Influencing behaviour: The mindspace way

By Paul Dolan, M. Hallsworth, D. Halpern, D. King, Robert Metcalfe, I. Vlaev. 2012

765 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ability to influence behaviour is central to many of the key policy challenges in areas such as health, finance and climate change. The usual route to behaviour change in economics and psychology has been to attempt to ‘change minds’ by influencing the way people think through information and incentives. There is, however, increasing evidence to suggest that ‘changing contexts’ by influencing the environments within which people act (in largely automatic ways) can have important effects on behaviour. We present a mnemonic, MINDSPACE, which gathers up the nine most robust effects that influence our behaviour in mostly automatic (rather than deliberate) ways. This framework is being used by policymakers as an accessible summary of the academic literature. To motivate further research and academic scrutiny, we provide some evidence of the effects in action and highlight some of the significant gaps in our knowledge.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b43c11708d202cdd38622addedb402fef99434c0

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Citations in the corpus

Digital Nudging (2016, background): “Commonly used nudges include giving incentives, providing feedback or anchors, and setting defaults (Dolan et al. 2012; Johnson et al. 2012; Michie et al. 2013; Thaler and Sunstein 2008; see Table 1).”
Informing Versus Nudging in Environmental Policy (2014, background): “It is easy to concur with Dolan et al. (2012) that “the best interventions will certainly”
23 Ways to Nudge: A Review of Technology-Mediated Nudging in Human-Computer Interaction (2019, background): “Prior frameworks, both in the technological context (e.g. [49], [95]) as well as in marketing and public policy (e.g., [22][42]) have attempted to review the different cognitive biases and particular implementations of nudges, but did not address the “how to” of nudging.”
Moving beyond the obsession with nudging individual behaviour: Towards a broader understanding of Behavioural Public Policy (2020, background): “In recent years, nudging has become a synonym for a range of techniques designed to influence human behaviour such as norms, defaults and salience (Dolan et al., 2012).”
Green nudges: Do they work? Are they ethical? (2016, methodology): “An overview on green nudges in the UK context is provided by RAND Europe (2012); see also House of Lords (2011), Dolan et al. (2012), and especially Halpern (2015).”
Framing behavioural approaches to understanding and governing sustainable tourism consumption: beyond neoliberalism, “nudging” and “green growth”? (2013, methodology): “MINDSPACE is a mnemonic “which can be used as a quick checklist when making policy” (Dolan et al., 2010, p. 8; see also Dolan et al., 2012): Messenger: We are heavily influenced by who communicates information.”