Behavior Change Levers and How to Use Them?

Behavior Change Levers

For human behavior change, we can use a set of behavioral levers (behavior-oriented strategies) based on established principles of behavioral and social science. These levers help describe the pathways linking actions to desired change in key actors’ psycho-social states and ultimately in their behavior. These levers are most effective when used in combination to address the different motivations or barriers actors have at institutional, social, and individual levels. These levers include:

Providing information and support (show/teach me)
Changing incentives (e.g., material costs and benefits, time, and effort) (tempt/help me)
Enacting rules and enforcement (make me)
Using social influences and norms (norm me)
Leveraging emotional appeals, key values, and interests (sway me)
Designing the choice or decision context (cue me)

Knowing which type of lever and specific action to implement depends on understanding the interests, context, cognitive biases, barriers to, and motivations for each key actor’s or interested party’s behavior.

Rare's Behavior Change Levers (Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment. (2024). Levers of Behavior Change: A Guide to the Science and Applications.)

Using Behavior Change Levers

If you have a behaviorally-informed theory of change that includes psychological and social variables (such as the beliefs, knowledge, or attitudes that you expect to change for behavior to change), then that can give you clues about whether those variables apply in other contexts to use the same levers. In other words, if there are similar psychological reasons, motivations, and barriers for change, you can focus your behavior change strategy on localizing to the context rather than designing an entirely new intervention with different levers

Behavioral Science in Context

The context of applying levers always matters.

As shown in this graphic, behavioral science is about focusing on understanding an actor’s psychological state, whereas social science focuses on understanding the socio-cultural context for that actor. Both are necessary for understanding an actor’s behavior within a given environmental context. Changes to the socio-cultural context, environmental context, or actor’s behavior create feedback loops with one another. Tools and methods from social science can help us better understand people’s behavior and the interactions between these psychological states and broader contexts. Still, there’s a lot of research to be done to understand how behavioral insights translate across populations and geographies, and so it's important to consider that this field is still growing and learning.