New Delhi: social support And when trying to change people’s behavior during a crisis, focusing on an individual’s habits may have a greater “big impact.” pandemic or to deal with Climate change A new study finds that strategies such as providing accurate information or trying to change beliefs have a “negligible effect.” To overcome practical barriers to behavior such as providing health insurance Encouraging healthy behaviors can also be effective, he said.

“Interventions targeting knowledge, general attitudes, trust, administrative and legal sanctions, and credibility – these factors that researchers and policy makers give so much importance to – are actually quite ineffective. They have negligible effects,” said Dolores Albarracín. University of PennsylvaniaUS, said.

The study, which reviews the results of several studies, has been published in the journal Nature Reviews Psychology.

Unfortunately, many policies and reports are centered around goals like increasing trust in vaccines (an example of one approach) or curbing misinformation, Albarracín said.

Co-author Javier Granados Samayoa, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, said that while targeting knowledge and beliefs to drive behavior change seems straightforward, “it’s not that simple.”

“The literature suggests that people need a number of intervening processes to actually act on those beliefs, so it’s not that simple,” he said.

Knowing this the writers said behavior change The level at which interventions work – individual or societal – will be particularly important in the face of increasing health environmental challenges,

In their analysis, the researchers found that ‘knowledge’ measures, such as educating people about the benefits of vaccination, and measures targeted at ‘general skills’, such as programs to encourage people to quit smoking, had negligible effects on changing behaviour.

Instead, they found that targeting habits at the individual level such as giving people support to start or stop a behavior was effective. Measures targeting attitudes and involving people associating certain behaviors as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ were also helpful. That led to changes in behavior, the researchers said.

Empowering people with skills such as learning how to overcome obstacles towards achieving a certain desirable behavior is also an effective solution, he said.

Social strategies such as vaccine restrictions and structural measures aimed at improving trust or justice in an organization or government entity (such as providing voters with the means to express their concerns) were also found to be ineffective in changing behavior.

Instead, the researchers found that measures to improve access, such as making flu vaccines available in the workplace, could influence greater behavioral changes.

They also found that measures that encouraged social support – for example, groups of people helping each other meet their physical activity goals – were effective in bringing about change.

Therefore, the researchers called on policymakers to look at the evidence to determine which factors would yield returns on investment.

“When faced with big problems like climate change, there is a desire among policymakers and other leaders to do something to improve people’s behavior,” Samayoa said.

He said, “Our research can inform future interventions and create programs that are actually effective, not just what people believe is effective.”