Psychology is an important field for the Service Designers of today. There is one field or approach of psychology that is especially useful in our practice: behavioral psychology or behaviorism.

What we today call the behaviorist movement seems to have begun in 1913. Back then, a smart guy named John Watson published an article under the title “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”. Others date behaviorism back to the work of Edward Thorndike and his “Law of Effect”, proposed in 1898. Behavioral psychology shows how you can strengthen a behavior through the use of reinforcement.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner, with his experiments on mice, and Ivan Pavlov, with his well know experiment involving a dog and a bell, are the more well-known behaviorists working later in the 20th century.

Behavioral psychology is of interest to Service Designers because it provides keys on how to help users change a specific behavior or create a new behavior. We will go deeper into these notions when we speak about books like Nudge and notions like Cognitive Biases that are based on behavioral psychology.

This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.