What science says we should do instead
From climate goals to public health to consumer choices — behavioral change is everywhere. Everyone tries to change behavior, or so it seems. And yet, many behavior change interventions fail. According to a landmark review, most interventions target the wrong things:
- We design awareness campaigns.
- We educate.
- We motivate.
- We inform.
And then we wonder why people keep doing the same things anyway. We call them lazy, stupid, or unmotivated. “They just don’t understand it”, we say, or “we need to give them more information”. And so we bury them in information, disclaimers, leaflets, conditions, folders, emails and books. But to no effect.
Perhaps it is finally time for the harsh truth.
What if we’ve been targeting the wrong things all along?
Behavioral science has produced thousands of studies about why people do what they do. But much of that research is fragmented: one study focuses on motivation, another on habits, another on social norms, etc. What Albarracín and colleagues set out to do in their 2024 landmark review was synthesize it all — to get a birds-eye view of behavior change interventions. This paper doesn’t just show what behavior is made of — it reveals what actually works to change it.
Which behavioral factors actually work?
Albarracín and colleagues reviewed over 400 meta-analyses that together cover thousands of individual studies on behavior change interventions across domains like health, sustainability, and consumer behavior. But they weren’t just looking for correlations. Their core question was practical:
👉 Which determinants of behavior are actually effective as intervention targets? To answer that, they examined three things:
1. How strongly a factor (like intention, habit, or access) is associated with behavior
2. Whether that factor is causally linked to behavior change
3. And whether it’s feasible to intervene on that factor in the real world
In other words: it’s not enough for something to matter psychologically. It also has to move — and be moveable. This is what makes the paper so useful. It goes beyond describing behavior to identifying where and how we should intervene if we want to change it.
Everyone who wants to develop behavior change interventions should start by reading the Albarracín et al (2024) review
What doesn’t work – and why it matters
Let’s be honest: most behavior change interventions don’t fail because no one cared. They fail because they were aimed at the wrong things. One of the most valuable insights from Albarracín et al. is that many behavior change interventions target factors that are psychologically meaningful — but behaviorally weak. That is: they sound right, they feel right, and come to mind easily… but they don’t work.
Often used but non-effective behavior change interventions try to change:
❌ Knowledge: a collection of facts about an object or behavior including information about the consequences of a particular object or event (e.g., knowledge that a COVID-19 vaccine exists, or that human behavior contributes to climate change)
❌ General skills: Cognitive or overt routines that enable people to carry out various specific behaviors. They involve broad capacitites such as controlling attention during tasks or being able to inhibit temptations when behaviors require high levels of self-control. (e.g., pro-social skills, executive fuctioning skills).
❌ General attitudes: Evaluations of objects, persons and events (e.g., prejudice, attitude towards cars).
❌ Beliefs: Subjective assignments of probability that an object or behavior has a given attribute or outcome (e.g., the belief that smoking is bad for you personally)
According to the authors, targeting these factors were the least effective individual interventions that have been researched. While all of these are associated with behavior, changing them doesn’t reliably lead to actual behavioral change — especially when that behavior is habitual, context-driven, or effortful. Why not?
Because these targets focus on the reflective system (thinking, evaluating, deciding), while most daily behaviors are shaped by the automatic system (routines, friction, cues, inertia). Changing how people feel or think might shift their answers on a survey — but it rarely shifts what they do on Tuesday at 17:30 when they’re tired, hungry, and standing in front of the supermarket shelf.
This has massive implications for how we spend public and private money. Every year, governments, NGOs and companies pour millions into awareness campaigns that try to inform or persuade — and then blame the audience when nothing changes. Health posters in hospitals. Sustainability slogans on packaging. Websites full of tips. It adds up fast.
In the UK alone, one estimate found that over £300 million per year is spent on health-related behavior change campaigns — many of which are information-based and short on structural support. That doesn’t mean information is useless. But if it’s not paired with environmental, social or habitual change, it often becomes little more than well-intended noise.
🔗 Related post coming soon: “Why motivation is overrated (and what to do instead)”
What does work: Access, social support and habits
So if changing minds doesn’t reliably change behavior, what does? The answer is both less intuitive and more powerful: behavior is most effectively changed by changing the conditions in which it happens. Albarracín et al. found that the most successful interventions don’t target what people think — but what surrounds them.
Effective behavior change interventions target the following factors:
✅ Access: Material or logistic resources to facilitate the performance of a behavior
example interventions: providing health insurance, providing basic income, providing a recycling bin to homes, making organ donation the default, taxing alcohol).
✅ Social support: Providing informational, instrumental or financial help to facilitate a particular behavior
example interventions:
support from family, class members or trainers during physical exercise; public commitment to a behavior and receiving social support for it).
✅ Habits: repeated behaviours that exhibit automaticity, occur without awareness and are difficult to stop even when they no longer provide benefits to the individual
example interventions: distracting oneself from behavioral cues; training to stop a behavior when faced with temptations; habit reversal training).
🔹 1. Access: reduce barriers
It’s hard to recycle when you have only one bin for all your waste. Or to bike more if there’s no safe path. Or to go to the dentist often if you need to pay out of pocket for each visit.
Changing behavior becomes much easier when the desired behavior is also the most accessible one. This includes:
- Making healthy or sustainable choices the default
- Removing friction for desired behavior
- Adding friction for undesired behavior
Think of this as behavioral gravity: people move toward the path of least resistance. Effective interventions reshape that path.
🔗 Related blog coming soon: “Designing friction that works for (or against) you”
🔹 2. Social support: make change collective
We are social creatures. Whether it’s quitting smoking, voting, or exercising — we tend to do what people around us do (or expect us to do). Interventions that tap into social support — group challenges, peer accountability, norm shifts — can be powerful, especially when behavior is visible or identity-relevant. This doesn’t mean you need a buddy system for everything. But it does mean that change spreads faster in networks than in isolation.
🔗 Related blog coming soon: “Behavior is contagious — how to harness social diffusion”
🔹 3. Break habits: redesign routines
Much of human behavior is automatic. We act out of routine, not reflection. This means that disrupting habits — like during a move or life transition — opens a window for change. These moments are called “habit discontinuities.”
Want someone to change their commute? Wait until they move.
Want to buy less snacks and unhealthy foods? Go shop in a different grocery store.
🔗 Related blog : “Why habits are hard to break – even when we desperately want to”
Together, these strategies point toward a different mindset: If you want to change behavior, don’t focus on changing minds, but on shifting environments.
The good news? This kind of change is often more scalable, more sustainable — and less dependent on sheer willpower. Want to help people act differently? Help them live differently.
What this means for real world behavior change
If you’re designing a behavior change intervention, the most common instinct is still to inform, convince, or motivate. It feels actionable. It looks rational. And it’s what most people expect.
But this approach — alone — rarely works. Please stop throwing information at people and expect them to change.
Behavior change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in routines, systems, infrastructures. That’s why effective behavior change begins not with better arguments, but with better environments.
So what does that look like?
It means asking questions like:
- What’s the friction in the current behavior?
- What’s the default?
- When are people most open to change — and can we catch them at that moment?
- Are we making the better behavior visible, accessible, and easy?
And it means shifting from information-based to system-sensitive design. Some examples:
- Instead of reminding people to eat healthier, change the placement of food in the cafeteria.
- Instead of urging employees to “speak up more,” adjust meeting structures and power dynamics.
- Instead of sending post-purchase emails to reduce returns, rethink your sizing tools, checkout nudges and free delivery&return policies.
- Instead of relying on good intentions to reduce car use, make public transport cheaper, faster, and more obvious.
This doesn’t mean communication is useless. But it should follow design — not replace it. Good information without access is like planting seeds in dry sand.
So next time you’re tempted to launch a campaign, write a flyer, or post a poster… pause.
Please, please, please, stop throwing information at people if you want to change their behavior. Ask yourself: What would it take to redesign the environment?
Reference
Albarracín, D., Glasman, L. R., Fishbein, M., O’Leary, A., & Hornik, R. C. (2024). Determinants of behaviour and their efficacy as targets of behavioural change interventions. Nature Reviews Psychology. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-024-00305-0
Further reading
A guide to megastudies by Angela Duckworth and Katie Milkman
