Lecture 14 (Persistence of Behavior Change) Flashcards
Are you trying to change a one-time behavior or a
repeated behavior creating new habits? What is easiest and why?
Generally, it is easier to get one-time behavior changes with nudges, because we can use emotions and attention. But emotions are, by definition temporary. Using activity-
mobilizing emotions such as
fun, hope, anger, or fear can
work to kick-start a new habit,
but we still have months or
even years of behavior
change ahead of us. Attention is also
temporary. When our attention is turned towards one thing it is
taken away from something else. The question should be: ”How can we minimize attention?”
It is way harder to change a habit, because we can get distracted by emotions and attention, but it is temporary, which means they will not change the way we behave in the future. Normally we fall back into out old habits after being distracted.
So what should we do instead?
Use nudges that do not require attention or an emotional
response
5 Pathways to Persistence
Persistence: How Treatment Effects Persist After Interventions Stop, by Frey & Rogers, 2014
Internal-to-self
1. Psychological habit
2. Change in mental content
External-to-self
3. Recursive social processes
4. Change in future costs
5. Rip currents
What is Psychological Habit
- Treatment produces an automatic tendency to repeat a particular
behavioral response, triggered by a stable context in which the behavior is
performed - Energy efficiency example
- People begin consciously turn off the lights every time they leave a room; eventually
the contextual cue (exiting the room) automatically triggers the behavior (turning off
the lights)
What is Change Mental Contents
- Treatment permanently changes beliefs or interpretations that are causally
consequential to target behaviors. This may arise by replacing existing
beliefs with different beliefs, by creating beliefs where they did not
previously exist, or by changing the way people interpret ambiguous
stimuli - Energy efficiency examples
- People open their windows instead of using the air conditioners, and they learn that
they enjoy fresh air in their homes even when it is warmer than they are used to
(results in a change in preferences) - After taking energy-saving steps, people develop a self-perception that they are the
kinds of people who save energy (“energy savers”)
What is Social Recursive Processes
- Treatment leads other people to enduringly treat targets in ways that
support the behavior change - Energy efficiency example
- People purchase energy saving products like solar panels and begin showing their
friends, who then regularly ask the people about their energy use, effectively putting
continued social pressure on the people to continue saving energy
What is Future Costs
- Treatment induces people to perform behaviors that change the costliness of future behaviors; the treatment may decrease cost of performing target behaviors, or increase cost of failing to perform target behaviors
Energy efficiency examples
* People make a one-time decision to program their “smart” thermostats, which
reduces their electricity usage in the future
* People retrofit their homes so their homes require less energy
* People purchase energy efficient appliances
What is Rip Currents
- Treatment induces people to perform a behavior that then exposes them
to on-going external processes that they would not have been exposed to
otherwise; these external processes cause the changed behavior to persist
Energy efficiency examples
* People buy an energy-efficient appliance and are added to marketing lists for other
energy efficiency products, which they also buy and which remind the people that
they need to save more energy
* Organizations like the Sierra Club target people based on these marketing lists, which
engages them in ways that further reinforce energy saving behaviors
What are explanations for how habits are formed using behavioral
economic theory? Volpp 2020
If you want to create habits, you need to understand which mechanism is
relevant in your situation.
Your intervention should target that particular mechanism.
Some interventions can be one-shot (technology, information), others need to
be repeated to build a habit (learning, taste discovery).
Other interventions:
Learning – being better at
something makes it more
rewarding
Status quo bias – continue
doing what you did before
“Nudging yourself” –
commitment or change of
environment
Peer effects
Information acquisition
Taste discovery
Technology
Swedens gouvernement want more people to take public transport.
* We worked with a large public transport operator in
Southern Sweden (250,000 daily trips) to conduct a
natural field experiment.
* Public transport consists of busses, trams and trains
A) outline the research questions and design of experiment 1
B) describe the results of experiment 1 given figure 30.
c) Online experiment 2 and the results.
d) outline experiment 3 and the results
e) Which incentive or intervention had the largest effect on changing habits?
- Are nudges, in particular descriptive social norms, compared to
traditional price instruments, effective in changing the uptake and
usage of public transport? - Does increasing the incentive (the trial period of a public transport
ticket) lead to long-term habit formation?
Design Experiment 1
Travelers use a JoJo Card (pre-paid or monthly card) to check in and pay for their trips (27-105 SEK ~ 2.77-10.80 USD)
Over the course of one month - 12th of December 2017 to 16th of
January 2018 - we collected the addresses of all households who have moved to or within the region (N= 14282).
We can track cards, claimed and used, but not
individuals -> no demographics
Four weeks between offer and start of card to make
it attractive even for those who already have a card
Experimental design
3 different options, where in one of them they test a descriptive social proof nudge
“Did you know that most people in Skane travel with us?
72% of us travel by public transport occasionally. So join
your neighbors and try it out”
- group - 2 weeks free transport
- group - 4 weeks free transport
- group - 2 weeks free transport + social proof nudge
Question b)
Social norms had no effect on uptake, activation or usage of the free
travel card, but doubling the incentive had significant effects on higher opt in, higher activation and
higher usage 6 months later, figure 30.
Question c)
Experiment 2
Research question:
What is the effect of a reminder on those who did not react to the initial
offer and can framing increase that effect?
Design
Same as before, but now we send a reminder (nudge) to those who did not react.
Furthermore we reframe the social norm to “Only 28% don´t take public transport”.
Results
Reminders have an effect (ca. 20%)
But framing doesn’t matter. no effect.
Question d)
Experiment 3
Research question:
Can a nudge give an extra boost to those who have already selected
into the trial, but fail to follow through with their intentions?
Design:
Trying to introduce implementation intention, if + then.
“It can help to make a plan.
” + Planning prompt
when they get the free card
Results:
No effect
Question e)
The only thing that had an effect on changing peoples habits, was giving them an economic incentive in the form of 4 weeks. But if they targeted only people who just moved to the city, this is not changing habits. It is more creating habits. It is harder to change people´s habits who have lived in the city for a long time.
What is the ideal time to change habits following (Goodwin 1977, Verplanken et al. 2008).
Ideal time to encourage people to change behavior is when they
change residences
