, and other times, to ensure certain steps are followed every time a person does a complex behavior.For behavior designers, the challenges of checklists often entail choosing the right behaviors, breaking them down to the correct level of granularity for a given population, and serving them up in the proper context or sometimes with personalization. They are likely underutilized and consistently improve the performance of even experts, like pilots and surgeons.
Studies involving Checklists
PAPERS
Reminders, Raffles and Rent Payments
TACTICS
Micro-Incentives, Lotteries, Reminders, Cues, & Triggers
PAPERS
Update Tax Exemption Status
TACTICS
Reminders, Cues, & Triggers
PAPERS
Redesigned Emails Bolster Work-Study Applications
TACTICS
Reduce Friction or Barriers, Implementation Intentions
PAPERS
Member Centered Credit Union Banking: How behavioral insights can help credit unions better serve members
BEHAVIOR
Savings
TACTICS
Social Norms, Checklists, Micro-Incentives
PAPERS
Increasing Enrollment in a Senior Discount
TACTICS
Social Norms
PAPERS
Increasing Engagement with Mobile Banking in Nigeria
BEHAVIOR
Savings
TACTICS
Social Norms, Reminders, Cues, & Triggers
PAPERS
Simulation-Based Trial of Surgical-Crisis Checklists.
AUTHORS
Arriaga, Atul Gawande
BEHAVIOR
Healthcare Delivery
TACTICS
Checklists, Reduce Cognitive Load
PAPERS
A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population’.
BEHAVIOR
Healthcare Delivery
TACTICS
Reduce Cognitive Load, Checklists
PAPERS
Changes in Safety Attitude and Relationship to Decreased Postoperative Morbidity and Mortality Following Implementation of a Checklist-Based Surgical Safety Intervention.
BEHAVIOR
Healthcare Delivery
TACTICS
Checklists, Reduce Cognitive Load
Products leveraging Checklists
PRODUCTS
Nudge Rewards
Behaviors
Physical Activity, Diet & Nutrition, Disease Management
Tactics
Education or Information, Reminders, Cues +5 more
PRODUCTS
Omada
Behaviors
Disease Management, Physical Activity, Diet & Nutrition
Tactics
Coaching or Counselling, Skill Coaching, Social Support +1 more
PRODUCTS
Digit
Behaviors
Savings
Tactics
Feedback, Automation, Smart Defaults +2 more
PRODUCTS
SuperBetter
Behaviors
Mental Health & Self-Care
Tactics
Identity Priming, Goal Setting, Gamification +6 more
Related behavior change tactics
TACTICS
AI or Chatbot
Using a chatbot or simulated conversational interaction.
TACTICS
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT is a therapeutic approach originalled developed by Steven Hayes. It borrows from previous concepts like cognitive behavioral therapy and Morita therapy. The principles of ACT are fairly systematic and lend themselves well to program design, finding empirical support in adaptations like 2morrow's smoking cessation and pain management interventions.
TACTICS
Active Choice
Active choice, sometimes referred to as enhanced active choice or forced choice, refers to removing default options and often increasing the salience of potential decisions through emphasizing the consequences of one or more of the options. Coined by Punam Anand Keller and colleagues in 2011, it was originally intended to address concerns around paternalistic nudging for use in situations where forcing the default option may be considered unethical. In one of the original studies, CVS customers were given the choice to enroll in automatic refills of medications via delivery. The choices they were presented were ""Enroll in refills at home"" vs “I Prefer to Order my Own Refills.”
TACTICS
Automation
Automation refers to having another person, group, or technology system perform part or all of the intended behavior. A prominent example is Thaler & Bernartzi's Save More Tomorrow intervention, which invested a portion of employees' earnings into retirement funds automatically and even increased the contribution level to scale with pay raises. Other examples include automatically scheduling medical appointments so the patient needn't do it themselves and mailing healthy recipe ingredients to the person's home to reduce the burden of shopping.
TACTICS
Behavior Substitution
Behavior substitution refers to attempting to eliminate a problematic behavior by replacing it with another one. Often, the substituted behaviors are intended to have similar sensory qualities (e.g. drink flavored sparkling water instead of soda). The goal is typically to disassociate the original behavior from its cue, enabling the more positive behavior to be triggered automatically.
TACTICS
Behavioral Activation (BA)
Behavioral activation is a therapeutic approach that typically pairs activity scheduling with either monitoring tools or goal-setting. For example, someone might aim to balance activities they "should" do but underperform, like self-care behaviors, with activities they enjoy. Users of this technique may also track which activities cause certain cognitions or affective states, like those associated with depression.