Persuasive Technologies.
Human behaviour 1
Behavioural change theories 7
Ethics of behavioural science 11
DECIDE process 13
Define the problem 13
Explore the context 14
Craft the intervention 18
Determine the impact 21
Evaluate next steps 24
Personalization 25
Visualization 27
Guest lectures 30
Neuroscience 30
Mischa Coster 32
Julita Vassileva 32
,Human behaviour
Behaviour Action, activity or process which can be observed and measured
- Occurs in response to internal or external stimuli
- Has an actor: individual , organism, system, object
- Has a trigger: behaviour is a response to change
- Happens in a context:
- Individuals we interact with (social environment)
- What we see and interact with (physical environment)
- Habits and response we learned over time (mental environment)
Properties of behaviour
- Observable (overt) or not observable (covert)
- Talking vs thinking
- Performed consciously or unconsciously
- Studying vs walking
- Simple or complex
- Smiling vs changing a tire on a car.
- Familiar or unfamiliar
- Walking to your room vs climbing mount everest
- Voluntary or involuntary
- Clapping vs hiccupping
- Innate or learned
- Sleeping vs riding a bike
- Innate: genetically programmed in an organism, response to cue without prior
experience
- E.g. newborn baby nursing reflex
- Learned: develops as a result of experience, with rewards or punishments
→ Depending on these factors you have to approach changing the behaviour differently
Learning a behaviour
- Classical conditioning: learning to associate a new stimulus with an existing behaviour
response by repeatedly pairing the new and old stimulus
- E.g. dog drools when it gets food, so when you start ringing a bell every time
you give the dog food, after a while the dog will start drooling with just the bell
- Operant conditioning: learning to perform the behaviour more or less frequently based
on the reward or punishment received after performing the behaviour
- Reinforcer is any event that increases the likelihood to do something, a
punishment is the opposite
- Positive reward: you are rewarded by adding something (treat)
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, - Negative reward: take away something unpleasant (e.g. get rid of beep of not
having seat belt on)
- Positive punishment: add something undesired
- Negative punishment: removing something desired.
- Complex learning: we are capable of more complex learning than simply learning a
conditioned series of behaviours
- E.g. spatial learning, cognitive maps, predictions
Intention action gap Struggle to turn intention into an actual action
- Behaviour change is difficult
- People have good intentions and aware of the benefits, but don’t follow up on it
- People don’t always make the best decisions when choosing how to act or when they
perform a behaviour, because of limitations:
- Attention (get distracted)
- Time (do not have time)
- Cognitive capacity (get overwhelmed)
- Memories (forget things)
- Limitations are worked around by having two semi-independent systems and using
shortcuts
Dual process theory
System 1
- Fast, automatic, irrational, emotional, easy
- Reactive thinking is fast, we are not conscious of the inner workings. Uses past
experience as rules to intuitively evaluate situations
- Effective in familiar situations with experiences from the past.
System 2
- Slow, conscious, difficult, rational, hard
- Deliberative thinking is slow
- Effective when we rationally analyse unfamiliar situations and attempt to solve
complex problems
- Limited in how much information we can handle at one time
- Brain prefers system 1 tasks
- Relies on System 1
We often don’t think when we act!
Shortcuts (system 1): heuristics and biases
- Heuristic: approximations/rules of thumb
- Bias: inclination/prejudice, shifts your opinion in a certain direction
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, - Examples
- Status quo bias: faced with many options and cannot spend time/energy to
make a choice, so you stick with the status quo (change creates risk of loss)
- Social proof/descriptive norms: if you are uncertain of a decision, look at what
others are doing and do the same
- Go to the restaurant where there’s already people eating
- Confirmation bias: seek out, and remember information already in line with our
existing thinking
- Present bias: focus on instant benefits, rather than longterm
- Ikea effect: invest time and energy, thus resulting outcome is valued more
- Halo effect: if we like something we maybe judge its other characteristics more
positively even if we have no information about it
- Choice supportive bias: your own choice is superior to that of others
- E.g. in fans or religion
- Representativeness heuristic: estimating the likelihood of an event by
comparing it to an existing prototype that already exists in our minds
- Most relevant or typical example of a particular event or object
- Useful, because reduces effort and simplifies the decision-making
- Likely to judge wrongly because something that is more representative
does not actually make it more likely
- Example: diagnosing someone with the most representative disease
- Availability heuristic: mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that
come to a person’s mind
- The easier it is to recall the consequences of something, the greater
those consequence are perceived to be
- If you have something in your mind you give more attention to it, so it
might become more obvious than first (e.g. having to use crotches)
- The news has large influence on the availability of knowledge, that you
use to make a decision, without knowing all the facts (e.g. more likely to
be killed by a falling coconut than a terrorist)
- Example: already having seen a restaurant brand in an ad, then seeing
on the street makes more likely to go to that restaurant
- Framing effects: framing something positively makes it more likely to be chosen
- Example: two treatments for 600 people affected by deadly disease
- Treatment A chosen much more than treatment B with positive
framing
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