From Lab to Field: Combining Behavioral Nudges for Sustainable Healthy Lifestyles

Unhealthy lifestyles, including poor dietary choices, physical inactivity, and other health-risk behaviors, are major contributors to the growing global burden of non-communicable diseases. Although traditional health education and information-based interventions remain important, knowledge alone often fails to produce sustained behavioral change. Behavioral science and health psychology therefore increasingly turn to nudges and other behaviorally informed interventions that reshape choice environments, decision processes, social influences, or motivational cues by engaging the underlying cognitive, affective, and motivational mechanisms that regulate health behavior, without restricting individual freedom. While many such interventions demonstrate promising effects in controlled laboratory settings, their effectiveness can diminish when translated into complex real-world contexts, and single interventions are often insufficient to generate lasting lifestyle change. This Research Topic focuses on that transition from lab to field, examining the psychological processes through which behavioral nudges and complementary strategies can be combined, adapted, and evaluated across settings to promote sustainable healthy lifestyles. A persistent challenge in health psychology is the gap between knowing what is healthy and actually adopting healthy behaviors. Considerable effort has gone into improving health literacy through education, information provision, and risk communication, yet greater knowledge and awareness do not automatically translate into sustained behavioral change: individuals may understand what they should do while still being influenced by habits, cognitive biases, emotions, social norms, limited self-control, and environmental constraints. Bridging this health literacy-behavior gap requires a psychological account of how nudges operate, for example through self-regulation, habit disruption, affective response, or social-cognitive processes, rather than treating them solely as economic or environmental adjustments, and represents a critical next step in health promotion.This Research Topic explores how behavioral science and health psychology can bridge the gaps between health literacy and behavioral change, and between laboratory evidence and sustainable real-world impact. We welcome contributions examining: - Psychological mechanisms underlying health behavior and its change, including cognition, emotion, motivation, habit formation, self-regulation, and social norms; - Behavioral nudges for healthier lifestyles, with attention to the psychological processes through which they operate; - Combined or multi-component behavioral interventions and their potential synergistic effects on psychological and behavioral outcomes; - Translation of laboratory findings into field, community, healthcare, and policy settings; - Digital health, gamification, wearable technologies, personalized feedback, and adaptive interventions; - Sustainability, scalability, heterogeneity, and cross-cultural applicability of behavioral interventions; - Interventions addressing diet, physical activity, preventive behaviors, and chronic disease self-management. We particularly welcome Original Research, Brief Research Reports, Clinical Trials, Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses, Reviews, Methods, Perspectives, and Study Protocols, incorporating laboratory experiments, field experiments, randomized controlled trials, longitudinal studies, and interdisciplinary approaches.Submissions should center on the psychological mechanisms, cognitive, affective, motivational, or social, through which nudges and related interventions influence health behavior, rather than treating nudges primarily as economic incentives, pricing mechanisms, or policy instruments. Manuscripts that report behavioral or economic outcomes without examining the underlying psychological processes, or that are framed mainly as economic or policy analyses, fall outside the scope of this Research Topic. Topic editors: Yulan Qing, Peiran Jiao, Zheng Feei Ma Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86680/from-lab-to-field-combining-behavioral-nudges-for-sustainable-healthy-lifestyles