Certaines expériences de psychologie ont acquis un statut quasiment mythique. Abondamment diffusées auprès du grand public, elles sont incontournables dans les cours d’introduction à cette discipline. C’est le cas de la « simulation de prison » menée par le psychologue américain Philip Zimbardo dans les locaux de l’université Stanford. Au début des années 1970, Zimbardo recrute des jeunes gens, qu’il distribue au hasard dans des groupes de « gardiens » et de « prisonniers ». L’expérience devait durer deux semaines, mais elle tourne mal : les gardiens deviennent sadiques et cruels, les prisonniers passifs et déprimés, et au bout de six jours il faut se décider à y mettre un terme. Conclusion : la seule attribution d’un rôle social peut transformer les individus, et le contexte exerce un pouvoir absolu sur les dispositions individuelles, expliquant notamment les phénomènes de violence sociale et carcérale. Voilà pour la légende. Car au terme d’une enquête approfondie sur cet épisode, pour laquelle il a compulsé nombre d’archives et interviewé quelques protagonistes de l’époque, le chercheur en sciences sociales Thibault Le Texier conclut à l’imposture.

In Nudge (2008) Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggested that public policy–makers arrange decision–making contexts in ways to promote behaviour change in the interest of individual citizens as well as that of society. However, in the public sphere and Academia alike widespread discussions have appeared concerning the public acceptability of nudgebased behavioural policy. Thaler and Sunstein's own position is that the anti–nudge position is a literal non–starter, because citizens are always influenced by the decision making context anyway, and nudging is liberty preserving and acceptable if guided by Libertarian Paternalism and Rawls’ publicity principle. A persistent and central tenet in the criticism disputing the acceptability of the approach is that nudging works by manipulating citizens’ choices. In this paper, we argue that both lines of argumentation are seriously flawed. We show how the anti–nudge position is not a literal non–starter due to the responsibilities that accrue on policy–makers by the intentional intervention in citizens’ life, how nudging is not essentially liberty preserving and why the approach is not necessarily acceptable even if satisfying Rawls’ publicity principle.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of hand hygiene was thrust into the spotlight like never before. While basic hand cleansing has long been advocated as a means of illness prevention, achieving compliance, particularly in healthcare settings, remains a challenge. With baseline hand hygiene compliance often around 3% to 10% in healthcare settings, healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) continue to pose a significant threat to patient safety, making the need for effective hand hygiene practices all the more critical.

For decades, the Theory of Planned Behaviour has offered a map of human action that feels both intuitive and practical. It gives practitioners convenient variables to measure, neat intentions to track, and surface behaviours to predict.But if we take seriously the deeper problems that run through folk psychology, economics, and social psychology alike, then the task is not to patch TPB. It is to recognise that the model was built on assumptions that never fully captured how behaviour unfolds — and that many entering Behavioural Insights still replicate, often unknowingly, despite nodding to newer ideas like dual- and triple-process theory.

Duolingo set out to address these challenges by reimagining how languages are taught online. To clear blocked utilities in the existing online language learning offerings, Duolingo shifted its focus from the productive delivery of education service to an active, engaging, and even addictive learning experience.

Baptisée “O Patrocínio Que Ninguém Viu” (Le sponsoring que personne n’a vu), cette opération a été imaginée par les agences End to End et Área 23, en partenariat avec l’Institut Melanoma Brasil. Son objectif : alerter sur les dangers du mélanome, un cancer de la peau aussi discret que mortel.

For GLP-1 receptor agonists specifically, adherence challenges are a major concern, as these medications require long-term use to achieve meaningful health benefits in chronic conditions like diabetes and obesity.

There was no difference in edoxaban adherence between the groups. However, the proportion of adequate medication adherence was higher in the intervention group, and the benefit of the smartphone app–based intervention on medication adherence was more pronounced among older patients than among younger patients. Given the low adherence to oral anticoagulants, especially among older adults, using a smartphone app may potentially improve medication adherence.

Many of us are struggling to stay on the narrow path of healthy choices. At work, at meetings, and in the car on the way home we are constantly tempted to snack a little bit—to kill boredom, to have a good time, or to get some quick energy to stay awake and aware. Each single occurrence does obviously not make a difference, but over time one snack becomes more, and slowly but surely our waistline expands.

What’s often overlooked is that employee resistance to change is most likely due to the emotions behind the change, not the change itself. And in examining those emotions, the late Carl Frost offered four key questions that people ask themselves when they’re being asked to change. The answers to these questions determine their excitement, or resistance, to change.

Patients were assessed for their adherence to optimal medical therapy at the time of the index duplex scan, the first follow-up visit, and at each subsequent follow-up visit until the end of the study, ultimately leading to a median follow-up period of 2.7 years. In the study, optimal medical therapy was defined via three key tenets: abstinence from smoking; use of aspirin or other antiplatelets; and use of statins or other lipid-lowering therapies.

Employee disengagement is a persistent problem, and attempts to inject excitement often fall flat. However, gamification — using elements of games to motivate — has serious potential when thoughtfully executed. This article explores the psychology behind gamification, successful examples, and how to leverage probabilistic rewards (like lotteries tied to performance) to increase employee motivation.

Human beings are creatures of habit. Ours days have a particular rhythm to them, and behaviours we exhibit today are generally indicative of how we behaved yesterday and will behave tomorrow. Yet for how routine our lives can be, behavioural research conducted the last 50 years has found that people tend to struggle when asked to recall specific details about their day-to-day life.

In recent years, it has been increasingly recognized that food choices are not only central to health, but also to global sustainability. In particular, production and consumption of meat have been linked to dying prematurely, as well as proven to be a central source of CO2 emissions responsible for ~15% of the total global CO2 emission. Thus, changing people’s diets from a meat-based to a vegetarian, may prove to be a necessary step in the battle against what has become a global food–health crisis as well as climate change.

One aspect of COVID-19 prevention, however, was not something foreign to the general populace. Basic hand hygiene is preached from a young age as a means of illness prevention, and health organisations made sure to emphasise that the simple act of washing one’s hands or using an alcohol-based sanitiser may help curb the spread disease in this new context too. Yet for how important hand cleansing is in keeping individuals and the community safe, compliance can be difficult to achieve, and even harder to measure.

At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.

Connaissez vous les cafés suspendus ? Cette tradition italienne du milieu du 20ème siècle consiste à payer deux cafés, l’un pour soi et l’autre pour un client démuni ou dans le besoin. Depuis quelques années, la tradition s’est importée en France. Zoom sur ces cafés suspendus.

After Suspended Coffee’s initial wave of popularity on the social media, critics have come out of the woodwork to cut down the idea. Some have been blatantly trolls, some have been hopelessly cynical, and some have made good points. Here is a summary of some of the criticisms. None have dampened my belief that this is a good idea.

Individuals engage in daily behaviours that are often at issue with self-interest and rationality. This paper supports the thesis of inadequacy of the homo oeconomicus model, providing results of a field experiment conducted in the city of Naples (Italy) on the practice of “suspended coffee” (caffè sospeso). The suspended coffee tradition was initially launched in Naples and consists in people purchasing two coffees, one to drink on the spot and one to be left “suspended” for someone else to drink for free. A convenience sample of café clients completed a self-administered questionnaire. Their answers were examined in relation to the declared choice and consequent purchase of a suspended coffee.

La quantification et l’identification des causes du non recours sont des enjeux majeurs pour la lutte contre la pauvreté. Plusieurs études récentes, portant sur différentes prestations sociales, montrent que le non-recours atteint fréquemment des niveaux supérieurs à 30 % en France. C’est le cas du RSA (34 % de non-recours) ou encore du minimum vieillesse (50 % de non-recours pour les personnes seules).