What are behavioral levers?
Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment (BE.Center) has a behavior change framework comprising six behavioral levers. Each behavioral lever represents a category of intervention strategies based on evidence-based principles from behavioral and social science. Think of these strategies like actual levers: discrete tools to be pulled in different combinations for different effects. Some levers you may be familiar with, like laws restricting plastic bag use or financial incentives to buy an electric vehicle. Other levers you may be less familiar with, like using pride to encourage sustainable fishing, or leveraging influence of key messengers to talk about plant-based diets. Levers are often most powerful used in conjunction with one another, and after you have done extensive research to understand actors’ motivations and barriers to behavior change.
You can employ these levers while using our Behavior-Centered Design framework to build an effective behavior change campaign. This page offers an overview of these levers. If you want to explore the levers, their applications, and related case studies more thoroughly, see this deep dive guide.