Behaviour Change & Technology

Most people adhere to their goals when they are both motivated and able. This is quite impressive in terms of the complex human social life people engage in and the multiple choices people face every day. But how is it that people who are highly motivated and proven to be capable of for instance studying or dieting suddenly may fail to do so? In this article, we discuss how making choices can impair subsequent self-regulation.

Ego depletion
Self-regulation refers to the ability to override or inhibit thoughts, feelings, impulses, and behaviours. It can be viewed as the active part of the self (i.e. agent), as opposed to the self as something known (i.e. identity) or the self as knower (i.e. knowledge). In other words, self-regulation is crucial for the ability to adhere to personal and social goals, but what happens when people’s self-regulatory capacity breaks down?

Vohs and colleagues (2008) conducted a series of experiments where a choice versus no-choice manipulation was followed by a task that required self-regulation. After for instance making active choices on a website, the researchers measured participants’ persistence on a subsequent self-regulatory task. In several of the experiments, participants were also led to believe that practicing or solving the self-regulatory task would help them on an upcoming task so that participants should have been highly motivated to perform well on the self-regulatory task.

The unanimous findings were that making choices leads to lessened tolerance to negative adverse events, lowered persistence, and more procrastination. In other words, making choices depleted the self of mental resources (i.e. ego depletion) that affected subsequent ability to self-regulate or adhere to goals.

Information architecture design
These findings are very interesting from an information architecture (IA) design perspective (see Danaher, McKay & Seeley, 2005). On the one side, we can depend on users to find the right information at the right time and give them complete freedom, including a range of choices and few restrictions (e.g. design digital interventions as matrices). Both users and designers may find it appealing to have a full set of choices and full self-determination although people often report feeling frustrated and overwhelmed with the intense cognitive demands that accompany large amounts of choices (Huffman & Kahn, 1998). And as Vohs et al. and related research shows (e.g. Baumeister, et al. 1998), providing people with many choices is not very helpful or supportive. In addition, from a therapeutic point of perspective, just providing people with choices would be equivalent to holding a laissez-faire attitude as the designer or therapist sort of lets the sequence of events take its own course and takes on a passive role and seeming lack of interest and involvement in the user (Rogers, 1951).

On the other side, we can guide users through a predetermined sequence and reduce or remove irrelevant information (e.g. tunneled IA design). A good example of these principles applied in action is e-commerce where users typically add items in a basket or shopping cart, proceed to checkout, enter shipping address, billing information, and place their order. This may be appropriate and desirable in e-commerce, but when it comes to health and well-being, such IA designs can easily end up objectifying a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, become too intellectualistic and didactic, and communicate a basic mistrust and lack of respect for the person and belief in his or her abilities to find solutions to their own problems.

Belief in the right for self-determination
The empirical evidence stand in stark contrast to the thought experiments by existentialist philosophers like Camus and early Sartre who portrait the self as an entity that is constructed by acts of free will. Most people strongly believe in the existentialist thought and would have a hard time accepting anything else because a rejection of the existentialist thought would entail that they reject the belief in their basic (human) right for self-determination. People feel it liberating and tend go to great lengths in protecting their freedom. When this freedom or opportunities for making choices is restricted, people become defensive, exhibit patterns of aggression, reactance, and imagine that they control events which they cannot possibly control (e.g. what other people think of them or the roll of dice at casinos). But let us assume that the empirical evidence and existentialist thought are equally true and neither is false, can we then find a solution which does not necessarily imply a compromise?

Is there a solution?
According to Rogers (1951), the counselor’s aim and role or, in our case, an intervention designer’s role is to perceive the phenomenological field as experienced by the person, wholeheartedly accept the person as he or she is which is already experienced critically by the person’s self as it is, and adopt an internal frame of reference. It means to see the world as the person sees it and put aside any preconceived ideas, preconceptions, and perceptions adopted from an external frame of reference (i.e. the counselor or designers perspective). It also means to move in the direction of greater self-responsibility; self-government, self-regulation, and autonomy. The paradox is not the right for self-determination, but it is the choice(s) itself which is the paradox.

Consequently, the potential solution is to help users make the right choices and be supportive of their decision even if it goes against every form of your personal and intellectual sense and understanding of users’ or clients’ problem. This can be an excruciating exercise for the counselor or designer because as human beings we tend to evaluate, compare, diagnose, guide, persuade, argue, teach, etc. quite automatically. Instead, help users decide the overall and important intervention components that strongly underscores that these decisions are fully self-determined rather than providing an excess of alternatives and options concerning nitty-gritty details which users might fancy, but which end up undermining users’ capacity for self-regulation. People want choices, but as Vohs and colleagues’ research shows, people eventually tire of the endless demands and stresses of making these choices. How liberating are these choices of freedom when they actually impair people’s optimal functioning, health, well-being, and social development?

Key reading(s):

Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M. & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 883-898.

References:

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1252-1265

Danaher, B. G., McKay, H. G. & Seeley, J. R. (2005). The information architecture of behaviour change websites. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 7(2), e12.

Huffman, C., & Kahn, B. E. (1998). Variety for sale: Mass customization or mass confusion. Journal of Retailing, 74, 491-513.

Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-centered therapy. London: Constable.

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