Engineering Resilience: An Energy-Based Approach to Sustainable Behavioural Interventions

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-based intervention framework inspired by nature to promote sustainable behaviors, emphasizing resilience and long-term stability of societal systems through a holistic, energy minimization approach.

Contribution

It introduces a novel energy-based regularization method for designing resilient behavioral interventions, integrating a nature-inspired postulate into intervention optimization.

Findings

Embedding lower energy states enhances system resilience.

Energy-based interventions effectively promote eco-friendly behaviors.

Simulation results show increased sustainability of desired states.

Abstract

Addressing complex societal challenges, such as improving public health, fostering honesty in workplaces, or encouraging eco-friendly behaviour requires effective nudges to influence human behaviour at scale. Intervention science seeks to design such nudges within complex societal systems. While interventions primarily aim to shift the system toward a desired state, less attention is given to the sustainability of that state, which we define in terms of resilience: the system's ability to retain the desired state even under perturbations. In this work, we offer a more holistic perspective to intervention design by incorporating a nature-inspired postulate i.e., lower energy states tend to exhibit greater resilience, as a regularization mechanism within intervention optimization to ensure that the resulting state is also sustainable. Using a simple agent-based simulation where commuters are nudged to choose eco-friendly options (e.g., cycles) over individually attractive but less eco-friendly ones (e.g., cars), we demonstrate how embedding lower energy postulate into intervention design induces resilience. The system energy is defined in terms of motivators that drive its agent's behaviour. By inherently ensuring that agents are not pushed into actions that contradict their motivators, the energy-based approach helps design effective interventions that contribute to resilient behavioural states.