A behavior model for persuasive design
Fogg's short conference paper sets out the behaviour model that carries his name, and its usefulness comes from how little it contains. A behaviour happens, he argues, only when three things are present at the same moment: the person is motivated enough, the behaviour is easy enough for them to do, and something triggers it. If any one is missing, nothing happens, however strong the other two are. The practical consequence is that a designer facing a behaviour that is not occurring has exactly three places to look, and the model implies an order of preference, since increasing ability by making the action simpler is usually cheaper and more reliable than trying to raise motivation. The paper was written for people building persuasive technology and is explicit that its second purpose is coordination, giving a team one shared vocabulary for arguing about behaviour change. It is a conceptual model rather than an empirical test, and this vault should treat it as a design framework, not a finding.
Fogg's short conference paper sets out the behaviour model that carries his name, and its usefulness comes from how little it contains. A behaviour happens, he argues, only when three things are present at the same moment: the person is motivated enough, the behaviour is easy enough for them to do, and something triggers it. If any one is missing, nothing happens, however strong the other two are. The practical consequence is that a designer facing a behaviour that is not occurring has exactly three places to look, and the model implies an order of preference, since increasing ability by making the action simpler is usually cheaper and more reliable than trying to raise motivation. The paper was written for people building persuasive technology and is explicit that its second purpose is coordination, giving a team one shared vocabulary for arguing about behaviour change. It is a conceptual model rather than an empirical test, and this vault should treat it as a design framework, not a finding.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, Article 40. ACM. A conference paper, not a peer-reviewed journal article.
Where we use it
- Nobody Is Born Consistent, Why We Move
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1145/1541948.1541999
DOI: 10.1145/1541948.1541999