Governments globally have introduced measures to reduce COVID-19’s spread e.g. closing educational establishments, cancelling events and asking people to stay at home.
While evidence exists that these measures reduce disease transmission, people’s willingness to follow these measures is unknown. There’s much media coverage on people’s difficulties in quarantine and isolation. Adherence to these measures has generally been positive. However, it’s unclear how long people will comply for.
The psychology of behavior maintenance
Much literature on the current situation’s psychology focuses on starting new behaviors (e.g. hand-washing) but less on the psychology of maintaining behaviors. As Dominika Kwasnicka and colleagues identified, few studies evaluate how much longer-term behavior change has taken place in fields such as weight loss programs, smoking cessations and reduced alcohol consumption. However, the information isn’t promising.
Given the long-term behavior changes needed from public health and commercial perspectives, we must understand how to motivate long-term behavior change. Key recommendations include:
Make activities enjoyable
Initial behavior changes for COVID-19 were motivated by wanting to avoid possible negative outcomes. However, long-term adherence needs more positive motivations as the precaution adoption process model suggests people are likely to better engage with behaviors they enjoy or have enjoyable outcomes.
For public health: Advice should highlight the positives people can find in new behaviors. A period of self-isolation, whilst difficult, may have positive aspects e.g. doing often neglected activities.
For brands: The new (digital) channels used due to COVID-19 must be well designed and offer positive experiences. The user design or development of new services is critical to achieve this.
Help build internalized motivation
Being obliged to do something only has short-term effectiveness, after which people must feel personally motivated to do these actions. Kwasnicka and colleagues suggest that when protective behaviors are congruent with existing beliefs and engagement, they’re more likely to be maintained.
For policy makers: Reference prior beliefs such as social responsibilities importance and good hygiene’s value.
For brands: Emphasize new behavior’s value as there’ll be pre-existing beliefs and attitudes towards the perceived value of old/pre-COVID-19 behaviors you must overcome.
Build positive identities
People are more likely to maintain behaviors if they’re consistent with how they see themselves. Sometimes, the required behaviors for COVID-19 protection may be inconsistent with people’s dominant identities. For example, an identity of a friendly, social person is inconsistent with the need to limit physical contact with others. However, if the same person identifies as being a responsible citizen, this identity should instead be emphasized when communicating with them.
For brands and policy makers both need to understand how to draw on positive identities that are consistent with these behaviors for people to understand and adopt them.
Helping people to self-regulate
An important aspect of maintenance is of course the successful monitoring and regulation of new behaviors. Rituals can be an important part of making new routines long-lasting. They pervade our lives from setting the dinner, to getting married. There are two elements involved in creating routines:
- Sequential chunking: rituals are behaviors that are segmented into chunks and arranged in a specific sequence that’s adhered to. The same can be applied to maintaining self-isolation behaviors for long periods. Public health guidance could suggest creating defined chunks of behaviors within a day (e.g. sitting at a specific table to work) or across several days (e.g. decluttering different rooms of a house) to help people maintain being housebound without developing poor psychological outcomes.
- Behavior’s psychological meaning: Aligning behaviors with pre-existing beliefs and attitudes helps motivate those behaviors. However, linking these behaviors to shared social meanings can build affiliation and develop an understanding of shared knowledge and norms. Therefore, communicate that self-isolating behaviors are a shared activity that we’re all doing to reduce disease transmission could build a deeper meaning around these behaviors.
Social forces
Before government restrictions were implemented, much impetus for behavior change came via direct appeals from experts through the media, that were then supported by emerging social normative pressure. Pandemics like COVID-19 are both an immunological problem and a social problem (in both causal and solution roles).
Social forces can spark, accelerate and support behavior maintenance strategy. Social facilitation and co-action make activities more enjoyable. A sense of relatedness from trusted other’s influence helps speed-up motivation’s internalization. Our social identities from these connections are essential in sustaining our personal identities. Social pressure to ‘do the right thing’ can trigger self-control as these norms are being internalized. In many ways, channeling these social forces can function as a “power-up” for behavior maintenance strategies.
Implications
There’s much guidance on needing to consistently practice protective behaviors to reduce COVID-19’s spread. There’s also significant work on forming behavioral habits to protect health. However, many of the motivational and regulatory dimensions that underpin behavior maintenance are social and cultural. COVID-19’s shared, social nature means we must bring these dimensions into the behavioral science guidance given to policy makers and brands.
