Drivers of Behavioural Change

What are the underlying drivers of behavioural change?

In this post last week (https://bit.ly/3Kt0CbR), I explored some of the Health Warnings around extrapolating from #neuroscience to #organisational change.

I also suggested that people’s behavioural reaction to uncertainty and change is highly nuanced depending not just on the level of uncertainty but also on individual and environmental conditions (https://bit.ly/378ePgu).?

So using stress as a proxy for organisational change is problematic.

But nearly 80% of you think that neuroscience did have something to offer organisational change (https://bit.ly/3KfUCTH)

So over the next few posts/articles I will deep dive into how our brains respond to change and how this can be related to what we know about behavioural change in psychology.

We know from the mechanics of complex systems that the free energy principle (https://bit.ly/3rGh2Hj) gives us a useful insight into how the brain uses different sources of evidence to make predictions and observe the world.?We know that we have access to two sources of evidence – our prior beliefs and sensory input.

Prior Beliefs

Prior Beliefs consist of different beliefs we have about ourselves and the world around us these are called internal control beliefs and normative beliefs

• Internal control beliefs – This is ?our confidence in our ability to perform the behaviour – the necessary skills and ability.?This is also referred to as self-efficacy – if you believe you can do it you probably can!?It is also about autonomy and how much control you feel (theory of locus of control) you have over what you are being asked to do. I can shape the events in my life.
• Normative beliefs – Often referred to as ‘peer pressure’ what is socially acceptable - how beliefs are framed by the perceptions of others & much we want our behaviour to comply with the perceptions of others i.e., how comfortable are you being the ‘odd ball’.?Is the opportunity to try something new restricted by what others think about us.

These prior beliefs are processed in the Hippocampus which is projecting a likelihood that we should try something.?You could call this intuition – Daniel Kahneman might call this System 1 thinking which operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

Sensory Input

Sensory input such as touch, body orientation, pain, temperature, taste, vision is processed by our (somato) sensory cortex. It helps us to make sense of the information we receive from our environment and make decisions on how to apply this new information and integrate it with our prior beliefs.?This is why it has strong connections with our hippocampus.

Integration of prior beliefs & sensory input

Our lateral prefrontal cortex integrates our emotions and cognition of what the change or new information means and 'calculates' a likelihood of whether we should do something given the evidence. You could call this a System 2 process. It extracts meaning from the stimuli and encode it using our prior beliefs (from the hippocampus), current emotional state (hypothalamus & amyglada) and sensory cortex.

I thought this idea of integrating prior beliefs and new sensory information not only sits well with Bayesian updating (https://bit.ly/3LfZ3yW) but also with two well established models of bheavioural change – the theory of planned behaviour (https://bit.ly/3s9sn2V) and the COM-B model which Dr Matt Hancocks Meg Hooper & Rob Robson ?pointed me to which seems to be based on the theory of planned behaviour (https://bit.ly/3s6QXkG).

Simply put both models seem to agree that behaviour change is based on the interrelationships between whether I think:

1. I can change = capability & efficacy – internal control beliefs
2. It is worthwhile changing = Motivation & Adaptablity
3. Others are doing it & will help me do it = opportunity & support – normative beliefs – sensory information?

Certainly there is a strong body of research supporting the idea of self-efficacy, autonomy , adaptability and social support (https://bit.ly/3s9dNYS) being critical to individual and organisational change.

What do you think??Is this the starting point of understanding individual and organisational change theory ??