Methods of behavior change

A behavior change method, or behavior change technique, is a theory-based method for changing one or several psychological determinants of behavior such as a person's attitude or self-efficacy. Such behavior change methods are used in behavior change interventions. Although of course attempts to influence people's attitude and other psychological determinants were much older, especially the definition developed in the late nineties yielded useful insights, in particular four important benefits:

Traditionally, reports of evaluations of behavior change interventions barely described the actual intervention, making it very difficult to identify the most effective methods. This was increasingly recognized in the late nineties and early twenty-first century, where behavior change methods gained increasing popularity, and another taxonomy was developed and subsequently gained popularity that enabled coding previously published interventions.

A behavior change method is any process that has the potential to influence psychological determinants. Psychological determinants are theoretical variables in people's head, comparable to risk factors in epidemiology, but only including psychological variables. Examples of such determinants are attitude, risk perception (which is in fact an element of the attitude determinant according to the reasoned action approach), self-efficacy, and habit. These determinants are included in theories of behavior explanation such as the reasoned action approach and health belief model. Other theories explain how such determinants may be changed, such as the social cognitive theory (which is in fact also a theory to explain behavior), the elaboration likelihood model, and the extended parallel process model. Examples of well-known, and frequently applied, behavior change methods are fear appeals, persuasive communication, and modeling.

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