Complete notes of the lecture and knowledge clips of From Theory to Intervention, a course of the master Social, Health and Organisational Psychology. I got an 8.1 on the exam by just learning these notes.
From Theory to Intervention
Lecture and knowledge clips notes
2024-2025
Lecture 1
9-9-2024
Aim of this course
Designing an intervention in a structured way
- PATHS approach
Analysing the problem
Connecting theory to practice
Behaviour change strategies
Reporting to a ‘client’
Knowledge and theory
Theory and empirical evidence
Behaviour
Many societal, health and wellbeing, and organizational issues are dependent on
or influenced by human behaviour.
Behaviour change techniques can have a big impact on these issues – and you
are the expert!
Complexity of behaviour
Health behaviour determinants
- Knowledge
o About health
o About what healthy behaviour entails
o About consequences of behaviour
- Skills
o Self-regulation
o Obtaining knowledge
o Impact on behaviour
o Impact on environment
- Motivation
o Intrinsic motivation
Example: if people don’t like to behave healthily, it becomes
much more difficult for them to behave healthy.
, o Incentives
Example: if people don’t like to behave healthily, it becomes
more difficult to influence certain incentives that there might
be for healthy, but also for unhealthy behaviour.
- Environment
o Cues for behaviour
May trigger certain behaviour
o Social support
Plays a role if people want to change their behaviour
o Complexity (complex to navigate)
Knowing a little bit about human behaviour does not mean that it’s easy to go in
a straight line from a problem to a determiner to a solution. There are many
possible determinants because human behaviour can be quite fuzzy in that
sense.
Some core theory concepts
Intention
- Intention-behaviour gap
o That people want something, doesn’t mean that they’re actually
going to do it.
- Self-regulation
- People who have a better self-regulation have a smaller intention-
behaviour gap.
Automatic behaviour
- Habits
- Impulse
o This doesn’t change if you give someone more information
- Nudging
o This does not focus on more information but on automatic behaviour
Norms
- Injunctive
o What should we be doing according to others
- Descriptive
o What you see other people doing
Interventions
Who makes these interventions?
- Psychologists but also a lot of other people.
- It is important to look at who made an intervention and with what aim
when looking at interventions.
,Interventions don’t always target the actual determinants.
For example:
- Providing information/education/knowledge
- Telling people what to do
- Trying to scare people into behaving a certain way
o This can work but it’s not advisable to do because it’s way too
complex to get it right
Effective behaviour change
Assumption: Attitude Intention Behaviour
- ‘Yelling at medical personnel is wrong, I should not do that’ aggression
decreases
- ‘Underage drinking is dangerous, so let’s not do that’ drinking behaviour
decreases
- ‘Snacking on sugary and fatty foods in unhealthy, so I will no longer do
that’ consumption and body weight decreases
Intentions cause behaviour
Theory of planned behaviour:
This theory assumes intention has a direct arrow to behaviour. But if you have a
model with arrows, the effect is being diluted with each level.
Meta-analysis on intention-behaviour association (Webb & Sheeran, 2006)
Successful interventions lead to medium to large effects on intention, and small
to medium effects on behaviour. From all the intentions that you form, only 28%
, directly corresponds to the behaviour. If you do everything intentional you
wouldn’t have time for anything else.
Moderators:
- Control
- Habit
- Impulse
- Social context
If it’s not intention than what are we talking about?
Environmental cues trigger…
- Habits
- Impulses
- Goals (sometimes conflicting)
- (Social) norms
… based on previously learned associations.
Example: social norms
- Injunctive norms
o (Perceived) expectancy of what others think of your behaviour; what
you ‘ought’ to do
- Descriptive norms
o What do others do?
o Descriptive norms are strong predictors of behaviour, because we
want to belong.
- You don’t have to be aware of this, most of the time it goes automatically.
(Anti-) social norms
- ‘Broken window theory’ (Keizer, Lindenberg, & Steg, 2008)
o If your environment signals norm transgressive behaviour, it’s more
likely that you will display that behaviour.
“If no one adheres to the rules, then why should I?”
o Does the visible ‘breaking’ of certain rules result in norms shifting in
slightly different behaviour?
o 33% vs 69% drop their flyer on the ground in the non-graffiti
condition vs graffiti condition.
Intervention implications
Look at the different underlying questions
- What are determinants of the behaviour?
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