Design and behaviourism: a brief review
Dan Lockton is publishing extracts from his Brunel University Ph.D thesis ‘Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change’ as blog posts over the next few weeks.
The first post deals with the importance of behaviourism in design for behavioural change, summarised in these eight bullets:
- Behaviourism is no longer mainstream psychology, but many of the principles have potential application in design for behaviour change
- There is a recognition that the environment shapes our behaviour both before and after we take actions—a useful insight for designing interventions
- There is also a recognition that behaviour change does not necessarily happen in a single step, but as part of an ongoing cycle of shaping
- Where cognition cannot be understood or examined, modelling users in terms of stimuli and responses may still offer valuable insights
- Positive and negative reinforcement, and positive and negative punishment can all be implemented via designed features, and often underlie designed interventions without being explicitly named as such
- Schedules of reinforcement can be varied (e.g. made unpredictable) to drive continued behaviour
- Design could either exploit or help people avoid ‘social traps’ where both reinforcement and punishment exist, or reinforcement is currently misaligned with the behaviour, converting them into ‘trade-offs’ which more closely match the intended behavioural choices
- Considering means and ends may provide a useful perspective on design for behaviour change. The end from the user’s perspective effectively becomes the means by which the designer’s end might be influenced
