BEHAVIOR CHANGE TACTIC
Increase Salience
Increasing salience simply refers to making a choice, behavior, or set of consequences more obvious. The forms this can take are myriad—increasing the size of a button on an app, showing a picture of lungs with cancer rather than verbally describing it, or adding warning labels onto unhealthy foods are all examples of attempting to influence behavior through manipulating salience. In financial interventions, this might entail calculating the total lifetime cost of failing to utilize an employer 401k match or showing a detailed photo of a potential drream home to influence savings rates.
Studies involving Increase Salience
PAPERS
Why are Benefits Left on the Table? Assessing the Role of Information Complexity
BEHAVIOR
Financial Behaviors
TACTICS
Education or Information, Increase Salience, Reduce Cognitive Load
PAPERS
Limited and Varying Consumer Attention: Evidence from Shocks to the Salience of Bank Overdraft Fees.
BEHAVIOR
Other
TACTICS
Increase Salience, Priming
PAPERS
Nudging Energy Efficiency Behavior: The Role of Information Labels.
BEHAVIOR
Conservation Behaviors
TACTICS
Increase Salience, Education or Information
PAPERS
`Nudging’ Hotel Guests to Reduce Food Waste as a Win–Win Environmental Measure.
AUTHORS
H Sælen, S Kallbekken
BEHAVIOR
Waste Management, Conservation Behaviors
TACTICS
Framing Effects, Smart Defaults, Reminders, Cues, & Triggers, Social Norms
PAPERS
Salience and Taxation.
AUTHORS
Raj Chetty, Adam Looney, Kory Kroft
BEHAVIOR
Other
TACTICS
Increase Salience
PAPERS
Pilot OSHA Citation Process Increases Employer Responsiveness
AUTHORS
G Chojnacki
BEHAVIOR
Workplace Safety
TACTICS
Increase Salience
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.