Designing for Behavior Change, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Creating Action

Americans are over 1.5 trillion dollars in debt with student loans—yet over two million students who are eligible to receive free government aid don’t apply each year.¹ They don’t ask for free money.²

When asked, students say that they didn’t apply because they didn’t know about their eligibility. However, Harvard researchers ran an experiment to see if that was really the case, and they found that a lack of information about aid eligibility doesn’t affect application rates one way or another. Their research illustrates one of the core lessons in behavioral science: people don’t always know why they act the way they do, and the real reasons may not be obvious.

Kristen Berman, cofounder of Irrational Labs, set to work on increasing aid applications with her team. They determined that students had to spend almost an hour to apply and undertake 20 separate actions. They believed that cognitive overload affected the students. They would mull over whether or not to apply and avoid making a decision because of its complexity. They postponed it until the next day, then the next day, and so on.

To help counter that overload (and procrastination), Irrational Labs ran an experiment in which they sent simple text messages to students. The message told them that applying for aid was part of the enrollment process (which it is, it’s just a step that many students skip), and reminded them to complete it by the deadline. In other words, the “decision” was already made. ...