Preventing Credit-Card Fraud: A Goal-Setting and Prompting Intervention to Increase Cashiers’ ID-Checking Behavior

The authors worked with grocery-store cashiers who almost never asked for ID when customers used credit cards.

Managers set a daily goal and gave each cashier a small card with the goal and a reminder. They tracked ID checks for several weeks using an ABAB reversal design.

The study ran in a real store, not a lab, so every shopper was part of the test.

ID checks jumped from about 2% to 36% while the package was in place.

When managers stopped the prompts, the rate slipped only a little, staying near 31%. A second store without the package stayed near zero the whole time.

Tilka et al. (2018) saw the same pattern in telemarketing: a manager-delivered bundle of coaching plus token payoffs tripled sales calls.

Whitehead et al. (1975) used an ABAB reversal in a nursing home and found that prompts were the key ingredient; without them, resident lounge use fell back to baseline. Downing et al. show the same prompt dependency, but the behavior held better after withdrawal, hinting that goal-setting may help lock it in.

Hahs et al. (2019) and Erath et al. (2021) both got staff to 90–100% integrity with brief BST or video training. Downing’s package is lighter—just a card and a goal—yet still lifted performance, suggesting you don’t always need full BST to see big gains in everyday compliance tasks.

If you supervise front-line staff who skip safety steps, try a pocket-sized goal card plus a daily reminder. It takes five minutes to set up, costs pennies, and can push compliance from near-zero to one-third of chances without ongoing feedback. Start with one shift, track for a week, and let the numbers tell you when to scale.