Too many behavioral change
related endeavors focus excessively on goals such as “raising awareness”, “changing
(improving) attitudes” and, of course, “informing the public”… yes, I have in
mind non-profit endeavors, but this situation (shortcoming) concerns not only such
projects.
The reality is that almost all
such endeavors are destined to fail at achieving actual behavior change. So,
why is there so much emphasis on attitudes? Here are some possible answers:
The people behind these endeavors
still hold the erroneous belief that behavior is driven by attitudes, thus changing
attitudes will lead to a change in behavior. Even if, most of the time, this is
wrong, I think that it is an honest mistake. If one (still) believes that human
behavior is the result of one’s personality combined with deliberate thinking, it
is only natural to think that attitudes precede behavior. Now, if you read this
blog, you know that human behavior is influenced by a huge array of factors and
that much of what we do is not necessarily the result of deliberate thinking.
When it comes to attitudes, the
reality is almost the other way around than the general (naïve) belief.
The naïve belief is that when attitudes change, behavior, too,
changes.
Reality is that when behavior changes, attitudes, subsequently
change.
The psychological process behind
this is a mix of self-identification theory and confirmation bias. (Note that I
didn’t mention the outdated cognitive dissonance). For example, let’s just
assume that as a result of randomness, Samantha ends up making a donation for a
(random) charity. After the fact (behavior) she will try to make sense of her
actions. In this process, Samantha will find all sorts of reasons for why her
action is not only justifiable, but even a very good (wise) one. She will think
better of the cause the charity is promoting. Moreover, Samantha will see
herself as a “good person who supports worthy causes”.
Another not so innocent answer, is
that attitudes are relatively easy to measure (who doesn’t know of the famous
7-point Likert-scale…). In contrast, behavior change is a lot more difficult to
measure, assess and, quite often, takes a lot of time.
The least innocent answer is that
some NGOs and even governments simply have some money to spend (waste) and they
do anything that can be done within the budget. In order to show that they have
done something useful (or at least pretend), these organizations show up with
some data on how attitudes have changed…
The essence is: if the issue one
wants to tackle is behavioral, then focus on behavior! The attitude change will
follow the change in behavior.
