The behavioural change enterprise disproportionately focuses on promoting successes at the expense of examining the failures of behavioural change interventions. We review the literature across different fields through a causal explanatory approach to identify structural relations that impede (or promote) the success of interventions. Based on this analysis we present a taxonomy of failures of behavioural change that catalogues different types of failures and backfiring effects. Our analyses and classification offer guidance for practitioners and researchers alike, and provide critical insights for establishing a more robust foundation for evidence-based policy. Behavioural change techniques are currently used by many global organisations and public institutions. The amassing evidence base is used to answer practical and scientific questions regarding what cognitive, affective, and environment factors lead to successful behavioural change in the laboratory and in the field. In this piece we show that there is also value to examining interventions that inadvertently fail in achieving their desired behavioural change (e.g., backfiring effects). We identify the underlying causal pathways that characterise different types of failure, and show how a taxonomy of causal interactions that result in failure exposes new insights that can advance theory and practice.

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theory of change

research on health comm messaging effects

In a meta-analysis of real-life experiments drawn from food science, nutrition, health economics, marketing and psychology, the authors find that behavioural nudges - facilitating action rather than providing knowledge or inducing feelings - can reduce daily energy intake by up to 209 kcal, the same number of calories as in 21 cubes of sugar.

We applied a Hidden Markov Model* (see Figure 1) to examine how and why behaviours did or did not change. The longitudinal repeated measure design meant we knew about food waste behaviour at two points (the amount of food wasted before and after the program), changes in the amount of food wasted reported over time for each household (more or less food wasted) and other factors (e.g. self-efficacy). By using a new method we could extend our understanding beyond the overall effect (households in the Waste Not Want Not program group wasted less food after participating when compared to the control group).

tories, and their ability to transport their audience, constitute a central part of human life and consumption experience. Integrating previous literature derived from fields as diverse as anthropology, marketing, psychology, communication, consumer, and literary studies, this article offers a review of two decades’ worth of research on narrative transportation, the phenomenon in which consumers mentally enter a world that a story evokes. Despite the relevance of narrative transportation for storytelling and narrative persuasion, extant contributions seem to lack systematization. The authors conceive the extended transportation-imagery model (ETIM), which provides not only a comprehensive model that includes the antecedents and consequences of narrative transportation but also a multidisciplinary framework in which cognitive psychology and consumer culture theory cross-fertilize this field of inquiry. The authors test the model using a quantitative meta-analysis of 132 effect sizes of narrative transportation from 76 published and unpublished articles and identify fruitful directions for further research.

Guide to outcome evaluation and development of logic models