Behavior Change
What is behavior change?
Simply put, behavior change is when a person’s actions change, either temporarily or permanently, relative to their past actions.
Diving Deeper
Depending on the person’s goals, these changes can be beneficial or not. In the context of fields like nudging and choice architecture, behavior change is typically talked about in the context of some kind of intervention - for example, helping people to quit smoking, exercise more or save money for retirement.
At the same time, psychologists use behavior change to describe any kind of alteration in a person’s actions, which can happen for lots of reasons (e.g. a mental health issue, changes in the physical environment, social pressure, etc.).
That said, the context we’re interested in is the nudging kind of behavior change - how we can understand people’s goals and help them get there more effectively.
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Sekoul is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. A decision scientist with a PhD in Decision Neuroscience from McGill University, Sekoul's work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals and has been presented at conferences around the world. Sekoul previously advised management on innovation and engagement strategy at The Boston Consulting Group as well as on online media strategy at Google. He has a deep interest in the applications of behavioral science to new technology and has published on these topics in places such as the Huffington Post and Strategy & Business.
