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whybehaviorchange |
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Jake Bowers |
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One Page on Behavior Change
Jake Bowers and _____ and _____
A government or NGO can help a person improve their behavior either by helping that person have experience with the desired behavior. The experience can be direct (like they've actually done the behavior at least once) or indirect (they’ve seen or heard about someone else doing that behavior). And of course, it makes no sense ethically or practically to attempt to create a new behavior that is not eventually both self-reinforcing and producing positive outcomes for the person and society.
If they can actually do the behavior, then behavior change happens when they receive a reward for the behavior. (NOTE: Insert cites. One idea is to just cite Don't Shoot the Dog. Noting that we are talking about direct behavior change and not Pavlovian conditioning where the behavior can be controlled by some outside force (like a clicker in the kind of dog training described by Pryor in her book).) The point of the reward is attention, not payment. The idea is to put the person in a situation where they are apt to do the desired behavior, watch for the behavior, and then give an attention grabbing reward immediately: the reward must be linked in the mind and dopamine system of the person to the behavior. Eventually, the rewards can be tapered away or removed because the behavior itself should be its own reward.
If they cannot actually do the behavior and/or organization aiming to change behavior cannot directly observe behavior, and thus cannot to reward it directly and immediately, then people can still change their behavior by watching other people do the behavior and imagining the benefits of the behavior. People have to (1) see or hear about the desired behavior, (2) imagine themselves doing this behavior, and (3) feel like doing the behavior would produce good outcomes for themselves or close others. This means that people should adopt behaviors and attitudes if they see multiple, relatable characters [@kazdin1974covertModeling; @kazdin1976multipleModels; @bandura1977social] engaging in behaviors with clear cause-effect linkages to outcomes they desire [@kazdin1974effectsAssertive; @blaisdell2006causal]. (NOTE: [@kazdin1974covertModeling;@kazdin1976multipleModels;@bandura1977social;@kazdin1974effectsAssertive; @blaisdell2006causal]) They also need to see that the desired outcome (perhaps newly desired) wouldn't be caused by other behaviors more easily or readily.
Implications (1) Neither theory suggests that showing the negative behavior — or other behaviors incompatible with the positive behavior — should produce positive behavior change. (2) ?