University College London, University of London
Medicine
Professor Emeritus of Health Psychology at UCL. Research focuses on addiction and behaviour change.
This an interesting paper that addresses an important issue. The gap between attitudes and behaviour and latterly between intentions and behaviour has been the subject of a huge amount of research over the decades in the psychology, and the idea of seeking to close that gap through decision support tools seems like a good thing to attempt to do.Like the other reviewers, I got a bit lost in the details and, although I think the material is there, perhaps the structure could be altered to make it easier to follow. Though I recognise sometimes readers need to put the effort in to grasp complexity when it in the nature of the subject matter.My main substantive comments are:The intention-action gap is not the same as the value action gap. Intention and value are different psychological entities. I think that here the emphasis is on the discrepancy between values as generalised appraisals and behaviour. This could easily be mediated by the people concerned NOT intending to behaviour in accordance with their values because they have other priorities. In that case there would not be an intention-action gap. This is important because it determines what any kind of decision support should do.Secondly, the Human Behaviour Change Project is about to publish an ontology of ‘mechanisms of action’ for behaviour change interventions that builds on the ‘mental functioning’ ontology that was developed by Janna Hastings. This may be of help to the author in being precise about the entities in the logic model underpinning the proposals. Check out ‘bciosearch.org’ and Google ‘Human Behaviour Change Project’. We are running webinars on all this at the moment and putting them up on YouTube (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/cc/human-behaviour-change-project-webinar-series-1684489).Thirdly, I would like to see, where possible, the article to use Qeios' facility to link to definitions of constructs as this is an area where the words typically mean different things to different people.Finally, I wonder whether the COM-B model[1] might help to structure thinking and modelling in this area. As a general model of behaviour it seems to me to be very applicable to what this paper is trying to do and could help to bring out the logic behind the proposals. References^Robert West, Susan Michie. (2020). A brief introduction to the COM-B Model of behaviour and the PRIME Theory of motivation. Qeios. doi:10.32388/WW04E6.
Behavioural science
Formal ontological definition: Behavioural science is a scientific discipline whose topic of study is individual human behaviour, group behaviour and population behaviour and factors that influence these.Comment: Behavioural science is sometimes equated with behavioural economics but is in fact much broader and has a much longer history. As a scientific discipline it involves using systematic methods to gather data, develop models and theories, and use these to predict the behaviour of individuals, groups and populations under defined conditions. Its applications include developing and evaluating behaviour change interventions and predicting the outcomes of naturally occurring events and human activities on behaviour. The scientific disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, economics, communications science, marketing science, and many others contribute to it. Its data collection methods include direct and indirect observation, questioning, and physical measurement. Its study designs include laboratory experiments, field experiments, quasi-experimental studies, cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys and participant observation studies. Data are analysed using statistical and qualitative methods.Behavioural science can be distinguished from ‘behavioural sciences’ which are any scientific disciplines that include the study of behaviour (e.g., psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, neuroscience etc.)
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Scientific discipline
Formal ontological definition: A human activity that involves systematically gathering and using data to develop, evaluate and revise explanatory and predictive models in order to increase knowledge and understanding of a topic of study.Comment: A given scientific discipline (e.g., physics, communications science, meteorology, psychology and anthropology) is typically characterised both by the topic of study and the methods used to investigate it. Scientific disciplines can be subclasses of other scientific disciplines (e.g., particle physics is a subclass of physics) and they can overlap in their methods or topic of study (e.g., social psychology and sociology).
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This is a well-developed meta-theory that I think does an excellent job of providing a conceptual framework for the wide range of addiction theories that have been proposed. This kind of conceptual work is extremely hard to do but is worth it because it help people working in a field to expand our field of vision and learn from other approaches. It is also of great practical importance because it can provide a basis for developing the kind of broad-ranging strategies needed for combating addiction by treating it as a complex system with multiple interacting levels.