The Challenge | Student wellbeing in 2020 was at an all-time low

Wellbeing among college students worldwide suffered during COVID lockdowns. At a large university in Sydney, 57% of students told my team that transitioning to study from home made their learning experience a little or a lot worse, with many feeling unsupported and disconnected. My team at BIT partnered with a federal innovation team at the Australian Department of Social Services (DSS) to design ways to improve the situation using behavioral science.

Approach | Nudging small behaviors that elicit positive emotions

As the lead intervention designer, I started with the wellbeing research, identifying gratitude, mindfulness, and altruism as drivers of wellbeing we could realistically influence through a light touch intervention.

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Based on likely impact and feasibility, I narrowed down behaviors empirically linked to each of our core wellbeing drivers (gratitude, mindfulness, altruism) and created a six-week prompt series. I then conducted several rounds of user testing and iteration with university students, who would receive message prototypes and give user feedback on:

• the appeal and actionability of the nudge behaviors themselves;
• message delivery timing
• tone and associations.

Design | Reaching students in their own homes and hands

Given limited touch points with students due to physical distancing, we landed on an interactive, text message delivery system for the intervention design. This 'wellbeing nudge' intervention that would send students a series of prompts over six weeks to do small, simple behaviors that were linked to different aspects of wellbeing.

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We finally launched it with thousands of university students in Australia, evaluating its impact using a randomized controlled trial (RCT)— the gold standard for testing a causal relationship between a treatment (like our intervention) and an outcome (like subjective wellbeing).

The texts above are real replies (though the name has been changed 😊).

Results | Wellbeing improved— and students loved it.

Our RCT found that wellbeing prompts significantly increased students’ life satisfaction (wohoo!!).

But what does that actually mean for how people feel? The difference between our treatment group who received the messages and the control group who did not was about .5 units on a 10 point scale (huh?). In human terms, that's equivalent to the average life satisfaction of someone with the annual household income (after expenses) of ~$18,000 versus ~$27,000.

Reflections

In the years leading up to this project, I had been obsessed with understanding the drivers and attributes of emotions— particularly positive emotions. At one point I had dived so deep that I was given permission to teach a 1 credit hour seminar on emotions and decision making at UNC, working with field-leading positive psychologist Dr. Barbara Fredrickson. The challenge in this project called forth a lot of that deep empirical emotions knowledge, contextualized based on student needs and feedback gathered in user testing.