Repost from Mad*Pow - Reopening After COVID-19: How to Support Employees’ Safety Behaviors
I'm sad to say the Mad*Pow brand and website are no more following the company's acquisition in 2019. I'm going to port over some of my writing from the Mad*...
PsychologyBehavior Change in the Time of Coronavirus: Why We Need Systems Thinking
Note: This comes from a five month old draft. Unfortunately, the situation has gotten worse rather than better, although we now have a roadmap to vaccination...
PsychologyEvery Project Needs Its Own Research
A key part of our process in a behavior change design project is to do a literature review. We comb the published peer-reviewed literature to find research t...
PsychologyCan Context-Bound Research Replicate?
The reproducibility crisis has hit psychology hard. In writing Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change, I found myself having to double check whether some of ...
Engaged BookPsychology12 Bits of Brilliance: Engaged Interviews
One of my favorite parts of writing Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change was talking to experts for their perspectives. Each of the twelve chapters of Enga...
Engaged BookTaming My Financial Beast
A very cool thing happened today; I was quoted in a New York Times article! A few months ago I spoke with writer Sally French about how credit cards can temp...
PsychologyThree Surprising Things About Writing a Book
Since last January, I've written a book! That's one reason why I've not updated this site much--it turns out, I have a limited amount of writing energy and t...
Engaged BookPsychologyWhy We Can't Predict Future Happiness: the Hedonic Treadmill
Have you ever found yourself daydreaming about a day, perhaps not too far in the future, where you’ve finally gotten something you really want and just feel ...
HappinessPsychologyBehavior Change Reading List
It's been a while since I've updated anything here, but for good reasons: I am very busy! And with projects and problems that keep my brain occupied, to boot...
PsychologyDo We Need Persuasion for Behavior Change?
Last month I presented at the World Wildlife Foundation's (WWF) Fuller Symposium, focused on behavior change for conservation. Several of the speakers from b...
PsychologyDesign Tactics to Foster Trust, Part 2: Legalese!
Want your users to trust your product? It's not just about the "fun" stuff like giving your product a personality, showing value quickly, and letting people ...
PsychologyDesign Tactics to Foster Trust
How do you build technology that people trust? The world gives us so many examples why we shouldn't trust technology. Many Americans recently had their perso...
PsychologyTechnologyBelieving In Behavior Change Means Believing People Can Change
I suppose this post is politically motivated, although I'll try to leave the actual politics out so as to not obscure my point by putting off people with bel...
PsychologyMental Well-Being and the PhD Student
So it seems like the general public has finally noticed that grad school is bad for students' mental health. We've known the punishing medical school curricu...
CareerEducationHow Can Voice Tech Help Health Behavior Change? The Alexa Diabetes Challenge
I've gotten to do some cool work things lately. One big one is getting involved in the Alexa Diabetes Challenge, sponsored by Merck & Co., and supported by A...
HealthInnovationTechnologyDigital Health Is Not a Hammer: Why Your Interventions May Be Set Up for Failure
As more data has become available on the success of digital health and wellness platforms, it's become clear that many health plans and self-insured employer...
HealthPsychologyEngagement Powers the Habit Cycle
At this week's Habit Summit in San Francisco, I talked about the role of engagement in creating new habits. I called my talk "Highway to the Habit Zone" not ...
PsychologyWhy Great Design Will Never Be 100% Effective
No matter how well-designed, well-researched, and well-implemented any given product or experience is, it will never work for 100% of people. This is true fo...
PsychologyMaking Choices Meaningful: At the Intersection of Competence and Autonomy
What constitutes a meaningful choice for one person may not be meaningful to another. When I presented with Raphaela O’Day at SXSW a few weeks ago, we talked...
MotivationPsychologyMoral Issues in Designing for Behavior Change
The big thing on my mind right now is preparing for my presentation at SXSW next Saturday. My J&J colleague and pal Raphaela O'Day and I are going to be disc...
PsychologyBookworm: My Top 2016 Book Recommendations
Last year I finished 180 books, according to my records on Goodreads. My reading tastes generally lean toward fiction, but include a healthy dollop of non-fi...
EducationThree Classic Social Psychology Findings That Matter Today
Watching current events in the United States these past few weeks, I find myself thinking often of some of the most basic Social Psychology 101 lessons. Even...
PsychologySo, Does Facebook Influence Users or Not? (Yes, It Does)
Two days after the election, Mark Zuckerberg said the following at a meeting in California: “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, of which...
PsychologyThe Diminishing Returns of Education for Health Behavior Change
Want someone to quit tobacco? Chances are your persuasive tactics to get them to stop smoking will include some cold hard facts about the damage that cigaret...
HealthMotivationPsychology(Don't) Repeat After Me: The Not-So-Quotable You
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to go through media training. Much of the training was common sense: Prepare for your interviews, hone the points you'...
CareerEducationIt's Dangerous To Go Alone! The Legend of Zelda and Fundamental Needs
I was never a big gamer, but I did become obsessed with the original NES The Legend of Zelda as a kid. On top of the hours I spent playing, I also avidly con...
MotivationPsychologyTechnologySelf-Determination Theory for Leaders and Managers
Although I've usually thought about motivation in terms of changing health behaviors, and often with a technology angle, the principles of motivation are act...
Motivation"Goldilocksing" on Choice: How Much Is the Right Amount?
Self-determination theory, at a high level, would predict that giving people choice is a good thing. Giving people the opportunity to choose seems like it wo...
MotivationPsychologyWhat If What Patients Want Is Not What Patients Need?
This may come as a surprise given how much I advocate for letting patients take the lead in setting their own health goals, but I believe that it's a mistake...
HealthPsychologyBehavior Change Detective: Effectively Coach by Finding the Smallest Action that Matters
One participant in a recent sustained engagement workshop talked about a frustrating patient she had who continually over-utilized the emergency room. Despit...
HealthSiding with the Negative: A Motivational Interviewing Technique to Shift Perspectives
I like to think of motivational interviewing as conversational judo. Rather than putting your opinion forward in the conversation, you wait for the other per...
MotivationPsychologyYou're Not Alone: Using Normative Feedback to Motivate
One of the three fundamental human needs that an engaging experience supports is competence. Competence is not necessarily about already being good at someth...
MotivationPsychologyOptimal Distinctiveness and Relatedness
If there is a universal human truth it's that human beings are social animals. According to self-determination theory, one of the fundamental needs that has ...
MotivationPsychologyWhy Coaches Can't Motivate
Autonomy, one of the three basic needs that an engaging product supports, is about choice, but particularly meaningful choice. Sure, people like customizing ...
MotivationPsychologyWalking Away from Academia with a PhD in Psychology
For many people pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology or a related field, there is an assumption that their career plans involve the tenure track. This is increasin...
CareerPsychologyTypes of Statistical Validity: What You're Measuring and How to Do It
Statistical validity is one of those things that is vitally important in conducting and consuming social science research, but less than riveting to learn ab...
PsychologyTeachingShould I Get a PhD in Psychology?
As someone who has a PhD in psychology (from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor), I am often asked by other people whether it's worth them pursuing the ...
CareerEducationPsychologyUnnecessary Badges: When Your Reward System Targets the Wrong Behavior
Badges are an incredibly common way that app developers try to hook users of their product. Theoretically, badges aren't a bad idea. They could conceivably s...
MotivationPsychologyTechnologyDisclosing Personal Information? It May Be Less Embarrassing To Tell It To a Computer Than a Doctor
Most of the data I work with is self-report, provided by a user to a database via a device like a computer or a mobile phone. No live counselor or coach proc...
HealthPsychologyFacebook's Informed Consent Problem
You've undoubtedly heard by now about Facebook's large scale emotion manipulation study, conducted on their site users. The study, published in the Proceedin...
PsychologyTechnology