[MUSIC] We're talking about the challenge of encouraging people to convert their existing good intentions into actions. We've discussed two possible strategies to consider in such situations, using prompts, and encouraging people to explicitly plan their behavior. Each of those strategies can be useful. But there's one more strategy to consider, and as a way of entering into the idea, think about the kind of situation we're focused on, in this way. People have these positive attitudes and intentions, but they are not acting consistently with those. They're not acting in accordance with their beliefs. So this third strategy is, to put it crudely, to make people feel bad about their inconsistency. Perhaps a little more carefully expressed, make them feel guilty, make them feel hypocritical, make them experience the cognitive dissonance of believing one thing but doing something else. And the idea is that, when people experience those uncomfortable feelings, that will spur them to start acting consistently with their positive intentions. But research has made something clear about this approach. If people are going to experience these negative feelings, guilt, hypocrisy, dissonance, two things have to be salient to them at the same time. First, their existing positive attitudes and intentions on the one hand, and second, their inconsistent behaviors on the other. The idea is that when both these things are prominent, the inconsistency will be so apparent that people feel uncomfortable. So uncomfortable as to motivate them to change their behavior. Here's an example of the application of this idea from a study of home energy conservation. Participants in this study were people who had expressed positive attitudes about home energy conservation, but who were actually using more energy than the average comparable household. This study had various messaging conditions, but here's the relevant bit for us. Some people got feedback about their actual energy use, presumably, making their behavior salient to them, but other people got both feedback and a reminder about their positive attitudes. The reminder makes those attitudes salient for them. The feedback alone was not enough to change people's behavior, but the combination of feedback plus an attitude reminder was effective. The takeaway point being illustrated here is this. In order to make people feel uncomfortable about inconsistency between their attitudes and their actions, uncomfortable enough to change their behaviors, you need to make both those elements salient for them. It's not enough to draw their attention to just one of them. There are a number of studies like that home energy conservation study and taken together, they provide really good evidence that this strategy can work. Making people uncomfortable with their inconsistency can be effective in getting people to start acting consistently with their positive intentions. But, this can be a dangerous strategy, one that produces negative reactions. I wanna to describe two ways in which those negative reactions can arise. First, people often react negatively to overt attempts to make them feel guilty, and that can make them resistant to change. So, rather than overtly scolding people for their inconsistency, it's better if you can just lay the groundwork for them to realize it themselves. If people can be led to think simultaneously about both their existing attitudes and their inconsistent behavior, that can be enough to make people feel uncomfortable, without you having to reproach them explicitly. There's a second way in which negative reactions can occur. And that's if people's perceived behavioral ability is not sufficiently high. If they think the behavior is just too difficult to do. Think about it this way, if you draw people's attention to inconsistency between their attitudes and their actions, and so make people uncomfortable but people think they can't change their behavior, low perceived ability. The only way they can deal with that discomfort is to change their attitude, and specifically change their attitude so as to make it consistent with their bad behavior. Imagine, for example, you're trying to encourage recycling. And you make people feel bad about failing to recycle. But if those people think it's too hard to recycle, if they think they can't do it or they don't know how to do it, low perceived ability. Well, they can't change their behavior, and you've made them feel bad about the inconsistency between their behavior and their attitude, so what are they gonna do? Maybe they'll decide, you know recycling isn't that important after all, which is exactly the opposite of what you were hoping for. In other words, it's possible for this strategy to backfire if perceived behavioral ability isn't sufficiently high. So if you're thinking of using this strategy, make sure that the people you're trying to influence think they can perform the action you're trying to encourage. To wrap up this idea, one way of encouraging people to convert their existing good intentions into actions is to make people feel guilty, hypocritical, uncomfortable about that inconsistency. This strategy can work to change people's behavior, but it's a dangerous strategy. One that can potentially backfire. So, this is certainly something you want in your toolbox, but it's a tool that comes with a big warning label attached. [MUSIC]
