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).

Jusqu'à 40% de certaines aides sociales ne sont pas versées chaque année, c'est ce que l'on apelle le non recours. Un phénomène désolant qui s'explique par la méconnaissance des aides, la complexité du système et la stigmatisation des bénéficiaires.

This study proposes a research model to corroborate that patient health information–seeking behavior (way and effectiveness) in OHCs exerts positive effects on patient compliance with the treatment and physician’s advice and provides suggestions for patients, physicians, and OHC service providers in China to help guide patients’ health-related behaviors through OHCs to improve patient compliance, patient satisfaction, treatment efficiency, and health outcomes.

As a leading world-renowned Centre, the CBC promotes the science and practice of behaviour change to address key challenges facing society through interdisciplinary collaboration and partnerships.

Uncover the science behind behaviour. This unique and dynamic programme provides the opportunity for full-time professionals working in any sector to obtain a graduate qualification in behavioural science, allowing you to pursue new and expanded opportunities within this emerging and exciting field.

This study is the first step in testing the acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy and safety of CBT-VR for patients with depression without controls in an open-label trial. If its feasibility for depression treatment is confirmed, we intend to proceed to a large-scale validation study.

So-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is largely philosophy-based medicine rather than science based. There are a few core concepts that are endlessly recycled in various forms, but it is mythology and culture, not grounded in the rigorous methods of science that allow us to tell the difference between our satisfying fantasies and hard reality. Sometimes proponents of such philosophies try to cloak their beliefs in the appearance of science, resulting in what we simply call pseudoscience.

There is a meaningful relationship between the perceived frequency of the outcome occurring in the presence and absence of the putative cause (i.e., contingency learning), and judgements of causality across a range of health beliefs, including popular complementary and alternative medicine and therapies. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the relationship between contingency estimation and causal judgement on real-world health beliefs, in particular beliefs relating to CAM and judgements of treatment efficacy. This finding is promising as it suggests that strategies that effectively improve people’s ability to accurately infer the likelihood of recovery from an illness with and without the alternative therapy should thus change their beliefs about the efficacy of the treatment when used for that purpose.

Healthcare is broken. Chronic diseases are eating up an increasing share of healthcare resources in every healthcare system across the world in ways that are not sustainable. Yes, there is a golden age of innovation happening in the form of new technologies like gene therapy, neural technology, immunotherapy, and increasingly the impact of AI on diagnoses and drug development, but we can’t let these extraordinary technological advances blind us to the tragedy of modern healthcare and to the much neglected miracle drug right in front of us: our daily behaviors. Whether for preventing disease or optimizing the treatment of disease, behavior is indeed a miracle drug.

Si vous ne connaissez pas la petite ville de Bauné située non loin d’Angers dans le Maine-et-Loire, il y a fort à parier que vous ne l’oublierez pas de si tôt. Pour pousser les automobilistes à revoir leur conduite et surtout leur vitesse, elle a eu l’étonnante idée d’apposer un marquage au sol des plus troublants au croisement de deux routes départementales très empruntées quotidiennement.

Nudging is a burgeoning topic in science and in policy, but evidence on the effectiveness of nudges among differentially-incentivized groups is lacking. This paper exploits regional variations in the roll-out of the Covid-19 vaccine in Sweden to examine the effect of a nudge on groups whose intrinsic incentives are different: 16-17-year-olds, for whom Covid-19 is not dangerous, and 50-59-year-olds, who face a substantial risk of death or severe dis-ease. We find a significantly stronger response in the younger group, consistent with the theory that nudges are more effective for choices that are not meaningful to the individual.

The influence of clothing on first impressions: Rapid and positive responses to minor changes in male attire - Author: Neil Howlett, Karen Pine, Ismail Orakçıoğlu, Ben Fletche