About this Research Topic
The goal of this research focus is, thus, to collect studies and papers that address the issue of real-world interventions, that explore the possible pitfalls, when leaving the realm of well-funded pilots, carefully guided by scientists, and that develop an understanding of how behavior science can be translated into easily usable, but powerful instruments to empower citizens to change their practices, for example, reduce their energy consumption. We aim to build a collection of highly influential papers that determine the conditions under which upscaling works or does not work, for which target groups which intervention is viable, which channels can be used to communicate the interventions, and how to engage partners such as public administrations, municipalities, non-governmental organizations or companies (e.g., energy or mobility providers) in campaigns that have the potential to really change the world.
We envision papers to deal with for example but not exclusively the following topics:
- Which interventions work for which target groups?
- What are the cultural differences in intervention strategies?
- Does it matter, who is communicating the interventions and through which channel?
- What are the experiences, learnings, and benefits of collaboration between behavior science and stakeholders in the real world?
- Which parts of the population are excluded or exclude themselves from intervention campaigns?
- How to reach the hard-to-reach people?
- How to affect the hard-to-affect people
- Which tools could make behavior science informed interventions more usable by non-scientific actors?
- How to talk about behavior science in a useful and comprehensible way?
- How to make behavior scientists understand the necessities of the real world?
Keywords: Energy consumption reduction, Environmental footprint, Behaviour science interventions, Upscaling, Barriers in the real world, Collaboration with user partners
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.