IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-31509-1_22.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Megastudy Approach for Changing Behavior at Scale

In: Behavioral Public Policy in a Global Context

Author

Listed:
  • Dena M. Gromet

    (University of Pennsylvania)

  • Sean F. Ellis

    (University of Pennsylvania)

  • Joseph S. Kay

    (University of Pennsylvania)

  • Heather N. Graci

    (Assistant Editor at the Behavioural Scientist and an Editorial Researcher for Authors Angela Duckworth and Dan Heath)

Abstract

The Behavior Change for Good (BCFG) Initiative was founded in 2016 to accelerate scientific discovery and identify the best behavioral science strategies to help people make meaningful and lasting changes to improve their lives. There have been many important insights from behavioral science, yet we still know very little about which insights have the best chance at cost-effectively changing behavior in any given situation. This chapter reviews BCFG’s novel, collaborative approach to combat these issues in behavioral science—the “megastudy.” A megastudy is a large field experiment in which many sub-studies are tested simultaneously on the same objective outcome, allowing for apples-to-apples (and dollars-to-dollars) comparisons across many different interventions developed from multiple disciplines. The authors review the benefits and drawback of the megastudy approach, explain how BCFG conducts megastudies, provide an in-depth look into BCFG’s 54-intervention megastudy on encouraging exercise with a large U.S. gym chain, and share the lessons learned for implementing this new approach to conduct behavioral science at scale.

Suggested Citation

  • Dena M. Gromet & Sean F. Ellis & Joseph S. Kay & Heather N. Graci, 2023. "The Megastudy Approach for Changing Behavior at Scale," Springer Books, in: Michael Sanders & Syon Bhanot & Shibeal O' Flaherty (ed.), Behavioral Public Policy in a Global Context, pages 345-360, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-31509-1_22
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-31509-1_22
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-31509-1_22. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.