If you got quite excited after reading the title of this post, you’ve probably got a bit of evil inside you. Congratulations. But since you’re all such kind and gentle people at heart, I’m going to trust you and use something called the Theory of Planned Behaviour (we’ll call it the TPB) to guide you on a magical journey of changing people’s intentions, and if you’re lucky, maybe their actual behaviour as well. I’ll warn you that this post is a little on the long side, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch…whatever that means.
The TPB states that one or more of three main influences shape people’s intentions: attitudes, social influence, and self-efficacy (which is basically how confident you feel about performing a certain task). In turn, you can sum up certain ‘beliefs’ that pinpoint which one of these influences is directing an individual’s intentions. Let’s stop for a couple of quick examples…
“My friends would have a lot of respect for me if I bought this” (belief) à social influence/social norms (influence) à buy a new Mercedes-Benz (behavioural intention).
“I have very poor will power” (belief) à self-efficacy (influence) à don’t try to give up smoking (behavioural intention).
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| looking at this diagram may give you a headache. If that happens, the best thing to do is just move on |
Once you’ve acquired a good few beliefs that relate to the intention in question (through questioning, guesswork, or telepathy), you need to match them up to one of three main influences mentioned above. In other words, you need to either take an attitudinal approach (make someone’s personal feelings towards a certain intention more positive/negative), social norms approach (make someone think that they’ll be approved of for adopting a certain intention), or a self-efficacy approach (give someone the confidence they need to change their intention). Next comes the decision of which beliefs you think you’ll be able to change and which ones you won’t. A couple of lads called Hornik and Woolf give three simple guidelines to follow when deciding upon this:
1. There must be enough people who do not already share the belief – this seems counterintuitive at first, especially in advertising, as you’d think that you’d want to target as many people as possible when attempting to change their intentions. However, if loads of people already share a certain belief, they’ll probably give you the silent treatment when you try to tell them otherwise (and there’s nothing worse than the silent treatment). For example, imagine trying to tell people that smoking is good for your lungs – that’s not gonna fly, since almost everyone already beliefs the opposite.
2. The belief must be significantly related to the intention – this basically just means that the belief needs to be a big enough influence. You can’t just change any old belief that’s ‘like, kind of’ related to the intention and expect a big change. Common sense people, common sense.
3. You must be able to change the belief in the form of a message – actually this one only really concerns advertisers, and just states that the persuading has to be carried out through some form of planned communication, as opposed to a simple beating and threatening. (I know, technically a simple beating and threatening could be considered planned communication as well. You choose whichever option you want; I’ll look the other way).
You’ll notice that different ads take these different routes of persuasion, using the three main influences of intentions – maybe they’ll try to heighten your attitude and likeability towards fast cars, convince you that women won’t love you if you have grey hair, or even persuade you that dieting is easy. But of course, you don’t have to focus on simply changing beliefs. There are many beliefs that people hold that will already be working in your favour; sometimes they’re just not at the top of people’s minds…
In the movie, Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio says, “I think positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time”. He’s probably wrong, but he does make me think of priming. Priming is when you make an already existing belief more accessible in somebody’s mind, and don’t have to change his or her point of view on it. For example, if someone knows that eating pizza everyday will make them a fat bastard, but they keep on doing it anyway, simply reminding them of this fat bastard belief might encourage them to change their intention to eat pizza everyday. You’re changing their intention, but not changing a belief – just simply encouraging an already existing one.
| negative emotion hurts my eyes, like this extremely long post |
Priming is fairly straightforward, but often overlooked. The guidelines for priming should really just follow a similar pattern to those for changing beliefs. For example, make sure the belief you prime is significantly related to the person’s intention, don’t just spout off a belief that someone won’t hold in high regard.
Well, I hope you got a nice little introduction to changing and shaping people’s behavioural intentions. I’ve had to give quite a brief summary here, and as you can tell, it’s already become a bit long-winded, but I’m sure we’ll have more time to expand on this topic in the future. To summarise the important bits…gather your beliefs, sort them into one of the main influence categories (attitudes, social influence/norms, self-efficacy), figure out which ones you consider to be the biggest influences, and then start changing or priming! Good luck.
