UC San Diego

This dissertation comprises three papers examining the psychological drivers of behavior change. Chapter 1 shows how the framing of a policy can harness the power of social norms to motivate behaviors. Chapters 2 and 3 investigate the role of attention in behavioral under- and over-persistence. Chapter 1 examines how the framing of an incentive can influence consumer behaviors. We demonstrate that framing an incentive as a surcharge, compared to a discount, signals that the incentivized behavior is more socially normative, motivating consumers to carry-out the incentivized behavior. Moreover, we show that because surcharges influence behavior by signaling a social norm—and not just through their monetary value—they also increase the likelihood of compliance downstream, even after the incentive is removed. Chapter 2 investigates why consumers often fail to persist for long enough in beneficial daily behaviors (e.g., exercise, hygiene). Past research commonly views suboptimal persistence as a result of poor self-regulation. We offer a different perspective and propose that because many such behaviors require minimal attention, a mismatch occurs between attentional demands and available resources, causing consumers to experience boredom and stop prematurely. We thus suggest that capturing and sustaining attention in a concurrent task (i.e., tangential immersion) will occupy excess resources, balance this attentional mismatch, and increase persistence. We demonstrate when and why tangential immersion increases persistence across a range of low-attention behaviors, including toothbrushing and strength-building. Chapter 3 examines contexts in which consumers display the opposite behavior, needlessly persisting in undesirable behaviors and foregoing opportunities to switch to preferred alternatives. We identify a novel underlying cause for this maladaptive behavior: behavioral entrenchment, a state of increasing task set accessibility that arises when performing high-attention repetitive tasks. As entrenchment grows, so does the perceived cost of switching to an alternative, decreasing the likelihood of doing so. However, decreasing both attention to and repetition of the task reduces entrenchment and increases the proportion who make a positive change. Together, these three chapters shed light on important cognitive processes underlying behavior change, ranging from the initiation of a behavior to persistence in the behavior once its begun.