The Power of Prospection

Before coming to the University of Michigan, I had never heard of prospective thinking, nor had I given much consideration to the utility of this style of thinking within the psychology field. As Ray discussed in class, past-driven approaches have been the focus of psychology research. With that in mind, why would I have given any thought to the future and its role in psychology?

Regardless of what’s in fashion in academia, however, listening to Ray highlight prospection and reading “Navigating into the Future or Driven by the Past” (Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, & Sripada, 2013), has made me think about behavior differently. The lecture occurred early in the class but I think that it has been helpful to keep it in mind as the course has continued. 

Image source: http://www.4thgearconsulting.com/blog/future-thinking-can-change-the-game/

It could be easy to disregard the utility of prospective thinking because of the structuring of the psychology field, or because many of the models that we have covered are past-driven instead of future-driven. I think it may help to remember, though, that many of the interventions that we have studied have components of prospective thinking and envisioning. Commitment, for example, is to commit to do something in the future. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations suggest that there will be a promise of either an internal or external reward in the future for completing a behavior. Goal-setting, obviously, is rooted in prospective thinking. With feedback interventions, individuals can prepare to complete the behavior even more successfully in the future. Plus, research has shown that future orientation—which is both a personality trait and cultural characteristic—strongly influences pro-environmental behavior (Carmi & Arnon, 2014).

I’m drawn to highlight prospection after reflecting about how much of a role it plays in my own thinking. As an informal experiment, I tried to be mindful of what I thought about and talked about with others, and categorized the subject-matter as past- and future-focused. I didn’t keep a formal Ulysses-style record of my thoughts, but generally, I was surprised by how future-focused my thoughts were. (It’s a fun exercise; you should try it.)

Furthermore, I feel like a great deal of my personal growth and development has occurred due to future-driven thinking. I’m not the only one: in a more extreme example, a violent and aggressive prisoner who was interviewed in the Invisibilia podcast discussed how he wanted to change his personality, so he did it, presumably with the help of prospection (Spiegel, 2016). The article doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about his process, but it seems that he envisioned the person who he wanted to be and took steps to become that person. It seems like it was simply a more extreme version of what we each go through to continually improve ourselves.

Not to mention that prospective thinking has led each of us to be where we are today—literally. I think that it’s fair to say that it is the reason that we are collectively studying at the University of Michigan. Sure, I guess it’s arguable that we learned in the past that we will benefit from higher education, but it seems to me that we used prospection to imagine ourselves here and to decide that the degree (with its accompanying knowledge, professional opportunities, and so on) would be worth the cost. Considering that this process has somehow convinced each of us to spend ~$20,000-40,000 per year, it is clearly a powerful force.

A few questions:

• Do you think some environmental behaviors are more appropriate to address with prospective thinking and envisioning?
• When do you find yourself using future-based thinking most effectively to make decisions or to guide your behavior?
  

References:

Carmi, N., & Arnon, S. (2014). The Role of Future Orientation in Environmental Behavior: Analyzing the Relationship on the Individual and Cultural Levels. Society and Natural Resources, 27(12), 1304–1320. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2014.928393

Seligman, M. E. P., Railton, P., Baumeister, R. F., & Sripada, C. (2013). Navigating Into the Future or Driven by the Past. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), 119–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612474317

Spiegel, A. (2016). Invisibilia: Is your personality fixed, or can you change who you are? Shots: Health News from NPR. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/481859662/invisibilia-is-your-personality-fixed-or-can-you-change-who-you-are

Short-term Commitment, Lasting Impact

In Katzev’s work on commitment theory (1986, 1987-1988 with Pardini), two conclusions intrigued me: commitment leads to behavior adoption that lasts much longer than the actual commitment time frame, and commitment can act as a catalyst to start non-target but related behaviors, i.e. spillover. While we've talked about them before, the possibility of a behavior change intervention being powerful enough to change countless other behaviors brings a chain reaction of collapsing dominos to mind. Who isn't excited by that?

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5Ap5j5dlr7o/maxresdefault.jpg

These two tendencies match with intervention evaluation metrics durability and generalizability, respectively, which are rarely present in interventions. This intervention sounds ideal, but the path to get from a simple commitment to extensive behavior change is poorly explained.

In class, Professor De Young suggested that these two strengths of commitment interventions are connected to internal motivation, which is generally more durable, more reliable, and more generalizable. Lanzini & Thøgersen (2014) and Dolan (2015) are in line with this idea. They describe spillover behavior as linked to target behavior by underlying motivation, goals, and self-identity that have an impact longer than monetary incentives.

How, exactly, does a time-limited commitment turn into an internal motivation that supports goals, shapes self-image, and promotes consistency? Does the internalization process described in Self-Determination Theory (Sheldon, 2016) accurately describe the conversion from an externally suggested goal to an autonomous identity? If so, how do we promote this process?

https://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.cartoonstock.com/dating-commitment_phobia-commitment-commitment_issue-pencil-pen-dcrn1521_low.jpg

Research on behavioral spillover is clearly evolving. Two papers (Lanzini & Thøgersen, 2014; Dolan et al., 2015) disagree on whether a high-cost or low-cost initial behavior is best – while spillover may only occur for easy-to-perform behaviors (implying that interventions should start with a relatively hard behavior), it may also be true that hard-to-perform initial behaviors cause rebounding while easy initial commitments build to more challenging behavior (i.e. “foot in the door”). While Dolan recommends keeping initial target behavior visualizations conceptual (rather than concrete) to allow self-identity considerations to come into play, Professor De Young recommended making interventions for specific behaviors. How can these competing interests be satisfied?

My current suggestion is for the intervener to suggest a type of behavior change (i.e. move to a more eco-friendly commute method), describe the underlying goal of the change (i.e. reduce carbon emissions), and guide the participant decide in details of the commitment (i.e. the participant decides to commit to taking the bus three times a week for the next month). Hopefully, this will allow people to consider self-identity while making sure they have a concrete goal. Signing an eco-friendly petition could serve as an initial foot-in-the-door, while a challenging commitment could keep individuals engaged and allow for a range of "easier" spillover behavior. Goal-internalization can further be aided by having participants give a reason or a value for why they are signing the commitment.

What do you think? Could this work? What would you tweak?

References

• Dolan, Paul and Galizzi, Matteo M. (2015) Like ripples on a pond: behavioral spillovers and their implications for research and policy. Journal of Economic Psychology, 47. pp. 1-16. ISSN 0167- 4870
• 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. & A. U. Pardini (1987-1988). The comparative effectiveness of reward and commitment approaches in motivating community recycling. Journal of Environmental Systems, 17: 93-133.
• Lanzini, P. & J. Thøgersen (2014). Behavioural spillover in the environmental domain: An intervention study. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 40: 381-390.
• Sheldon, K. M., Wineland, A., Venhoeven, L., & Osin, E. (2016). Understanding the Motivation of Environmental Activists: A Comparison of Self-Determination Theory and Functional Motives Theory. Ecopsychology, (December), 228–238.

The Rewarding Aspects of...Rewards

In the readings for last week, I was really struck by a point in the Price, Vining, and Saunders article (2009; this was the case study of the Nature Swap program at a Chicago zoo). The importance of extrinsic rewards for the program's success was a common theme in interviews of parents and staff members, which seems to contradict everything we've learned about the problems with extrinsic rewards (overjustification effect, lack of durability and generalizability). But these interviews also made a point about an important characteristic of these extrinsic rewards--that is, that they were linked to the program's goals. Children brought in natural objects in exchange for points, and their reward was to choose another natural object to take home.

It seems like such a simple idea, and yet it strongly stuck with me, perhaps because it doesn't seem to be a strategy that's often employed (despite its simplicity!). Why don't we link extrinsic rewards to the actual goals of the intervention program more often?? For example, I can imagine an energy use reduction program that would provide incentives, not in the form of monetary rewards or even billing discounts, but rather by rewarding successful reduction with a free low-flow showerhead or free CFL lightbulbs. What better way to make an extrinsic-reward program durable, and perhaps even increase its effect over time? After all, as stated by several of the articles we've read, systematic efficiency upgrades (e.g., installing low-energy showerheads and lighbulbs) are likely to have a much larger practical impact than the individual curtailment behaviors that tend to receive more focus.

Of course, it's still possible that such incentives may trigger the overjustification effect, or that their effectiveness might taper off over time (for example, people might start wasting water because they feel that their low-flow showerhead gives them an excuse to take longer showers). This is where I think some other concepts from this class could be incorporated into an empirically testable solution.

We've already talked in class about how behaviors can feed back onto values and intentions, for example because performing an eco-friendly behavior strengthens a person's self-identity of being "pro-environmental," thus increasing their future eco-friendly behaviors. Also, the Verdugo (2012) article on "The Positive Psychology of Sustainability" discussed how performing pro-environmental behaviors can itself feel good, thus increasing the likelihood that those behaviors will be performed again. Both of these may be true for a extrinsic incentive program with goal-linked rewards, as installing the energy-saving reward may help to further strengthen their pro-environmental identity and also make them feel extra-good about their pro-environmental impact.

However, there is another aspect of "feeling good" that I think has been traditionally overlooked. At the beginning of the semester, we read Barb Fredrickson's (1998) article on the "Broaden and Build" model for positive emotions. Critical to this model is the idea that positive emotions broaden our attentional focus and foster more flexible thinking, thus allowing us to gain new ideas and skills and resources. We know that receiving rewards feels good, leading to an experience of positive emotions. But reward-based interventions usually just dispense a reward and then move on, without stopping to capitalize on the possibilities afforded by positive post-reward feelings. If feeling positive emotions leads to a "Broaden and Build" mindset, then this state shoud be the ideal moment to provide participants with information about the importance/impact of eco-friendly behaviors, and opportunities to reflect on this new information and their own behaviors, in order to produce durable behavior change.

This approach would map on nicely to the findings from this week's readings, about the effectiveness of small-group interventions that provide feedback and reflection opportunities. But the difference is that my approach would particularly capitalize on the positive feelings of getting a reward, to target participants specifically when they may be most receptive to exploring new ideas. And because the reward in this case would be relevant to achieving the program's eco-friendly goals, it should be particularly effective at keeping participants' focus on environmentally-relevant information and reflection. (This might not be true of non-relevant extrinsic rewards--e.g., money--because after receiving such rewards participants might be distracted by thinking about what they're going to do with the money, or might just be interested in getting the reward and uninterested in attending to additional information after they already have the money.)

This approach could take the much-maligned extrinsic incentive and turn it into a force for good :-), but of course, it would need to be empirically tested (as I don't know of any existing intervention that has tried this particular approach). What do you all think about this idea? Do you think that this intervention would actually work if it were tested in the real world?

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.

Applying Stern's VBN Model to Corporate Change Management

I took this class to learn about behavior change models in the environmental psychology space such that I could compare these models to those that I used in the corporate world, as a change management consultant.

In many cases, the models used are understandably different, due to the inherent differences between the citizens being targeted for environmental interventions and the typical corporate employee. That said, through this post, I want to explore the corporate application of one model specifically, Stern’s Value-Believe-Norm model, using a case study of one of my past clients, Kraft Foods.

In 2005, Booz Allen Hamilton and the Aspen Institute conducted to survey on corporate values. Their core finding was that many large companies are explicitly adopting corporate values, representing a significant change from 10 years prior. For example, Kraft Foods adopted the following values in 2009:

•        We inspire trust.
•        We act like owners.
•        We keep it simple.
•        We are open and inclusive.
•        We tell it like it is.
•        We lead from the head and the heart.
•        We discuss. We decide. We deliver.

First, in order to leverage the values above to apply the VBN model, we would have to know that these value are truly “lived” by the employee population and the leadership team.  While it is safe to assume that not every employee embodies these values, overall I believe that Kraft employees do. And, I think that’s fairly logical, because companies lead with their values when hiring employees, so employees are opting into Kraft’s values with eyes wide open.

Second, to apply the VBN model, I think it is necessary to explore how corporate values translate to employee beliefs. For example, when considering the value “We tell it like it is,” we would expect this value to translate into the belief that employees should speak up to offer criticism or support of policies, products, leadership initiatives, etc. Again, in general, I think this holds true. Not only do Kraft leaders encourage junior employees to speak up, performance reviews are grounded in these values, so an employee would have to demonstrate this belief over time to be successful at Kraft.      

Now, I think it is worthwhile to give an example of how this could be applied. In 2014, I was engaged by the company to help with a Supply Chain process implementation. We were effectively revamping all processes related to Kraft’s supply chain. My role on the project was to facilitate the behavior change component of the project.

In many ways, we unknowingly applied the VBN model. For instance, the associated communications campaign was grounded in the value of “We keep it simple,” meaning that when we announced the changes to the broader company we explained how these changes would help Kraft to make their processes simpler. This was relatively successful, as it’s hard to argue with changes that are directly aligned to company’s values. But, we failed to carry this over into efforts like training. During training on the new processes, we could have and should have emphasized how these new skills reinforced Kraft’s values. In doing so, I believe we could have more effectively created personal norms in employees, resulting in longer lasting behavior change.

All in all, I think that this model could be a valuable tool for corporate change management efforts. First, if organizational leadership is pushing for a change that does not align to the organizations values, then this would become immediately apparent and the initiative might need to be reconsidered. Second, by aligning change to a corporation’s values, we more easily justify the change effort and create better “corporate citizens.” Third, and perhaps most importantly, when change efforts are strongly aligned to corporate values, then they inherently reinforce these values, pushing corporate values to the forefront of employee’s minds.

Finally, during our discussion with Ray yesterday, Julia asked to what extent psychologists have studied the evolution of values, and Ray commented that this research has been limited primarily due to the rigid nature of values. However, if the logic that I presented above does hold true, the corporate sector may actually be an interesting case study in the evolution of values, due to the fact that their values are well-documented and performance (i.e. behavior) is well documented through a variety of financial and operational factors.

Sources Cited:

http://www.foodbev.com/news/kraft-foods-reveals-new-company-values-and-logo/

http://www.strategy-business.com/article/05206?gko=9c265

The Power of Social Norms? (It's Not Always Easy Being Green)

One of my lingering questions about the norm-based models for this week is the distinction between personal norms and social norms, and relatedly, whether social norms are adequately accounted for in these *norm*-based models.

This question probably arises from my specific disciplinary background, but in social psychology, there is a lot of emphasis on the importance of social or even situational norms. Looking ahead in the syllabus, I see that we'll be talking about some of the classic social psychology experiments on situational norms and environmental behaviors next month, but I think that even without having read those studies we can think about the powerful influence of social norms. After all, we all know the major role that peer pressure can play in our lives; we often feel pressure to conform to actions and even attitudes that we perceive being done by or held by many other people. And I bet most of us can think of a personal example of when peer pressure caused us to do or say something that may not have entirely been in line with our personal values. There's even a famous psych experiment which showed that if you ask people to do a very easy task (i.e., judging whether two lines are the same length or not), you can peer-pressure them into giving an obviously wrong answer by asking them to respond after all the other people in the room have responded one-by-one with the wrong answer!

So, given our firsthand knowledge of the power of peer pressure, I think that it is valid to consider whether or not the Norm Activation Model and Value-Belief-Norm Model account adequately for the influence of social norms. In the Norm Activation Model, social norms must be internalized into personal norms in order to affect behavior, and (as I understand it) the personal norm must incorporate a sense of personal responsibility and strong intrinsic motivation to take action. But don't temporary, situational norms sometimes influence one-time behaviors without a corresponding internalization of personal norms? For example, even if I feel pressured in the moment to conform to others' incorrect responses on a line judgment task, that does not mean I have internalized a personal norm to give incorrect answers to easy tasks.

On the opposite extreme, the Hines et al. environmental education model we previously discussed does include a path for "situational factors" (like norms) to influence behavior directly, without involving personal norms. But, this model has the opposite problem of not allowing for situational social norms to be internalized as personal norms at all, and that seems to be a problematic omission as well! There are many instances in which we *do* indeed derive our personal norms and values from the dominant social norms set by those around us. Meanwhile, the Value-Belief-Norm Model seems to omit social norms entirely (!) by instead focusing on how our personal values and beliefs drive our personal norms, which then determine our behavior.

I think this is an important issue to think about because social norms and "unwritten rules" about acceptable social behavior in different contexts play such a big role in our day-to-day behaviors. When social norms influence our personal norms, they certainly have important implications for our environmental behavior; and even when situational norms influence our behavior without being internalized as personal norms, they may still end up having a long-term impact. In lecture, Ray has mentioned the issue of whether attitudes always determine behaviors or whether it's possible that behaviors can determine attitudes. I think the latter case definitely has the potential to drive behavioral change; if we can use situational norms to get people to perform proenvironmental behaviors, even though they haven't yet internalized a personal proenvironmental norm, it is possible that by performing the behavior they will start to think of themselves as "proenvironmental" and thus continuing behaving in ways consistent with that identity.

So, perhaps we need a norm-based model that allows norms to influence behavior both directly and indirectly via the internalization of personal norms. But I would love to hear more about what you all think about this, either in comments here on the blog or perhaps in discussion during class!