COVID-19 + Behavioral Science

by John Austin in Behavior change, Leadership, Reinforcement, Safety, Training

What can behavioral science add to help us prevent the spread of Coronavirus?

Due to recent requests from a number of leaders we know, we delivered a webinar to share some behavioral science and research related to executing on Coronavirus prevention practices…

Some of the points that we covered in the webinar include:

• • There is research on behavior change related to hand hygiene, social distancing, and cleaning
    
    
  • The common features of these studies include making the expectations clear and behavioral, making it easy to do the desired behaviors, adding prompts to the environment, adding feedback for the performer, and adding praise for doing the right thing.
    
    
  • How to prompt the right behaviors in each other
    
    
  • What to do when people are panicking and overwhelmed with too much information
    
    
  • How to keep people focused on their normal job safety requirements, and reduce corner-cutting

We discussed a lot more than this, and Dr. Nicole Gravina reviewed some of the science she and Jessica Nastasi wrote about in their recent blog post.

Click here to watch the entire video…

We hit on a number of topics and I mentioned articles, here is a list in case you are interested.

Additional resources mentioned during the webinar…Learn from science-based organizations, not facebook:

• • https://www.who.int/
  • https://www.cdc.gov/
  • https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/large-events/mass-gatherings-ready-for-covid-19.html
  • Hand washing: https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/when-how-handwashing.html
  • Reducing response effort: https://link.springer.com/article/10.5210/bsi.v21i0.3979
  • Using reminders: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01608061.2019.1666777
  • Using feedback: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jaba.467
  • Behavioral expectations, recording, training, and feedback: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J075v02n03_08
  • Cleaning and checklists: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J075v09n02_06
  • Diagnosing performance to improve cleaning: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J075v23n02_02
  • Communication best practices from TJ Larkin – You know safety, but you don’t know communication: http://www.larkin.biz/papers.php