A common problem in society is how to change people’s behavior. Most approaches include informing one about dangers and threatening one, but people tend to avoid bad news, so this strategy is ineffective. The TedTalk How to motivate yourself to change your behavior spoken by Tali Sharot illustrates three effective ways to help change one’s behavior. Changing behavior is crucial in times like this, where many people do not wear face masks and forget the importance of social distancing. Fortunately, one can create an app that does just this. Employing features such as social incentives, monitoring progress, and granting immediate rewards into an app can significantly improve COVID-19 prevention measures.
Social incentives are comparing one to others. For example, creating a leaderboard system for committing a certain helpful behavior can promote this action. The speaker used social incentives to increase the hand-washing rates of doctors from 10% to 90%. In this app, let’s call it COVID-19 Fighters (yes the name is cringy), the developers can add a leaderboard that shows how many times one is washing their hands, or how often they social distance and wear masks. There could be four separate leaderboards. Three of them each represent how much people social distance, wear masks, and wash hands. The fourth leaderboard can show the overall amount of protection. There can also be a system added which shows the average performance, one’s own performance, and the performance of the top 10%. Obviously, competitiveness is a common human trait, so people will take even more precautions to reach the top.
Progress monitoring is another strategy in order to improve behavioral change. The speaker explained how one of her electrical bills included the average usage, her usage, and the usage of the most efficient neighbor. Of course, she wanted to become that efficient neighbor. In COVID-19 Fighters, there should be an option for one to see a graph of their progress. One could see progress over each month, week, and day. Doing the right actions will make the graph go up while committing wrongdoings does the opposite. Not only can one see their own progress, but the app should also enable one to see anyone’s progress. This helps people see how much one should improve if they want to climb the leaderboards. Additionally, the opening screen of the app should contain a message saying how the person is doing. If their progress over the current week was less than that of the previous week, the message would help motivate them to try harder. If they were doing better, the message would tell them they are doing great. These possible ideas of progress monitoring can really help people strive to climb up the leaderboards and fight COVID-19.
Granting one immediate reward is also crucial for changing one’s behavior. In the same strategy of making doctors wash their hands more frequently, the speaker also explained how making the points go up immediately made the doctors feel better. In COVID-19 Fighters, immediate rewards are presented when one earns points and climbs in the leaderboard for taking precautions. There should be two immediate rewards granted at the same time, one of them is leaderboard points, which increases their leaderboard rank. The other reward should be a reward of a certain amount of in-game currency. This currency can be used to buy cool items and gadgets which can help increase points earned for each activity. For example, buying a sink for one’s in-game home can increase the number of points one earns from washing hands in real life. There should also be something added called leaderboard rewards. Every few weeks, the top performers on the leaderboard will earn a large amount of in-game currency, and possibly even real money. Obviously, the money reward should not be so much that the game goes bankrupt.
Below are some possible additions to this app that do not follow these three strategies can also help promote safety precautions. There could be a small icon in the corner of the screen that shows the distance of one from another user. If the distance is under 10 feet a warning should pop up. Additionally, there should also be an option to friend family members who live in the same home, this way, the warnings will not pop up if the two family members are near each other. Friending should only be allowed to people within a ten-foot radius to prevent the app from not showing warnings when confronted with strangers. The game should also employ animations and graphics that are pleasant to all ages. The app should not be seen as a childish game nor something boring for children. The entire family should enjoy it. Adding in-game homes would make the app a lot more fun to play during spare time. One could upgrade their home size, add furniture, and also tour other user’s homes. The in-game furniture can be used to generate automatic points, grant more points for specific actions, or just for decorations. If this game were to be further developed, it could help save millions of lives.