[MUSIC] We're talking about the challenge of encouraging people to convert their existing good intentions into actions. And in the previous segment we talk about one strategy to consider in addressing that challenge, namely, using prompts. There's a second possible strategy that will sometimes be useful. Encouraging people to engage in explicit planning about their behavior, about their performance of the behavior, that is, you get people to specify when and where and how they're going to do the behaviors. So that it's not just some vague intention, abstract intention. Oh yeah, oh I'll do that sometime. Instead, you lead people to think concretely about what they're going to do. There have been literally dozens of studies of this strategy. And typically in these studies, participants write down what they're going to do. They have to explicitly plan how they're going to perform the behavior. And the effect of doing this, is to make people more likely to actually follow through on their intentions. Explicit planning helps people convert their intentions into behaviour. And you see this effect in study after study. Here's an example. People who explicitly planned when and where they would take a vitamin C pill each day, were more likely to, in fact, take the pill each day, compared to people in the control condition who did not plan. In another study, participants who specified when and where and how they would make an appointment for a medical screening test, we're much more likely to subsequently actually get the screening, compared to people in the control condition. And a number of different studies have found this effect for exercise behavior. If people explicitly plan their exercise activity, they're more likely to actually do it. The reason these explicit planning interventions work, is that they encourage people to move from an abstract general intention to a much more specific concrete intention. So, for example, instead of just having an abstract intention such as, I intend to get a flu shot, or even I intend to get a flu shot next week Instead of that, people are led to have have much more specific intention. Something like next Tuesday, on the way to work, I'll stop at that pharmacy on Main Street to get my flu shot. I've seen politicians use this explicit planning idea during election campaigns. When election day is coming up, they'll send an email to their supporters, an email that in effect asks people to engage in explicit planning about voting. It asks people to think about exactly what time they're going to vote, where they will be just before that, how they are going to get to the polling place, encouraging people to think concretely about their action plans. The idea, obviously enough, Is that they hope, this will make their supporters more likely to actually go vote. In short, when people already have the desired general intention, but the persuasive challenge is getting them to try to translate that intention into behavior, one useful strategy may be to encourage them to explicitly plan their behavioral performance. So, imagine, you've got this work place safety and health courses that employees can attend. Should attend. Maybe even are legally required to attend. But not many people are doing it. The courses are offered from time to time, and people don't have to reserve a place, they can just show up. And still, they're not going, and you don't get the sense that people are necessarily opposed to attending, they probably, oh yeah, I should probably do that. But, they don't actually go to the training courses that are offered. Well, that might be a circumstance in which encouraging explicit planning could be useful. Imagine giving people information about the dates, times, places of upcoming courses, and asking them to think about which one they'd go to. Maybe even write themselves a note about which one they'd go to. This is not a hypothetical example. An organization facing just a situation found that people who engaged in that explicit planning, were in fact more likely to subsequently attend a training session. That is, explicit planning made people more likely to convert their intentions into behavior. So, encouraging explicit planning can be a handy strategy to have in your toolkit. But in order for explicit planning interventions to work, at least two conditions have to be met. First, and sort of obviously, people must already have the appropriate abstract intention. And second, perceived behavioral ability must be sufficiently high. People have to already think that they can do it. They might not have thought concretely about how they're going to do it however, and that's where explicit planning comes in. So when those two conditions are met, encouraging explicit planning is an influence strategy you should think about. [MUSIC]
