Does Changing Behavioral Intentions Engender Behavior Change

Summary

A meta-analysis that tests what much of social and health psychology assumes: that intentions cause behaviour. Since most of the evidence is correlational, Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran gathered “47 experimental tests” in which intentions were strengthened experimentally. The gap is telling: “a medium-to-large change in intention” only “leads to a small-to-medium change in behavior”.

Rationale

Both halves of our position hold here: changing what people intend matters, but it moves what they do less than often assumed, so we look to their surroundings too.