The Question

Behavioural change is one of the most practically important challenges in public health, environmental policy, and organisational management. Countless interventions have been designed to change what people do, targeting everything from knowledge and attitudes to habits and social norms. Albarracín and colleagues (2024) synthesised multidisciplinary meta-analyses to establish which types of intervention actually work, and how well.

What They Found

Across domains, interventions can be ordered by increasing impact. Among those targeting individual determinants, the hierarchy from least to most effective runs: knowledge, general skills, general attitudes, beliefs, emotions, behavioural skills, behavioural attitudes, and habits (Albarracín et al., 2024). The practical implication is stark: interventions targeting knowledge and general attitudes, the most common types of behavioural change programme in organisations and public health, sit at the bottom of the effectiveness hierarchy.

Among interventions targeting social and structural determinants, the hierarchy from least to most effective runs: legal and administrative sanctions; programmes that increase institutional trustworthiness; interventions to change injunctive norms; monitors and reminders; descriptive norm interventions; material incentives; social support provision; and policies that increase access to the desired behaviour (Albarracín et al., 2024).

The consistent pattern across both individual and structural interventions is that the most effective approaches are those that make it easier to enact the desired behaviour, rather than those that try to persuade people that they should want to behave differently. Access-enabling policies and social support outperform attitude change and information provision (Albarracín et al., 2024).

Why It Matters

The finding has direct implications for how organisations design wellbeing programmes, how governments design public health campaigns, and how anyone responsible for changing behaviour allocates limited resources. Investing heavily in knowledge provision and attitude change, while neglecting behavioural skills, habit formation, and access, is a common pattern that this review suggests is systematically misaligned with the evidence (Albarracín et al., 2024).

Excerpt

What actually changes what people do? A comprehensive synthesis of meta-analyses finds that the most popular intervention strategies, targeting knowledge and attitudes, are the least effective. The approaches that work best are those that make desired behaviours easier to enact.

Reference

Albarracín, D., Fayaz-Farkhad, B., & Granados Samayoa, J. A. (2024). Determinants of behaviour and their efficacy as targets of behavioural change interventions. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00305-0