This session offered an introduction to behavioral science and the behavioral design process: Define, Diagnose, Design, and Test. In the next two sessions, you will dive into the details of several behavioral science concepts and design principles and tactics.
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Check Your Understanding
Thank you for completing the first session of Behavioral Design to Inform Social and Behavior Change for Nutrition. Next is an ungraded quiz to test your understanding of Session 1. Click the Knowledge Check button to get started.
https://learning.breakthroughactionandresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/BA-logo-horizontal-300x110.png00Carriehttps://learning.breakthroughactionandresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/BA-logo-horizontal-300x110.pngCarrie2023-06-30 09:44:472023-10-20 12:06:20Recap and Preview
Behavioral science and the behavioral design process
In this session, you will be introduced to the principle of behavioral science. It gives an overview of how behavioral science is used to understand human behavior and how it can be applied to support social and behavior change in nutrition. The second part of the session describes behavioral design approaches, and how they were applied in the DRC case example, and how they might be relevant to other contexts. You’ll learn how behavioral design can be used to apply behavioral science in program and service design. You will also complete some activities in your worksheets to reflect on how the application of behavioral science might be relevant to the challenges you encounter in your own nutrition-related SBC work and how you could use a behavioral design approach to identity, diagnose, and design effectively towards them.
Introducing the case example
Throughout this course, we will rely on a real life case example to illustrate the behavioral design process in action: research and design work conducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) by Breakthrough ACTION and USAID Advancing Nutrition to support families to follow nutrition guidelines for feeding their young children during and after illness. As you move through the course content, you will learn a lot more about this work and the solutions that the project developed. You will also have opportunities to reflect on how the insights generated and solutions developed through the process might translate to your own programs, services, and policies.
Human behavior can sometimes seem puzzling
As a health or nutrition policymaker or practitioner, you may have encountered situations in which people’s behavior seems puzzling, and sometimes counter to their own health, well-being, and goals. The photo below, for example, shows people darting in front of traffic to cross a road, rather than using a nearby pedestrian walkway that would allow them to cross much more safely. In the context of nutrition, people sometimes don’t take full advantage of the nutritious foods available to them, don’t access services that might be useful to them, or fail to put a health worker’s guidance into action. These actions may be confusing to those who design programs and services, because they appear to go against what people want for themselves.
Behavioral science is a tool to help solve the puzzle by offering new insight into why people choose and act as they do.
What is Behavioral Science?
Behavioral science offers empirical insights into how people interact with their environment and each other under different conditions. It includes research from various fields: cognitive and social psychology, marketing, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and others that provide insight into the complexity of human behavior. Session 2 will offer a deep dive into a few behavioral science concepts, and point you toward resources for learning more.
One key tenet of behavioral science is that context is extremely important. We use the term “context” expansively. The physical environment, culture, social norms, words and actions of other people, and past experiences all form part of the context, and this context shapes behavior. When we seek to change a person’s behavior, it can be very tempting to try to change the person by convincing them of the importance of acting in a certain way. Sometimes this is effective. But approaches that focus instead on influencing behavior by reshaping the context can at times be even more impactful.
Earlier, you saw a photo of people failing to use an important public safety feature: a pedestrian crossover. What features of the context might be influencing this behavior?
Tips: Think about the physical environment, past experiences, and what a person trying to cross the street observes other people doing.
What is Behavioral Design
Behavioral design is an approach that leverages insights from behavioral science to develop and test innovative solutions that, rather than trying to change people, seek to reshape their context to positively influence their behavior.
We will walk through four steps of the behavioral design process:
Defining the problem to be solved and the intended outcome, in terms of specific behaviors
Diagnosing the drivers of behaviors
Designing solutions to influence their behavior in positive ways by changing the context to address barriers
Testing the solution’s impact and iterating to improve the solution
