The social creation of action and inaction: From concepts to goals to behaviors

Sunderrajan, Aashna; Dai, Wenhao; White, Benjamin X.

doi:10.1016/bs.aesp.2019.04.001

Cited by 13 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 108 publications

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“…Overall, people prefer action over inaction (Albarracín et al 2019); this tendency may be exaggerated when bored. Thus, we predict that in situations with limited options, boredom will increase prosocial behavior when taking action is positive (i.e., when only prosocial actions available), and increase antisocial behavior when taking action is negative (i.e., when only antisocial options available).…”

Section: Good Choices Require Good Optionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

From electric shocks to the electoral college: How boredom steers moral behavior

Yucel¹,

Ec²

2021

Preprint

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We all experience boredom, from being stuck in airport security lines to reading poorly written book chapters. But what is boredom, why do we experience it, and what happens when we do? We suggest a new take on this everyday emotional experience, as an important and potentially useful cue that we’re not cognitively engaged in meaningful experiences. According to the Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model of boredom, people feel bored when they can’t successfully engage their attention in meaningful activities. Boredom can be painful, but it gives us important feedback about our lives, by signaling a lack of meaningful attentional engagement. In short, boredom tells us whether we want to and are able to focus on what we are doing or thinking, and steers us towards behaviors that ensure that we do. Across a broad range of situations, attention and meaning independently predict boredom, are not highly correlated, and do not interact. But more importantly, attention and meaning deficits result in different types of boredom with different downstream consequences for how people behave. For instance, being bored because what you’re doing lacks meaning feels different and has different consequences than being bored because you can’t pay attention, in part because they signal different problems. Likewise, boredom can result when something is too easy or too hard, because both make it hard to pay attention. All of these different causes of boredom matter, we argue, because they result in different types of boredom with different downstream consequences. Why we are bored shapes what we want to do next, and helps explain why bored people make often puzzling decisions, such as choosing to self-administer painful electric shocks or turning to political extremism. In short, like pain, boredom may be unpleasant but it plays an important role in alerting us when we either don’t want to (or are unable to) pay attention to what we’re doing, and motivating us to change our behavior to restore attention and meaning to our lives, for good or for ill.

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Section: Good Choices Require Good Optionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

From electric shocks to the electoral college: How boredom steers moral behavior

Yucel¹,

Ec²

2021

Preprint

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“…Prior work has examined diffusion of information and behaviour as a function of network properties, including tie‐strength (Granovetter, 1973, 1983), tie‐asymmetry (Almaatouq et al, 2016), and homophily (Becker et al, 2017; Centola, 2010, 2019a), among other factors. Despite its great advances, this prior work has not studied generalisation processes (Albarracín & Handley, 2011; Albarracín et al, 2008, 2018, 2019; Hepler & Albarracín, 2013, 2014; Jiang et al, 2014) or the reciprocal influences of attitude (i.e., evaluation) on behaviour (overt actions including, in our case, posting a badge) and of behaviour on attitudes (Albarracin, 2021; Albarracín & Wyer, 2000; Glasman & Albarracín, 2006). Although behaviours that make use of our automatic, reflexive processes (e.g., posture) may easily be adopted by mimicry (Albarracin, 2021), understanding how attitudes influence collective adoption of behaviours that require deliberation (e.g., violating social distancing) is key in public health contexts.…”

Section: Dissemination Of Information Within Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

A research agenda for the post‐COVID‐19 world: Theory and research in social psychology

Jung

2021

Asian J of Social Psycho

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“…Besides the type of recommendations to include, the number of recommendations to include in an intervention is also an important question to consider when aiming for the most efficacious intervention program. Whereas too few recommendations may not be stimulating enough to elicit change, an excessive number of recommendations can create burden and undermine the motivation to change (Wilson et al, 2015; Albarracín, Sunderrajan, & Dai, 2018; Albarracín, Sunderrajan, Dai, & White, 2019). Therefore, our meta-analysis also investigated the optimal number of recommendations to produce the greatest behavioral change.…”

Section: Optimal Number Of Recommendations To Reduce Drug and Alcohol...mentioning

confidence: 99%

More behavioral recommendations produce more change: A meta-analysis of efficacy of multibehavior recommendations to reduce nonmedical substance use.

Dai¹,

Palmer²,

Sunderrajan³

et al. 2020

Psychology of Addictive Behaviors

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Death and morbidity associated with substance use have risen continuously over the last few decades, increasing the need for rigorous examination of promising programs. Interventions attempting to change multiple behaviors have been designed to address interconnected problems such as use of both alcohol and drugs. This meta-analysis aimed to examine the efficacy of multibehavior interventions to curb nonmedical substance use in relation to the theoretical relation among different substance use behaviors. Specifically, our synthesis aimed to estimate the optimal number of recommendations for intervention efficacy and evaluate the impact of different combinations of recommendations on intervention efficacy. A synthesis of multibehavior interventions addressing nonmedical substance use was conducted to measure behavioral changes between the pretest and the follow-up. These changes were then compared across different numbers of recommendations. Sixty-nine reports and 233 effect sizes (k of conditions ϭ 155, n ϭ 28,295) were included. A positive linear relation was found between the number of targeted behaviors and intervention efficacy, which was stronger for drug use than alcohol use. Furthermore, recommendations on drug use worked better when paired with recommendations targeting other behaviors, whereas recommendations on alcohol use worked more independently. Lastly, multibehavior interventions were especially efficacious when delivered by experts. Overall, our synthesis indicated that targeting multiple substances is beneficial for changing drug use outcomes, but less so for alcohol use outcomes. Therefore, in the current substance use epidemic, innovative multibehavior programs appear to hold promise, especially to combat nonmedical drug use.

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The social creation of action and inaction: From concepts to goals to behaviors

Cited by 13 publications

References 108 publications

From electric shocks to the electoral college: How boredom steers moral behavior

From electric shocks to the electoral college: How boredom steers moral behavior

A research agenda for the post‐COVID‐19 world: Theory and research in social psychology

More behavioral recommendations produce more change: A meta-analysis of efficacy of multibehavior recommendations to reduce nonmedical substance use.

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