If our environment could talk...would it matter?

During last week's lectures, Ray listed a set of guidelines for using extrinsic motivation and or/ commitment-based approaches for behavior change interventions. When looking at both strategies, it seemed they had the following features in common:

1) The behavior must be specific and explicit
2) The behavior must have social, instrumental, or informational value
3) Gentle interventions or small rewards are most effective (minimum justification principle)

Beyond these shared guidelines, I was also intrigued by the commitment-specific one that the behavior should be inconvenient, or costly in time, attention, or energy. I feel like this goes against a lot of the initiatives I learned about in school and work experiences where you are encouraged to meet people where they are in terms of energy investment – usually this means whatever is most convenient.

During this discussion, we also played with the question, if our environment could tell us what we're doing wrong, would it actually change our behavior? I decided to see what I could find. I read about a research fellow in Germany, Matthias Laschke, who designs inventions that are making convenient behaviors more difficult in an effort to make people more conscious about their behavior. He calls his set of inventions, "pleasurable troublemakers" (follow this link to read more about the ones he's created thus far!). What I found especially interesting about his ideas is that they call forth some of the guidelines we discussed for both extrinsic and commitment-based motivation.

Examples: an elevator that always takes you to the floor below your desired one to make you walk up one floor; a lamp that only works if you insert your smartphone to discourage texting and multitasking; or a stool that is wobbly intentionally to make you focus on your posture and keep your legs moving. What if our environment and devices gave us such feedback? Would this actually help us consider alternative behaviors or merely offload responsibility to external forces in the long run? It worries me that there is a trend of trusting technology instead of people to change their behavior. In a resource-limited future, we will have to take on these behaviors ourselves, without the aid of any devices. Could these interventions then act like training wheels to help us build skills and motivation? Maybe. But I like to believe we'd do better to develop strategies that are intrinsically driven.

Still, if we look at the guidelines posted above, it seems like these interventions perform well. They address a specific behavior and provide feedback and reinforcement, have informational value to help us learn, offer gentle reminders and small rewards, and make normally convenient actions a little less so. From a human information processing perspective, the amount of attention required may be greater, but they also draw on fascination and tangible visual cues in the environment.

If we assess his inventions through our evaluation metrics, they are also interesting. First, let's talk about durability. We learned that intermittent rewards are more effective than continuous ones. How does that play out here? It appears that people may become accustomed to these stubborn objects, and then they become less effective over time. It's unclear whether such behavior change is long term or only effective when the objects are present and there is reinforcement. Additionally, Laschke says he intentionally made these inventions so that people could cheat. He recognizes that humans are smart problem solvers, and so they always have a choice in doing a different behavior. For example, someone wanting to go to floor 4 in the elevator could just select floor 5, knowing the effect. This introduces an element of volitional over obligatory behavior change, which could increase its durability if people willingly choose a different option (or forget the default!). Overall, this metric seems like it presents the most problems for these inventions.

For particularism, it seems like Laschke tried to make inventions that are individually effective for single users but also can be distributed to a general population and setting. These inventions would not require much or any adjustment from one person to the next, because they rely on intuition and learning from feedback.

Both speed of change and reliability seem strong as well. Although individuals can cheat, these inventions are surely effective in causing an immediate change in someone's behavior or at least causing that person to think twice. They are also reliable in that repeated exposure to them is likely to have the same effect as the first time, with the added benefit that people might have learned to do something differently. Still, these inventions do benefit from their fascination and initial training period to change behavior, which could fade in effectiveness with each subsequent exposure.

Finally, generalizability is another unknown with these inventions. It seems he has purposely made designs that span across the spectrum of behaviors, recognizing that changing one kind of behavior may encourage other non-target behaviors. But again, I am skeptical whether using his kind of exercise elevator or anti-multitasking lamp would prompt awareness of the other. Maybe if your life was full of these devices!

In general, it appears that these pleasurable troublemakers act like extrinsic motivators, or incentives/rewards to pursue alternative behaviors. Still, they incorporate lessons from binding commitment strategies, especially if they link to individual goals, which make them a kind of hybrid approach. Would you purchase one of these devices for your own use? How effective do you think it would be for you?

References:

• https://www.fastcoexist.com/3040839/world-changing-ideas/dont-relax-uncomfortability-is-the-new-convenience 
• http://www.pleasurabletroublemakers.com 
• Katzev, R. D. (1986). The impact of commitment in promoting consumer energy conservation. (Chapter 21, Pp. 280-294).  In E. Monnier, G. Gaskell, P. Ester, B. Joerges, B. Lapillonne, C. Midden and L. Puiseux (Eds.). Consumer Behavior and Energy Policy: An International Perspective. NY: Praeger.
• Katzev, R. D. & T. R. Johnson (1987). Social Influences (Chapter 4, Pp. 89-107). Promoting Energy Conservation: An Analysis of Behavioral Research. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Katzev, R. D. & A. U. Pardini (1987-1988). The comparative effectiveness of reward and commitment approaches in motivating community recycling. Journal of Environmental Systems, 17: 93-113.