Changing Behaviours

Motivation (Solomon Ch6)

Hedonic v Utilatian

Satisfying hedonic needs implies that consumers emphasise subjective and experiential aspects, e.g. self confidence, excitement

Satisfying utilitarian needs implies that consumers emphasise the objective, tangible attributes of products

Motivational strength is degree to which a person is willing to expend energy to reach one goal as opposed to another reflects their underlying motivation to attain that goal.

Drives or expectancy

Drive theory focuses on biological needs that produce unpleasant states of arousal, e.g. stomach rumbling when you are hungry. We are motivated to reduce the tension caused by such arousal.

Expectancy theory suggests that behaviour is largely governed by expectations of achieving desirable outcomes – positive incentives rather than pushed from within.

Needs vs wants

Biogenic needs – people are born with a need for certain elements necessary to maintain life, e.g. food, water, shelter and so on.

Psychogenic needs – are acquired in the process of becoming a member of a culture, e.g. status, power, affiliation and so on.

Motivational conflicts

Positively valued goals – consumers are motivated to approach the goal and will seek out products that will be instrumental in attaining it.

Avoiding negative goals – consumers are motivated to avoid a negative outcome structuring their purchases or consumption activities.

Habitualising a change of behaviour?

Appeal to the consumer’s hedonic needs.

Use positive reinforcement and novel stimuli

Subtopic

Make behaviours emotional rather than cognative!

Philisophical debates

Heidegger (1889-1976 on authenticy

A Dasein chooses to care about three things: its Facticity, its Fallenness and its Existentiality.

Heidegger thinks modern, technology focused, consumer driven societies make it easy to fall into a set of tasks predetermined by how other people tell us to behave. He’s critical of the idea of people are looked at as consumers…consumers of nature…he’s critical of this strange virtue of just living your life…consuming more stuff all around us

“The circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure which distinctively characterizes the history of a world which has become an unworld.”

“Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry.”

“Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. … All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man — all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition
of his native world.”

The camel is the load bearer; the one who does what they are told and who follows in the crowd.

“What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded. What is most difficult, O heroes, asks the spirit that would bear much, that I may take it upon myself and exult in my strength?”

The camel does not run from life or distract itself from it. It greets life head-on and embraces the difficulties that it presents out of a sense of duty.

The camel does what is expected of it and that is its burden. As a consumer it is unquestioning.

Eventually the camel will question everything, both its worth and the value of its pursuits.

To fulfil its destiny, the spirit needs to rule over the desert, to become lord of the desert to capture freedom

The lion is the assertion of self confidence and self determination following on from the "desert", as he calls it, that the camel must traverse. The image is power and the control of one's life possibly with a rejection of normative concepts that others have taken for granted.

Here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert. Here he seeks out his last master: he wants to fight him and his last god; for ultimate victory he wants to fight with the great dragon. Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god? “Thou shalt” is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, “I will.” “Thou shalt” lies in his way, sparkling like gold, an animal covered with scaled; and on every scale shines a golden “thou shalt.” My brothers, why is there a need in the spirit for the lion? Why is not the beast of burden, which renounces and is reverent, enough? To create new values—that even the lion cannot do; but the creation of freedom for oneself for new creation—that is within the power of the lion. The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred “No” even to duty—for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. To assume the right to new values—that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much.”

The dragon is the enemy of true self-mastery.When confronted by the dragon, the lion says “I will!” But the dragon retorts that all values are already created, every one that makes up its golden scales. The dragon says, “there shall be no more ‘I will’.”

As the lion confronts the dragon it roars what Zarathustra calls “the sacred ‘No’.” The sacred No is the rejection of all values that came before the lion.

The child: The child conjures up a wide eyed innocence and, to an extent, humility. The quote is: the child is innocence and forgetting.

To complete the three metamorphoses, the lion must become a child. ‎Maturity, for Nietzsche, means rediscovering the seriousness one had as a child at play.

“The child”, Nietzsche says, “is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a Sacred Yes” (Z, 55). The lion becomes a child when the individual who says “I will” ceases to affirm their values contrary to the law of “Thou Shalt”, and affirms them instead “for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, … its own world” (Z, 55). Life is no longer a reactive struggle to defeat other forces. Life is a celebration of one’s powers – a sustained act of pure affirmation. The child-like spirit knows the joy of life and the innocence of perpetual creation.

Nietzsche and “herd mentality”

to self-actualize our potential is to ignore social conventions and norms.(Human: All; to Human)

Heuristics

Making a Decision

Rational perspectiveopic (Cognative)

calmly and carefully integrate as much information as possible with what they already know about a product, painstakingly weighing the pluses and minuses of each alternative, and arriving at a satisfactory decision

Behavioural influence (low involvement and Habituial)

decisions are made as a result of a learned response to environmental cues. known as limited problem solving

Expereriencial (high involvement) and afffective)

degree of risk and use extended search and active use of external sources to validate decisosn based on multuiple criteria

Subtopic

Herbert Simon’s study of a notion he called “bounded rationality” focused on decision-making under restrictive cognitive conditions, such as limited time and information.

This concept of optimizing an inherently imperfect analysis frames the contemporary study of heuristics and leads many to credit Simon as a foundational figure in the field.

Cognitive (mental) shortcuts or rules of thumb that simplify decisions, under conditions of uncertainty. (Kahneman, 2003). sees them as substituting a difficult question with an easier one.

These strategies are generalizations, or rules-of-thumb, reduce cognitive load, and can be effective for making immediate judgments. However, they often result in irrational or inaccurate conclusions.

Affect (Adjustment) Heuristics

when estimating a certain value, we tend to give an initial value, then adjust it by increasing or decreasing our estimation. However, we often get stuck on that initial value – which is referred to as anchoring – which results in us making insufficient adjustments. Thus, our adjusted value is biased in favor of the initial value, which we have anchored on

how we can rely on our emotions when making decisions, which allows us to reach a conclusion quickly and without much effortful thought.

occurs especially when under time pressure.

Public health campaigns may use fear appeals to decrease an unhealthy behaviors within society by sharing statistics, information, and images that lead people to experience negative affect in regard to that behavior.

The affect heuristic represents a reliance on good or bad feelings experienced in relation to a stimulus. Affect-based evaluations are quick, automatic, and rooted in experiential thought that is activated prior to reflective judgments (see dual-system theory) (Slovic et al., 2002).

1980, Robert B. Zajonc highlighted the importance of affect in decision-making in “Feeling and thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences”.5 He suggested that all perception has an affective component; he wrote: “We do not just see “a house”: we see a “handsome house”, an “ugly house”, or a “pretentious house”.”(p.154).

Availablity Heuristics

relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. Implies people default to use a readily available fact to base their beliefs about a comparably distant concept.

occurs when we’re attempting to make judgments about the frequency with which a certain event occurs.

Representative Heauristics

we categorize different objects and identities in our memory

Mental shortcutwhen making judgments about the probability

Linked to Gamblers Fallacy, the probability of a random event occurring in the future is influenced by previous instances of that type of event.

Classical conditioning (Skinner, 1974)

Classical conditioning ‘occurs when a stimulus that elicits a response is paired with another stimulus that initially does not elicit a response on its own. Over time, this second stimulus causes a similar response because it is associated with the first stimulus’ (Pachauri, 2002, p. 324).

The best-known example of classical condition is Pavlov’s work, in which the sound of a metronome acted as the conditioned stimulus (CS), food as the unconditioned stimulus (US), and salivation as the unconditioned and conditioned responses (UR/CR) (Macklin, 1986).

Skinner, who denied the usefulness of hypothesising about unobservable acts, such as the concepts of freedom, will, and dignity, and is most famous for his exploration of operant conditioning. Skinner (1974) distinguished two types of behaviourism: methodological (based on the development of Watson’s work) and radical (which attempts to understand and analyse behaviour in relation to its environmental context) (Blackman, 1985).

Hot Cold Empathy Gap

A hot-cold empathy gap occurs when people underestimate the influence of visceral states (e.g. being angry, in pain, or hungry) on their behavior or preferences (Loewenstein, 2005). In medical decision making, for example, a hot-to-cold empathy gap may lead to undesirable treatment choices when cancer patients are asked to choose between treatment options right after being told about their diagnosis.

linked to addictive behaviours.

Framing Effect

Kahneman & Tversky, 1979 highlights positive or negative aspects of the same decision, leading to changes in relative attractiveness. Links to Prospect theory

risky choice framing (e.g. the risk of losing 10 out of 100 lives vs the opportunity to save 90 out of 100 lives),

attribute framing (e.g. beef that is 95% lean vs 5% fat),

goal framing (e.g. motivating people by offering a $5 reward vs imposing a $5 penalty) (Levin et al., 1998).

When decisions are influenced by the way information is presented. Equivalent information can be more or less attractive depending on what features are highlighted.

Decisions are made by focusing on the way the brand information is presented instead of the product attributes. Such decisions may be sub-optimal, as lesser features can be framed in a positive light. This may make them more attractive than options or information are objectively better, but cast in a less favourable light.

(Dual) System Thinking

System 1, is fast, effortless, automatic, and emotional

System 2, is slow, effortful, deliberate, and logical

Kahneman book, Thinking Fast and Slow argues both systems have their pros and cons.

Links to affect heuristic

System 1 thinking is beneficial in situations when there is no time to deliberate; an immediate decision must be made. This kind of automatic thinking allows us to make the quick decision to hit the brakes when someone cuts us off on the highway

Example, the attention of buyers of entertainment systems can be attracted to some options because of specific cues (brand, price, specific functionalities, aesthetics, location in-store, etc.) but using their device to seek online reviews while in-store can quickly and strongly reshape buyers’ options and preferences.

Bounded Rationality Kahneman, (2003)

Bounded rationality is a human decision-making process in which we attempt to satisfice, rather than optimize. We seek a decision that will be good enough, rather than the best possible decision.

Assumes we have dual personalisity

Social Norms

Social norms are collectively held beliefs about what kind of behavior is appropriate in a given situation. They range from specific customs—for example, the Western custom of shaking hands with somebody when you meet them for the first time—to more general rules that govern behavior and influence our understanding of other people.

Mapping social norms gives an indication of how people will behave in socail situations and assumes conformity rather than deviancy. Suggested as

Can be described aspluralistic ignorance, where we don’t realize many other people privately disagree with something, or hold a different attitude than the majority.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general. They tend to believe they know more eg bleach, Trump, COVId

The Dunning–Kruger effect is meta-cognitive abilities. This is based on the idea that poor performers have not acquired the ability to distinguish between good and bad performances. They tend to overrate themselves because they do not see the qualitative difference between their performances and the performances of others. Termed the "dual-burden account" since the lack of skill is paired with the ignorance of this lack.

when a lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area cause them to overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect also causes those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone, and underestimate their relative abilities as well.

Economic behaviours

Game Theory

Assumes self-interested, rational maximizing. Behavioral game theory extends standard (analytical) game theory by taking into account how players feel about the payoffs other players receive, limits in strategic thinking, the influence of context, as well as the effects of learning (Camerer, 2003). Games are usually about cooperation or fairness. Well-known examples include the Prisoner’s Dilemma,

Links to inequity aversion, Guth, (1982)

Herd Behaviour

people defer to other influencers instead of, independently, looking for their own information or making independent decisions. The idea of herding has a long history in crowd psychology. Often applied in finance, where it has been discussed in relation to the collective irrationality of investors, including stock market bubbles (Banerjee, 1992)

Commitment Bias

Tendency to remain committed to our past behaviors, particularly those exhibited publicly, even if they do not have desirable outcomes.

Commitment bias can become an even greater issue when it is exhibited by someone in a position of power.

Homo Economus

‘economic man’, denotes a view of humans in the social sciences, particularly economics, as self-interested agents who seek optimal, utility-maximizing outcomes. Behavioral economists and most psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists are critical of the concept

Self-interest may conflict with people’s honesty as an internalized social norm, but the resulting cognitive dissonance can be overcome by engaging in self-deception, creating moral “wiggle room” that enables people to act in a self-serving manner.

Inertia

In behavioral economics, inertia is the endurance of a stable state associated with inaction and the concept of status quo bias (Madrian & Shea 2001). Behavioral nudges can either work with people’s decision inertia (e.g. by setting defaults) or against it (e.g. by giving warnings)(Jung, 2019). In social psychology, the term inertia is sometimes also used in relation to a persistence in (or commitments to) attitudes and relationships.

Loss Aversion

the pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. People are more willing to take risks (or behave dishonestly; e.g. Schindler & Pfattheicher, 2016) to avoid a loss than to make a gain. Loss aversion has been used to explain the endowment effect and sunk cost fallacy, and it may also play a role in the status quo bias.

Nudge

Thaler and Sunstein (2008, p. 6), a nudge is "any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not."

Cognitative Science (Bias)

Short (Present) term bias

Present bias refers to the tendency of people to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time when considering trade-offs between two future moments (O’Donoghue & Rabin, 1999)

Present bias is the tendency to care more about our current experiences than about what might happen to us in the future (Ainslie, 2001; Laibson, 2001).

As noted by Duckworth, 2020, affective states vary over time and the future is less vivid than the present, it can be difficult for our “present self ” to empathize or feel continuity with our “future self ” (Bartels & Urminsky, 2011; Hershfield & Bartels, 2018; Sayette, Loewenstein, Griffin, & Black, 2008).

The present bias refers to the tendency of people to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time when considering trade-offs between two future moments (O’Donoghue & Rabin, 1999).

The tendency to focus on the here and now and over-value immediate rewards at the expense of long-term intentions and benefits is called present bias. That’s true even if the long-term effect or reward is more beneficial than the immediate one.

Money taoday People chose to receive the 150 euros today because that’s a guaranteed gain, or 160 euros in four weeks. A risk perspective suggests no matter the promises, take money today. 'a bird in hand is worth two in the bush'.

Procrastination is defined in the psychology literature as the practice of putting off in pending tasks to a later time when such practice results in “counterproductive and needless delays” (Schraw et al, 2007)

For example, students under-estimate their ability to exercise self-control (at least in repeated tasks), a form of partial naïveté at the deadline setting stage. (Bisin 2020)

Second, students are over-confident about their ability to complete the task(s); in particular they over-estimate their ability to persevere on the current and future tasks after a failed attempt (Bisin 2020)

Internal mechanisms include mental deadlines, cues, and anticipatory planning. External mechanisms include binding self-imposed deadlines and voluntary exposure to social pressure. (Bisin 2020)

Cognative Dissonance

positive reinformcement and prominanct in socail media algorism that select and can encourage deviant behaviours over novel seeking behavious.

Cognative bias

Ariely, 2008) is a systematic (non-random) error in thinking, when judgment deviates from what would be considered desirable from the perspective of accepted norms or correct in terms of formal logic.

“bias bias” – the tendency to see biases even when there are none (Gigerenzer, 2018).

Anchoring Bias

A form of cognitive bias that suggests consumers favour the first bit of information they find.

Once the value of the anchor is set, subsequent arguments, estimates, etc. made by an individual may change from what they would have otherwise been without the anchor. For example, an individual may be more likely to purchase a car if it is placed alongside a more expensive model (the anchor).

When we are setting plans or making estimates about something, we interpret newer information from the reference point of our anchor, instead of seeing it objectively. This can skew our judgment, and prevent us from updating our plans or predictions as much as we should.

Links to Planning Fallacy - the tendency to underestimate the amount of time it will take to complete a task, as well as the costs and risks associated with that task—even if it contradicts our experiences.

Diversification (Niave) Bias

Read & Loewenstein, 1995, suggests consumer seek variety and will overspecify

Simonson, 1990 When people have to make simultaneous choice (e.g. choose now which of six snacks to consume in the next three weeks), they tend to seek more variety (e.g., pick more kinds of snacks) than when they make sequential choices (e.g., choose once a week which of six snacks to consume that week for three weeks).

Hindsight Bias

referred to as the ‘knew-it-all-along effect’, is a frequently encountered judgment bias that is partly rooted in availability and representativeness heuristics

example is jurors

Optimism Bias

tend to overestimate the probability of positive events and underestimate the probability of negative events happening to them in the future (Sharot, 2011). For example, we may underestimate our risk of getting cancer and overestimate our future success on the job market.

The Halo Effect

A persons opinion of something in one domain influences their opinion of it in other domains [1][2]. A commonly used example of the halo effect is the fact that when we meet other people, we often let one of their traits influence our opinion of their other traits.

The challenge of assessing changes in behaviour.

Social marketing puts the consumer at the centre of every intervention and initiative, and this means that messages, services, products, and activities should be designed with the needs of the particular target audience.

McQueen (2001) agues that complexity affects evaluation, measurement and design.

As the complexity of an intervention increases we need more complicated methods of assessment [and] answers provided by the assessment may be less certain. It is also clear that the most rigorous method of assessment that many propose for evaluation, namely an RCT, is best suited to a simple intervention.

Livingstone ( 2005) notes it is difficult in naturalistic settings to eliminate possible confounding variables. In social science, the ‘perfect study’ often simply cannot exist, for technical, ethical, or other reasons.

Marketing programmes tend to evolve in response to changing needs

This inability to specify in advance and then to control the ‘active ingredient’ in the intervention is incompatible with the typical approach to establishing effectiveness, which requires a treatment or procedure to be tightly specified, implemented consistently, and compared across different cases Clark & McLeroy 1998

Reprocity

Neoclassical economics views us as rational beings who are motivated solely in order to maximize their own wealth.

Altruism is when someone consciously makes sacrifices to benefit others without expecting a personal reward. (Rushton, 1984). Pro -social behavior includes volunteering, philanthropy, and helping others in emergencies (Piliavin & Charng, 1990).

Reciprocity is a social norm that involves in-kind exchanges between people—responding to another’s action with another equivalent action. It is usually positive (e.g. returning a favor), but it can also be negative (e.g. punishing a negative action) (Fehr & Gächter, 2000)

used as a social influence in charitable giving tool in the form of ‘reciprocal concessions’ Chuan, 2018

Reciprocity tends to degrade over time - donar fatique.

Stimulus-Organism-Response
framework. Woodworth, 1929

there's a stimulus that triggers a response based on the internal feelings or behavior of an organism (person). This internal processing of the stimulus can be conscious or unconscious. It further triggers an emotion that leads to a response.

The three dimensions based on the emotional responses to the environment elaborated by Mehrabian and Russel (1974):

Measuring pleasure regarding the verbal judgments based on the emotions such as happiness, joy, or satisfaction level in some scenarios.

Arousal can be measured using verbal judgment, such as the person’s happiness level or situation-based activeness.

Dominance can be predicted using the feelings of the respondent’s indication, which is in the form of willingness to be dominant and based on environmental situation influence. Based on the three dimensions, assume that every individual may affect by emotional conditions by each environment.

Consumer behaviour theories may be applied internationally, however, consumers’ decision making is influenced by their specific cultural backgrounds (Ciarlante and Schütte, 2016).

Consumers possessing strong environmental attitudes are found to be willing to pay a premium for sustainable products and services (Diamantopoulos et al., 2003; Krystallis and Chryssohoidis, 2005; Sekerka, McCabe and Bagozzi, 2014). Some studies found disparities between sustainable attitudes and behaviours, (Peattie, 2010; Zollo et al., 2018; Nguyen, Nguyen and Hoang, 2019) notes that consumers who recycle do not always engage in other sustainable behaviours such as buying eco-friendly products. (Tucker and Speirs, 2003; Staats, Harland and Wilke, 2004)

In the pursuit of morality, consumers’ self-identity will align with sustainable behaviour, e.g., those who view themselves as a green consumer are likely to buy organic foods (Sparks and Shepherd, 1992; Zollo et al., 2018).

The switch to sustainable consumption boils down to being altruistic, where consumers deal with compromises and inconveniences to make sustainable decisions, with the belief and expectation that it will make the world a better place (Peattie, 2010; Wang, Liu and Qi, 2014; Vantamay, 2018; de Morais, Pinto and Cruz-Jesus, 2021).

On the other hand, (Stern, Dietz and Kalof, 1993) suggest that egoistic values are more effective influences than altruism, e.g. consumers make sustainable decisions for their self-satisfaction, social identity, and personal health and gains, rather than for social justice.

Change Profiles (Cools,E 2021)

Judge et al. (1999) identified seven traits that influence people’s responses to change processes.,

locus ofcontrol, self-efficacy, self-esteem, positive affectivity, openness to experience, tolerance forambiguity, and risk aversion).

These authors clustered the seven traits together in two factors that significantly predicted people’s ways of dealing with organisational change,

being apositive self-concept

risk tolerance

Trait Approach

Lotus of Control

Locus of control refers to the extent to which people attribute thesource of control over events to themselves (internal locus of control) or to externalcircumstances (external locus of control) (Rotter, 1966). Organisational change researchers(Judge et al., 1999; Nget al., 2006) conclude that an internal locus of control might bepositively related to handling organisational change, as it is associated with problem-focusedcoping strategies. Blau (1993) found that an internal locus of control was positively related tothe initiative dimension of performance.

Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is a person’s belief about his or her chances of successfully accomplishing a specific task (Bandura, 1997). Self-efficacy is a motivational construct thatinfluences people’s choices of activities, goal levels, persistence, and performance in a varietyof contexts (Zhao et al. 2005). Self-efficacy is assumed to have an impact on people’swillingness to introduce new products or services, to be proactive towards the environment,and to take risks (Poonet al. 2006). As high self-efficacy gives people confidence to deal with unexpected events and to be able to handle whatever comes to them, it is considered tobe an important factor in coping with organisational change (Judgeet al., 1999; Stajkovic &Luthans, 1998).

Tolerance for ambiguity

(Furnham & Ribchester, 1995).People with high tolerance for ambiguity find ambiguous situations challenging and strive toovercome unstable and unpredictable situations to perform well. People with low tolerance forambiguity see ambiguous situations as threats.

Cognitive

The cognitive perspective starts from the idea that some peopleare better in recognising opportunities, on the one hand because they possess information thatis necessary to identify an opportunity, and on the other hand because they have the cognitiveproperties necessary to exploit them (Mitchell
et al.
, 2002).

Barriers to Theory Informed Practice

Include the quantity of relevant theories, the nature of theoretical information, the way theory courses are taught, and the perspective on theory held by health education students and practitioner, Jackson 1997

Example EV Tactics for influencing adoption

The Challenge: Consumers with the same attitudes may still have a behaviour change, often due to competing priorities, obligations, societal pressures, and compromises (Moraes, Carrigan and Szmigin, 2012).

Firstly, changing consumers’ feelings about the brand by pairing it with a liked stimulus e.g., associating with celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger to create a formidable and powerful image of the EV brand (Stock and Boudway, 2022).

Changing consumers’ rational behaviours e.g., offering temporary discounts and making it more convenient to purchase. .

Changing consumers’ beliefs through emotional appeals e.g., buying EVs would save the environment for their future generation

Self Iniatives changes

Changing behavior for the better depends not only on our individual capacity to regulate impulses, but also on the ecosystems in which we operate —including shared structural affordances and impediments, social norms, culture-wide practices. Cited by Duckworth 2020

In other words, successful behavior change calls for both self-initiated and other-initiated strategies.

The process model of behavior change posits that all impulses to act, think, or feel in a certain way —regardless of whether they are good for us in the long run or merely satisfy momentary desires —are response tendencies that develop over the course of moments to minutes in qualitatively distinct stages (Duckworth et al., 2016). Specifically, as suggested in Fig. 2, impulses evolve in a recursive (but one-way) cycle that may or may not include the active appraisal of our options. When impulses reach a certain threshold, they are enacted. These behavioral responses, in turn, may change our situation, which can redirect our attention, and so on. Duckwoth, 2020

Situational strategies take aim at our objective circumstances. As B. F. Skinner once quipped: “If you ’re old, don ’t try to change yourself, change your environment. ” The process model unpacks this adage by showing that our physical and social circumstances matter because they have downstream effects on attention, appraisal, and behavior. It is therefore advantageous to proactively create situations that render desirable behaviors more salient, more rewarding, or easier to enact and/or make undesirable behaviors less salient, less rewarding, or more difficult (Duckworth et al., 2016).

Perhaps the best-studied self-initiated attentional strategy is self-monitoring, the intentional and consistent observation of one ’s own behavior (Snyder, 1974).

Situational strategies

Situational strategies take aim at our objective circumstances. As B. F. Skinner once quipped: “If you ’re old, don ’t try to change yourself, change your environment. ” The process model unpacks this adage by showing that our physical and social circumstances matter because they have downstream effects on attention, appraisal, and behavior. It is therefore advantageous to proactively create situations that render desirable behaviors more salient, more rewarding, or easier to enact and/or make undesirable behaviors less salient, less rewarding, or more difficult (Duckworth et al., 2016).

Appriasal Strategies

One strategy for enhancing the value of long-term goals is called “episodic future thinking ”: for example, overweight and obese adults who were randomly assigned to visualize personal events they anticipated happening at a series of time points from one day to two years later subsequently ate less than adults in a control group (Daniel, Stanton, & Epstein, 2013).

Attention strategies

Perhaps the best-studied self-initiated attentional strategy is self-monitoring, the intentional and consistent observation of one ’s own behavior (Snyder, 1974).

While the potential for attentional strategies is clear, it bears noting that evidence for the benefits of self-monitoring devices, particularly over extended periods of time, is mixed (Behrens, Domina, & Fletcher, 2007; Freak-Poli, Cumpston, Peeters, & Clemes, 2013). One possibility is that we quickly habituate to such devices or, ironically, forget to use them (Rapp & Cena, 2014). Likewise, it is easy to ignore automated emails or text messages from our employer reminding us to engage in healthy behavior.