Five Pathways to Lasting Behavior Change
Thursday, February 17th, 2011
We seek to change behavior (stop, start, avoid starting) in order to achieve some outcome such as better health, more savings, superior customer service, killer communications and the like. There are only five pathways for achieving and sustaining a behavior change:
1. Eliminate the need to change behavior but still achieve the outcome. For example, healthy foods well disguised as your favorite snack. I can continue to eat the same food but am now emulating healthier eating habits.
2. Engineer hard stops or gos into the environment that make it impossible to do unwanted behaviors or avoid desired behaviors. For example, no more vending machines in schools.
3. Engineer soft stops or gos into the environment that nudge us towards the preferred behaviors. For example, making healthy choices easier to see and access in the lunch line.
4. Provide guidance or support to individuals as they go through the process of learning the new behaviors from experience. For example, joining Weight Watchers.
5. Observe individuals with advanced skills in self-regulation as they work solo through the process of learning the new behaviors from experience. For example, losing weight on your own. 20-25% of the population have this capacity and more can develop it.
From a cognitive design standpoint we can see how the different pathways leverage insights into the nature of decision-making, self-regulation or control, learning from experience, self efficacy and individual autonomy. For example, the first three pathways (eliminate, hard and soft) focus on changing the environment. As such the need for self-control is minimized and learning is at the stimulus-response level. But ethical issues can emerge as these pathways may impinge on individual liberty and personal choice. They work well in case were there are clear safety concerns and behavior changes are not complex (e.g. healthcare workers washing their hands).
The last two pathways on the other hand (guided, solo) involve the much higher cognitive load associated with self regulation and learning new mental models from experience but are unavoidable when we need to master more complex behavior changes.
I have yet to find a behavior change program that does not follow one or several of these pathways. Even work on the cutting edge seems to fit. Take for example, the recent story in the Wall Street Journal about how food scientists are designing foods to trick our brains into thinking we are full:
“Nestle, one of the world’s largest food companies, hopes to develop new types of foods that, essentially, seek to trick the gut brain. The foods could make people feel full earlier, or stay full longer, in order to curb the desire to eat more. For example, cooking french fries in oil that gets digested more slowly than regular oil could confer a longer-lasting sense of satiety, researchers speculate.”
The gut brain refers to the large neural mass in our gut sometimes called the second brain. Designs that satiate in this way are an example of the first pathway – eliminate. I am redesigning the environment to eliminate the need to change behavior. It happens automatically.
Very interested to hear about behavior change programs or approaches that don’t seem to fit into the five pathways framework.
