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.
