Project
The Malleability of Confidence in Preferencesand Durable Behaviour Change
Lasting changes in behaviour are hard to bring about. Think about new year’s resolutions, people almost always fall back into their bad habits and old routines. Often, these habits and routines put pressure on individual, societal and planetary wellbeing and health.
When making a decision, people will next to always pick the option they prefer the most at the moment of decision making.
Supporting people in making better decisions is a matter of making better options more preferable for people.
Deep understanding of how preferences are constructed and factors that influence confidence in preferences are thus of utmost importance. They are building blocks that may be used for effective interventions aimed at supporting people breaking their bad habits and form new routines.
In efforts to human behaviour change, a lot of attention has been devoted to self-control and inhibition trainings. The success of this avenue of research has been limited and unreliable. Therefore, this project will look at human behaviour change from a value-based decisions perspective. From this perspective, behaviour change is not to be achieved through resisting more preferable options in favour of less preferable options. Instead, behaviour change is to be achieved through changing the preferability of options.
Understanding of the construction of preferences for options and confidence in preferences is gained through a series of experiments. The experiments are designed to build knowledge from the ground up and inform the design of future interventions. The effects of various trainings are tested on confidence in peoples preferences and their actual decisions.