Bitesize: From Nudging to Boosting – How to Build Sustainable Behaviour Change

At our latest Bitesize event, Director Georgie Howlett was joined by Dr Stefan Herzog from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development to explore an idea gaining momentum in behavioural science: the shift from nudging to boosting. 

While nudges can be effective quick fixes, tweaking environments to guide behaviour, they often rely on people’s cognitive shortcuts and don’t always create lasting change.  

Boosts, by contrast, aim to build people’s skills, agency and confidence, helping them make informed decisions long after an intervention ends. 

Stefan shared examples from digital attention to road safety and school‑based self‑regulation, all illustrating how boosts strengthen competencies rather than bypassing them.  

We also discussed the growing importance of boosts in an online world engineered to grab attention and spread misinformation. Including some practical tools communicators can use, from pre-bunking and ‘mental inoculation’, to helping people design their own “self‑nudges”. 

A central theme running throughout the session was empowerment.  

Boosting requires us to see people not as irrational decision‑makers to be steered, but as capable, social beings who can shape their own environments – and even resist manipulation – when given the right tools. And crucially, boosts shouldn’t replace system‑level action. As Stefan noted, they’re a first line of defence while we push for wider change, not an excuse to place responsibility solely on individuals. 

It was a rich and thought‑provoking conversation about how we create behaviour change that endures – by working with people, not around them. 

At Claremont, this approach is at the heart of our CO‑LAB model — a collaborative framework designed to bring people into the process from the start, uncover lived insights, and co‑create interventions that genuinely work in the real world. 

You can learn more about boosting and find academic papers on the Science of Boosting website. 

Our next Bitesize is on 24th March at 9.30am GMT – Focussing on the Psychology of Drug Driving. Sign up here.