Habit Summit, Standford University
Podcast for the MIISRadio: Designing Behaviors for Environmental Consumerism (Palo Alto, CA 2016)
May 18, 2016
Script:
Hi everyone, thanks for tuning into this podcast. My name is Kenji Tabery and I am a student at MIIS in the International Environmental Policy degree program with a focus on business, sustainability, and social impact. Today, I’d like to share a bit about my recent experience in attending the Habit Summit.
The Habit Summit was hosted at Stanford University on March 22, 2016. It was a unique event that explored thematic issues about building consumer habits. This uncanny behavior design workshop created a collaborative space to learn more about building more engaging products and services. Different workshops dove into consumer psychology, design, and behavioral science to develop products and services that create new habits and behaviors. Throughout this workshop, I enhanced my knowledge in behavior design and how it could apply to increasing consumption of environmentally friendly products and services to create a positive environmental impact. However, it
doesn’t have to be restricted just to the environmental field. These new behavior design tools could apply to international security, health, childhood education, and many other policy fields. I’d like to share with you one powerful behavior design tool that could help you in your academic and career goals.
Let’s face it – at the end of the day of policymaking – we are all trying to convince someone to adopt new measures, products, and strategies to support our policies. This tool that I’m about to share will help spur design thinking about constructing your approach and delivery of specific policy or strategy to improve a certain outcome. Stanford’s BJ Fogg Behavior Model is an innovative behavior design model that illustrates how we are missing opportunities to help people improve their lives. Since we only focus
on building products and services, we miss critical opportunities to help people, and should instead be building behaviors for these products and services.
For example, there are many US federal subsidies for low-income families, such as EITC, but 25% of families who are eligible for EITC don’t apply for it. The primary reason many families don’t apply for it – the paperwork is a nightmare! This bureaucracy is an automatic barrier to entry for many families that benefit from EITC to could help pay for education, healthcare visits, and more. But shouldn’t “free money” be enough motivation for families to apply, and therefore assume these “25%” are unmotivated and lazy. The BJ Fogg Behavior Model contends this notion explaining that if we want to provide a
product or service, such as a governmental public benefit, policymakers shouldn’t focus on just increasing motivation, but rather increasing an individual’s ability to change their behavior. Under this model, Fogg says influencing people’s motivation is very difficult, but making it easier for them to perform the action (in essence their ability) will inherently increase their motivation.
For example, the most delicious ice cream truck near MIIS has parked 20 blocks away. I might go visit it once every two weeks. However, if the ice cream truck parks less than 3 blocks away, I would definitely increase my ice cream truck visits, because the driver made my ability to purchase ice cream easier and thereby increasing my motivation. Fogg states, “simplification matters – especially for people who have the least.”
While new scientific information provides new and better insight to make informed decisions that protect our environment, policymakers tend to not change their behaviors to mitigate threatening climate change impacts. The BJ Fogg Behavior Model is an innovative behavior design tool that can prepare you to design creative behavioral models to improve policies, products, and services that support environmental conservation.
My personal academic goals are to design new environmental strategies to help MIIS reach its Carbon Neutrality goal for 2016. We want to help the campus body be more efficient with their water and energy consumption habits, and also explore new healthy dietary options that reduce our campus GHG emissions. We’ve already measured preliminary success with our bathroom water conservation posters and observed a 25% decrease in water use since posting the water conservation posters in the bathroom last
semester. Overall, this workshop and similar ones can advance students’ understanding of how to shift consumer behaviors towards more environmentally friendly diets and lifestyles.
Thanks for joining me today for this podcast and thanks for listening! Keep designing and think about how you can leverage this tool to influence behavioral outcomes for the environment, security, healthcare, education, and beyond!