The Role of Behavioural Science
Susan Michie
@UCLBehaveChange
www.ucl.ac.uk/behaviour-change
Translating inter-disciplinary
academic expertise
Professor Susan Michie
Director
Dr Stephanie Lietz
Project Manager
Dr Caroline Wood
Assistant Director
Dr Lou Atkins
Senior Teaching Fellow
Sean Bamberger
Research Administrator
CBC Executive Committee
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Psychology
Human-Computer Interaction
Built Environment
Engineering
Health informatics
Environmental sustainability
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Economics
Public Policy
Law
Behavioural medicine
Arts & Humanities
Glidhe partnership aims
• Empower people to achieve their goals with
minimum effort and maximum enjoyment
– In real time in everyday life
• Achieve this by
– recognising that engagement is the first behaviour
change challenge to address
– bringing together expertise from behavioural science,
computer science, human-computer interaction,
engineering and design
Some key behavioural principles
Behaviours do not occur in a vacuum
• In context of other competing or
supporting behaviours
• within or between individuals
Start from understanding
• perspectives of users
• in context of everyday lives
• Material and social
Core ideas
• Motivation: Increase
• enjoyment of the experience
• satisfaction with the outcome
• trust of the process
• Self-learning system
• As a person uses the tools, it
• ‘learns’ the places, times and situations
associated with responses and
• personalises support, getting feedback as to
helpfulness
There is a science of behaviour change
• Evidence about
– Behaviour change techniques
– Delivery modes
– Tailoring and personalising
• Theories about
– Mechanisms of action
– Modifying factors
• Individual and cultural differences; contexts; types
of behaviour
• Methods for intervention development, evaluation and
dissemination
Advancing behavioural science: opportunities
• Large amounts of rapidly collected, real-time objective
data in everyday contexts means possibilities for
• Identifying effective components within interventions and
rapidly building evidence
• Refining theories about how interventions work and why
their effects vary
• Developing sophisticated designs for testing
effectiveness and theory
Conclusion
• Exciting opportunity for
– Behavioural and computer scientists to work closely
together
– Rapid cycles of
• evidence and theory informed interventions
• producing Big Data to …
• build evidence and theory