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#20: And the winner is…

Have you ever bought a lottery or raffle ticket? I have. I enjoyed musing about what I’d do with the prize (until, inevitably, I lost!)

While they may not be wise investment strategies, lotteries can be surprisingly effective for encouraging positive behaviors because they can make an unappealing task more motivating (and people tend to focus more on the prize, rather than their chance of winning).

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#18: Our Flawed Forecasts

Are you planning a holiday this year? Perhaps you’re picturing the sheer joy you’ll feel when you can finally relax.

Now, think back to your last holiday. Was it as amazing as you imagined, or somewhat marred by unexpected issues?

According to Affective Forecasting research, it turns out that people are generally bad at predicting how we’ll feel in the future.

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#17: On a Positive Note

Do you ever find yourself struggling to “stay positive”?

If so, there’s good news – the Pollyanna Principle (named after a perpetually cheerful book and movie character) explains that most people subconsciously focus on the positive in our conversations, and recall more positive memories. We discuss more good news than bad, we’re upbeat in most texts and emails, and we describe others more positively than negatively, too.

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GLEAN, Behavioral Science, Behavior Change Erica Phian GLEAN, Behavioral Science, Behavior Change Erica Phian

GLEAN: Using BVM to Increase COVID-19 Vaccination in Rural Pakistan

Throughout 2021 and 2022, Pakistan’s Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) administered millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccinations. This systematic rollout campaign operated at scale – by August 2021, one million doses were being administered a day. However, at a district level, statistics from EPI showed that the rollout was not penetrating equally in all areas. 50 districts in the provinces of Baluchistan, Sindh, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa were identified as having the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates across all districts in Pakistan. These districts are predominantly rural, have lower digital access and lower literacy levels.

Save the Children hypothesized that the population may have been missed by previous COVID-19 communication efforts, due to the identified digital, literacy, and language barriers.

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CUBIC x UPENN Students Design Challenge 2023

CUBIC, along with Save the Children Spain, spent February to May 2023 working with the students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Behavioral and Decision Science program as part of their Capstone Design Challenge.

The challenge at hand: Online gender-based violence against high school students is a grave concern in Spain with devastating impacts for victims.

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#15: How to increase response to your emails

About how many emails do you receive each day: 50, 100, 200?

Now think for a second: which emails do you respond to immediately, and which do you put off till later, or ignore?

Professor Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist at Harvard, has determined the secret to increasing responses to emails, letters, and text messages, and it’s (drumroll . . . . )

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#14: I heard you

Think about where you live – which accents are “desirable,” and which are not?

Professor John Baugh explains in an enlightening Ted Talk that how people speak can lead to linguistic profiling: when someone is denied access to available goods or services by phone, sight unseen, based exclusively on the sound of their voice.

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#10: Think Again

Do you remember the last time you realized you were wrong? 

 In his book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing what You Don’t Know organizational psychologist Adam Grant encourages us not just to develop knowledge and experience, but to hone the skill of rethinking. Grant asserts that too often we favor feeling right over being right, and we slip into one of three mindsets: preacher, prosecutor, or politician.

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#7: “Oh What the Hell!”

Imagine this: You’re on a 1500 calorie/day diet when your spouse brings home freshly-baked cookies.  You decide to have just one, then realize you’ve exceeded your daily calorie limit. Oh, what-the-hell, you think, and eat four more — you’ll restart your diet tomorrow.

The “What-the-Hell” Effect is the actual term for this psychological phenomenon.

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#6: License to Err

Have you ever finished some intense exercise, and then later rewarded yourself with an indulgent dinner or dessert? Moral licensing is a phenomenon via which human beings give ourselves permission to do something “bad,” because we’ve already done something “good.” We conduct psychological bargaining, and let ourselves off the hook because “we’ve earned it.”

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#5: Simple Plans, Real Actions

Last week we introduced the intention-action gap: how human beings often know what we should do, but we have trouble following through on our good intentions. One method for addressing this gap is called a planning prompt, a.k.a. implementation intention plan. This is a simple intervention through which people are prompted to decide when, where, and how they will do something.

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#4: Bridging the Gap

Raise your hand if you’ve ever: planned to exercise, but ended up on the couch; started a diet, then found yourself eating cake; vowed to save money, then splurged on a new purchase. These examples demonstrate a key focus of the behavioral sciences called the intention-action gap: basically, people often know what we should do, and we have good intentions, but we have trouble following through on these intentions. There’s a gap between what we want, and what we do.

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