An exploration of the ethical boundaries of behavioral science, examining how nudges can transition from helpful guidance into tools for psychological coercion and control.

The digital health industry is experiencing unprecedented growth, with the global market projected to reach $660 billion by 2025, driven by increased smartphone adoption, improved internet accessibility, and rising demand for remote healthcare solutions. Wearable technology represents a significant segment of this expansion, expected to achieve a market value of $265 billion by 2030. Digital health applications and wearable devices, including smartwatches and fitness trackers, are revolutionizing healthcare delivery by enabling real-time health monitoring and enhancing accessibility. This transformation presents substantial opportunities for startups developing innovative health management applications and established companies integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. For consumers, these advancements facilitate remote healthcare access and personalized health tracking without requiring in-office visits, while industry stakeholders must invest in digital tools to maintain competitive advantage in an increasingly technology-driven healthcare landscape.

This comprehensive symposium addresses the critical intersection of nutrition, health, and environmental sustainability in healthcare practice. Scheduled for April 2026, the six-hour accredited event is designed for health professionals, tutors, and students seeking to integrate sustainability principles into their work. Participants will gain evidence-based knowledge on food systems, dietary patterns, and Net Zero targets while exploring practical strategies for implementation across clinical settings, community practice, and hospital operations. The programme covers policy developments, real-world case studies, and nutritional considerations for plant-rich diets across all life stages. By bridging science and practice, this symposium equips dietitians and nutrition professionals to simultaneously advance population health and environmental sustainability goals.

This scoping review examines the application of digital nudges and recommender systems in obesity prevention strategies. Conducted by an international team of researchers across multiple institutions, the study maps existing digital health interventions designed to influence dietary and lifestyle behaviors. The research explores how behavioral economics principles, combined with personalized digital technologies, can effectively promote healthier choices among populations. By synthesizing current evidence on web-based and mobile health interventions, the review provides insights into the effectiveness and implementation of these digital tools in clinical and public health settings. This work contributes to understanding how innovative digital approaches can address obesity as a significant public health challenge, offering valuable guidance for developing evidence-based obesity prevention programs.

A recent UK study demonstrates that displaying images of animals alongside meat options on menus significantly influences dietary choices. Researchers found that university students, staff, and visitors were 22% more likely to select vegetarian dishes when menus featured pictures of the corresponding animals. This subtle intervention, known as a "nudge," leverages psychological principles to encourage behavior change without restricting consumer freedom. As global meat consumption continues to rise despite environmental concerns, such low-cost strategies offer promising solutions to address the "meat paradox"—the disconnect between consumers' stated concerns for animal welfare and their actual eating habits. The findings suggest that simple presentation changes can effectively promote more sustainable dietary decisions.

This research investigates the sustained effectiveness of digital nudges in promoting healthier food choices during online meal ordering. A three-day experimental study with 154 participants compared the impact of just-in-time feedback, assortment modifications, combined interventions, and control conditions on daily meal selections. Results demonstrated that while initial healthy ordering increased from Day 1 to Day 2, choices declined by Day 3 in feedback-only and control groups. The combined intervention, integrating both structural and moment-of-choice approaches, successfully maintained healthier selections, achieving a 24% higher composite health score compared to control. Component analysis revealed that main dish choices converged across conditions, while combined nudges sustained effectiveness primarily through improved side dish and drink selections. These findings underscore the importance of multifaceted digital interventions in sustaining long-term healthy behavioral change in online food ordering platforms.

Avec cette opération autour de Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, le studio mise sur une idée simple mais efficace : faire ressentir physiquement ce que les spectateurs voient à l’écran. Une stratégie qui s’inscrit dans une tendance plus large où le divertissement devient de plus en plus immersif.Au-delà de l’effet spectaculaire, cette activation fonctionne aussi comme un puissant levier de visibilité. Filmée et relayée sur les réseaux sociaux, l’expérience prolonge la promotion du film bien après la séance. Et prouve qu’aujourd’hui, pour marquer les esprits, il ne suffit plus de montrer une histoire… il faut la faire vivre.

L’idée ne cherche pas à supprimer la peur du noir, mais à la détourner. En rendant l’obscurité indispensable à la lecture, le dispositif inverse complètement le réflexe habituel qui consiste à allumer la lumière pour se rassurer. C’est précisément cette contrainte qui fait la force du concept.Le livre devient une expérience sensorielle et émotionnelle. Il ne raconte pas seulement une histoire, il crée une situation où l’enfant doit accepter le noir pour accéder au récit. Un insight simple, celui de la peur du noir, est ainsi transformé en levier pédagogique et comportemental, sans discours moralisateur.

A new preprint reports that in nearly one-third of studies on social media appearing in major interdisciplinary journals, the authors have ties to industry that should be disclosed but aren’t. Some received funding from a social media company, others previously co-authored work with industry employees. These ties may be skewing the research, the authors say. The industry-linked studies appear more likely to focus on topics such as why individuals share misinformation than on the role of the platforms and their algorithms.

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.