Crawford Hollingworth: Rethinking the gap

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Often, when encouraged to change particular behaviours, people say they intend to change, but fail to follow through. Using the latest insights from behavioural science, however, there are new ways in which this intention-action gap can be reduced or eliminated:

• Can we build stronger intentions for behaviour change using more lateral motivations and reasoning?
• Can we make intentions stronger by harnessing societal awareness to create more pressure to change?
• Can we make the desired behaviour change easier to achieve?

One idea is to ask if we are building the intention to change in the most effective way. For example, recent work has found that it might be productive to highlight a more direct personal gain to build stronger intentions to change. Abstract or collective societal goals can sometimes lack a more appealing ‘what’s in it for me?’ angle and fail to turn intention into action. A recent trial by Unilever and the Behavioural Insights Team found that using climate pragmatism and climate-optimistic framing via influencers on TikTok and Instagram increased intentions slightly, but it had no impact on whether consumers then put any of 14 specific sustainable behaviours into action.

The more someone feels an action or behaviour benefits them or aligns with their identity, the more likely they are to do it. Accommodating an action to suit their identity in some way might be more effective than getting them to change their point of view.

Recent work by The Behavioural Architects (TBA) for the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment in Australia, encouraged Sydney citizens to plant a tree in their garden. Rather than calling on (guilting) people to do their bit for the environment and climate change, TBA’s strategy invited them to create a haven for birds in their back garden, make a shady space, or grow fruit. None of the messages specifically mentioned the word ‘tree’, as many people had negative associations about trees being too big to plant in their backyards.

This campaign strategy led to more than one million trees being planted in the space of a year.
Similarly, research on how to encourage parents to use reusable, rather than disposable, nappies found that the personally motivating factor of having more space in the bin worked more effectively than a ‘save the environment’ message. A week’s worth of disposable nappies takes up a lot of space.

A recent experimental trial by Sofia Deleniv, Sarah Jane Fraser and colleagues at the Canadian government’s Impact and Innovation Unit found that Canadian homeowners with little prior knowledge of heat pumps were least convinced by environmental arguments for heat pump adoption. Highlighting health benefits driven by better indoor air quality was more effective, driving higher interest in adoption.

A second approach is to make people more aware of others’ approval of a behaviour. Even if consumers approve of a behaviour and intend to carry it out, they probably won’t do it if they believe ‘other people’ don’t think it’s important, don’t approve of it, and wouldn’t do it. This phenomenon is particularly pertinent for sustainable behaviours.

Social change organisation Rare recently built a Climate Change Index and found a substantial gap between what people thought others should be doing and what they thought others believed – what it terms the ‘normative bubble’. For example, eight out of 10 Americans believe people should be wasting less food, yet they also assume only five out of 10 Americans known to them think this as well. Reducing this gap by building social awareness, with stronger communication about what other people approve of or are actually doing, could increase the social pressure to act.

Research conducted by Erik Thulin and Abdurakhim Rakhimov in 2019 found that someone’s beliefs about what others were doing was the only strong, consistent predictor of intending to take impactful, sustainable actions – for example, switching to an electric car or a renewable energy tariff. In contrast, neither climate beliefs nor political orientation were significant predictors of intention to make sustainable behavioural changes.

Finally, a third idea might be to adopt what is known as the ‘tiny habit’ approach. If we feel we’re asking too much of ourselves, aiming for big (potentially disruptive) changes can be daunting and could make taking action feel too hard, so that – despite strong intentions – we let ourselves off the hook. Often, people feel it’s all or nothing.

If we lower our goals and, instead, intend to do something occasionally, or when we feel able – or do just a little – we might achieve more than we thought, especially collectively, and especially if we make that socially acceptable. For example, society approves of eating ‘less meat’, ‘no red meat’, or having ‘meat-free Mondays’, without the pressure to become fully vegetarian. Parents daunted at the thought of using reusable nappies might feel more able to do so if they set themselves a goal of using a hybrid system – perhaps using disposables at night, or when away from home.

Research by Ryan E Rhodes and colleagues in 2021 found that ‘goal dimensions’ – meaning how hard the goal is to achieve, its priority and how much it conflicts with other goal behaviours – affected how much intention resulted in action. This means that making the goal less difficult, or less conflicting with other priorities, might reduce the size of the intention-action gap, making the behaviour more achievable and, therefore, more likely.

Checklist for reducing the intention-action gap in research

• Are there some personal benefits that could strengthen intentions? For example, financial gains, resource gains, reaffirming or communicating identity, time-saving benefits.
• Are there misperceptions of social norms? What do people think others believe and approve of? What do people think others do?
• How can the action be scaled down to make it easier to achieve, at least some of the time?

Crawford Hollingworth is co-founder at The Behavioural Architects.

This article was first published in the July 2023 issue of Impact.