When it comes to design, behaviour change is usually associated with choice architecture and long lists of cognitive biases that we can exploit or mitigate against to help people make better choices (sometimes for individual, sometimes for the business designing the experience).

What is harder to find are the techniques we can use to move people towards behaviours that will benefit them. So here is a list with some examples. I've drawn this sample from the very comprehensive List of Behaviour Change Techniques and Cass Sunstein's Ten Types of Nudge in How Change Happens.

Of course, when and how to use them will depend greatly on the context of the behaviour. I love Rory Sutherland's observation that lauded behaviour change experts like Dan Ariely are "creative geniuses first and behavioural economists second".

Appealing to identity

Appeal to the roles and social norms associated with a particular identity. Robert West's SmokeFree baby intervention encouraged pregnant teens to stop smoking by eliciting their new identity as mothers who should protect their child.

Modelling behaviour

Show people how to perform the desired behaviour. The Mayor of London's "maaate" and "have a word" campaigns show young men how to approach difficult conversations with their friends when they need to call out their behaviour towards women.

Incentives

Offer rewards for performing, or punishments for not performing, the desired behaviour.

Incentives often produce undesirably second-order effects. For example, when India introduced a bounty on Cobras to curb a growing population, people started breeding cobras to cash-in (and when the government stopped the incentive scheme, the cobra breeders released all the cobras into the wild!). In 1973 the US passed a law stating that no development could take place on land where endangered species were spotted, this led to the on-sight shooting of a number of endangered species. And Uri Gneezy shares a classic example of a kindergarten seeking to reduce the number of late arrivals by introducing a fine for parents who drop their kids off late. This created a financial transaction which parents were happy to trade, substituting and nulling the social shame felt at dropping your kids off late and in fact, increasing the number of late drop offs.

Social proof

Show that most people behave a certain way or make a certain choice. Examples abound, most hotel websites will now include some sort of social proof (e.g. "28 people booked this in the last hour) to direct people to certain options, or allow you to sort by "best sellers". Although it has to be said, the more this design pattern is used, the less effective it is.

Restructuring the physical or social environment

Change the environment the behaviour is performed in to encourage the target behaviour and/or discourage competing behaviours.

Glasgow Police treated violence in the city as a health epidemic and restructured the social environment to "prevent transmission." They set up a service to help gang members leave gangs, often by supporting them in moving away from the area in which the gang operated. The creation of this service restructured the social environment by giving gang members support from outside their community and helped them restructure their environment further by moving away from it.

Feedback on behaviour

Tell or show people the impact of their current or past behaviour.

Feedback works best when it is tied to the goal someone is trying to achieve. Without understanding this it is difficult to provide feedback that will be well received. For example, Dr Robert Zhildini ran an experiment using door hanger prompts to encourage people to use less energy. None of the hangers that appealed to good behaviour had an impact but the door hanger that said 'your neighbours use less' and led to a 6% drop in energy consumption. This suggests that the goal of these residents was to beat their neighbours, rather than use less energy.

Education

If people don't know about something, they can't act on it. If they don't know how to do something, they're less likely to do it. In these cases, educating people can go a long way to changing their behaviour.

Lots of government campaigns focus here. One that still sticks in my mind is the advert educating people on the signs of a stroke with the acronym F.A.S.T.

Implementation intentions

Asking someone whether they plan to do something (might) make them more likely to actually do it.

This study found a 4.1% increase in voter turnout amongst voters who were called and helped to create a concrete voting plan. "In fact contrary to some past research, self-prediction only marginally increased turnout."

Default rules

Defaults are incredibly powerful. They play on three things:

• Ease - they are the most "plausible path" through a choice architecture i.e. they take the least mental effort
• Endorsement - the default suggests that the organisation thinks this is the right choice for you
• Endowment - you feel ownership over the choice and switching away from it feels like losing something

Examples abound. Default opt-ins to pensions in the UK and US have been incredibly effective at improving people's retirement savings. Organ donation is an oft-cited example (numbers of registered organ donors in countries where people are defaulted to being organ donors are higher than in countries where people must choose to opt-in) though actual rates of organ donation do not necessarily prove to be higher.

Uses of social norms

It is very difficult for people to violate social norms. Doing so can make people feel deep shame and lead to punishment (often social) from their peers. Communicating a norm to people can reinforce it, resulting in increased adherence.

There is an excellent podcast with Dr Erez Yoeli in which he discusses his research around using social norms to change behaviour. His three steps are:

• Make people's behaviour observable
• Remove all excuses
• Communicate the norm

I keep a list of social norms that were created by brands here. My current favourite example is households in Japan eating KFC for Christmas dinner. With no social norm for Christmas dinner, KFC filled the gap by communicating a "norm".

Precommitment

Asking someone to make a rule today for how they will behave in the future. The Save More Tomorrow program is a good example here. It asks people to commit to saving more by linking that saving to future pay rises.

Showing consequences of past choices

Using hypotheticals to show people how their past choices have played out compared to an alternate choice. A common design pattern here is to show people what money they could have saved by using a different tariff or product or what rewards they have missed out on by not being part of a loyalty scheme.

Increase ease and convenience

I still giggle at a comment by Russell Davies:

Fifteen years of behavioural science boils down to: If you want to get people to do something, make it easy. The problem organisations face is, making something easy to do is really hard.

The Google cafeterias are a great, physical example of this. To encourage healthier eating they moved salads to the front of the cafeteria and put snacks away in cupboards, and hidden in opaque boxes. (This is arguably restructuring the environment too.)

Disclosure

Revealing the extent of something can change behaviour. The following example from How Change Happens is also linked to social norms. Sunstein refers to disclosure here as "correcting beliefs".

A stunning study of the power of political correctness comes from Saudi Arabia. In that country, there remains a custom of "guardianship", by which husbands are allowed to have the final word on whether their wives work outside the home. The overwhelming majority of young married men are privately in favour of female labour force participation. But those men are profoundly mistaken about the social norm; they think that other, similar men do not want women to join the labour force. When researchers randomly corrected those young men's beliefs about what other young men believed, they became far more willing to let their wives work. The result was a significant impact on what women actually did. A full four months after the intervention, the wives of men in the experiment were more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job

Reminders

Reminding people to do something increases the chance that they'll do it. There are lots of examples in health and wellbeing like reminders to take medicine, Garmin and Apple's reminders to get up and move if you've been sat down for a long time. I like Strava's reminders to do some stretching and recovery work after a run.

Simplification

Similar to making things easier and more convenient, reducing the complexity of a task will increase completion and even the number of people starting it. The UK Government's digital overhauling of many of its processes is a great example. TurboTax in the US is another.

Warnings

In the same vein as reminders, warnings can interrupt a habit or routine causing someone to reflect and question their behaviour. A good example here is Instagram's "You're all caught up" warning when you scroll through your feed. In the banking sector, alerts that you're about to go into your overdraft or you're approaching a credit limit are also good warnings that can prompt changes in behaviour.

This list is not exhaustive–Michie's behaviour change technique taxonomy lists 93 techniques–and I will update it and continue to add examples, and relevant research. If you've found this helpful, let me know. I'm thinking of turning it into a card deck to help people design interventions in workshop settings.