Ipsos Encyclopedia - Behavioural Change
Understanding (a clearly specified) behaviour in context in order to develop interventions more likely to prove effective in changing that behaviour.
Changing behaviour is the goal of marketers and policy makers – there is typically a range of target behaviours that people that are in scope which can range from the very narrow (e.g., making decision of which brand to buy at a supermarket shelf) to the more complex (e.g., deciding whether to get a vaccine for a condition).
Regular behaviours often become routinized, allowing people to concentrate on novel activities or those requiring more cognitive effort. As such, our behaviour becomes more intuitive and less reflective. This is reflected in other Ipsos work such as the Dynamic Decision Making Model (DDMM) and Dancing with Duality (which highlights the way in which we operate on a spectrum from ‘mindful’ to ‘mindless’.
As such, there are a wide range of ways in which behaviour change can be thought about and executed on. Within behavioural science there are two broad schools of thought concerning how to go about making change happen.
First is the notion that individuals can be encouraged to change through the use of small changes to the environment (or ‘decision architecture), often called ‘nudges’. This draws on cognitive psychology, and in particular the ‘Judgement and Decision Making’ literature to inform how people are making decisions and from that, what types of ‘nudges’ (changes to the decision architecture) are most suited to encouraging change. This approach suggests that decisions can be encouraged by referencing human failings that leads people to reference automatic rather than systematic information-processing strategies and decision making.
Second, is an emerging field, sometimes called Implementation Science, that uses social science informed frameworks to understand behaviour but links to intervention activities designed to change behaviour. This approach does reference our more intuitive processes but also references the way in which we also activate our more ‘mindful’ and reflective behavioural mechanisms to make decisions. One of the leading frameworks here is COM-B and the Behavioural Change Wheel (BCW), which is a credible and accessible approach to behaviour change with a wide range of supporting resources.
The BCW is a 3-layered wheel with the behaviour ‘system’ (COM-B) at the centre, the methods for changing behaviour (Intervention Functions) in the surrounding layer and the high-level societal and organisational strategies for implementing and sustaining behaviour change (Policy Categories) as the outermost layer.
At Ipsos we have adapted the BCW to be more suited to a range of behaviour change challenges (and more usable by a wider population of Ipsos people and clients). Our behaviour change framework is called MAPPS (Motivation, Ability, Processing, Physical and Social). MAPPS is designed in a way that is broadly aligned with BCW, but the sub-dimensions are more straightforward and the linkage to designing interventions is made easier for a range of commercial and policy challenges.
Within behavioural science ‘behaviour change’ typically refers to the use of behaviour change frameworks such as BCW and MAPPS, rather than ‘nudges’. There are of course significant overlaps between these broad approaches with them offering complementary rather than competing perspectives.
Ipsos Point of View
At Ipsos we tend to refer to ‘behaviour change’ approaches when there are more ‘distal’ influences on behaviour e.g. sustainability behaviours or health protection decisions such as vaccination. In these settings we will often use behaviour change frameworks such as COM-B or MAPPS.
We tend to consider the use of ‘nudge’ style approaches to be most effective for behaviour change in situations in which proximal influences on behaviour are important, e.g. in a retail environment.
However, there are few definitive rules here and the approach used will necessarily require judgement of what approach is most useful to provide tangible guidance and the most effective shaping of outcomes. There is a very live debate about the value of nudges with recent research suggesting they have little impact but there is also evidence that nudges work in conjunction with other types of intervention (see Magda Osman, Pauline Schwartz & Saul Wodak (2021) Sustainable Consumption: What Works Best, Carbon Taxes, Subsidies and/or Nudges?, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 43:3, 169-194, DOI: 10.1080/01973533.2021.1889553)
Further Reading:
