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Megastudies to test the efficacy of behavioural interventions

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 2, page 263 (2023)Cite this article

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Combating society’s biggest issues — including promoting healthy behaviours, fighting climate change and reducing the spread of misinformation and disease — requires effective strategies for behaviour change. Although many behaviour change interventions have been developed, comparing them and determining which most effectively change behaviour is difficult.

In 2021, Milkman and colleagues developed the ‘megastudy’ approach — an experimental design in which the effects of many interventions are tested on the same dependent variable. Participants are randomly divided into groups, each receiving an intervention or a no-intervention control condition. The multiple intervention groups are each compared to the control group to determine which interventions are effective. Because there are many participants included in a megastudy (the Milkman study included over 61,000 participants), this approach allows researchers to compare many interventions at the same time.

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  1. Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Kimberly C. Doell

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  1. Kimberly C. Doell
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Correspondence to Kimberly C. Doell.

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Doell, K.C. Megastudies to test the efficacy of behavioural interventions. Nat Rev Psychol 2, 263 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00174-z

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