Design to Encourage Positive Behavior

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Define behavior change design.
• Name the seven individual behaviors with the biggest impact on climate change.
• List Rare’s six behavioral levers of behavior change.

This module was produced in collaboration with Rare. Learn more about partner content on Trailhead.

Before You Start

Before you complete any units in this module, make sure you complete Best Practices for Sustainable Design. The work you do here builds on the concepts you learn there.

Know the Role Business, Design, and People Play

This trail, Design for Sustainability, has focused on the role that businesses and designers can play in addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges, such as climate change. This focus is intentional, as industries and businesses greatly impact the emissions that cause climate change more than individual consumers do. Our aspirations to address a global challenge like climate change with the speed and scale needed can only be met by whole industries and countries working on the problem.

However, individual behaviors do play a big role in the climate solutions outlined by experts charting a path to decarbonization. Of the 80 climate solutions presented by climate nonprofit Project Drawdown and highlighted in the study, Climate Change Needs Behavior Change, 30 are behavioral solutions that can mitigate up to one-third of global emissions from 2020 to 2050. These go beyond getting people to recycle, use less plastic, or compost (none of these actions even rank among the top 25 ways Americans can most effectively reduce their greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions).

And as individuals, we aspire to play a role as well. A 2019 poll by Rare shows that more than 55 percent of Americans believe that citizens should be doing more to address climate change.

What Is Behavior Change Design?

Behavior change is the intentional effort to modify people’s attitudes, choices, and habits. New insights across economics, political science, psychology, neuroscience, and design thinking have transformed our understanding of human behavior and decision-making.

Intentionally creating experiences that foster desirable behaviors is called behavior change design. When you design products, services, and communications, you have the power to support positive behavior change, encouraging the behaviors that most greatly reduce GHG emissions.

Identify the Behaviors That Matter Most

Based on recent analysis, Rare uncovered seven individual behaviors people can adopt with the greatest potential for climate impact. Rare calculated that if each of these seven behaviors were adopted by even 10 percent of Americans, it would reduce the gap to America’s emissions targets in the Paris Agreement (the international agreement signed by almost every country to reduce global GHG emissions to safe levels) by over 75 percent.

The behaviors, organized A through G, are listed along with their potential cumulative impact on United States emissions. For details on how to adopt each of the actions, see the Resources section.

Include Behavior Change Design in Your Work

So if 10 percent of US consumers adopted these behaviors, we’d significantly reduce the country’s contribution to climate change. How can we, as designers of the choices people make, support the adoption of these behaviors? 

Changing behavior isn’t easy. But it helps if we know how the human brain works. Understanding how the brain works enables you to design relatively small interventions that can result in meaningful behavioral shifts. 

This works in the same way that a lever does on a fulcrum: a point of leverage that allows you to move something that seems impossible to move. We call these points of leverage in the brain the levers of behavior change. 

Get to Know the Levers of Behavior Change

Rare puts behavior change strategies in six categories, or levers. Each follows evidence-based principles and case studies from behavioral and social science. 

The six behavioral levers are:

• Social Influences
• Information
• Emotional Appeals
• Rules & Regulations
• Choice Architecture
• Material Incentives

Six Behavior Change Strategies: levers we can pull to change behavior.

 

For decades, the traditional sustainability toolkit has consisted of three common levers: information, rules and regulations, and material incentives. These levers can be effective. But information does not necessarily lead to action. Incentives can backfire or send the wrong message. Rules can be difficult to enforce. Research from behavioral science tells us about other powerful insights that can drive behavior change. For example, people make decisions based on their emotions (emotional appeals), what other people are doing and expecting them to do (social influences), and how we structure the context for decision-making (choice architecture).

By expanding our behavior change toolkit with additional levers, you can design solutions that reflect people’s full range of behavioral motivations. In the upcoming units, you learn the best practices for behavior change design you can start using today.

Resources

• External Site: Rare: Changing Behaviors to Reduce U.S. Emissions (PDF)
• External Site: Project Drawdown: Solutions
• External Site: Sustainable Brands: Behavior Change