How to motivate individual and collective action: 6 ways to inspire behaviour change

Information
The first lever is all about giving information and building awareness on what the desired behaviour is, why it’s important, and how to implement it. Suggested strategies consist of offering step-by-step instructional training or materials to the actor as a guide to reach the behavioural change, and increasing awareness and understanding through informational forums, meetings, or materials, concise communication, and performance feedback.

Rules & Regulations
The second lever relates to passing rules and regulations to either promote or restrict a certain behaviour. Enacting mandates that require or encourage the target behaviour, or enacting prohibitions that limit or forbid the problem behaviour. While rules and regulations can be used alone, they are often used in combination with material incentives to achieve the favoured outcome.

Material Incentives
Offering material incentives is the third lever and it involves making the target behaviour more accessible or desirable through costs, time, or effort. This can be done by either removing barriers to reach the target behaviour, or putting up barriers to the problem behaviour and, therefore, making it harder to do. Material incentives can also include giving rewards to encourage the target behaviour or imposing penalties to deter the problem behaviour.

Emotional Appeals
By appealing to an actor’s emotions, the fourth lever can help change the way a person feels and trigger behavioural change that goes the distance. The framework explains how different emotions can be used to suit different contexts. For example, pride can be leveraged to get people to share with others when they have done something good while the prospect of shame can be used to avoid socially undesirable actions. The emotional appeals lever can also be actioned by personalizing the message, for instance by highlighting real human stories over statistics or tailoring messages to make them more relatable to the target audience.

Social Influences
The fifth lever taps into an actor’s social networks and social dynamics to inspire change. As a practical tool, this can be achieved by making behaviour observable, for example, by making public who has and has not engaged in the target behaviour. Social influence strategies also involve making the target behaviour the perceived norm by changing perspectives of what is right or wrong according to an actor’s social network. This can be achieved by facilitating conversations or community exchanges or sharing success stories of the desired behaviour. Finally, social influence can be used to eliminate excuses, for example, by giving out badges or other visual indicators that show clear support.

Choice Architecture
Last but not least is choice architecture, the design of how a choice is presented. There are a number of tools that designers can utilize to change the choice context and elicit the desired behaviour change. These include directing attention by making the target behaviour the default option, focusing on key information to simplify the decision, utilizing timely moments and providing reminders, and facilitating planning and goal setting to help actors achieve the target behaviour.

The Levers of Behavior Change framework was created by Rare, a non-profit organization that’s on a mission to inspire change so that people and nature thrive. “Human behaviour is at the heart of every environmental challenge that we face today, so if people are part of the problem, they also have to be part of the solution”, says Rare’s Kevin Green.