Changing Automatic Processes Flashcards
Situational Cues
- The environment, things around you that may provide cues and prompt behaviour
- e.g. a couch on a Friday night
Cueing Interventions
- Cue the cues
- Trying to make a change in your environment so you are cues to whatever behaviour you want to do
- e.g. leaving shoes by the door, hiding the chips
- Goal priming, prompting, serving size cues, nudging, product placement, default options
Goal priming
- Leaving something in the environment to remind you of what it is you want to do
- e.g. shows by the door to prompt yourself to go for a run
Serving size cues
-Getting big versus small pop
Product placement
-How marketers try to get us to buy things
Situated Conceptualizations
- Thinking about the cue and imagining
- Feeds the behaviour
- e.g. Couch and TV, snacks in fridge, relaxing with friends while enjoying drinks and snacks
Training Interventions
-Implementations intentions, attentional bias modification, approach-avoidance, inhibitory control, mindfulness based training, evaluative conditioning
Implementation Intention
-Dual processing: creating an implementation is conscious and you practice it to allow you to bypass thinking in the actual situation
Attentional Bias Modification
-Training where we look in the environment and what sorts of things attract us
Mindfulness based training
-Another way to train people to automatically say “I will bypass this behaviour and choose this one”
How can we change impulsive processes?
-Behavioural Conditioning
Reinforcing behaviour arises from…
-Operant Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
-Being reinforced or punished for something constantly
Stimulus –> Learning –> Response –> Consequence
Feedback is…
- Stimulus = Antecedent
- Response = Behaviour
- We always feed back from consequence into learning
Changing antecedents is called…
- Stimulus control
- Changing what you feed in the beginning (stimulus) so we can change people’s learnings
Types of consequences
- Reinforcer
- Punishment
Reinforcer
-Any consequence that strengthens the behaviour is follows
Positive reinforcement
- When the consequence that strengthens a behaviour is the appearance of a new stimulus
- e.g. Penny behaviour of leaving is strengthened when chocolate appears
Negative reinforcement
- When the consequence that strengthens a behaviour is the disappearance of a stimulus; removal of a stimulus, taking something away
- e.g. dog barking so you take it for a walk; the dog is reinforcing you to take a walk by disappearing of barking but you strengthen the behaviour of taking it out for a walk
Punishment
- Decreasing a behaviour
- The appearance of a stimulus following the behaviour suppresses or decreases the behaviour
- e.g. pain so you stop running
Altering consequences is a powerful method for behaviour change… therefore what do we need to do?
- Consider the person in their environment
- If you try to change someone’s behaviour in an unsupportive environment, it can be challenging
Mastery experiences is an example of what?
-Positive reinforcement
Environmental Cues
-What is happening around people?
Prompting practice
-Constamntly trying things and constantly reinforcing people so they learn from behaviours and it becomes habitual
How does knowing you are being operant conditioned affect a person?
- Aware but ready for change = likely to change
- Don’t want to change and you try to reinforce them = reactance
- it depends where they start attitude wise
Evaluative Conditioning
- Thoughts that automatically arise are changed by repeatedly pairing a topic with positive or negative stimuli
- Trying to change associations
- When things are paired in our environment, we automatically get thoughts about them
- A way we can try to change how people think about certain situations
- We can change societal representations (e.g. reduce weight bias in gyms)
- Targets operant conditioning
Evaluative Conditioning Example
- Unhealthy snacks compared to fruit
- Snacks repeatedly paired with photos of heart diseases
- Automatic associations towards unhealthy snacks were worse; directed people to think “these chips aren’t good” at an automatic level
- People were more likely to choose fruits over unhealthy snacks
Nudging
- Influencing behaviour and decision making in a subtle manner by making changes in the environment
- Manipulating our environments so we are nudged into a certain behaviour
- A cueing intervention
- Influences choices without taking choices away from people
- People are free to do whatever they want but you are trying to use cues to push them in another direction
- Exploits our biases and heuristics (cognitive flaws) to affect our individual decision making
- Choice architecture is inevitable therefore we are manipulating the choices people have and are offered without EVER eliminating choices
Nudging Analogy
- GPA: the user chooses the destination, the map helps you get there and allows you to take a detour without ever yelling at you
- it makes where you want to go easier, without commanding you must do something
Green footprints towards garbage cans are an example of…
- Nudging
- People could still litter if they wanted to but they were more aware of the habit and directed to the garbage cans to litter less
How do we create associations we hold in memories?
- Happens over time by exposure, culture, families, environments we are in
- We have learned to associate things in our long term memory
- They influence our gut reactions/automatic impulses and how we react to things in our environment
- Therefore many behaviours occur without us thinking about them or we aren’t aware we are doing them (so we want to get people to stop and think about what they are doing!)
