Two Minds Blog

  What's the appeal of digital badges? I used to think that only a crazy person would be motivated to exercise just to move some electrons around on their smartphone screen. My phone would notify me that a new challenge was available each month, and I would routinely ignore it. I felt no pain or consternation about this -- in fact, I never gave it a second thought, or never notice the challenge at all. But for the past few months it seems that I'm among those who increase their activity level just because their iPhone tells them to (my latest badges shown above). Why does this seemingly stupid behavior-change strategy work, and why did it start working for me when it didn't help me before? First, it's important to know that rewards do motivate behavior. In a previous post on behaviorism I provided some background on how this works by training the Intuitive Mind. Two Minds Theory posits that the final stage before a behavior is produced by the Intuitive Mind (after proc...

  If you're trying to make a change in areas of your life like diet or exercise, you might come across the idea of "stages of change" that everyone passes through in trying to change their behavior. The stages of change were one of three original components in psychologist James Prochaska's (1983) transtheoretical model of psychotherapy (TTM), although many people have heard about the stages without ever knowing the TTM. The stages of change construct has by now been widely accepted in fields that are increasingly far from psychology, including medical case management, nursing, medicine, and healthcare business administration. Although the stages of change are among the most widely known and cited explanations of health behavior, this success arrived at exactly the same time that the TTM was being questioned and increasingly disputed  in the scientific literature.  An interesting case study of the rise and fall of the stages of change can be seen in the connection b...