Psychology of behavioural change

Health Belief Model

Social Cognitive Theory

Percieved serverity

percieved susceptibility

Percieverd Barriers

Percieved Benefits

Self efficacy

Cues to action

Environmental Determinants

Theory of Planned Behaviour

Norms

Studies

Attitudes

Preferences

Psychological Determinants

Individual behaviour

Facilitation

Self efficacy # #

Incentive motivation

Barriers to doing a behaviour

Belief that you can overcome barriers (may or may not reflect reality)

Outcome expectations

Money or other benefits to do a behaviour

Individual motivational factors

Norms

Goal: determine individual motivational factors that lead to (predict) specific behaviours

Attitudes

Personal Agency

Individual motivational factors > Behavioural Intention > Perform behaviour

Normative beliefs

Motivation to comply

How much you are motivated to follow others approval/dissaproval - do you care about the normative belief

Whether important individuals to you approve/dissaprove of doing a behaviour

Percieved behavioural control

Self efficacy

Beliefs about own ability to overcome barriers

Indirect measure: I can restrain from smoking after work - barrier = stress -> Can be used to explain the answer to the direct measure

direct measure: I am certain I can quit smoking

Percieved power

Control belief

Beliefs about how a factor/barrier will affect ability to perform a behaviour

Beliefs about liklihood of encountering a barrier

Beliefs about factors that effect your ability to perform a particular behaviour

Intentions-behaviour gap

Behavioural beliefs

evaluation of behavioural outcomes

beliefs about which outcomes will result from performing a behaviour

beliefs about whether outcomes are good or bad

Beliefs about factors that effect your ability to perform a behaviour # #

Using TPB

Need to do fieldwork prior to identify what outcomes, barriers, norms etc people think are likely in a given population > Can then generate more specific questions asking about beliefs indirectly > Can figure out important concepts driving behaviour > can use information to develop interventions

HIV prevention in Zimbabwe - lecture

Healthy eating in children - lecture

Recycling

Critiques of TPB on page 10

Charitible giving #

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Just because participants say they would donate X amount in a hypothetical scenario, does not mean that they would in real life.

Supported by the concept of the intention-behaviour gap, whereby an individual's intentions to do a behaviour does not completely correlate with them actually doing the behaviour.

Kashif, M., Sarifuddin, S., & Hassan, A. (2015) found that intention to donate positively contributed towards actual donation behaviours, however this is a correlational finding not causation → The two did not match

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Charitible giving Bailey paper

Capraro and colleagues (2019)

Descriptive norms and moral nudges

Investigated the impact of social norm exposure on prosocial behaviour in 1 real life scenario and 4 economic games.

“What do you think your society considers to be the morally right thing to do in this situation?”

Good: real life secario extends their findings from economic games. Does not necessarily represent what they would do though

Found - social norm exposure group → increase in prosocial behaviours

Cons:
1) Participation fee- They gave them 50 cent at the start of the survey and then asked if they were willing to donate this at the end. Participants may feel that they earned this, decreasing their attitude to donate. This may have influenced the interaction between norms and prosocial behaviour of donating.
2)They made the social norm quite salient in their study, which may have increased the effect of demand characteristics on the participants subsequent behaviour. [i.e., the amount of donation may therefore be impacted by the demand characteristics]

Wider implications of these studies

If social norm exposure has an effect of increased donation to a hypothetical charity, real world charities can use this information to increase donations

E.g. increase social visibility of people who are donating to their charity so that their peers may be more encouraged to donate themselves too.

Some successful real world examples, for example: Wearing poppies, Facebook donations (where you see what friends have donated to a fundraiser)

Recycling is important since it conserves valuable resources and reduces the amount of solid waste that must be deposited in landfills (Hopper & Nielsen, 1991).

Recycling

TBP was used as the basis for a study of 191 participants in a local kerbside recycling scheme

Data collected in 3 stages

1) Observation of recycling behaviour in 248 houses - measuring participation in kerbside recycling scheme. Was not self-report - for 16 weeks

2) 20 randomly selected residents did elicitation interviews (like a pilot study) - these where from the target population - to get a sense of attitudes, consequences, costs and benefits and factors that would discourage recycling

3) 191 completed self-report questionairre sent in the mail to return. Aim: The measurement of recycling behaviour, the factors which underpin this behaviour and the demographic characteristics of respondents

Findings - Look at discussion section

Behaviour - All the respondents (apart from one) indicated that they had recycled their household waste in the past, and 80% stated that they recycled on a weekly basis. When asked about the likelihood of recycling over the coming 4 weeks period, 88% agreed that it was extremely likely. Biasing effect on results

Measures

subjective norm
was operationalised by two questions ‘most people who are important to me think that I should recycle my household waste’ and ‘most people who are important to me would approve of me recycling my household waste’

  • Here they only measure normative beliefs and not the motivation to comply with them explicitly

attitudes Seven-point semantic differential scales were used to measure attitudes to recycling. The attitudes identified in the literature were: recycling is good/bad; useful/a waste of time; rewarding/not rewarding; responsible/not responsible; sensible/not sensible; hygienic/not hygienic. not asking about the behavioural beliefs behind this - just using a direct measure. Cons to this: Does not measure individual belied that may be driving it - cant inform interventions

Recycling behaviour - The respondents were asked how frequently they recycled their household waste, how much of their household waste they had recycled in the past (previous recycling behaviour) and how likely it was that they would recycle their household waste over the next 4 weeks (intentions). Also good how they observed actual behaviour to - can check intention-behaviour gap

percieved behavioural control - direct measure qs: Recycling is easy/a hassle.Also indirect ones related to barriers of information

Go on later about consequences of behaviour- behavioural beliefs, does not measure the evaluations of these behavioural outcomes

General critiques

A lot of the time studies do not use the same standardised measures to measure a concept, and these need to be changed and adapted for different situations (groups, behaviours, type of study) so we cant cross compare the effectiveness of a concept directly across studies or make conclusions. Some meta-analyses may be good to include in your essay but this is a good general limitation.

Many dont actually measure behaviour

The TPB (attitudes, subjective norm and perceived control) only explained 26.1% of the variance in recycling intentions. The variance explained increased to 33.3% when the additional measures of moral norm, situational factors, recycling outcomes, recycling consequences, concern for the environment and previous recycling behaviour were included. This is consistent with the conclusions of Boldero (1995) and Davies et al. (2002), who argue for the inclusion of additional variables when applying the model to recycling behaviour. Ajzen (1991) accepts that additional variables may be required but argues that they should contribute significantly to the explanation provided by the model. On this basis future applications of the TPB to recycling should include the additional measures of past recycling behaviour, consequences of recycling and concern for the community.

Percieved behavioural control did not contribute much - poor measure? biased sample? or just did not matter w this behaviour?

Could also include other countries mentioning generalisiblility

OR specify using TPB model of behaviour - ACTION, TARGET, CONTEXT TIME FRAME

Specific behaviour: ACTION, TARGET, CONTEXT, TIME FRAME

Self efficacy - Studies

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societal variation in behavior is potentially due to societal differences in the cultural evolution of social norms - Henrich et al., 2010

Descriptive norms - communicate patterns of behavior that individuals want to conform to on the condition that most other people also perform the behavior

Injunctive norms - communicate what one should do in a given situation

These norms influence our behavior by changing our social expectations. They change our expectations of how others behave (referred to as empirical expectations — our beliefs about what others do). They also change our expectations of how others expect us to behave (referred to as normative expectations — our beliefs about what others believe) [23].

Descriptive norms

Moral nudges

In Studies 1 to 3, participants decided how much to donate to charities before learning that others donated generously or stingily. Participants who observed generous donations donated more than those who observed stingy donations (Studies 1 and 2). Crucially, this generalized across behaviors: Participants who observed generous donations later wrote more supportive notes to another participant (Study 3). In Studies 4 and 5, participants observed empathic or non-empathic group responses to vignettes. Group empathy ratings not only shifted participants’ own empathic feelings (Study 4), but they also influenced participants’ donations to a homeless shelter (Study 5). These findings reveal the remarkable breadth of prosocial conformity.

Moderating factors: group identification and moral self-concept

Empirical expectations motivate prosocial behavior, with people being more likely to give to charity themselves when they learn that most other people give to charity. Capraro (2019, Bailey said in Bartke and colleagues, 2017

Trust game and dictator game - Lecture

In one DG study with adults, descriptive norms motivated giving more than did injunctive norms [31], while in another study the opposite was true [32]. Bailey House, 2018

Field experiment.
Examined whether conveying descriptive social norms (e.g., ‘‘thisis what most people do”) increases charitable giving. Additionally, we examined whetherpeople are more likely to conform to the local norms of one’s immediate environment thanto more global norms extending beyond one’s local environment.
University studentsreceived a charity organization’s information brochure and were asked for a monetary con-tribution.
An experimental descriptive norm manipulation was embedded in the brochure.
We found that providing people with descriptive norms increased charitable giving sub-stantially compared with industry standard altruistic appeals (control condition).
Moreover, conveying local norms were more effective in increasing charitable giving thanconveying global norms. Practical implications for charity organizations and marketing areproposed

In one TG, adult participants initially underestimated how many recipients would return money to them [35•]. However, after receiving feedback about what recipients would actually do (i.e. information about a descriptive norm) participants increased their expectations of how many recipients would return money, and increased their rates of giving, as well.

n a TG, whether or not participants gave was better predicted by whether they thought that they should give, and not as well predicted by whether they wanted to give Lecture and paper

Weight loss/nutrition behaviour

Volitional self-efficacy interacted with intention in the prediction ofbehaviour, indicating that volitional self-efficacy is only beneficial for individu-als with high levels of intentions.

In the context of nutrition behaviour, self-efficacy has proved to be animportant factor and is examined in most studies (e.g. Contento, Randell, &Basch, 2002). Research has demonstrated that individuals with higher nutri-tion self-efficacy are more likely to act on their intentions and translate plansinto action (Guiterrez-Dona, Lippke, Renner, Kwon, & Schwarzer, 2009;Richert et al., 2010). Self-efficacy seems to be a core factor for the initiationand maintenance of dietary behaviour (Richert et al., 2010) and people withhigher nutrition-specific self-efficacy are more successful in changing theirnutrition in comparison to people with a lower nutrition-specific self-efficacy(Schwarzer, 2008).

Bernier and Avard (1986) examined the relation betweenself-efficacy and weight change at baseline and during treatmentfor 62 women enrolled in a 10-week weight loss program. Theyfound that higher self-efficacy at baseline was associated withgreater weight loss during treatment and that higher self-efficacy atthe end of the program was associated with greater weight loss ata 6-week follow-up assessment.

Jeffery and colleagues examinedself-efficacy, weight loss, and weight maintenance in 89 partici-pants enrolled in a 15-week weight loss program (Jeffery et al.,1984). They found that higher pretreatment emotional and situa-tional self-efficacy and higher posttreatment situational self-efficacy were associated with greater weight loss at the end oftreatment and at 1-year follow-up.

Scales used: Items were modified from the Weight EfficacyLife-Style Questionnaire (Clark et al., 1991). Because the Weight EfficacyLife-Style Questionnaire items assessed eating self-efficacy only, modifieditems were added to assess confidence in ability to follow exercise as wellas eating plans in difficult situations. They weighted ppts and also monitored self weight loss behaviours like weighing themselves and calorie counting (self-reported) - may have been reminded by this to do as they are apart of the study, NOT because of overcoming barriers??

large sample of men and women (N349)enrolled in a weight loss trial

FOUND: Consistent with prior findings (Chao et al., 2000; Schwarzer &Renner, 2000; Shannon et al., 1990; Stotland & Zuroff, 1991), ourcross-sectional analyses revealed that self-efficacy for both eatingbehaviors (confidence in following eating plan under varyingconditions) and exercise behaviors (confidence in following exer-cise plan under varying conditions) were significantly associatedwith weight loss program monitoring behaviors, such as days oftracking adherence to diet or physical activity plans constructed inthe weight control intervention described above. Associations,though not as strong, were also observed for specific diet andexercise behaviors (e.g., fat intake or recent exercise).

Correlations between a concept and behaviour change - not causation. Could be that individuals change behaviour resulting in changes in beliefs, such as self efficacy (can overcome barriers as i did the behaviour)

Interventions

Legal

Media

Facilitation

Incentives

public policies have been shown to have large effects on health behaviors. When governments tax cigarettes, smoking rates drop. Restrictions on where people are allowed to smoke also lower cigarette consumption. People respond to prices and regulations, even if they do not respond to reinforcing messages Cutler 2004

HIV/AIDs - condoms

Barriers

Lack of perceived threat, absence of protective motivation, inadequate knowledge, perceived lack of control, negative attitudes towards condom and misperception were the major personal barriers, while unsupportive environments and cultural norms were the common socio-environmental barriers to condom use among these at risk women Lotfi et al 2012

Among men, noncondomuse was independently associated with feeling shy to buy condoms, condoms reducing sexualpleasure, and HIV is a serious and deadly disease.
Amongwomen, experiencing forced sex, condoms reduce sexual pleasure, and inability to convince a partner to use condoms were predictors of noncondom use.
These are psychosocial barriers to condom use in youths - 15-24 Katikiro & Njau, 2012

Condoms/HIV/AIDs

Model explained 46% variance of condom use/. 53% of this was outcome expectations and peer group influences (norms). Sexual attitudes, AIDS knowledge, and perceived vulnerability did not predict condom use - suggests an intervention enhancing knowledge wont work Wulfert & Wan, 1993

Self-efficacy was related directly to condom use behaviors and indirectly through its effect on outcome expectancies. As predicted, self-efficacy was related to anxiety, but anxiety was not related to condom use. Substance use during sexual encounters was related to outcome expectancies but not to condom use as predicted