Dominic King
Applying behavioural insights to challenges in health policy
Dominic King. 2015. (View Paper → )
Many of the more significant challenges we face in healthcare - such as reducing smoking, encouraging exercise and improving clinician adherence to evidence-based guidelines - will only be resolved if we are more successful at changing behaviours. The traditional tools used when thinking about influencing behaviour include legislation, regulation and information provision. Recently, interest has been shown in policies that ‘nudge’ people in particular directions; drawing on major advances in our understanding that behaviour is strongly influenced (in largely automatic ways) by the context and situation within which it is placed.
For a product to be successful, you often need to change people’s behaviour. Changing behaviour is hard, PMs can benefit from leveraging research in the this space. I found the table of ‘Mindspace’ effects interesting…
The Mindspace Effects
Messenger | we are heavily influenced by who communicates information to us |
Incentives | our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses |
Norms | we are strongly influenced by what others do |
Defaults | we ‘go with the flow’ of pre-set options |
Salience | our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us |
Priming | our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues |
Affect | our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions |
Commitments | we seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts |
Ego | we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves |
